We recently passed the hat around the media team at ZEDO to see what people thought would be the hot topics for digital in the upcoming year 2010.
Whilst there are some old favourites in the mix, mobile and personalisation, the scope of these rather broadly talked about themes is now beginning to take on a more defined shape and it’s a little easier perhaps to now identify where this growth will actually come from.
Our list for trends to watch goes something like this:
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Farmville
Earlier this week my colleague Sam Granleese posted an entry on this blog debating the notion of user pay content? I thought therefore it might be a nice follow up to have a little look at another emerging market; that of Virtual goods.
Now, virtual goods are certainly not a new idea. We would all hopefully be able to recall from our ever diminishing short term memories the story of Anshe Chung, the first Second Life Millionaire who was successful in selling virtual land and property in a virtual world. Of course there are also WOW (world of warcraft) and other such fantasy gaming communities / worlds where there are existing markets for goods, powers and secrets. There are even companies dedicated to the dubious and sometimes illegal accumulation of said powers and weaponry which they then on-sell to eager gamers for ‘real’ dollars. But let’s be honest these are still relatively niche markets and unless you are a participant in these games you are unlikely to have seen and certainly not paid over your hard earned dollars for a virtual item. Yet that is.
Enter facebook and gaming applications are suddenly readily accessible to over 250Million users world wide. Currently the most visible and successful one is farmville
“FarmVille is a real-time farm simulation game developed by Zynga, available as an application on the social networking website Facebook. The game allows members of Facebook to manage a virtual farm by planting, growing and harvesting virtual crops, trees, and livestock.[2] Since its launch in June 2009,[3] FarmVille has become the most popular game application on Facebook ….”
I checked, and the Farmville application is currently being actively used by 69Million users. Much like the a fore mentioned virtual goods sellers Virtual Goods are at the heart of the Farmville experience with users earning or paying for virtual currency ‘coins’ and trading with one another to buy land, seeds, equipment livestock or even a duck. Interestingly advertisers are also allowed to provide offers or actions to users of this application asking them to conduct brand interactions; Watch a commercial, sign up for our newsletter or apply for credit in exchange for ‘coins’ provided by that advertiser.
Now Farmville is a very popular game and I assume is highly addictive, as are other such games like Mafia Wars where users can also pay for virtual items to help them achieve missions. Here is the draw dropping bit though; Virtual goods sales are estimated to hit $1 billion USD in 2009. (for reference the entire AU online ad spend for an established market is estimated at $1.7 billion for 2009)
So back to the question at hand. Are people likely to purchase virtual goods? They most certainly already are, and I think we can expect a lot more frivolous micro spending where that came from.
If anyone wants me i’ll be out on the farm with my virtual tractor working toward a holiday in 2020.
Last month Clay Shirky (NYU) and Stephen Brill (Journalism Online) participated in a McKinsey Online debate about whether or not people will pay for digital content.
Whilst I generally agree with most of Clay Shirky’s writing I couldn’t agree with him on his argument that absolutely no people will pay. In my opinion Brill’s argument that a mix of paid and free systems, even on single websites, is more likely to be sustainable. I think some people will pay for content, and some wont. Like with all media, there is equilibrium between the two (i.e. 1/3rd of Australian households have Pay TV and 2/3rds have only free to air TV).
Shirky argues that sites already successfully charging access in the finance industry (FT.com, Economist.com and WSJ.com) are not sustainable. This is because pay-walls stop syndication of content and there are less opportunites to create ‘media cartels’ he argues. This is a very short term view, and one that mirrors the old attitude of major recording companies now ruing Apple’s iTunes innovative music store which has put them in an enviable bargaining position as the one dominant music purchase point in the world (and sharing only 30% of revenue with record companies). Read more
Google has officially announced new ad formats for AdWords.
We have recently seen Ad Sitelinks (which are working very nicely, thanks) released in Australia, and Local Business Extensions have been running for a while, but there are some new ad formats on the way as well.
Ad Sitelinks
Video ads
These look designed for the likes of 20th Century Fox to enable playing of movie trailers directly in the search results. This makes a whole lot of sense for movie releases – our “traditional” campaigns would run across search, the content network and YouTube to get users to play the trailer. Doing this in the search results directly should massively improve efficiencies.
New Google Video Ad format
Discovered this little branded app from Emirates on the Creative Social blog.
It’s a clever spin on text based language translators. The app allows the user to take a picture/video of their own mouth to use as the spokes image for a set of common, useful foreign language phrases. In this example its translating into French. Emirates bring this to us free and and its being used to promote flights to France of course.
An interesting stat I read recently said that 90% of apps are only opened once, indicating that they need not only to be fun or entertaining but actually useful. This one looks like it ticks both boxes. In fact its easy to see from the reaction of the people who are interacted with in the video that the experience is one that’s fun for speaker and listener.
Personalisation + mobility + utility = A great user experience all wrapped up in a contextually aligned brand message. Good work.
On Monday I spent the day at DMMS09 an event that saw string of digital marketing and agency types address a large and mostly awake crowd at the Hilton on the Park Melb.
I was bristling with caffeine and so managed to capture quite a few notes which I’ll drop highlights of here for your review and historical reference. (note i missed the first 2 speakers so don’t have notes from sessions by The Population or Publicis Digital) Read more
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