Congratulations…
Congratulations to Golin Harris and Nintendo for winning PRWeek’s Technology campaign of the year. And to Fleishman-Hillard for their Honorable Mention for the Zillow.com campaign. Both were exemplary programs with results that hit the bottom line. I loved Colin’s for its creativity. And, Zillow’s for the results and courage in banking on PR as the primary launch vehicle.
Congrats also to Manning Selvage & Lee and Philips Norelco: Creating Buzzzz for Philips Norelco Bodygroom – Product and Web – They picked-up the “Best Use Of Internet” category.
It was a privilege to be a judge in the awards. Couple of quick observations:
- It was amazing how strong the consumer entrants were in both categories, and how absent the Enterprise players were. Get your entries in next year gang!
- Measurement phrases like “impressions”, “OTS” and the like are bandied about like old hats. Keep using them – a couple of years ago we bemoaned the fact that most didn’t have good measures. What makes for a winner though is a direct correlation to bottom-line, business performance.
- Participatory media (blogs, wikis and the like) still seemed to be, for the most part, an adjunct to the core PR program. The judges next year should see some of the first pure-play entrants where participatory platforms are the lead vehicle for engaging people.
And the biggest observation: this is one highly creative, dynamic industry to be associated with. Frankly, all of the finalists were brilliant.
Apple Launches New Product…
Too funny… All joking aside Apple are really the masters of the product launch.
Soundbites & Links
- Are blogs headed for a slowdown? “Research by Gartner, according to the magazine, found that the number of blogs will top out at about 100 million this summer. But it also noted that some 200 million blogs are no longer being updated–many of them abandoned by their authors.” What a terrible measure of the health of blogging. Lets look at the growth of posts, comments, video content. This is the equivalent of measuring the health of the Internet on the basis of URL registrations. Garbage.
- I’ve got some Joost beta invites if you’d like one. Still can’t get it to work on Vista though.
- Interesting: Scribd. Scribd is a free online library where anyone can upload. Use our embeddable PDF player to publish and view documents right in your web browser.
- Like this from Nick:
“I like to think of the blogosphere as a vast, earth-engirdling digestive track, breaking down the news of the day into ever finer particles of meaning (and ever more concentrated toxins). Another word for “parasitic,” in this context, is “critical.” Blogging is at its essence a critical form, a means of recycling other writings to ensure that every nutritional molecule, whether real or imagined, is fully consumed. To be called a literary parasite is no insult. It’s a compliment.”
- Rod Launches Xero (beta) and scores a Kiwi sports star. Brilliant move.
Measurement Landscape Shifts
One of the two leaders in communications measurement – CYMFONY – just got gobbled up. Consolidation was inevitible in this market – and as I’ve said before, it won’t serve communicators as well as it will serve marketers.
Ultimately what we needed was an evolution of communications measurement that was an inch wide and a mile deep. Maybe we will get that… But back to the announcement:
Steven Fredericks, TNS MI president and CEO, said the company had been looking to acquire a company in the market influence analytics space for about a year and decided on Cymfony because “they were the most advanced in terms of the technology.”
“We decided we had to go and get the leader [in the space],” he added. “We think this whole area is going to explode in the next couple of years. We think it’s going to reach the tipping point very quickly and we wanted to target it.”
Now, CYMFONY is a very fine company with some great talent and neat innovations – I’m not sure there is much credence to them being the most advanced in technology or being the leader in the space, but then his guess is as good as mine on both fronts. What I do agree absolutely with is that this validates the incredible investment of time and money made by the big measurement vendors.
Where CYMFONY had established an enviable lead is in measuring conversations across blogs and in the various recommendation zones of sites such as Amazon. When coupled with core media data, this is immensely powerful to everyone from product management through customer service. Brand tracking is just one dimension that this capability delivers. CYMFONY were on the right track in delving into product monitoring, reputation analytics, and marketing performance measurement.
The real rub here is that the kind of data and insight CYMFONY and Biz360 have been generating is of immense value to media planners and marketers as a whole. TNS are now armed with the most complete set of tools for the CMO and that will make for a pretty compelling proposition that others will have trouble competing with – especially the smaller vendors who are already under substantial pressure. As Katie says, the giants are lining-up.
We needed a powerhouse and we got one. Congrats to TNS and go for it – you have a very large market waiting for what you have just created. In many respects they could be answering a question that many of us have had about this space for some time – “is communications measurement a feature of a broader marketing performance and analytics tool-kit, or, a stand-alone industry serving the communicator…?”
BTW, hat-tip to CYMFONY’s PR team – they did a great job of SEO optimizing the announcement and complementing the press release with blog posts and a podcast.
