(They have all been around the blogosphere a couple of times already, but there is a reason for that. They’re good.)

As was the case with early examples of TV advertising being radio spots with a picture, the first wave of digital video advertising was essentially repurposed TV spots.

But increasingly, we’re seeing marketing take advantage of the strengths of the medium. An absence of a standard, inflexible format. Interactivity. Spreadability.

Kudos to W&K and Lionsgate for the following:

Click through for the Expendables

sk

And it really was new: BBC Online was a mere two-and-a-half years old, it had 3 million monthly unique users (it now has nearly ten times that) and fewer than 4 in 10 people in the UK had ever used the internet. What’s more, the kinds of services and devices that are now integral to our lives, such as broadband, MP3 players and even DVDs, were the domain of the innovators at the very foot of the adoption curve.

But it was a time of unbelievable excitement and discovery. Although the dot com boom had officially ended a few months earlier, the bubble had certainly not burst in Bush House. During my first year, the division’s budget doubled to around £100m and I was pleasantly surprised to discover that my research budget was around a million quid. Pretty much everything we did was a step into uncharted territory.

The pace of media change over the past ten years has been so explosive that you might expect most of what we learnt at the time to be consigned to distant history.

But remarkably, a lot of it continues to hold true today.

We learnt a lot about the twin pitfalls of researching innovative new concepts: on the one hand, audiences can’t articulate a need for something which they don’t yet understand, so they may reject some very sound ideas. (Focus groups have famously rejected any disruptive new media over the years, from television to mobile phones.) On the other hand, a ‘wow’ factor can occur, where respondents are so bowled-over by a wizzy new concept that they claim it will become indispensible. And then no-one buys it. We overcame this by using research techniques that could identify unfulfilled needs (from diaries to ethnography) and placing these needs at the heart of the production process – something we still subscribe to today.

We learnt that when it comes to concept development, not all respondents are equal. Rather then screening out innovators and ‘experts’, we actively encouraged their involvement in early co-creation, before sense-checking the emergent prototypes with ‘real’ audiences.

We learnt that technology was converging, but not the circumstances in which content was consumed. We understood that TVs, PCs and mobile phones would increasingly have the same capabilities and connectivity, but that the different screens would retain their own core values and audience expectations. This was something of a heretical view at the time, when platform-neutral content creation was all the rage, but it explained why Top of the Pops karaoke through the red button was a real success for us and web on TV was a complete disaster. Today it explains why Nintendo Wii games belong on the living room screen but Facebook doesn’t.

In essence, the advance of technology was allowing each screen to fulfil its real potential: the living room screen got bigger and brought families back together; the desk screen allowed faster and easier completion of tasks and sharing with distant friends; and the handheld screen became an intensely personal device where content could be truly engaging, but only delivered with the user’s permission.

We knew that the internet would be an important social medium and suspected that user-generated content would become as important as that created by the big media owners. But we didn’t get everything right. What we didn’t know was that video would become such a key element of internet use, or that peer-to-peer file sharing would fundamentally change content distribution, or that Google would reinvent everything from web navigation to the online advertising model, or that a very skinny man in a black polo-neck would persuade millions of people to spend £500 on a media tablet through which you could only watch video that you bought from the very skinny man.

But even a million quid can’t buy you that kind of foresight.

This is all very exciting, but something of a pyrrhic victory as our other two showpiece submissions (some extremely ambitious pan-platform audience work with ITV, and some equally ambitious multi-country, multi-screen customer journey work with Microsoft and Carat) were summarily rejected. We don’t know why.

Fingers crossed for the MRS awards then.

Stuart

In the past, I have looked around in the dark, guessing opinions in an attempt to make the robbery less irksome by generating some kind of support – I will have a conspirator even if I wouldn’t like to walk anywhere outside, in the daylight, with them.

I am sure William Goldman would say we are still in the hands of studios who are more comfortable with marketable entities like talent and formulaic concepts than they are with real creativity. Perhaps it is unsurprising that most of what comes out often fails to grip me.

But it is more than that. Watching a film is a deeply personal experience that studios and cinemas contorted into a mass consumption exercise. This would have surprised the very man who created the medium, Thomas Edison, at the time of his invention.

When he sat down Edison first experienced the synced sound and motion picture on his own. He sat staring at a small screen with rudimentary sound projection.  Kinetoscopes (the device that played the motion pictures captured on his Kinetograph) were penny machines in arcades. Individual engagement was Edison’s imagined reality. In his lifetime he saw it become more than that.

In our lifetime, things have changed once more. The popularity and business potential of the invention is without question but it is interesting to consider the recent cultural development of internet downloads with the experience of the Kinetograph in mind, and how much it cost.

Small, personal screens brought the studios full circle. It is common knowledge that modern studios are powered by DVD sales, rather than box office takings. In recent years, many are threatened to their core by illicit downloads that deliver the original experience at a fractional cost; a modern penny.

Goldman wrote in the 80s, arguing that studio heads pandered to stars, bending scripts to preserve their carefully managed public personas. Something similar may happen now as studios try desperately to cling to their business models. A hit in the cinema comes at a high cost (covering the fall out of other projects that flop). DVD sales are driven by these titles – for 1 new film, retailers buy 10 old films. Now, more than ever, they are chasing ‘the smash’ to encourage back catalogue sales.

MGM is in trouble because their catalogue is floundering, failing to bring in the money that is used annually to service the debt that it bears as an independent company (Universal, owned by Viacom, has much more freedom to push it’s production development slate). It can’t create new films. Bond has been put into hiatus and many other projects are leaking key contributors.

Maybe they will be forced to lead the way in creating a viable digital download business model and we can all watch new James Bond instalments until we turn grey, like our dads, on projectors strung from our ceilings.

What we know from our own research is that consumers attach less value to media content as a digital service. But, in our House Special report on VOD we discovered that not everyone expects content to be free – the price that most people are willing to pay for a movie via a digital service is approximately £4.99.

Today, HMV launch their digital service. They will charge 40p for chart songs and £4.99 for albums.

Lets wait and see how the motion picture industry responds…

Daniel

Malia Milligan joins us as a Research Manager on the Quantitative side, having previously worked at both Channel 4 and the BBC World Service.

Lina Pio and Tom Timbers join us as graduate trainees. Both will initially be working on the Qualitative side of the business, but will get fully trained up in all aspects of research.

This means that we are now up to 17 full time members of staff, and we’re still recruiting (see our main website for details of vacancies). We’ve undergone some elaborate desk restructuring in order to accommodate our new colleagues but we’re reaching the natural limit of our office space (witness the congestion in the kitchen at lunchtime). Fortunately we have our lounge which, when not in use as a venue, offers additional space.

So far we’ve been evolving as a company. But the environment – both internally and externally – has changed to such an extent that more substantial changes to our working practices make more sense. So viva la revolution. We’re provide updates on some of the exciting initiatives we’ve got planned as and when they roll out.

sk

We’ve been conducting our own job experiment. Through social media, we have been publicising our job vacancies. For a princely sum of zero, we have already been fortunate enough to attract several high quality candidates.

However, we’re growing fast and we remain keen to recruit additional researchers. If you feel as if you possess the necessary interest and potential to be a researcher in the areas of media, technology and communications then take a look at our available positions on our main website.

sk

Of course, the report in question doesn’t actually conclude that “children who watch television are more likely to be bullied”. But it does seem to conclude that toddlers who are allowed to watch more than two hours of television a day become fatter and more stupid than other children. And this I can well believe. But does this actually make TV the villain? Unfortunately what is missing here is what we researchers would call a concomitant variable. Perish the thought, but could it be that the sort of parents who let their toddlers watch more than two hours of telly a day are, regardless of this, likely to raise kids who are fatter and more stupid than their peers? Just a thought.

Stuart