Top 100 Australian Web2.0 Applications Announced

BRW have released their Top 100 Australian Web 2.0 Applications as a feature in their latest issue.

Take a look at the full list on Ross Dawson’s blog.

Big up’s to Ben’s gnoos.com.au in at number 8, Guy at Stateless Systems in at number 10 with retailmenot and the very cool CushyCMS at 40, as well as Jake and Nat’s adimade in at #48 after only 4 months. Eight of the top ten .com sites doing great things o/s. Never an easy list to compile, easy to critique, but overall a great attempt at capturing the web2.0 market locally, and a good opportunity to give these guys some well deserved credit.

Where’s the lab love?

Around 3 years ago Google Labs was setting the trend, with many a local publisher mirroring the concept, allowing their internal developers and UI teams to experiment with their own 20% time. It became a sandbox to trial, experiment and showcase new concepts that may require further quantitative feedback without risking their brand if the concept was not quite right just yet.

Realestate.com.au Technology Sand Pit and news.com.au Labs were one of the first to jump in and setup their own destination pages, but over the last 12 months, there as been very little seen or heard of them. RSS is the best Realestate can offer on their page, the news.com.au page is down as I type.

The originator, Google Labs, has also slowed up and I find myself very rarely heading to this page. Their most recent Google Friend Connect skipped the queue all together, graduating straight to Beta territory, and it seems as though Google, like Realestate and news.com.au have lost the love for labs.

It seems innovation, although somewhat slowly, is still happening, realestate have Property.com.au, although this doesn’t seem to have progressed all that much in over a year now, their main competitor Domain now have Just Listed in Beta, looking very web2.0 with it’s large trebuchet search font, supersized buttons and tag cloud-arama. There’s been some brilliant examples of experimentation with UI and functionality o/s recently, including MCNBC’s Spectra, but it appears none of the heavy hitters locally are stepping up to really push the conventional. I believe, labs or no labs, these publishers in particular, resourced and content rich, can do more. We shouldn’t have to rely on startup’s or the filtering through of tried and tested o/s developments to push the local envelope forward.

Online has a fantastic opportunity to test concepts, ideas, products with hundreds of thousands of users at relatively low risk and investment, “try stuff”, and it is through this that future products we interact with can be moulded, refined and produced.

24 Hr Self-Serve. Media Planner Evolution

Google’s self-serve buffet continues to roll-out, with Google TV ads (currently only available in the US) complimenting their online and radio offers by allowing users to schedule, buy, analyse and optimise their TV schedules. Overlay the results with their online and radio data via Google Analytics and you have a one-stop-shop to measure cross-media effectiveness.. or does it?

Bless Google for providing us with these tools, but while it does provide a somewhat over-simplified approach to media buying and optimisation, does this open the door to a lazy, self-optimising approach to media buys? If x delivers y for z ROI, then a ok? For many, this will be the case. It’s still early days, but if the Google model works for TV, the reach and targeting improve, it really does have the potential to redefine the modern day role of a media planner. It opens up an opportunity to add depth in two key areas I feel need the most attention - consumer psychology and data analyse and interpretation.

Take a quick job ad for a Media Planner on SEEK, the description states they’re after -

1. Campaign Optimisation
2. Development of media concepts and plans
3. Developing innovative and effective communication solutions
4. Maintaining effective relationships with clients and ensuring in depth knowledge of their business and its needs
5. Media negotiation and buying
6. Researching past brand or product strategies and results, competitive actions, consumer behavior and changes to the marketplace
7. Understanding and interpretation of research, market data and systems
8. Produce media plans identifying mediums, timings, weights and cost estimates
9. Prepare presentations and reports
   

In theory Google has the ability to alleviate large chunks of 1, 2, 5, 8 and 9. Let’s ignore 3 and 4 for one second and focus on the remaining numbers 6 and 7 – two clearly distinct roles I feel will evolve in importance and demand for clients in the future.

You need someone who is able to proudly wear the cap of number 6, truly understand and define a brands audience, their behaviour relative to the brand, campaign and how they interact with media – all media, not just your traditional above-the-line categories we are all familiar with, but new media, social media and the yet-to-be-defined media.

You also need someone who is happy to wear number the 7 cap, delve deep into the available data sources, filtering, sorting, refining and identifying what metrics are important and why they are important relative to the brand and campaign objectives. This is all the more important in the online world, where everything is measureable, a lot of data, but not a lot of sense in what data is important.

These are truly value-generating roles, one’s that will push the ad industry forward, provide true value to clients, and from this result in numbers 3 and 4 for the media planner – innovative and effective communications solutions that deliver on client objectives and satisfaction.

Creativity is limitless. But knowing your limits creates innovative ideas.

If you were to have all the money in the world, what would you spend it on? I don’t think it’s an easy question to answer. Give me $10k, $500k, 1mill and I’ll reel off a shopping list for easy category – I have a limit. I think everybody is capable of great ideas, in many ways this is the easy part. But I believe the key to generating innovative executions, is in the deep understanding of the limits, the paddock you have to play in.

Apply this to online advertising. In responding to a client brief. A great brief offers detailed insights, target audience and clear objectives that provide us with boundaries to work within. You expect that they are S.M.A.R.T. and you hope the funnel isn’t too big or too small to filter your ideas and response. You have several ‘limitation buckets’ that are defined for you –

- The Client – their understanding and enthusiasm for digital, their budget, their previous success with online.

- Their Campaign objectives – ROI, CTR, CPA, - insert three letter acronyms here -

- Your resources and assets – your audience, your internal resources, skillsets, time.

And one more..
- Technology

One bucket I think is most undervalued, you are limited in technology. Understanding the limits of technology and how you can manipulate the online space is fundamental to being able to fully maximise your creative opportunities and produce innovative digital executions.

Online is no doubt the most complex of all media to understand. Changing standards, measurement metrics not always easy to interpret and of course the constantly evolving technology; from Adobe Air to Silverlight, the mobile evolution and the big wide world of widgets.

But too often, local players, through failed understanding of what is possible, a lack of willingness to challenge what has been done in the past, apply a cookie-cutter approach to online solutions, tried and tested executions, that rarely deliver on client objectives or deliver true value. I feel there needs to be more people actively seeking to understand and apply this technology in new, unique and relevant ways.

I don’t expect everyone will want to know the latest Web2.0 social-networking site, spend their days on a carousel between RSS feeds, Techcrunch, Friendfeed and Twirl, but overall I think there needs to be a greater demand by those in the local online ad industry to understand and apply what is possible.

Check Orange’s ‘The World’s first internet balloon race’, a clever, unique execution which will no doubt deliver on Orange’s objectives above and beyond. And it’s not always about thinking large. NDM’s very own prized possession, the news.com.au homepage, offer up 14% of your above-the-fold pixels to advertisers via a medium rectangle and banner.

Forget the IAB terminology of ‘display ads’, we’ve got an interactive canvas, opening up opportunities for a conversations, engagement and interaction. And I hope through increasing the understanding and the limits of this technology, we can drive innovative, creative ideas that push forward local online advertising.

Users are number one

This is one point I'll always come back to. Understand how to reach and engage users, change behaviour, improve lives and the dollars will follow. Usability and user testing, while not glamorous, are important. Forget search-engine optimisation.. for a moment. And focus on the user. Spend too much time optimising to an algorithm and you take your eye off your real users. Human based search-engines such as Mahalo.com have the ability to redefine search all together.

Vote for this article. What is this?

Ninemsn have added Flock to the footer of all of their news articles. Digg style article recommendation, they’re using the results to feed ‘The Flock’, a Med Rec sized visual display of their ‘most flocked’ articles. It looks pretty nifty as the news circles fly across the screen, but when you need a legend to explain how it works, you’re losing the users already. And it’s easy to skim over this movement in a ‘banner blindness’ state, given there’s no actual content until you mouse over. More importantly, to ‘Flock’ something isn’t an adjective 99.99% of ninemsn users are going to understand. Brands need to stop trying to invent their brand as an adjective and focus on user-centric terminology. To many are striving for ‘to Google it’ type brand recognition. But Google don’t need a ‘What is this?’ link beside their search box to make it dead clear what you’re there for.

I don’t think ‘voting’ for articles works on the publishers. The incentive isn’t there, where’s the reward? My thoughts are you measure the clicks driven from the index page hyperlinks and search-engine article specific traffic to derive your most-popular. It doesn’t measure the quality of the content, you leave that in the hands of the editors, but it does derive what users are deeming important.

So it drops another piece of realestate in the sandbox that is the baseline of your articles along with all those other icons that are breeding down there. To Digg, to Flock, to Share on Facebook, Messenger, del.icio.us, email. Some of these icons I can’t even decipher. I use del.icio.us frequently, and I have never used this icon, there’s a big fat button in my browser that serves me fine.

News.com.au has a smorgasboard of icons at the base of all articles, yet at the moment on IE 7 none of them are even clickable. I’m sure no-one has noticed. * emails to product team *

So who actually uses these icons? No-one. Those that do use these are probably the same type that don't visit portal sites to consume their news. It’s half-assed social media sharing with more return for the publishers than for the users. Replace that strip with a list of ‘like’ articles, breadcrumbs to related news and attempt to increase the session times on your site. Or just remove them all together.

Over the over the page (OTP) advertising

I see over-the-page ads as the nearest format we (online) have to a TV commercial, interrupting our regular programming with a forced advertiser message.

It’s a short-term shotgun approach to online advertising, agencies love them because they provide reach, publishers love them because they provide super CPM rates. Users hate them. If you ask a novice user what is “online advertising”, they’ll often mention these ads. In a digital world that offers so much, it’s a shame we still have to resort to these formats.

Like watching a great TV commercial, there are OTP’s that generally make good viewing (see Soap’s Jumper launch, great example of online specific video done well) however a majority are poor flash projects that add little value or fully exploit the medium. Red flags also to Virgin Money and Sony, who both have over-zealous marketers running over-the-page style advertising on their own sites. Crazy.

What’s made worse if their lack of standardisation – in size, in duration, in mandatory inclusions. Ninemsn allow up to 10 seconds for a full page OTP, a lifetime in online. The IAB goes further offering maximum 15 seconds. And there is no mention of ad frequency, as publishers continue to bump up their frequencies from one a month, to one a week, to frequency of one throughout a week. I’m sure the usability departments in all of these publishers have fought and lost the war when it comes to these formats – too much revenue at stake.

But it’s a short term strategy, he who wins the user, wins the game. Users can and will move, when competitors are only one click away. As RSS and News feed widgets continue to gain in popularity, back door entry to publishers content via these links will become increasingly popular, effectively avoiding the homepage onslaught.

As Dr Schmidt highlights, while Google’s astronomic revenue is derived from their advertising model, the “number one priority is end-user happiness”. Publishers needs to get smarter about their ad units and return more focus to the user.