For Internet ad giants like Google and Yahoo, the Toyota Scion brand should be a dream marketer. With an 18-24-year-old trendsetter target audience, the carmaker sees the Internet as key to its marketing efforts. But while other auto brands buy up keywords and run banners and pre-roll spots online, Scion takes a decidedly alternative route, relying instead on virtual worlds, its own broadband video site and viral gaming to reach an audience averse to ads, offline or online.
“The days of the banner ad are getting old,” said Adrian Si, interactive marketing manager at Scion. “We try not to do any pre-roll [video spots] if we can. We try to do as few banners as we can.”
Scion is focusing on less proven channels. A month before Anheuser-Busch tried its hand at broadband entertainment with Bud.tv in February 2007, Scion Broadband launched with five channels featuring clips devoted to indie music and culture. Unlike Bud.tv, it is not aiming to be a mass destination, Si said. The site draws about 50,000 viewers a month.
Rather than jump on the MySpace and Facebook bandwagon, Scion has established outposts in virtual environments like Second Life, There.com, Gaia Online and Whyville. It opened “Club Scion” on There.com in August, featuring a series of interconnected clubs built in the shape of the Scion xA, xB and tC. On Whyville, frequented by young teens, Scion set up a financing arm for users to purchase a virtual car.
“The sites are quite small,” Si said, but Toyota actually aims to keep the brand on a niche scale to maintain its underground appeal. It sold about 170,000 Scions last year and wants to repeat that this year.
Bigger advertisers are unlikely to take the same chances, outside of establishing experimental budgets, said David Cohen, U.S. director of digital communications at Interpublic Group’s Universal McCann. “They’re fairly comfortable with this idea of targeted reach,” he said. “A lot of that other stuff is hard to measure.”
Scion has also leaned heavily on viral campaigns. It used movie theater spots this spring to promote Want2BeSquare.com, an interactive gaming site to promote the boxy Scion xB. A “Little Deviant” advergame campaign where conformists are attacked followed this summer for the xD model.
“For this audience, you’ve got all this clutter of advertising,” Si said “We’d prefer to keep it underground and have them discover it.”
An obvious side benefit to the let-them-find-it approach: It doesn’t cost as much. For the first seven months of the year, Scion spent just $1.5 million online, according to TNS Media Intelligence. “It works well for us because it keeps our budgets down,” Si said.
Scion is not abandoning the tried-and-true tactics: It still runs traditional ad units, although it is experimenting with new methods. In a campaign it ran in conjunction with blog search engine Technorati in September, Scion made widgets that piped in real-time headlines from independent-film blogs, rather than extol the vehicle’s features. It ran the widgets as ad units on a couple of sites, but also offered them as content via Technorati.
“It’s participating in the culture,” said Peter Hirshberg, chief marketing officer of Technorati. “It’s actually the way you have a conversation [with the blogosphere], by sending links.”
Scion is also dipping its toes into search advertising, long a staple of auto brands. What took it so long? Research among its young male trendsetter demographic showed they disapproved of brands that “buy their way” to the top of search results.
“We’d prefer to rise to the top of search naturally versus doing paid search,” Si said.
Along with its emphasis on nontraditional approaches, Scion takes an expansive view of its agency roster and metrics. It works with more than 20 small agencies–from virtual world developer Millions of Us to independent Attik–on digital initiatives, and uses buzz-monitoring data from Nielsen Online (a sibling of Adweek).
“Agencies will claim they can do all things well, but the reality is they do one thing well but not others,” Si said.
Not all of Scion’s moves have been successful. An early mobile experiment in 2004 fizzled after the brand collected names through a contest ad, then re-messaged entrants about the Scion. People felt the company had taken advantage of them, Si said. On the drawing board: trying to create its own social network for owners in 2008.
“You have to figure out how to engage them on their ground,” said Si. “Everything we do online we think, ‘If we do this, how is it making their lives better?’”
This is a potentially powerful approach for youth-oriented lifestyle brands, said Garrick Schmitt, vp of user experience at Avenue A/Razorfish, part of Microsoft. Red Bull, one of his agency’s clients, has also mostly shunned traditional online advertising in favor of new approaches like desktop widgets, a Facebook rock-paper-scissors application and a broadband video channel on Joost. “[Red Bull] wants a direct relationship with their consumers and they know they can do that by bypassing traditional media outlets,” he said.
At the end of the day, nontraditional programs could face the same problem as traditional ones as more brands vie for a finite amount of audience attention. Attik group creative director Simon Needham warned that as more brands look to emulate the formula, response levels inevitably decline. “These days it’s a mistake to overestimate what the results are going to be,” he said.
“Can you imagine a world of 30 million Facebook applications?” said Shane Ginsberg, executive director of global business development at Omnicom Group’s Organic, a shop on the Scion roster. “There’s a danger there that even the new stuff gets absolutely diluted because everyone rushes in too quickly.”
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With Gmail’s adoption of IMAP, one of electronic messaging’s best-kept secrets has been thrust suddenly into the spotlight. But IMAP’s inventor says the move, while overdue, doesn’t deserve the fanfare it received.
Mark Crispin, an often outspoken purist when it comes to e-mail implementations, had a typically-for-him dubious reaction to the announcement of Gmail’s added support for his protocol.
“I am very pleased that Gmail intends to adopt IMAP,” he says. (Note his word choice: “intends.”) “I feel that their current server should be considered to be a ‘work in progress’ and not as a viable ‘ready for prime time’ IMAP server.”
Crispin says if he were to rate Google’s current implementation of IMAP, it would be “quite damning.”
“The consequences of the current server being presented as a completed product would be far worse than their not doing IMAP at all.”
Google announced Oct. 24 that it would add support for IMAP to Gmail, one of the most-requested enhancements to its massively popular web-based mail service. Gmail, like similar services from Microsoft and Yahoo, has previously only used the more popular — but much less useful — POP protocol.
As with many things Google, Gmail’s IMAP implementation is not quite finished. It lacks a few important features, and in our initial tests, we found it to be painfully slow.
When asked to comment on Crispin’s criticism, the Gmail team offered an oblique response.
“Our primary focus is on our users and the user experience,” a Google spokesperson says, “and we’re focused on building the features that are most important to our users. We’ll be updating our IMAP implementation as we go, in response to how our users use it and what they request.”
However, even non-compliant support for IMAP is encouraging to users like Nancy McGough, who maintains a list of IMAP e-mail providers, and shares in the frustration of seeing the 22-year-old protocol so marginalized. McGough was losing hope earlier this year. She posted on comp.mail.imap: “My guess is that (Google, Yahoo and Microsoft) will not (support IMAP). My prediction is that they will support annotating messages and that will be another step towards the death of IMAP.”
But now it seems likely instead that Gmail’s role as a trendsetter, as well as the proliferation of mobile e-mail, will give IMAP the boost it deserves. Although McGough, a self-described “privacy nut,” distrusts Google’s motives — “They want to profile you,” she says — the latest move gives her hope for the future of the medium.
“Now that Gmail is supporting IMAP, I predict that Yahoo Mail and Microsoft will, too,” she says.
With POP mail, you’re responsible for keeping copies of your messages on your own computer. If you have more than one computer, or a mobile device, you have to manually synchronize everything — or, more commonly, just live with a disorderly array of inboxes. “I’ll just forward that to myself at work” is the battle cry of the POP mail user, a phrase which makes IMAP devotees shake their heads in pity.
With IMAP, everything lives in perfect sync on the server. Flag a message as “to-do” on one machine and the change is reflected everywhere else simultaneously. In an era of mobile devices, POP is a sadly inadequate relic.
E-mail providers have been loath to adopt the superior protocol, in part because it requires a significant storage commitment on the provider’s side. With POP, on the other hand, the user carries the burden of keeping all the mail locally.
For ad-driven web-based e-mail like Gmail, there’s another hitch. “Companies are worried that, because IMAP syncs so well, users will turn to mail clients rather than the web interface, which means a drop in advertising revenue,” says Keith Coleman, product manager of Gmail.
It’s a reasonable fear, and Google deserves an optimistic round of applause for taking the leap.
IMAP is unquestionably miles better than POP, but McGough’s hopes extend further.
“We need e-mail messages to be linkable, annotatable and access-controlled,” she says. “Basically we need all our e-mail in a wiki with multiple levels of access control (private, various groups and public). I think that’s going to happen soon. I’ll be brave and say within a year!”
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Leopard, the latest update of the Apple Mac operating system OS X, goes on sale on Friday.
The release ends months of waiting for Mac fans, after Apple pushed back the launch to finish development on its much-hyped iPhone.
Early reviews for Leopard have been positive with veteran technology writer Walt Mossberg calling it “evolutionary, not revolutionary”.
Apple is hoping to build on recent strong sales of its Mac computers.
In the last three months, Apple sold 2.2 million Macs, up 400,000 on its previous best quarter.
The company is touting Leopard as a Vista-beater, pointing to new features not found in the new operating system (OS) from Microsoft that drives many PCs.
Leopard, the latest update of the Apple Mac operating system OS X, goes on sale on Friday.
The release ends months of waiting for Mac fans, after Apple pushed back the launch to finish development on its much-hyped iPhone.
Early reviews for Leopard have been positive with veteran technology writer Walt Mossberg calling it “evolutionary, not revolutionary”.
Apple is hoping to build on recent strong sales of its Mac computers.
In the last three months, Apple sold 2.2 million Macs, up 400,000 on its previous best quarter.
The company is touting Leopard as a Vista-beater, pointing to new features not found in the new operating system (OS) from Microsoft that drives many PCs.
‘Few disappointments’
In the New York Times, technology columnist David Pogue wrote: “Happy surprises, and very few disappointments, lie around every corner.”
At the MacLiveExpo, being held in London, there was a mixed response from attendees on whether they would be rushing out to buy Leopard on day one.
Many of the delegates said they would wait for the operating system to “bed down” before they bought it.
“I never buy any operating system when it first comes out. I normally wait until it has been out for six months or a year,” said David Ramage, a Mac user from Luton.
He added: “Tiger does what I need it to do right now. I’ve not seen anything in Leopard to make me want to buy it immediately.”
For developers, a new operating system means having to work to ensure their programs run smoothly on the new platform.
Ben Rudolph, director of communications at SWSoft, makers of Parallels, said Leopard was a big step forward for Apple and “would continue to drive sales of Macs”.
Parallels lets users run Windows and Linux alongside OS X on a single Apple machine.
Mr Rudolph said Parallels would run smoothly under Leopard, barring any last minute changes to the code released by Apple.
“If that happens, we’ll release a free, automatic update to account for them very soon after Leopard’s launch,” he said.
Of the new features in Leopard, Mr Rudolph said he was looking forward to being able to take advantage of his Mac’s 64-bit architecture.
The new OS takes full advantage of the latest generation of chips inside Apple machines, while running applications on older processors also.
“I’m also looking forward to new user-experience features like Stacks, which should help me organise my incredibly messy desktop, and Spaces, which lets me cycle between different desktops.”
Nik Rawlinson, editor of MacUser magazine, said many users would get Leopard in its first few weeks on sale.
“When Tiger was launched it earned Apple $120m very quickly and all the expectations are that sales will be double that.”
He added: “Vista has been quite a disappointment for many people and Leopard could be the reason many people make the switch to Macs.”
He said he felt Leopard had enough new features to distinguish itself from Microsoft’s Vista.
“A lot of things that were previously only add-ons in the Mac world, such as the Apple TV interface, are now integrated into the OS.
“That is competing directly with Media Center on Windows PCs. Apple has seen that Microsoft has moved forward in some areas and is responding.”
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