Hotwire Blog

28 March, 2007

CeBIT 2007




For one week, Hanover has again been the centre for IT and telecommunications. And, as every year, there was a lot of speculation about the validity of CeBIT: is it now more a local rather than a global show? Is its influence declining now that some of the big companies like Motorola and Nokia have dropped out? And as always, will it snow?

Against all odds, CeBIT seems to have made the final turn: for the first time in years CeBIT saw its visitor numbers grow, although it is probably fair to say that some of the tickets were sold at dumping prices. Still, nearly 480,000 visitors attended for an update on new technologies and trends. And the overall quality of the meetings seems to have been quite good – all of our clients attending the show were very pleased with them. And from a PR perspective, the show was a great success and a fantastic opportunity to reach out to media from other territories like Eastern Europe or Asia.

It was pretty clear from the beginning that we would not see the unveiling of any revolutionary new technology this year – instead there were a lot of enhancements to existing technologies. Ahead of the show editors were expecting seven big trends: Blu Ray and HD-DVD (where we German’s are pretty far behind), Full HD, Vista/Hybrid Disks and Solid State Disks, Quad Core CPUs and IP TV. Navigation was also a really, really hot topic. But as our client Factiva found in their CeBIT Index, which we had placed in the trade show magazine “Messe Zeitung”, the dominating topic turned out to be mobile internet (and you can include navigation here).

Factiva’s Index assessed 146 dailies, magazines and newswires during the show and identified the most frequently mentioned topics. Mobile applications were of the most interest to media (and consequently consumers). Besides new devices, many carriers were introducing flat rates for mobile internet on handhelds like BlackBerry or other smartphones.

Another frequently mentioned topic was “growth”. The business climate in Germany is quite positive and companies are predicting good growth. The IT and telecommunication industry is no exception, although it is no longer perceived as the “economy driver”. Still it seems as if more and more companies in the industry are investing in their product and brand image.

So while some companies decided not to participate, CeBIT was again the most important technology trade show in the world. And with IFA, the Berlin based show for consumer electronics now taking place annually, we will see another highlight in the German technology calendar.

Btw – to maintain their position the CeBIT organisers are revamping CeBIT next year. The show will start on a Tuesday and finish on the following Sunday evening. Good news for most of us who either dreaded the weekends when loads of young consumers streamed in, on the hunt for giveaways or who had left at the weekend to go home, only to have to return again on Monday. And it means we will have nearly four days for successful media relations.

P.S. Yes it did snow, but only a little bit.

23 March, 2007

Simplicity and the art of communication


This year in Italy we supported the second ‘Meet the Media Guru’ seminar organised by MGM Digital Communication and promoted by Forum Net Economy and BlackBerry.

One evening a few days ago, one of Milan’s prestigious centres of culture, the mythical Mediatec, was crowded, queues of people were at the gate all eager to get into the seminar.

A famous ‘guru’ was the reason for the crowds. Hundreds of people, including many from the new networking generation were all wanting to hear John Maeda, a graphic designer, artist and leading professor at MIT media Lab. Famous for making art with computers and a noted collaborator with important tech companies such as Samsung, Toshiba and Sony…

And what were people clamouring to hear: his current thoughts on the concept of simplicity, on which he founded the MIT SIMPLICITY Consortium.

He began by saying: “I am not a media guru, I am a media guy!” He went on to discuss his appreciation of simple and small things, the things that you do everyday, which can become extraordinary. He says that the world is full of fantastic things and he likes to live in it. His approach to life and technology is the Zen way “right is easy and easy is right”.

Thinking about marketing and communications, simplicity sells, look at the iPod and at the BlackBerry. People like things that make their life easier. The key to targeting a market is the creation of strong relationships, underpinned by love: the love of doing things in an easy way. Think also about social networking through blogs, online communities and new media. They are a simple way of communicating: simple things that create big ideas. See YouTube or SecondLife, they are the result of new ways of communicating, and which in a very simple way develop an emotional attachment to a community…and this is what people like…

http://www.meetthemediaguru.org/

06 March, 2007

Never fear - PR is on a roll


Every quarter, “news aktuell”, a major German newswire service, conducts a survey among in-house and agency PR professionals in Germany. The “PR-Trendmonitor” tracks their views on the latest trends and developments in communications. This quarter’s PR-Trendmonitor highlights three challenges that PR pros are facing today.

1. Increasing pressure on budgets. (27.8 per cent of responses)
2. Web 2.0 and its implications for PR (17.5 per cent)
3. Measuring the success of PR (11.4 per cent)

Let’s take a look at budget pressures first. In our experience at Hotwire, the recent uplift in the technology industry has contributed to a drop in budget pressures. While this may not be true in other sectors, technology companies have learnt their lesson from the bursting of the New Economy bubble: brand building is not about spending millions on advertising campaigns, it’s about building a reputation with ever more fragmented audiences. There’s a job for Public Relations! While overall communications budgets may be shrinking, PR for technology is on a roll.

Quite possibly, our relatively comfortable position in terms of budget pressures has to do with our approach to challenge number three: measurement of PR success. Since day one, we’ve been doing virtually everything with measurability in mind. While the academic discussion about measuring PR success seems to go in circles around fairly abstract approaches, such as “communication scorecards”, we’re taking a pragmatic stance and deliver results that make a difference to our client’s bottom-line.

Web 2.0 and what comes with it for PR is definitely exciting as new technologies contribute to a shift in media usage. While newspapers, TV and radio programmes are consumed in a linear way (the media makers defining content and the sequence of presentation), Web 2.0 technologies (RSS news aggregators, social book-marking, video-on-demand, etc.) will ultimately lead to non-linear patterns of consumption. The reader/viewer/listener will start re-mixing content independently of the medium and time constraints to fit his/her individual way of life and daily routine.

While this is a massive threat to classic advertising on television and in print, it’s a fantastic opportunity for PR. If PR today is about good arguments and good content presented to the right audience through the best-fitting channels, ‘PR 2.0’ will be about making that good content re-mixable. The odds are that PR will loose control over the channel and context of presentation. But one new economy vision is now closer to becoming reality than ever: “content is king”. And PR will lead the coronation ceremony.

01 March, 2007

“The press is dead, long live the press!”


Is there a future for the press in our countries? Will it be paper or digital? This issue hit the French headlines last week with the publication of a report for the government by Marc Tessier, former director of the French public TV channel, France Televisions, and Maxime Baffert, financial inspector (http://www.culture.gouv.fr/culture/actualites/rapports/tessier/rapport-fev2007.pdf). This report - as has been widely reported elsewhere – showed how the paper press has been losing its audience for a few years now. And the digital revolution, initiated by the specialised press and the classifieds sector, has only contributed to the acceleration of this phenomenon.

A lot of areas were researched in the report in order to solve the issue and to find a positive way to exploit the ‘digital era’s’ arrival. The report also included a comparison of the French market to other countries, including the US, UK, Germany, Italy, the Nordics, Japan, and South Korea.

It showed how the French press is particularly touched by this phenomenon compared to other countries; with Italy and Spain beginning to face the same kind of situation. The report mainly highlights the weakness of the national distribution channel networks. For example, in 2003, in France 181 newspapers were distributed per 1000 people, compared to 274 in the US, 371 in Germany, 383 in the UK and 543 in Sweden! This has had a direct impact on French advertising budgets, which went down to only 9.3 % in France against 14.3 % in the UK, 17.2 % in Germany and 18.9 % in the US in 2006.

However, over the last three years, two free publications have entered the top five of the French national daily titles: Metro and 20 minutes. There are two ways to look at these two publications: the first one is to consider them responsible for the “malaise” of the French newspapers, the second is to see them as alternative offerings which help boost French readership, in a way similar to the web: free, short articles, easily available and easy to read. This success confirms there is a problem with distribution. But it also invites us to imagine that there are alternative solutions, rather than just claiming that the press is dead…