Digital Recruiting

Employer Branding - setting the right expectations

It's late on Friday afternoon as I write / copy this, but it jumped out as so bang on that I couldn't help but copy it here.

I'll be upfront - this came from www.utalkmarketing.com (I like this site and really recommend their weekly newsletter) and was contributed by Nigel Cooper who seems to be a very very busy man (Divisional Managing Director of Motivcom PLC, Managing Director P&MM Travel, Chairman of Zibrant, Chairman of AYMTM and former Chairman of trade association Eventia).

Anyway - to quote that amiable bloke who won the last series of The Apprentice with the dodgy CV: "Now dat's what I'm talking abowt!" (please put as dodgy a wide boy London accent on that as you can - sporting a fat tie a definite bonus).

Nothing particularly rocket science in what follows, just nice to hear someone from outside of our niche market making sense of it all. And gives me further hope that the transparency that the web now offers will indeed increasingly lead brand guardians to finally realise that their Employer Brand is every bit as, if not more, powerful an entity (especially when it's not right) as anything they can cultivate themselves in their consumer focused marketing departments and therefore worth the time and effort to get right, beyond hollow senior management words.

Well - a man can dream can't he?
:) 

How to get staff to live your brand
By Nigel Cooper

Selling and marketing your product and service to the public is a major challenge which every industry sector faces, but how do you get your own employees to buy into your brand?

1. Aim to obtain 'buy in' from employees at all levels.

A campaign is only truly effective if the whole company identify with and live with the brand values. I think of the brand as the "soul" or spirit of the business. A brand should be an outward projection of the inner belief.

2. Research for best results.

If the ultimate objective of a campaign is to change employee attitudes and subsequently, their behaviour, research is essential to develop a solid understanding of what attitudes exist and reveal how they can be changed.

From concept stage through to final delivery, when looking to drive the behavioural changes that all projects depend upon, knowing your staff and what motivates and encourages them is what will drive the change.

3. HR people are not marcoms people!

This is not meant to be disrespectful to the global HR community, but companies employ marketing communications experts to market their brand and values to customers, so why not the staff!

Many employee branding programmes fail because the message is not compelling or personal enough or because they are under-funded and under resourced.

Take into account your audience age groups, and demographics where possible and find the right collateral, theme, and appeal which will grab their attention. 

4. Form working parties to define the brand.

Companies will need to form working parties across the business to define what they believe the brand should stand for. This in turn will effect the values that the staff and the company should live up to.

5. Apply internal marketing - the same principles and many of the same processes as brand marketing to customers.

The difference is that it is focused on influencing the attitudes and behaviour of staff. The core of a marketer's role is to be the guardian of his or her product.

This translates into understanding the needs and dynamics of the internal marketplace to ensure not only that the messages are delivered but in a way that maximises the chances of the benefits being realised. 

It takes real effort to change customers' or consumers' behaviour. Yet that same type of consumer probably works in your organisation, and when you are restructuring or introducing new working practices, the success of your project depends on changing their behaviour and that of their colleagues and managers.

Let staff own the brand.  They must be involved in establishing what the brand means today and what it is going to mean and in turn the values.

6. Set measurable goals.

How will companies be able to evaluate whether their internal staff branding campaign has worked?

Companies must have a clear sense of how many of true brand ambassadors they hope to cultivate, which key performance indicators they hope to achieve and the level of customer satisfaction or sales increase which is expected.

It's also key to set a realistic timeframe against specific targets along the way for your internal branding to filter through and take lasting effect for all employees. 

7. Incentivise and reward performance.

As I work in the business of performance improvement, you would hardly expect me to say anything else!

However I do see the amazing results that strategic incentive programmes can make to a company performance. This applies both to internal motivation, dealer or channel incentives and customer or consumer promotions.

The most effective solutions create push and pull through the products route to market. And don't assume this is all expensive, small tactical initiatives can make a huge impact.

Even something as low cost as £1 per employee can start to make an impact on how people think, a 99p Easter Egg on everyone's desk would be a great start and very low cost for any company.

8. Using events to create internal brand loyalty.

Working in the business of events, we at P&MM are often asked how much an event will cost so that the client can decide if they can afford it. 

Maybe the question should be: "What's the cost of brand reinforcement loyalty, motivation, initiative, enterprise and hard work?" Because that's what good events create.  Think of the buzz in the office the week after the office Christmas party or the atmosphere at the company conference.

Now imagine if it was like that every week.  Events don't have to be expensive, just well planned and thought out. If companies are bold enough to want to change the way their employees feel then what better way than to get them engaged in a programme of monthly staff events.

Bowling, cinema, theatre, football, theme parks, there's a lot that can be done with a little money and a bit of effort. The upside however could be that staff will feel that "this brand cares about me." 

9.  Achieve brand consistency

Customers need to see consistency of brands from marketing to sales to operations to delivery to finance – a complete experience.

This requires communication understanding and engagement. Understanding why things are important and what they mean to the business and the customer.

10. Make it sustainable.

Getting staff to live your brand is more than a one off campaign.  Align key people and processes to sustain the brand values and culture of the company.  An ongoing internal branding programme should be a key part of recruitment, learning development, staff training and ongoing communications. 

Pay...Go Dutch...or Expect it for Free?

I attended a breakfast seminar a couple of weeks ago held by the FT/exec-appointments.com. The topic was 'International Jobs – Strategies for Candidate Sourcing' and the presentation was given by the exec-appointments CEO, Betty Thayer. There was some great content in there on global talent management, talent being globally mobile, emerging markets and the rise of the Internet as a primary sourcing tool for global executive recruitment. All great stuff.

Now, as often happens at such things, something will be be mentioned or discussed which gets me thinking......

On this occasion, there was mention of how, in some countries, there are recruitment websites that have a candidate subscription model, you register your CV for a fee.....you pay to give them your CV. It was mentioned how Theladders was finding uptake of its 'premium' membership challenging in the UK market.

This brought me back to about a year/year and a half ago, when a German recruitment company was asking MediaCom to launch its services in the UK. They asked me for my tuppence worth and on investigation I discovered the German website/recruitment service was based 100% on job seekers subscribing to this site, paying money for connecting with a recruiter. Seemingly this model was incredibly successful in the German market.

I was at a bit of a loss. Recruitment consultants were ringing tonnes of professionals across many different industries in the UK trying to get them to give their CV to recruiters, arrange an interview, coach them through the process. All for free. Why on earth would I pay money to give a recruitment consultant (of types) access to my CV?

My thoughts, were that for this to be a successful launch, they would have to position this as an exclusive-club of sorts (people like feeling elite) offer fantastic added value (which I couldn't see from the model on show, what that would be) and really it would be more of a compelling proposition in the UK in an economic downturn, when the supply and demand dynamic shifted in the employers favour.

So, we are in the midst of a credit crunch and there is talk of things getting worse before they get better. Does this mean we will all soon be subscribing to the premium LinkedIn and Theladders services? Mmn...I'm not so sure. Unlike previous recessions talent and skill shortages exist, and talent is recognised, like never before, as being an incredibly important commodity to a companies success.

It's only really niche, exclusive type social  networking sites that I see as being capable of securing a paid fee from users. Think of asmallworld.com or the exclusive graduate/MBA professional networking site Doostang.com. 

Call it the cultural conditioning of growing up in the UK Internet recruitment market, but I guess I don't see the added value or exclusivity from premium subscriptions on such sites....not yet anyway.

You Earn How Much??

The inevitable tripadvisor type 'rate your company' website has arrived, Glassdoor.com. The site appeals to the nosey parker number nine, in us all, in that you can view salaries at different organisations. It sidesteps the uneasiness that UK-type people feel, when discussing salaries or indeed money in general. We can now have a good nosey from the comfort of our own chair.

What's really interesting, from an employer point of view, is the employer review sections where employees rate their companies. In terms of employer brand reputation management, all these peer views and opinions will be very interesting. From a candidate perspective this site will be potentially very influential in shaping perceptions of organisations.

The key learning that organisations should take, is that in terms of employer branding, your values and employer value proposition will need to be genuine and have integrity, recognised equally by both your internal and external audience.

Reviews are anonymous and in return for your views and salary info, you get full access to all the info so the model perpetuates growth.

The US-based site intends to make money through recruitment advertising and is adding reviews on UK based employers in next two weeks, although there are already a few interesting ones on there.......

This article sums the whole offering up nicely.

Time for a change

It has been an interesting year … credit crunch, stoke getting into the premiership and a lot of talk about the changing recruitment advertising market.

Ok well maybe it is not that interesting …

But I think this year has shown me one thing … PEOPLE STILL HAVE NO IDEA WHAT THEY ARE DOING.

In fact at times it is pathetic …

So in a vague attempt to make sense … I will not quote any research, books or other things that help to improve our knowledge, thinking and ability to do our jobs.

At the end of the day … we work in advertising – why try and understand what we do? Just sell the same old rubbish to the same old people!

For those of you who want to keep on doing the same old rubbish then stop reading.

For everyone else I have a little thing to do – go out and apply for jobs online.

1. Do search for vacancies on search engines, job boards and on employer sites.
2. Apply for a job online.
3. Go for a few interviews.
4. You might even get a new job.

But you will find a truly awful process … painful, gibberish, dull and seemingly designed to make the process one of the most drawn out experiences of your life.

Why is this?

Well for a start people are designing advertising strategies using old visual advertising techniques that were applied in print. Websites are pieces of software and need to be based on human behavior.

Secondly, people are still not tracking the communications correctly. And if I hear one more person say that the client is not ready for solid ROI measurement I might be drawn to kill. Since when did a person not want to make sure what they are doing is working?

Finally, clients need to see the truth behind the products they are buying. How can this be independent when planning (when it happens), buying, creative and web builds are all under full service.

The conflict of interest between each component leads to biased communications strategies, aimed at hitting the media and agency targets. Rather than client needs.

Now I know there are good people in the media and agencies.

Media and agencies also need to make good margin and pay the teams well …

Clients need to invest in the communications strategies, rather than just try and cut costs.

BUT the industry needs to make a step change, and introduce good quality communications planning.

An interview with VisualCV

I don't know how many of you have had a look at VisualCV.com yet? In a word: cute. Great idea, great networking capability, great future. We're all creating VisualCVs over the next couple of weeks, and will post them here. Thanks Scott and Alex for organising this

Everyone knows the internet has changed how people look for work. Recruiters have had to adapt (and will have to continue to adapt) their businesses for this. Want a new job? Time to visit Google and see all the different options - recruitment consultancies, employer careers sections, referral sites... List seems to be limitless these days. A new technique/ tactic seems to pop up regularly with varying degrees of success.

The one part of the cycle that really hasn't changed is the good old CV. No matter how our info reaches a prospective employer, it’s still pretty much the same format. Hasn’t really changed has it?

Well one company is looking to change all that. VisualCV.

I was intrigued so thought who better to talk to than Scott Herman, VP for Product Management at VisualCV. You can see Scott’s own Visual CV at www.visualcv.com/scottherman

CARVE: Scott, the mission statement on your website states your goal is to reinvent the CV for the internet age. That’s a bold objective. How did the business get started?

Scott H: Our cofounders, Clint Heiden (www.VisualCV.com/clintheiden) and Phillip Merrick ( www.VisualCV.com/phillipmerrick ) have been executives, entrepreneurs, and job seekers themselves and together they have recruited thousands of professionals. Like all people and companies who recruit, they found the whole process very inefficient and frustrating for their companies and for the candidates and professionals they interviewed. Clint even founded his own recruiting company to try and solve these frustrations. Turns out that what he discovered from this venture was that the resume was an essential but broken tool. So, Clint got together with his friend and technologist, Phillip, to talk about how they could apply technology to the resume and make it more applicable to today's professionals. The two spent the next few months meeting with human resource managers, recruiters, and professionals to find the points of frustration and dream up a product that could ease the frustration for companies and professionals. After the research and planning phase, they went out to find the start-up team that could help bring the concept to fruition. Many of the current VisualCV.com team worked with Clint and Phillip in the past (myself included).
The world didn’t need another job board or applicant tracking system. It didn’t need yet another social network. In fact, job boards, corporate recruiting websites, and social networks are often the source of the frustration with job searching and professional networking! We wanted to focus on the common “personal” element – the resume or CV. Thus the product focuses on making it easy for people to create CVs for the Internet age – VisualCVs. Development of the production version of VisualCV.com started last Fall and we launched our public beta in February of this year.

CARVE: Given your own CV is online, you clearly believe this is a great way to advertise your firm. Are other firms outside of VisualCV using this product to promote their services or are most of your customers using VisualCV to differentiate themselves during a job search?

SH: VisualCVs are great for job searching. Not only do they allow people to represent themselves in a whole new way, but creating multiple tailored versions, controlling who gets access to a particular VisualCV, and tracking who views your VisualCV are killer features for job seekers.

But we see a significant percentage of our members who are using their VisualCVs for business development, self-promotion, or personal brand management. They’re not looking for their next job but they want something that helps them stand out from the crowd in their daily business dealings. Their VisualCV becomes an extension of their business card; they build a VisualCV that highlights their experience or their current offering and they use our privacy settings to make the VisualCV “public”. A public VisualCV has a friendly web address and can be seen by anyone on the Internet, including the various search engines. We also see companies creating VisualCVs for themselves – an organizational VisualCV that highlights what the company is about, often with links to the individual VisualCVs of their key personnel. A great example of this is Weeman Entertainment, a recording industry firm you can find at http://www.visualcv.com/premier/weeman. This is clearly not a job-seeking VisualCV but a great way to promote their company!
I use my own VisualCV for many purposes other than job searching. You’ll find links to my “public” VisualCV (I have many different versions with varying privacy levels) in my email signature, in my blog posts, printed on both sides of my business card, etc.

CARVE: Again, looking at your site, there’s a number of high profile firms that have already signed up to use and accept VisualCVs. In terms of implementation, what sort of process changes do these companies go through to start using your service?

SH: We see companies using VisualCV.com in a number of ways. At the simplest level, companies can create their own VisualCV, perhaps highlighting why job searchers might want to work there. They can then list themselves (for free) in our Company Directory where our members can find and research them. Members can share their own VisualCVs with the company through a simple “one-click” interface. A job searcher can express interest in 10 companies with as many clicks, rather than wading through 10 different online application forms on 10 different corporate websites. And the company benefits by getting the higher-quality VisualCVs vs. Old-school paper resumes. As of July, we have over 600 companies in our Company Directory where our members can check them out.

At the mid-level, a company can buy a “private-label” version of VisualCV.com that allows them to maintain their own branded community of VisualCVs. A company can control who gets access to create VisualCVs, what the visibility of the community is, how the user experience looks – they even get their own private domain name. We continue to host their gated community as a Software as a Service (SaaS) offering similar to SalesForce.com. This is a great option for corporate recruiting, mid-large size recruiting firms, associations, and professional networking communities. One example of this “private-label” model is The China Business Network http://www.thechinabusinessnetwork.com/ ), which is launching their own “private” VisualCV community this Fall.
At the highest-level, we offer companies the ability to have their own private-label community of VisualCVs that is tightly integrated with their own applications and business workflows. The company can customize the VisualCV user experience and incorporate company-specific features into the service. This is what we’re doing with Heidrick & Struggles.

CARVE: Arguably the highest profile VisualCV has had in the UK so far has been the deal you have concluded with Heidrick & Struggles. What can you tell us about this? What were Heidricks looking for and how will the VisualCV service change how they go about their business?

SH: Heidrick & Struggles is one of the top executive search firms in the world. They operate up in the stratosphere, often placing C-level candidates in Fortune 50 companies. So obviously anything that would allow them to better feature and promote their very senior candidates would get their attention. Imagine presenting a virtual binder of CEO-level interactive VisualCVs to an exclusive client, rather than a stack of “wall of text” paper. It totally changes the “short list” selection process.
Heidrick & Struggles got involved with us very early on, when we first started shopping around the concept and looking for feedback. They’re not just a customer for us, they’re an early-stage investor as well. We’re building a highly customized “private-label” version of VisualCV.com for them that will be integrated into their internal business processes. Our privacy and security features are a big draw since confidentiality is at the heart of an executive search.

CARVE: If I as an individual want to use a VisualCV, either for a job search or to promote my own service, how would I go about doing this, and how much would it cost me?

SH: VisualCV.com is free for individual members. Getting started is as simple as visiting our website at http://www.visualcv.com/ and clicking on the “Sign Up” link. Once you’ve signed up, you can use our user-friendly editor to create your first VisualCV. We support cut-n-paste, drag-n-drop, and other interface concepts that people are familiar with from their desktop applications. You don’t need “web skillz” to build a VisualCV – we’ve specifically designed it so that a non-technical person can build a VisualCV. We also have over 100 real-world example VisualCVs available (after you log in) so that you can see what other people are doing to make their VisualCVs stand out from the pack. Lots of very creative ideas; we’re often surprised by how often our members take their VisualCVs in a direction we had never even anticipated.

CARVE: A free service for individuals sounds good to me! In that case, what is your revenue model?

SH: Admittedly, our revenue model seems strange at first. We don’t charge individual members. We don’t put advertising on VisualCVs (it’s your personal brand, not ours!). We allow companies to join our Company Directory for free. So how do we make money? We often joke that since we’re Web 2.0, everything is free. But there are a few different ways that VisualCV.com generates revenue.

Most important is our “private-label” offering. Our free public site shows what’s possible with a VisualCV. But companies and organizations usually want more control over brand, access, privacy settings, member communications, etc. Depending on the level of customization and integration required, these private-label versions of VisualCV.com can generate significant revenue for us.

We’re also rolling out a Partner Marketplace this summer. Companies or individuals will be able to buy listing space in a Marketplace area of our website where they can draw attention to their own VisualCV and the services they provide, like boutique recruiting, career counselling, and resume writing, The key to the Marketplace is that it offers services that will be focused on job searchers. No Viagra ads or “dancing aliens” mortgage ads. The Marketplace will be a professional directory of (hopefully) very relevant services for our members.

Also keep in mind that we’re young. We want to think carefully about how we introduce revenue-generating services to the site. We’re more interested in helping VisualCVs become popular and widely used at this point. When VisualCVs are common currency, more revenue opportunities will present themselves. We get a lot of advice from our user community, including many great ideas for future revenue. We’re VC-funded at this point and have major investors like Heidrick & Struggles behind us. We have a backlog of those private-label opportunities. We don’t have to scramble for every dime at this point like many startups.

CARVE: In terms of a target market for your community building service, what types of firms do you believe would benefit most from this?

SH: I think there’s two major reasons why an organization would want to create their own VisualCV-based community. They may be a professional association or alumni group where they want to combine VisualCVs with social/professional network features. They don’t want to simply use our public site because they want to control access to their community and not just let anyone join. They may also want to integrate the functions of VisualCV.com with their own website.
The other type of organization that might want to create a private community based on VisualCVs is the recruiters. VisualCV.com is really tailor-made for recruiting firms. It’s a very competitive environment and the recruiter that can find good candidates and then present them to clients as VisualCVs is going to win out over competing recruiters doing things the old-fashioned way. Those recruiters are going to want to keep those candidates private and confidential, so they want all of the VisualCV.com features around confidentiality, security, and the role of a recruiter within the system. For example, a recruiter wants to easily search the entire population of their community to find potential candidates with matching skills. So search capability within a very private website is a big deal for recruiter-based communities.

CARVE: For as long as there have been job seekers there have been CVs. For as long as there have been CVs, people have been offering advice on presentation etc. What sort of advice would you give an individual on how they can make the most of their VisualCV, from both the perspective of a job seeker and as someone looking to promote their services?

SH: The key to a successful VisualCV is Portfolio Items. A VisualCV is made up of classic resume sections like work history, education, certifications, and skills. But it’s the portfolio items that turn a boring old text-based resume into an interactive, multimedia VisualCV. Portfolio items like work samples, images, audio, even video can really add personality and make your VisualCV stand out from paper-based resumes. And everyone has portfolio items – you don’t have to come from a visual or creative profession (like entertainment or architecture) to have good portfolio items. Check out our Examples Directory online to see how people from all walks of life are creating killer VisualCVs.

A special note on video – a VisualCV can contain video clips, but doesn’t have to. Most don’t. But even when VisualCVs contain a video, it’s rarely a “talking head” staring into a webcam saying “I’d like a job, please”. Instead, some of the best VisualCVs contain a video of the member giving a keynote address at a conference or demonstrating a product. Maybe the local news covered a project you worked on. Maybe there’s a YouTube video that provides a general background understanding of your particular skill set.

CARVE: Given how close profiles on networking sites liked LinkedIn resemble traditional CVs, do you view these sites as competitors?

SH: LinkedIn and VisualCVs go great together, like peanut butter and jelly. I love LinkedIn and have been a power user for many years. LinkedIn is a great network for finding people. But once you find them, their profiles are dull, shallow, and essentially the same-old text-based stuff you might find in a resume. Instead, we see our members putting their VisualCV *into* their LinkedIn profile. So they can be found via LinkedIn but then their VisualCV takes over. Take a look at my own LinkedIn profile to see an example of how I reference my VisualCV – http://www.linkedin.com/in/scottherman”
VisualCV is not another social network. It makes your existing social networks better by giving you a much richer profile that you can insert into LinkedIn, FaceBook, or wherever you hang out online. And VisualCV is all about a “professional” presence. Nobody can alter your VisualCV by adding drunken pictures from the party last Saturday night. Nobody throws pies or bananas, plays Scrabble, or whatever. There’s two people you never want to meet on Facebook, your mom and your next boss. VisualCV.com gives you total control over your online presence, whether you want to remain invisible, or tightly control who sees you, or broadcast to the entire web.

CARVE: The recruitment market globally has been changing at a rapid pace over the course of the last few years. In my opinion, periods of economic slowdown accelerate this change. Again in my opinion, the US is a little further ahead of the UK in terms of web usage per head and widespread adoption of the net as a tool for recruiting. What do you think have been the biggest changes in the online recruitment market in the US over the last couple of years and what do you foresee as being the next steps in the evolution of the market?

SH: There’s been one big trend in the last 5 years that I’m focused on, and it’s not a good trend. With the increasing automation of the recruiting process, people have become simply data processing objects passed around huge job boards and corporate application tracking systems. Job seekers are basically a big pile of keywords desperately trying to be harvested by the corporate search engine. It’s extremely hard to differentiate yourself when you know that your resume is parsed to shreds and then disappears into some central data bank. Why spend time creatively describing your skills when it’s all about keyword searching by overworked recruiters and hiring managers? It’s one of the reasons that “who you know” is still so much a part of the job search process.
Philosophically, that’s a major reason we are developing VisualCV.com. To allow people to have more control over their own personal brand. To bring personality and creativity back to the job search. To help hiring managers make better short-list and final hiring decisions. And to let people define how, when, and where they want to be seen online.

Clearly there's quite a bit more to VisualCV than may first meet the eye. They're not finished yet either mind you. Anyone connected to Scott on LinkedIn will know he's been working on version 1.8. What's on the way? Quite a bit actually....From new member home pages with tips for new users, bespoke privacy settings and connecting functionality with other VisualCV users - not dissimilar to the "friends" function on social media. For organisations - "gated" communities allowing VisualCV clients to vet registrations and monetize their membership.

So what do you think? Will we end up seeing VisualCVs becoming the norm? Clever product, that's for sure but will you be using it to promote your business or as part of your next job search? My view? Well put it this way, don't be surprised to see a VisualCV on my Linkedin profile soon...

A big thank you to Scott Herman for his time and input into this post, and to Alex Strang for organising this.

What's in a name?

Last night was one of our irregular Digital Recruiting meet ups and I thought it might be a good idea to film some of it for later inclusion on the blog. Having looked through the footage this morning I'm unsurprised to report that most of it can't be posted for either quality control or legal reasons! However these two gems did stand out....

Below is a rare opportunity to get an insight into why Paul and Alex's companies are called 3DMarComms and Carve. Thanks to Jamie Leonard for being our guest interviewer!

Enjoy....

ITV - 2007 rubbish & the future's looking pants too (IMHO). And what's with such lazy journalism?

I'm sure that anyone who's touched any kind of news channel over the past 24hours will be well aware that ITV announced their profits had fallen in 2007 by a whopping great 35%.  I can't say that I was particularly all that interested - but I found myself unable to muster the effort to lift myself from the sofa at that particular time and thus consumed about 80% of the 10pm news (think it was ITV - but that's irrelevant).

I was amused by Bushes’ hypocrisy and dismayed at watching the IOC playing politics and calling black - white (or indeed smog – mist), but what really got my gander (yes – even at gone 10pm on a school night it can be "got") was the reporting of the ITV profits slump.

What's the easy go to in journalism these days - what do you want to blame everything on? Move over Al Qaeda & the war on terror, hold on a sec rising fuel crisis & global warming, we’ve got another one this month on which to hang our bad news fixation, the credit crunch.  Yup – ITV are losing millions because of Le Crunch. Case closed, move along here, nothing more to see thank you very much.

That’s right - not a single mention / acknowledgment / aside about the migration of ad spend online. Nothing about the changing face of entertainment delivery and media consumption that's causing marketing budgets to be reconsidered - re-evaluating what the true value is of a stuck on the sofa mid Coronation Street eye ball on your expensively produced "all on transmit" TV advert against different audiences where you could can get immediate engagement as well as generating information that will allow you to in near (or indeed actual) real time re-target and / or evolve your messaging to deliver maximum ROI!

I even looked into what was being reported on this on the BBC today - and all Mr Grade is being reported saying is:

"Viewers that had deserted us are coming back," Mr Grade told the BBC. "With a much improved performance onscreen, we have countered the myth that ITV is a business managing decline."

"In my first year back at ITV, we put together a growth strategy for the business and strengthened the senior team," Mr Grade said. "The first priority for ITV was to stem the decline. We did more than that, delivering an increase in viewing to the ITV family for the first time in over a decade."

Don’t get me wrong – I’m certainly not an “end of the world is nigh” kinda guy. I’ve said many times that I feel that the established media and the medium through which they have traditionally delivered their messages will co-exist with new and emerging mediums as advertising platforms for a hell of a long time yet, but that doesn’t mean that the impact of the change won’t be significant and the pace relentless. And for many of those established broadcasters and publishers who have enjoyed decades of massive profits generally based on monopolizing the routes to consumers through mountainous cost barriers to entry then, and I thought they knew this already (although apparently not in all quarters), then ready yourself for a steady leaching of your profits whilst you cling desperately to your old business models and miss the point in that which you snap up in an overpriced manner (see: FriendsReunited). 

In ITVs investors statement they do at least mention their online efforts (although not in the most promising of lights) – the overall message does indeed seem to be that they see their future profitability coming from audience growth / share.

So my beef with this was / is summarised into two distinct elements:

1. I know the Credit Crunch is causing all sorts of issues and isn’t nice news at all – but don’t we deserve to have our journalists doing more than just taking press releases at face value? Is it just me that thinks that’s sloppy?

2. I have to say (certainly not the first nor the last) surely ITV are barking up the wrong tree - the tree where getting a message in front of a possible customer could be charged in tens of £s as opposed to the real value ultimately likely to end up being realized as more like a couple of quid.

Good job the ITV Management Team have a ropey economy to blame their failure on (for the moment). More Lobotomy TV anyone?

:-]

The most pointless research in the world

A recent bit of research from McKinsey ... Building the Web 2.0 Enterprise ... is the most pointless thing i have ever seen.

http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/home.aspx

But away from the pointless nature of the report - a few interesting points

14% of response saw legal/hr risks holding back web 2.0 projects
16% say it has changed the way they hire and retain talent

Interesting ... not very

But people are using the tools and it is having a positive effect ...

New research into online tv services

UK television industry body Thinkbox plans to investigate how consumers are using online TV services and how attitudes toward them compare with broadcast TV.

In addition, the study will look at differences in viewing behaviours and patterns; how online TV affects engagement; the role of catch-up TV; and how the online TV ad market is likely to develop.

http://www.thinkbox.tv/server/show/ConWebDoc.1328

Blyk and you'll miss it?

'I want you.....I need you....I can't get enough of you.....'

The year was 2002 and these were the opening lines of a text message sent out to 2,500 people living in Stockport. A recruitment message sent out on behalf of Sainsbury's, who were opening a store in the area and needed customer service assistants. I couldn't have anticipated the headline in the national newspapers the next day, it screamed:

'Saucy Text Message sent out by Supermarket'

The story recounted how a woman's husband went into a rage when he discovered the above opening three lines sent to his wife on her mobile phone. He didn't proceed to read the final line of the text message, which read...'opportunities for customer service agents in our new Sainsbury's Stockport store'. Not so saucy.

Needless to say, I had a small kitten and worried I was in big trouble. The copywriter Craig, on the other hand, who to his credit, had only 130 characters to work with, was delighted his handiwork had made it into the national papers.

I realised that there was a fatal flaw in the targeted SMS lists from the provider, who insisted they had been double opt-ins from subscribers on a mobile ring tones site. It was then and there, I knew that, with the mobile being such a personal medium, the potential damage and annoyance to a brand from unsolicited messages, was too great in exchange for some targeted impactful messages. My ardour dampened and I was happy to use and explore mobile as a response mechanism in the intervening years...that was until last year, when I read all about a new ad funded mobile service being launched by ex President of Nokia, it was to be named Blyk.

I was seriously interested. Free text messages and minutes for 16-24 year olds in exchange for relevant and personalised messages. We explored how it may be relevant for our clients and one of our global clients will be piloting it to the UK graduate market next month, being able to have a dialogue with specific students, studying certain courses in certain universities.

The really interesting approach of this model is that it achieves a number of things - Personalised messages. Relevant messaging. And Added Value to our audience. All critical to brands in todays communication landscape.

With the web access over mobile growing month on month (and interestingly, more so among the older demographic, due to no cost restrictions) the medium and the opportunties to truly communicate with candidates may just be ready to be re-explored again.