Earlier this month I had the good fortune of introducing Bill Dunphy, the tech-savvy journalist who is currently running the Torstar Metroland West Media Group's WebU, at the Mags U conference put on by Canadian Business Press and Masthead magazine at Toronto’s Old Mill.


The session was titled “Journalism 2.0 – A Digital Survival Guide for Editors.” But frankly what Bill talked about is instructive to anyone involved in any aspect of marketing and communications these days. And certainly the Web U “boot camp” he runs is aimed at all departments of the Metroland West (that’s west of T.O.) local and community papers, including general management, sales, marketing and circulation people as well as editorial types.


You could call Bill a newspaper industry lifer. In 26 years in the news business, he has worked as an editor, copy editor, daily news columnist, investigative reporter, crime reporter, satirist and weather columnist at community and daily newspapers in Toronto and Hamilton. You may also know him as the guy at the Hamilton Spectator who was taken to court by Hamilton Police in 2005 for refusing to hand over his notes from interviews with a murder suspect (he and the Spec eventually won the case at the appeals level about a year ago).


At the Spectator Bill chaired a staff group that introduced breaking news, blogging, video and podcasting to the newsroom and their website, thespec.com. His interest in the computers dates back to 1974 when he had to learn Basic programming for a part-time job in high school. In the years that followed, he used computers in the newsroom for writing, to build databases, create collaborative software, crunch numbers and do his own desktop publishing. Since the Web was born he's been a newsroom leader in adopting web tools for newsroom use, building online databases, blogs and wikis and playing a key role in training other staff in those technologies. Hence, his current role.


I thought by Bill’s advice on the four things everyone can do to “go native” in the land of digital fast was especially smart.  I asked him to recap the points in a post-presentation conversation we had in the Old Mill garden, and I’ve posted a clip of that on YouTube here.

Top line, his four fast tips are:

• start a blog
• set up an RRS feed
• sign on for twitter
• edit and post a bit of video

Do these things, Bill says, and even the most technophobic can be half way to comprehending all the revolutionary changes new media is bringing. Just messing around and getting your hands dirty with the stuff opens your eyes to the implications and possibilities.

Bill also had some good thoughts on the challenges media have right now in figuring out models to finally start making serious money online. He admits to not having any firm answers, and doubts anyone really has any yet. Interestingly, he suggested that magazines are perhaps best positioned to thrive in the new media environment, in large part because they are already extremely niche focused. (This isn’t to gloss over the fact that the magazine industry went through a massive and traumatic adjustment from being the dominant national mass media in 1950 to its now predominantly niche focus when the biggest of the last century’s revolutionary new media, TV, swept across the landscape.) And in the case of B-to-B magazines, their content may well be specialized enough as to charge for it.

But one of the smartest things he reminded us all –and I’ve never heard this said before, which says something- is that the newspaper industry, the one he grew up in, got its start in the 18th and early 19th century when printers went looking to find something to do with all the excess capacity they had. So in effect, the newspaper as we know them started without a clear business model…a cool new format and technology awkwardly looking to monetize itself.  Sounds awfully familiar.

Bill also writes a prescient blog about online media, but touching on all things Web 2.0 really, that he dubs The Idea Factory.

Posted by sutter or mckenzie at 10:19 AM EDT

Updated: Monday, 23 June 2008 11:54 AM EDT

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You can download PDFs of the key presentations here:

Chris Anderson

Paul Gillin

Bryan Segal

As well, here are links to some of the related press clippings around the event:

http://www.conversationalcapital.com/
http://www.mastheadonline.com/news/2008/20080516734.shtml
http://www.financialpost.com/story.html?id=522291
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/Page/document/video/
vs?id=RTGAM.20080529.wvanderson0529

And finally, we’ve also posted photos from the day on flickr. The photographer, by the way, might be familiar to anyone who worked in Toronto agency circles in the past decade or two: Erwin Buck, who is clearly keeping the creative juices flowing in the wake of his early retirement from MacLaren: McCann a few years ago.

Originally written for and posted on In:fluencia Digital, a beta site created with Editions Infopresse to serve the Canadian online and interactive marketing, communications and media communities. The site’s development is in hiatus.

Posted by sutter or mckenzie at 10:52 AM EDT

Updated: Monday, 23 June 2008 11:39 AM EDT

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Every new medium and technology mimics the previous dominant media in their early awkward stages of development, Colleen DeCourcy, chief digital officer for TBWA Worldwide told the Toronto Ad and Sales Club’s annual Internet Day luncheon yesterday. But inevitably the unique new features and opportunities of the new medium emerge in their own right.

And now is the time for digital marketing and advertising to go beyond the traditional media “real estate” approach of selling time and space and embrace the opportunities for true consumer engagement, DeCourcy told the capacity crowd of 600.

“We really do have to move past that,” she said. “Technology is an enabler not a destination.”

Engagement is the new holy grail of interactive marketing, she said. Although the challenge is that the word means different thing to different people and is tough to measure.

It’s not enough just to get attention. Ideally engagement includes “time spent,”  “a relevant experience” and “having a conversation over time in an emotional and rational sense,” she said.

A Toronto native, now-based in New York, DeCourcy will chair the Cyber Lions jury at the 2008 Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival in France later this month.  DeCourcy, who was creative director at the pioneering Toronto digital shop ICE before  it closed in the 2000 dotcom meltdown, went on to senior creative positions at Organic and JWT in the U.S. before taking  the top digital job at TBWA about a year ago.

DeCourcy applied communications theorist Marhsall McLuhan’s comments about the impact of TV during the 1960s to the impact of the Web over the past 14 years. In essence, she said, by changing how we view the world, the world has changed.

“The Internet is not an ad platform,” said DeCourcy. Rather it is causing a “social revolution on a scale of the industrial and sexual revolutions.”

Originally written for and posted on In:fluencia Digital, a beta site created with Editions Infopresse to serve the Canadian online and interactive marketing, communications and media communities. The site’s development is in hiatus.

Posted by sutter or mckenzie at 5:24 PM EDT

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I was fascinated by the many issues and implications around the shuttering on May 21 of Disney’s MMOG (massively multiplayer online game) the Virtual Magic Kingdom. Most companies would kill to build a high-profile interactive social community with in excess of a million faithful users, but here was Walt Disney Parks and Resorts abruptly closing the three year old game site, apparently thumbing its nose at loyal fans  and taking a lot of heat online and off for their trouble. What were they thinking?

I first heard about the outcry on CBC Radio’s excellent weekly program on all things digital, spark (you can get the podcast of the show that originally aired May 7 here and on itunes). The Wall Street also ran a good summary story about it last week.

Disney isn’t saying much officially, but naturally a lot of others are. In fact, Disney’s only statement, really, when it announced the closing on April 7 was that the free site was originally created as only a temporary promotion to mark the 50^th anniversary of the opening of its first theme park, Disneyland in May 1955. The life of VMK, as it quickly became known to aficionados, had been extended several times since owing  to its immense popularity,   but the time had finally come this spring to move on to other promotional activities.

Critics piled on accusing the company of among other things crushing the dreams of the 8-to-14 year old primary VMK user base (although many adults were also apparently playing) and disrespecting the feelings of the community it had invited and encouraged to build the experience.

There is something to both those argument.  An academic speaking on the spark program made the point that if a real theme park shuts down the regular visitors would, of course, be disappointed, but probably not too emotionally invested in it. In a virtual theme park like VMK, where big parts of the experience are the social interaction and consumer generated content that are created by the visitors themselves, the users have a more intimate stake in the place. As such you could argue they deserve more of a say in its fate.  Morally, at least.  Legally, of course, every user signed away any ownership rights to anything they did or co-created in the VMK in the fine print of the user agreement they had to accept to get in the first place. 

Just as interesting, I think, is the fact that Disney’s success at making VMK a safe community for kids online has severely hindered the company’s flexibility in graciously closing the site. Because exchanging e-mails or phone numbers or really anything that would fellow VMK users  to identify each other off line was strictly verboten,  there’s no way for kids to ever find or reconnect with their VMK friends once the online park is shut. (Now we can ponder whether virtual friends whom we don’t know basic information about –like their names, where they live etc. - are really friends, but the answer from those who spend a lot of time immersed in MMOGs is unequivocally yes.)

So why would Disney provoke it loyal VMK users and violate just about all the conventional wisdom about building and maintaining vibrant social communities online? And, the abruptness of it all doesn’t quite add up either.

 Certainly, VMK had to be a very costly proposition to maintain, especially with all the human supervision needs that a place for kids requires. And, it is true, promotions are generally aimed at achieving short term goals.

But, thinking about online communities in terms of tactical promotional tools is extremely short sighted. And when something takes on a life of its own like VMK did, that’s gold. Why would you abandon it?  And assuming even if VMK wasn’t building overt sales and traffic for the real theme parks, aren’t the data and consumer insights from something like this more than worth the effort?

Speaking after his keynote presentation at the mesh 08 conference last week keynote. Club Penquin co-founder Lane Merrifield dropped some hints that there was more at play in the end of VMK. Club Penguin, of course, is the Canadian built site targeting a similar demographic that Disney purchased for $700 million last year.

I asked Merrifield if Disney executives had consulted him on the closing and what he thought of it all.  He was very careful in his response, but did say that Disney, in effect, had wanted to keep the VMK property going, but its partners in the project had engaged in some heavy-handed gamesmanship about its direction and fate. Disney was stoically taking the bulk of the PR hit for a decision that it wasn’t completely in control of, he suggested.

Disney’s partner in VMK, by the way, was the Finish Sulake Corporation, best known for creating the  Habbo online multiplayer community/game sites aimed at teens.

So maybe a big lesson, aside from be thinking about your exit strategy for social communities when you start them: be sure about your partners.

Originally written for and posted on In:fluencia Digital, a beta site created with Editions Infopresse to serve the Canadian online and interactive marketing, communications and media communities. The site’s development is in hiatus.

Posted by sutter or mckenzie at 1:31 PM EDT

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Originally written for and posted on In:fluencia Digital, a beta site created with Editions Infopresse to serve the Canadian online and interactive marketing, communications and media communities. The site’s development is in hiatus.

Posted by sutter or mckenzie at 1:46 PM EDT

Updated: Monday, 23 June 2008 2:07 PM EDT

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Kaplin, a former White House staffer, broadcast journalist and MTV politics and technology producer, predicted that as online show creators begin to draw audiences in the tens of millions for their programming they will be in the driver’s seat as traditional broadcasters inevitably seek them out to work their magic. See her comments here.

Kaplin, whose New York-based double Webby-award winning video sharing web site enables independent producers to create their own TV shows for the Internet, made the comments during the panel on the future of online video at the mesh conference 08 in Toronto May 21. 

Originally written for and posted on In:fluencia Digital, a beta site created with Editions Infopresse to serve the Canadian online and interactive marketing, communications and media communities. The site’s development is in hiatus.

Posted by sutter or mckenzie at 1:53 PM EDT

Updated: Monday, 23 June 2008 2:10 PM EDT

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 The Internet has boomed over the past decade owing largely to the unprecedented free flow of communications and content. But the Net’s ability to foster individual and business creativity, especially in Canada, are potentially threatened by several current pushes here to unduly restrict, directly and indirectly, the online freedoms we take for granted, says Dr. Michael Geist, the Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law at the University of Ottawa and arguably the country’s foremost expert on technology law.

Geist spoke at the mesh conference 08 in Toronto May 21 on the power of the web to unleash new forms of public advocacy here and around the world (video and audio highlights can be heard at his blog).

But Geist also addressed the looming new round of federal copyright legislation –which was to be introduced late last year, but put on hold apparently in large part because of advocacy efforts lead by Geist- that, if, as expected, it closely mirrors U.S. rules, could dramatically reduce what companies and individuals can do with content online. As well, he touched on the growing practice of Internet Service Providers like Bell, Rogers and Telus of “shaping” and “throttling” the web traffic of their customers. This, in effect, has corporations taking for themselves the right to decide what  people can do and say online and as such raises a host of free speech issues. As well, he says, even the recent announcement that the CRTC will revisit its hands-off policy of web regulation in a new review this summer will likely unleash calls from various groups for tighter controls and regulation online.

Following his talk, I spoke to Geist about these issues. See and hear the interview here.

Post script: Industry Minister Jim Prentice finally introduced the new federal copyright legislation, Bill C-61, which contained most of the elements Geist has predicted, on June 12.

Originally written for and posted on In:fluencia Digital, a beta site created with Editions Infopresse to serve the Canadian online and interactive marketing, communications and media communities. The site’s development is in hiatus.

Posted by sutter or mckenzie at 12:00 PM EDT

Updated: Monday, 23 June 2008 12:34 PM EDT

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That’s totally the wrong approach, Bhargava insisted. It’s like throwing your hands up and just giving up.

You still have to control your brand, make key decisions about what you want to stand for and who you want to speak to. You do need to learn to “share control” with consumers. But that’s a far cry from ceding control entirely.

I go to a lot of these kinds of conferences and read a lot lately about this issue. I can’t recall such a common sense challenge to the mantra of the customer is totally in control in the digital world. It was refreshing. And I’m sure the perspective would be a big relief to marketers whose guts have been telling them to resist the chorus of advice telling them to give up control.

Bhargava, by the way, is the Washington DC-based senior VP, digital strategy & marketing at the Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence Group. He also writes the well regarded Influential Marketing blog and has just published the book Personality Not Included: Why Companies Lose Their Authenticity and How Great Brands Get It Back (McGraw-Hill). Think we’ll be hearing more about this book.

It was a pretty good panel all round actually.

Shortly before Bhargava’s comment, Maggie Fox, head of the Social Media Group had floated that marketers really only control about 25% of their brand image (conceding it would have been better if she could remember the source of this stat), and that things like consumer word of mouth, media and even employee communications have huge impacts. I don’t see that statement as necessarily inconsistent with Bhargava’s, even if you might debate the per centages.

However, Michael Garrity, president and CEO of the CommunityLend –a Toronto start up in the social lending field that plans to go live in August-  got the biggest laugh of the afternoon by stressing that the best way to build a brand on the web is to “not suck.”

Seriously. The product or service stands or falls on its merits, and no amount of banner ads, blogger relations or Facebook communities can save a bad product from itself.

It was essentially the same point that Lane Merrifield, founder of Club Penquin –which everyone knows, after being founded and nurtured in rural B.C.,was sold to Disney last year for $700 million- made in his morning keynote conversation. Merrifield, in fact apologized to those who’d come hoping to hear the magic recipe for marketing a massive community like Club Penquin (12 million users, 700,000 paying subscribers). They’re only now interviewing for their first marketing director. His best advice: do a great product and do it better than anyone else.

So near the end of the branding on the web panel when moderator Mark Evans commented that Club Penquin had built its brand without spending anything on marketing at all, it occurred to me that that simply wasn’t true. They spent a ton on product development. And in the end Club Penquin’s marketing was the quality of its product.

If the Web has changed anything, it has taken away the ability of marketing to “fake” a brand. The ultimate key to success in branding on the Web is having a product that markets itself. And that doesn’t happen by accident. And for sure, as Bhargava would have it, marketers also still have total control over their product development. (Not that it couldn’t hurt to share some control there either-but that’s a conversation for another day.)

Originally written for and posted on In:fluencia Digital, a beta site created with Editions Infopresse to serve the Canadian online and interactive marketing, communications and media communities. The site’s development is in hiatus.

Posted by sutter or mckenzie at 1:24 PM EDT

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MIT anthropologist Grant McCracken gave a decidedly non-linier talk during the opening evening session at the Institute of Communications Agencies Future Flash 2.0 at Niagara-On-The-Lake last Wednesday.  Of all the presentations I’ve heard in the past week –and believe me, between our own In:fluencia Digital Interactive Marketing Conference featuring Chris Anderson and Paul Gillin and the Canadian Marketing Association ’s annual convention, I’ve got an overload of good presentations percolating in my brain right now- this one was perhaps the most salient. That’s as much because of the plethora of intellectually challenging ideas McCracken unleashed in his hour or so, as to the polar reactions to it I encountered during the social that followed at the Jackson-Triggs Estate.

The Canadian-born McCracken spoke to 80 or so senior Canadian ad agency executives and a few guests about “marketing for the new media and the new consumer.” His style and content seemed to channel Marshall McLuhan –with a bit of Dustin Hoffman’s Rainman in the mix­­- in that there were a lot of accessible probes and observations that, added up, seemed a bit chaotic and confusing. Some people find that stimulating. Some find it off-putting.

Some typical take aways, culled from my rather disjointed notes nearly a week later (did I mention the venue was a very nice winery):

•         McCracken talked about how a lot of the IT-focused people at MIT are bugged by Twitter and how’s it used for seeming trivia, or “exhaust data.” All this brain power and technology, their reasoning goes, and people use it to tell each other they’re going to the store or the bathroom now.  But McCracken noted that in anthropological terms the efforts by people, especially by teens and young twentysomethings, to stay in constant contact with their social networks through things like SMS, instant messaging, Facebook and Twitter, are akin to the gruntings and mutterings of primates (or the tweets and twitters of birds). It’s called phatic communications, and it’s all about saying “I’m here, you’re here, we’re all fine.”

•          In a sense, McCracken said, we’re “all Korean now” in that we in North America are now “always on” via cell phones and other PDAs –something that not long ago was unique to South Korean culture. And our contacts never die; indeed, they multiply. With things like Facebook and Linked In we’re now able to stay in touch with everyone we’ve ever known with as much energy and efficiently we might have used to keep in touch with our dozen or so closest friends and associates in the recent past.

•        McCracken observed that the new consumer see themselves as producers, as well as consumers, of content. They’re collaborative and experimental. And in that context, the old “stand and deliver” model of marketing is obsolete, he said. In fact, the day of the finely crafted in stone USP (unique selling proposition) is done.  The new consumer is looking for dialogue and exchange, not a heavily-scripted one-way monologue shouted at them.

What should marketers specifically be doing in this new world?:

• Reward the “editors” and “curators,” for one thing. These self appointed connectors can be your allies in spreading your message if they are motivated and enabled.

• Enable “distributors,” or as McCracken put it more bluntly: “shoot the lawyers.” It’s now an open source world, and anything that impedes passing on content that in the past we’d try to control through things like ridged intellectual property rights rules will cause messages to be ignored. You have to “release control” and “give to get,” he said.

• Enable social networks, especially using mobile devices. The IT guys may not like it, but “tiny bursts” of content (whether “exhaust data” or not) makes the social networks hum. Make lots of them, and design them to be adaptable.

McCracken had much, much more to say, but I long ago passed the point where this post constituted a “tiny burst” and you get the drift.

But, as I said up top, for me the most interesting thing was the reactions of people at the ICA event. Almost to a person the ad agency executives I encountered got a starry-eyed look and were effusive in their praise of McCracken’s presentation. Not so much the reaction from Association of Canadian Advertisers president Ron Lund.

Lund’s gut response when the presentation was over was “and… so what.” Yes, Lund said, what McCracken had to say was pretty cool and interesting… but what can you actually do about it? How do we act on this stuff?

I’ve always found Ron’s down to earth approach refreshing. There is something to be said for remembering that when someone is dazzling you with their brilliance, the fact that they’re saying things you don’t quite understand might not be because you are the one who doesn’t “get it.” And remember, as ACA head he is the voice in Canada of the C-suits in the traditional marketer sector, which is populated with people who have –and by their job functions are required to have- a similar skeptical “show me” attitude toward all things new, including  the emerging new interactive marketing paradigm.

That said, new technologies are enabling consumers –and the rules for engaging them – to change at an accelerating pace. No, the jury’s not in yet on what to do about and with a lot of this stuff. But even if we haven’t figured out how to –or even if we can- use these new mediums and trends for marketing purposes yet, we do need to learn about them. It’s not Grant McCracken’s fault the new world is a complex place.

Originally written for and posted on In:fluencia Digital, a beta site created with Editions Infopresse to serve the Canadian online and interactive marketing, communications and media communities. The site’s development is in hiatus.

Posted by sutter or mckenzie at 12:37 PM EDT

Updated: Monday, 23 June 2008 12:56 PM EDT

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Companies are missing huge opportunities for up-selling and even simple branding with the slew of transactional e-mails they regularly send to customers.

Even modest improvements to transactional e-mails can result in reduced call centre costs and increased average order sizes through cross- and up-selling, Ryan Deutsch, director, strategic services with StrongMail Systems of Redwood City, Calf. told the Canadian Marketing Association annual conference earlier this month.

Transactional e-mails are “anything that facilitates or helps a transaction or sale,” and can include order confirmations, etickets, billing notices, shipping notices and even password changes.  Many organizations aren’t even conscious of how many email contacts they have with customers, and certainly in most cases marketing departments are out of the loop on automated “machine to machine” messages from shipping, order processing or other IT-driven departments, Deutsch notes. In the case of one client he was working with recently, the organization had 80 different potential streams of communications with customers, and the marketing team was only aware of just two of them.

The average open and click through rates for transactional messages are much higher than for commercial messages like sales offers and newsletters. According to a study by ClickZ.com in the U.S., 26.9% of commercial e-mails are actually opened, while a whopping 70% of transactional messages are opened. The gap for click through rates is even more stunning: just 7.2% of commercial messages are clicked through, while 50% of transactional messages get clicked.

For that reason alone, companies should be sure they get the branding and cross sell messages right, Deutsch says.

Some organizations like expedia, itunes and Eddie Bauer do a great job of both the branding and promotional offers in transactional messages, Deutsch says. In the case of expedia, order confirmations always inquire if the recipient also needs to book a hotel room or car rental with their travel faire.  Itunes order confirmations often show items that others who purchased the same thing the recipient is about the buy also bought.

Still, too often transactional e-mails are bland plain text affairs that don’t even use branding that’s consistent with the overall marketing messaging, Deutsch notes. Sometimes that’s because companies fear running afoul of regulations governing e-mail contact.

There are indeed rules guarding against turning transactional messages into stealth ad messages. But regulations in the U.S. –which are largely the same in Canada- allow branding and selling on these messages as long as the transactional elements are front and centre and constitute about two thirds of the total message content. And there are few limits to creativity. The only real no fly zone is in using the message line for selling.

Originally written for and posted on In:fluencia Digital, a beta site created with Editions Infopresse to serve the Canadian online and interactive marketing, communications and media communities. The site’s development is in hiatus.

Posted by sutter or mckenzie at 3:11 PM EDT

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