CBS Outdoor: Coca-Cola media on the London Underground

In August CBS Outdoor sensationally announced its intention to cancel the London Underground contract if issues surrounding the late running of upgrade work could not be resolved.

Following CBS Outdoor’s announcement Richard Parry, Transport for London’s (TfL) London Underground director of strategy, told Media Week that CBS did not have any grounds to terminate the tube contract.

But today the two parties said they had patched up their differences.

Graeme Craig, commercial development director at TfL, said: “Following discussions with CBS Outdoor we have reached a comprehensive agreement that sees CBS Outdoor continue to run the commercial advertising concession for London Underground. We are delighted to be maintaining our long and successful relationship with CBS Outdoor.”

Antonio Alonso, chief executive of CBS Outdoor International, said: “We are pleased that our partnership will continue on what is undoubtedly the best outdoor advertising estate in London and we look forward to working closely with TfL and London in the exciting lead up to the London 2012 Games and beyond.”

The London Underground outdoor ad contract is believed to be the largest in the world and was believed to be worth an estimated £1bn in revenue when it began in 2006. The contract is due to run until 2015.

Although there had been industry speculation about the London Underground contract for some years the first time CBS Outdoor confirmed there was a problem was in April when it said it was to claim damages in the High Court.
CBS Outdoor argued that the “massively delayed” Public Private Partnership construction projects on the London Underground denied it the opportunity to complete its upgrade work in a “timely fashion and within budget”.

Despite CBS Outdoor’s insistence that the issue was not about ad revenue, figures from the London Mayor’s office covering the four years up to 2010showed that while Tube ad revenues had declined since the contract was signed, the amount CBS paid to TfL had vastly increased.

A spokesman for CBS Outdoor confirmed that all legal action had been called off and all differences between the two parties had been resolved but refused to comment on the terms of the settlement.

Following the departures of former CBS Outdoor managing director Mike Moran and commercial director Mark Chippendale in June, it is understood that the negotiations have been handled by CBS Outdoor’s New York-based management.

The London Underground estate includes 31,000 traditional poster sites at stations and 88,000 panels in train cars as well as an extensive digital network including cross track projection, LCD digital screens and digital escalator panels.

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It’s that time of year again! It’s time for the PR, communications, and marketing world to look at the challenges and opportunities ahead. It’s time we determine what’s in store for our businesses, our industry, and our way of working.

We spent weeks scouring the web, talking to industry experts, and listening to our customers. We wanted to boil down the changes we see shaping the PR and marketing landscape to ten essential trends.

After doing our research, we noticed a red thread going through the majority of the trends we highlight below. The changes in the PR and media landscape distinctly reflect the changes in human behavior we’ve been observing and experiencing ourselves over the past few years – changes brought upon by new technologies. Think about how we consume information nowadays, as well as what we expect from the creators of this information in terms of presentation and access. Think about how you as content creators aim to share and spread this information in order to gain maximum exposure and engagement.

For us, the trends below are about understanding these changes in human behavior, the technologies that affect them, and the engagement you can create from giving your audience a sense of achievement, empowerment, authenticity, and fun. Hopefully our research will give you – the communicator, the PR pro, or the marketer – the tools, the motivation, and the knowledge to tackle the challenges head-on.

We live in amazing times, but it can only get even better in 2012!

1. Digital First

We’re seeing a big shift happening – a shift that will most likely continue throughout next year. Companies and organizations are now, finally, giving digital marketing channels precedence over traditional, analog media. Of course an integrated marketing approach remains key, but digital comes first, both in strategy and in budget.

An important example of this is the Guardian newspaper in the UK. They are describing themselves as a digital organization, even though the majority of revenue still comes from print. However, a story published in print media is self-limiting. It forces stories to have a beginning and an end. It cannot adapt or keep up with rapid developments that might change the story.

However, if a story lives online, in social media, it can develop organically, quickly. It’s a new way of working for the journalists, but it’s clearly more effective in meeting the needs of their readers. This concept of social journalism, as Jeff Jarvis puts it, allows journalist to involve the people, the audience. You see things like live reporting a developing story to a broad audience, allowing them to interact and engage. A story becomes more expansive because it is open to outside, real-time influence.

The same concept can be applied to the business world. What this really reflects is a behavioral change that has been in the making for a number of years. A brand or organization’s audience is increasingly found online and is demanding the companies to be digital too. The consumption of media now happens through the web, through apps, through social media. It forces a structural change like the one Guardian is going through.

When it comes to PR pros and communicators, the focus will be to meet the needs of your online-savvy audience and influencers, needs that are actually quite similar to those of the Guardian’s audience. This means re-engineering your business, much like the media business has done. In other words, you must involve your stakeholders in your business. You must encourage your influencers to develop, share, and spread your story digitally.

2. Decentralize Social Media

Is social media decentralized at your company? Or is social media is controlled by a single department, or even just one person? Chances you would answer yes to the latter. Last year, we mentioned Jeremiah Owyang’s Frameworks for Social Business.

We believe that social media will become increasingly decentralized, forming theholistic “honeycomb” pattern, where everyone is socially enabled, has access to a company’s social networks, and represents the company even on their private accounts.

Concrete examples of this are Dell, SolResor, and, you guessed it, Mynewsdesk.

What we’re seeing is that social media is becoming integrated in to the whole organization. Ownership is spread and social media becomes a tool for conversation, not just a marketing, PR, or client services channel. And why? Because it’s now about people, not logos. Every employee should be a brand ambassador.

But there are risks in socializing your enterprise. You must relinquish control of your brand story, trust non-marketers to represent your brand, and accept an inconsistent brand message. But according to Paul Holmes, “the more consistent a company’s message, the less authentic it sounds. […] Any consistency should be organic – a natural result of shared values and cultural cohesion, rather than imposed by the message police.”

For PR and communications people, it will be vital to empower every employee and enable them to be the different faces of the company, each with a similar, but not identical, understanding of the company’s values. This means that cultural values must be communicated internally.

This could require a fundamental organizational change. If the employee is not “good” at social media, or isn’t willing to be represent your brand in this landscape, you might have to rethink your hiring criteria.

3. I Get By With A Little Help From My Friends

We’ve all heard about user-generated content, and maybe even attempted to get some. However, what do we do with this material once we have it? Unfortunately, not much at the moment. But in 2012, crowd-generated digital storytelling will (finally) be fully embraced.

The trick is to find your crowd, to find the people that will help you tell your story digitally. These are your influencers, your colleagues, or your friends. They are the people nearest to you. Southwest Airlines is a strong believer in this. According to Brooke Thomas, emerging media coordinator, stories can be found everywhere, especially on Twitter: “Every tweet is essentially a story idea.”

A recent example of Southwest embracing crowd-generated content was when frequent flyer Paul Lovine proposed to his girlfriend on a Southwest Airline flight and then tweeted that she had accepted. Southwest picked up the story, contacted Paul, and wrote a blog entry about it.

Why would Southwest Airlines go through this trouble for one passenger? In our personal lives, we are judged and defined by the company we keep, by the people that surround us. It’s the same for brands and companies. A brand is defined by its customers, its friends, and its influencers. Engaging with them and sharing the stories they tell about your brand ultimately reflects what kind of company you are or want to be – your influencers can add to your credibility. It is therefore essential that PR pros and communicators start building and interacting with their networks, both internally and externally.

If you come across something that one of your influencers did or created, on their own initiative, embrace it. It will lend more credibility and authenticity to your brand than anything coming from an official corporate campaign.

4. Customize This!

Personalized content will make the Internet more effective, as increasingly the needs of the individual are catered to, rather than a larger demographic or target group.

A clear example of this is in the news world. Last year, we discussed the emergence of applications like Zite, Flipboard, Pulse, and Trove. What these and other tools do is allow the news to find us. We don’t look for news anymore, because we automatically receive news about the specific subjects we’ve asked for from our networks and services.

The behavioral change we observe is that people are choosing their own content, on their own terms. We don’t like being pushed suggestions by people we don’t know or trust. We are more interested in what our friends say is newsworthy, not what a news editor says.

A similar pattern can be seen in the continued rise of social commerce. Recommendation services have been around for a while, like on Amazon.com, but recently social commerce has been developing most rapidly on Facebook. As Mark Zuckerberg puts it, “If I had to guess, Social Commerce is next to blow up.”

Zuckerberg might be biased, because if the numbers add up, Facebook stand to gain big – up to 10-15% of total consumer spending could occur through Facebook (social commerce on Facebook even has its very own buzzword: f-commerce). Facebook is the perfect platform for a company to sell their products, because of the sheer number of active users and the way they interact with each other. Not only will this mean that users can recommend products and services to others, but it can also lead to a completely unique variety of products for each user to see.

What does this mean for you, the PR pro, marketer, or communicator? Remember that the concept of personalized news or social commerce relies on people creating a trusted and engaged network around them – a network that will help them achieve their expectations. Communicators have to be keyed in to those networks.

Companies, too, can build networks and have influencers – both externally and internally. As stated before, the people in these networks need to be empowered to share your products, services, and stories with their own network, on their own terms.

5. Brand News World

We’ve seen companies and organizations take a clear step towards being digital first, towards embracing crowd-generated content, and towards empowering both their external and internal influencers. But on top of all that, companies and organizations will start thinking like journalistswhen creating and curating stories around their brand.

What is Brand Journalism then, and why do we need to distinguish it from content marketing? According to a panel discussion at this year’s SXSWi, brand journalism is described as:

• An editorial approach to brand building
• A nonfiction attempt at advertising
• Thinking more like publishers
• It’s all about real time marketing, brands acting as media in real time, as life happens
• It’s the responsibility of companies to help their customers succeed

The purpose is to tell stories, but this method of content marketing emphasizes a neutral tone, lending credibility and trust to the brand. This tone does not slant to favor your brand, nor is every piece promoting an aspect of your company directly. Stories could be about industry leaders, trends, or events too – anything that would be deemed newsworthy for your audience, in the editorial sense.

That’s the key to brand journalism – taking out the middleman by thinking like the middleman (in this case, the journalists). Nissan is a great example of this. They hired a bunch of journalists (victims of a downsizing trend among news organizations) to run the Nissan newsroom. Simon Sproule, head of global marketing communications at Nissan, says, “It’s about killing press releases. We decided that if we’ve got good stories to tell, we’ll tell them ourselves.”

We talked last year about companies and brands becoming media houses and we see that continuing next year – even going a step further by convincing media people to make the switch from journalism to PR.

As a communicator you need to start thinking of your content in terms of newsworthiness. Offer value, think of all audiences, not just journalists, and don’t always talk about yourself.

6. Online Goes Offline Goes Online Goes Offline

As we mentioned, placing more importance on your digital communication channels will be key in 2012. However, keep in mind that Digital First does not mean Digital Only. Next year, more than ever before, it will be vital for companies to complement and leverage their digital channels with offline efforts.

This is because the line between people’s online profile and their real-life personalities will become increasingly blurred – you’re the same person when browsing Amazon as you are when walking through a department store.

An example that illustrates this attitude is this year’s winner of the Cannes Lions Grand Prix for PR, Clemenger BBDO Melbourne. They used a holistic approach to the winning campaign, Break Up, involving elements of PR, marketing, and advertising to help distinguish their client, National Australia Bank, from the competition.

We’ve focused a lot on digital storytelling. Clemenger BBDO’s example above also incorporates the real world – connecting the digital with the physical in an integrated campaign. One thing that it didn’t do, however, was to involve their public directly. While, of course, the story spread through social media initially, Clemenger BBDO controlled the whole campaign, rather than allowing it to become an organic, evolving story with input from customers, influencers, competitors, or other stakeholders.

Had they used a fully holistic marketing approach, they would have empowered their audience to build a community around the story, sharing and developing it beyond its original incarnation – both online and off.

The example above required an immense budget. However, creativity is key, not money. For communicators and marketers, there are many opportunities offered by the free tools and services currently available, such as location-based services like FourSquare or Gowalla. Ensure that all clients and employees are aware of the digital channels, campaigns, and competitions you’re running. Encourage them to promote and take part in these.

7. Come Out And Play

The gamification of online experiences will start dominating all online activities in 2012. That’s a very bold statement, and despite most companies not even thinking of gamifying their communications, we’re noticing the increased importance of giving people a personal experience and, most importantly, giving them an opportunity to have fun.

It’s all about that most innate of human character traits – competitiveness – combined with getting motivated by gaining a sense of progress. Gamification caters to both these needs and instills a deep level of engagement in the participants. And in the last year, BMW launched a campaign that is an excellent example of this:

The Winner

Of course, a campaign of that magnitude would require a big budget, but as mentioned before, a little creativity (and perhaps the use of free services like FourSquare), could get you a long way. Communicators need to think of different ways to engage their audience on a personal experience level. The trick is to come up with a campaign or event whose main objective is to let your influencers have fun, while fulfilling a sense of progress towards a clear goal or reward.

It’s more than just rewarding air miles or bonus points for each purchase. Allow for other activities along the whole customer journey that would be rewarded with more points, gifts, or even intangible rewards like badges or titles for a certain level reached. It’s like playing a video game!

8. Life On The Go

We mentioned this last year, but at the speed things are developing within this field, we might have to mention every year. No PR and communication trends report would be complete without the inclusion of Mobile. In fact, we strongly believe that the future of online will be in mobile.

The reason is that we see three behavioral trends dominating our lives. It’s about convenience, context, and fun.

When we speak of convenience, we mean that mobile devices allow us to be connected to what we want 24 hours a day (for better or worse). We’re able to get things done faster and transform the way we do business and consume information.

In terms of context, the mobile allows for more efficient access to relevant information when needed. And as Marissa Mayer, Head of Mobile and Geolocation at Google says, “The mobile phone acts as a cursor to connect the digital and the physical.”

And finally, the best thing about mobile is the ability to make life fun.

This is exactly what we’ve been talking about previously, when discussing an integrated marketing approach, gamification, and focusing on digital first. Mobile is the platform to make it happen.

As a communicator or marketer, regardless of what type of business, you need to start thinking of mobile as an important channel for your brand, if you haven’t already. Perhaps start with mobile versions of your website or think of an app that can engage your customers even further.

9. In The Eye Of The Beholder

At this point, we thought it would be important to highlight two of the most exciting and innovative technologies and services available today.

Qwiki

When launched as an iPad app earlier this year, it shot up to number four on the App Store Chart, and when looked at as a content platform, that’s when things really get exciting. Qwiki creates interactive multimedia presentations of information. So, instead of reading a Wikipedia article about London, Qwiki creates a visual presentation, complete with narrative, about London, sourcing information from various sites, including Wikipedia itself.

The idea is to release Qwiki as a platform on which anyone can create Qwiki presentations about any subject. Imagine being able to present a multimedia news release in this format, or creating Qwiki profiles of your sales people, using information sources of your choice (i.e. not just Wikipedia). An app that is currently being made is a Qwiki-based alarm clock that wakes you up with the latest headlines, your appointments of the day, and the weather predictions for the next few hours.

Augmented Reality

When first introduced two years ago, it was perhaps a little ahead of its time or too reminiscent of virtual reality, the concept it supposedly replaced. But now, the real world application of augmented reality can clearly be seen. Again it connects the digital with the physical, again it emphasizes a fun personal experience, and again it can involve mobile.

While current usage would probably involve a hefty investment, the technology is rapidly advancing. Communicators willing to give it a try will quickly realize just how many possibilities technology like this offers.

10. Content Is King, But It’s The People’s Kingdom

Last year, we predicted that 2011 would see a shift from the B2B and B2C narrative, to a B2P (business-to-people) mindset. We also said that we hoped we’d be talking about people-to-people instead. We believe that 2012 will see this concept become mainstream.

As mentioned, the quality of the brand is measured by the people who surround it. Or rather, the customers make the brand. Therefore, it becomes clear that companies need to let go of the brand as a self-centered media object, and embrace it as a dynamic collaboration between the company, community, and influencers.

This is because a customer is not just buying the products or services, but they are also buying the people. In the recent People issue of Think Quarterly (by Think with Google), the authors state: “Information is inseparable from the people who are creating, consuming, and sharing it. And the web is no longer anonymous – it’s built on real people and their connections, opinions, and ideas.” This is true for the information, content, and organization of your company.

It is vital then that companies maintain and nurture their network of influencers and customers, because people trust other people, not logos, brands, or corporations.

As communicators, this will be essential. This is what all the previous trends boil down to, this is what all the technologies, concepts, and strategies are based on. To create true engagement around your brand, you must first change your mindset and think in terms of people-to-people.

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The influence of Social Media and its ability to transcend different communities and spread your brands message is pervasive through the viral ability of the medium to enable people, companies, groups and communities passing your content and message on, especially if they see it is of a value and helps them solve problems.

Your link and content can start on Twitter, then transfer to Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, Company Websites and other blogs as other people take your content and pass it on by copying it, pasting it and adapting it. I have even had one of my blog posts ”28 Reasons Why The CEO Is Afraid of Social Media“ turned into a Bingo game at Craig Thomler’s Blog at eGov AU. I am constantly amazed at people’s creativity.

A blog post by Joseph Greeny who states in his Business Week article, “Increase Your Influence Tenfold, that when we want to change behavior, we usually immediately are looking for a quick fix. This means that we choose one method of changing the bad behavior and the one method we choose is the one we feel will give us quick results”.

What Greeny and the other researchers found however, is that when people try to change behavior using “one” source of influence, that they are rarely successful.

They have found that when four or more of the six sources of influence are combined, the influencer’s are 10 times more likely to produce a profound, sustainable change in behavior.

I think that there are significant parallels between the “Mutiple Channels” of Social Media and Greeny’s “Six Sources of Influence” and the evidential effectiveness of the ”Mutiple Channels” of Social Media. A lot of digital marketing is single channel (or primarily one channel such as email marketing) rather than using multiple channels to provide leverage and efficiency. So here are the “Six Sources of Influence” and the parallel comparison with Social Media.

SIX SOURCES OF INFLUENCE: (and its comparative “Social Media” parallel equivalent)

1. Personal Motivation – overcome individual reluctance and resistance
Social Media: It empowers the individual and provides personal motivation by rewarding them with feedback, comments and ratings with Social media Platforms such as Facebook, where you receive comments on your updates and increases in the number of friends, YouTube you get viewings and ratings, Blogs receive comments and you can track your subscribers and hits. This all can be very motivating to the point of obsession

2. Personal Ability – teach the necessary skills for success
Social Media: It provides the content and the tools to learn. Blogs provide the latest and greatest thought provoking content that transfers knowledge faster and more efficiently than ever before in the history of humanity. YouTube provides online tututorials on almost any topic you can imagine. Twitter is constantly pointing you at links and content that teaches and informs

3. Social Motivation – enlist help
Social Media: With Social Media you can ask for assistance from Facebook friends, ask your loyal followers on Twitter, Ask a question on LinkedIn and find a tutorial on Twitter to find the right advice

4. Social Ability – leverage teamwork
Social Media: The medium provides a platform for you to put up content and then the web community passes it on in effect providing leveraged teamwork. In fact social media platforms such as YouTube allows the “Team” to put up information and content for everyone to view and share, in fact the top sites on the web are content provided by the “World Team”

5. Structural Motivation – reward early successes
Social Media: Put up a Blog post… get a comment, this is a reward, Follow someone on Twitter they follow you back (another emotional reward), Put up a YouTube Video, you get a rating and views (another immediate reward)

6. Structural Ability – create a supportive physical environment
Social Media: This Influence of providing a supportive physical element is addressed by Social Media by facilitating through online communication, the arrangement of a physical meetings with a coffee or a lunch (maybe a drink even). In fact a Twitter message from Florida by a Twitter follower resulted in a physical meeting with all its supportive elements with a fellow passionate social media enthusiast in Sydney, Australia.

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Something odd is happening in the land of the web these days; we’re becoming weary of self-promotion.

(Some) Business people are afraid to “toot their own horns” because on the Internet, it’s so easy to sound like a braggadocio (and even if you don’t sound like one, chances are@humblebrag will find you).

Social media is inherently a narcissist’s tool, so we’re all in good company. But lately, we’ve been calling out others in our own networks for being “shady salesmen.”

The Internet has a bad habit of eating its young and we (as a collective group of social media users) are responsible for that. We create or position someone as an “influencer” or “thought leader” and as soon as they start selling us on something, feelings of distrust, jealousy, and deceit start to develop.

Interestingly enough, there are industries out there, where self-promotion is not only accepted, but is the necessary standard.

If you’re friends with a musician or band member on Facebook, I’m sure you’ve seen similar posts:

• “Make sure you ‘LIKE’ [insert band name here] on Facebook! We rock!”
• “Hey, we need your help, vote for [insert band name here] in this contest. Thanks! If we win, you’ll get to watch us rock out LIVE!”
• “[insert band name here] is having a show tonight at the venue, make sure you come and bring a friend. It’s only $10.”
• “We just released our album! Swing by our record release party and buy the album online. Also, watch our videos on YouTube, we just hit 50,000 views!”

Are bands and musicians and artists exempt from self-promotion?

No, they are not.

They just do it in a way that’s so authentic, so pure, and so genuine that you can’t help but to support them. Artists are the ultimate entrepreneurs and we as business people can learn a lot from them.

So, it’s time to recognize that we’re all here for ulterior motives. We all have something to “sell.”  It’s OK to self-promote and there are ways to do it without sounding or looking like you’re full of yourself.

First and foremost, get rid of your cheesy avatar and slip into something a bit more comfortable.

Five Ways to Self Promote and Keep it Real

1. If you’re going to talk about an accomplishment, give props to others. It’s not possible to do it alone. Give the people who helped you along the way credit. Not only will it help you spread you’re message, but it allows you to be self-promotional without sounding self-absorbed. Invest in yourself by investing in others.
2. Believe in yourself. Believe in what you’re saying and believe in what you’re doing. Stand for something and don’t be afraid to argue your point. If you don’t believe in your cause, no one else will.
3. Honesty is the best policy. Unfortunately, many marketers tend to “extend the truth a bit.” People are already skeptical of us, and our industry. Earn the trust, reap the reward.
4. Everyone makes mistakes. One of the biggest faults committed by big names in the industry is that they hardly admit fault. They never say sorry. They never seem as vulnerable as we do. Being human is our biggest selling point.
5. Be Likeable Remember that kid in gym class who was always the best at everything? Remember how much you disliked him? Don’t be him. Stay humble, remain respectful and  make it easy for people to like you. Always remember where you came from/how you got where you are.
6. Just Say It. If you have something to say, just say it.

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The media and communications industry has embraced social media, and PR practitioners in many organisations are similarly jumping on the bandwagon, creating Facebook profiles and Twitter handles for their companies. Nonetheless, in a playing field that is getting more cluttered, communicators need to adopt new ways of differentiating themselves and making themselves seen and heard.

To stand out from the crowd, PR practitioners need to start creating content that adds value to their readers and viewers. Instead of one-way brand messages, the content that brands provide now needs to be informative, compelling, timely, and most importantly, relevant to their target audience. Simultaneously, by providing people with a platform on digital media to interact with the brand, it allows for greater engagement and brand resonance.

“By providing expertise and thought leadership, brands gain credibility and trust from communities as they position themselves as industry experts. Great content is critical and social media provides the channels which brands use to engage their audiences in conversation. Combining these elements helps to enhance a brand’s reputation,” says Andy Oliver, Senior Vice President of Lewis PR.

The shift of brand communications to digital platforms is not without risk, and the media industry has seen many examples of communications evolving into a full blown PR disaster with the help of social media. While most organisations already have a crisis plan in place, it is imperative, when brands venture into social media, that they also incorporate the digital element into their crisis plan. Such a preemptive provides organisations with an action course that will prevent the escalation of any issues into a major PR crisis.

Donald Steel, former Chief Communications Adviser of BBC, confirms this: “In this social media age, where news spreads round the world in a nanosecond, it is more important than ever that companies plan and prepare for a crisis.  It’s cheap and easy to do, with a little help. Without a crisis plan, an organisation is on the road to losing their reputation and their revenue when trouble hits.”

Oliver and Steel, among other experts in the industry, will be addressing these issues and more in a conference held in Singapore and Hong Kong in July this year. Some of the key highlights of the conference include relationship building, media pitching, leveraging on opinion leaders, and measuring the ROI of media campaigns. These will be shared by Genevieve Hilton, Regional Head of External Communications of BASF, Carson Dalton, Head of Corporate Communications of BT Asia Pacific, James Hacking and Max Sim, VPs of BlueCurrent Group, Ian Brown, VP and Head of Communications for SAP Asia Pacific Japan, and Jon Wade, Head of Digital Practice, Asia Pacific of Weber Shandwick among others.

Title:                 Media Relations in the Digital Age Conference

Date & Venue:   4 – 5 July 2011, Sheraton Towers, Singapore

7 – 8 July 2011, Regal Hongkong Hotel, Hong Kong

Organiser: Pacific Conferences

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YOKOHAMA, Japan (December 9, 2011) - Nissan Motor Co., Ltd. announced today that it has launched an all-new corporate brand channel, Nissan Newsroom, on YouTube.

Nissan Newsroom was established as a means for Nissan to strengthen its brand communication using video news from around the world. In addition to videos that are streamed from the Nissan Global Media Center (a new organization established within Nissan at its headquarters in April 2011), the channel also connects visitors to other Nissan brand channels already set up in various countries around the world. To engage with people effectively in today’s digital ecosphere, video news clips and related video content have become essential tools in Nissan’s brand communication strategy. Going forward, Nissan Newsroom will be showcasing anything and everything about Nissan directly to viewers through videos about its employees, products, technologies and brands.

Main Features and Functions
For its official YouTube channel, Nissan Newsroom uses a proprietary system called “custom gadgets”, which enables the following functions:

• Sorts the videos registered within the brand channel by language and category
• Maintains color design combinations that are consistent with Nissan’s official website and provides links to Nissan’s social media sites
• Features unique navigation settings, such as displaying related videos to encourage visitors to watch more news about Nissan
• Provides links to other Nissan brand channels already set up in various countries around the world

Special Campaign Commemorating the Launch of the Nissan Newsroom
In commemoration of its launch, for a limited time the Nissan Newsroom will showcase never-before-seen car racing footage of the GT-R and Skyline, which have won numerous motorsports titles over the years.

Nissan Motor Co., Ltd.’s inroads into social media began with Twitter* in October 2009 and Facebook** in January 2011. Nissan’s brand channel on YouTube will be used together with Twitter and Facebook as tools to directly convey and broaden understanding of the company’s brands, products and technologies among its customers.

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You probably already know this, but we marketers are the bad guys in the battle of good versus evil. One commonly employed metaphor—“The Dark Side”—is particularly apt: we hunt down Jedi masters and destroy Alderaan. The top guys in marketing might refer to themselves as ninjas, but siths is a better descriptor, depending on whom you talk to.

I hear the moniker all the time; after seven years as a journalist and editor, I defected a couple years ago and took a job at JWT. I’m constantly asked by friends and coworkers “How do you like working on The Dark Side?”

My answer: I haven’t blown up any planets lately, but my work is quite fulfilling, thank you.
JWT brought me on to lead its Brand Journalism practice, working with global clients and the agency itself to adopt the best practices of publishers. At its most basic level, Brand Journalism involves honest brand storytelling that invites the audience to participate.

Brand Journalism as a term has been accused of being typical Dark Side dissembling, but at its best, it can be a powerful combination of honesty, narrative, and audience participation. We tend to target the most intelligent and most savvy audience members—the influencers. These people are not easily fooled, they hate crappy content, and they tune out traditional advertising. It’s tough to reach them, but brands can do so by being real, addressing their information needs, and maintaining relevance in a real-time world.

In other words, we need to act like journalists.

Like journalists, we can create compelling content under extremely tight deadlines, and engage with communities in meaningful ways. Good and fast—that’s what we’re striving for with Brand Journalism. The marketing industry isn’t exactly known for creating good content quickly, but we’re working in a real-time world, and clients and agencies are realizing that they’re struggling to keep up. Brand Journalism can be a tool that helps them optimize for speed.

The marketing industry also isn’t known for its honesty and transparency—it’s The Dark Side, right? When I tell my journalist friends that I’m working to help global brands communicate more openly, they react with skepticism. An advertiser that acts like a journalist could be a mole, trying to trick an unsuspecting audience into consuming and believing whatever crap a brand wants to spew.

I look at it as quite the opposite: I’m a mole, but for the other side. And I’m not alone—JWT has a team of editors and strategists with journalism and publishing backgrounds. Other agencies and campaigns are hiring journalists as well. Together, we infiltrate big companies and convince them that it’s possible to work quickly and openly.

In my Brand Journalism work with Microsoft, we built what is essentially a news organization. Our audience of savvy IT leaders wasn’t interested in hearing from marketers and executives, so we tapped engineers, product managers, and even independent journalists to produce content. After our first year, our top five bloggers were averaging more than 19,000 views per post. By the second year, our best articles were being shared hundreds of times across several social networks.

We did it through speed, human interaction, and relevance. We published same-day responses to hot news stories, supported by ads that we could traffic with a 6-hour turnaround time. We interacted with our audience on Twitter and in blog comments, and we partnered with some of the biggest tech publications and tech journalists. Furthermore, we were always transparent about our relationships with those partners.

I doubt this level of speed and transparency will be a big deal five or 10 years from now; the industry knows it needs to move in this direction. But until it does, a company’s ability to speak honestly and quickly to its customers, fans, and detractors is a huge competitive advantage.

There’s a lot more to Brand Journalism than speed, relevance, and transparency—perhaps in a future post I’ll delve into how we incorporate balance theory and cognitive disequilibrium—but in the meantime think of Brand Journalism as a way of enabling brands and audiences to shine a light on themselves.
In other words, we’re trying to make The Dark Side a bit less dark.

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When a word is used too many times a year and the context in which the word is used broadens in every article, it is very likely that the management community develops a sort of immunity. There are multiple examples of management terminology being coined as fast as falling out of favor.

Co-creation, as a phenomenon, was destined to have a similar lifecycle. The question that arises in such matters, is whether the term was a hype introduced by some management gurus, or an emerging domain just struggling with its maturity. As we see the world now, co-creation is here to stay. No matter what you would like to fit in the definition, co-creation is the result of a broad and irreversible shift in the society and corporate culture. During the growth to maturity we wonder what is left beyond the hype. What is the essence of co-creation? Which forms of co-creation proved to be most beneficial for the initiators and participants? Which processes are most suitable for ‘outsourcing to the crowd’?

This report will give you insights into the current status of co-creation, as perceived by top managers out of the FEM500 business list. If you would like to verify your current experiences or if you are curious about what co-creation could do for your business, assess the following three basic questions:

· Who contributes, who gets the benefits and who takes the risks?

· Where & when in the process is co-creation applied?

· What is the result of co-creation?

Co-creation assessment

To improve the success of your current co-creation business, it is very important to have the right knowledge to be able to assess the initiatives according to objective criteria. Those assessment criteria can also be used in advance, as a checklist for the design of a co-creation initiative.

Who contributes, who benefits and who takes the risks?

To answer this question you map who has a share in a certain part of the value creation process. There are three important events that are distinguishing: value creation, selection and consumption. Who creates and delivers the actual value, who is allowed to make selections or set priorities within the content that has been provided, and finally, who does benefit from the co-created value?

Content creation

You could ask yourself whether you can still call it co-creation, when the content is purely created by the company. It actually can be co-creation, for instance when the selection is done by the consumer. This is a typical customization setup, where the building blocks are still predefined and internally created. The opposite can work also: content creation by the consumer or business network, but selection by the organizing company. This is a typical ‘contest setup’. In the last phase of value consumption, it is impossible to call it co-creation when the benefits are not shared between the initiator and the participants. The benefits can be split into hard benefits, for instance the firm’s business case and the extraction of economic value by the consumer, and soft benefits, like corporate reputation and social drivers of the consumer.

Initiator or director?

Another important discriminator is the distribution of roles like the initiator and director of the process. Those two can be different. A company could consider joining a current community instead of creating one itself. We learned that you have to have a strong brand or have to claim a clear

theme, to be able to keep a company-owned community alive. The director of the co-creation process is the party that is allowed (or accepted) to set the rules of the game, determine the duration or moderate other contributions. Again, it is not obvious that the firm itself has to control all those elements. The right degree of ‘self guidance’ is always an important factor for success.

Costs & risks
Finally, there are the cost and risk elements, which are in fact closely related. Who bears the costs of setting up a co-creation environment and therefore also runs the risk of there being no significant outcome? You can think of the online environment, but for instance when co-creating during use-phase, it could also mean significant FTE costs for supporting internal processes. The legal implications of the creation process present another risk. Who is responsible for the co-created product or service when it fails physically or economically? Equally applicable to co-creation is the fact that: Sharing benefits also means the willingness to share risks.

Where & when in the process is co-creation applied?

The second key question zooms in on the practical elements in the design of a co-creation initiative. Map the most important processes, using a standard value creation chain, like: strategy, NPD phases (idea generation to product launch), marketing, logistics, use phase, recycling. For every step in this chain you can think of processes within that step that could be open for outside participation. Most of the time co-creation is connected to one of the NPD stages or during marketing (campaigning) phase. This is not wrong, because co-creation has mainly proved its value in those areas, but do not forget to consider customer or b2b cooperation in the other steps.
The impact of the introduction of co-creation is different for each step. Co-creating on strategy formulation for instance, could have significant impact on the organization if you are fully transparent and willing to change course because of external ideas. On the other hand there are a lot of examples of companies that neglected the collective opinion and had to deal with even more organizational impact. In logistics there can also be a nice tradeoff between consumer participation and the price the consumer is willing to pay for the product, including transportation. This often resulted in new business models like IKEA and McDonalds which were introduced in the past, but which have become quite common nowadays. During the use and recycle or replacement phase many opportunities are lost. If you have the right approach towards your brand ambassadors or lead users, using ‘permission based marketing’, you can direct the realization of additional value by the user community. This also provides the opportunity to personalize your product or service according to the exact context the customer is in after the moment of selling. The original targeted needs often change and an intensified number of interactions enable the company to make the necessary adjustments or to provide additional extensions. This brings us to the next question: what is the intended frequency of the interactions and which channels do you plan to use for that? The range of possibilities extends from twice, like in an idea competition, to almost continuously in an innovation development community. This last type of co-creation results in strong ‘learning relationships’, leading to products or services that have an optimal market fit while creating strong loyalty both ways.
When thinking about proper co-creation channels, companies should not forget to define the right balance between on- and offline or even online in virtual worlds. Joining an existing platform or social medium is a fast way to reach potential co-creation participants and saves all the effort of building a platformand keeping it vivid. Another possibility is to share a platform with multiple organizations, which are all interested in a certain topic. Sharing a platform can enable one to attain the larger scale that is necessary to start the co-creation process.

What is the result of co-creation?
The third and final question is all about the outcome of the co-creation process. It is recommended that you try to visualize the results in advance. What about the ‘richness’ of the value created? Is the goal to reach a certain level of customization? This is a form of extreme segmentation, allowing the personalization of the offering based on limited combinations of modules. Not every product or service is suitable for splitting into several modules. In that case the modules can also apply to for instance, the logistics or processes around the offering. The unbundling trend among the low cost carriers is an example of that.
Another goal, when defining the desired end-result, is to reach a certain level of collaboration. The proportion between in-house and externally co-created value, is crucial for the final success. The most advanced form of co-creation, in which customer experiences are co-created, can only be achieved by performance in personalization and collaboration. When a company does not take care of one of them, there will be a barrier that hinders full deployment.

Furthermore it is important to verify whether the outcome of an initiative meets the basic guidelines of co-creation, like:

· Does the collaboration offer more value than the individual contributors could have delivered themselves?

· Can the final result be characterized as ‘win-win’ or ‘pie-growing’? (None of the collaboration partners should win by damaging others.)

· Is the result a matter of value creation instead of value distribution?

The last, but not the least important topic relating to the outcome of the co-creation is about the impact on the organization as a whole. Even a co-creation pilot does have impact on back office processes. When an organization chooses to continue with co-creation as a central, strategic theme, it is inevitable that there will be significant changes in the corporate culture and several processes in the operating model. Co-creation is even a main driver in the transition to new business models.

Understanding needs as the main driver

How far beyond the hype are we with Co-Creation? To answer this question, we have launched the Global Co-Creation Survey 2010, asking top managers from the FEM500 business list to what extent co-creation is currently applied in their business, what results co-creation brings and what are their expectations of the future.

The survey shows that 70% of the respondents expect revenues from co-creation to rise in the coming years, indicating the opportunities and high expectations the respondents have of co-creation initiatives within their organization.

Although the respondents have high expectations from co-creation, only 25% indicate that they proactively and continuously involve customers in the design and development of new products or services. If most respondents expect increased revenues due to co-creation, why have only 25% started implementing it? Although there is a high level of willingness to co-create, organizations have to deal with barriers which place constraints on their ability to achieve their co-creation goals.

The main constraints that respondents identify are the urgency of pressing day to day business demands (36%) and lack of formal processes for co-creation (28%). This indicates that co-creation is not yet at the top of the management agenda, although the respondents do recognize the opportunities co-creation has to offer. To align co-creation and make it part of the day to day business successfully, organizations have to make dedicated choices and deploy a clear and focused co-creation strategy.

Drivers & results

The respondents indicated three main drivers for involving customers in their value creation: understanding new needs, increasing their competitive advantage and improving their customer loyalty. Although co-creation is currently often used as a marketing tool, these drivers show that co-creation is much more to the respondent than just a marketing tool. Its aim is to understand customers better and to develop services and products that fit their needs.

According to our respondents, involving customers really does result in meeting their needs; new products and services are for them the key result of customer involvement. It is however interesting that attracting new customers is only the fifth driver for co-creation, whereas it is the third highest result. We have seen this unexpected result before in our previous research ‘Co-Creation & Firm Performance’ (Arjan Tijmes, 2010). This research showed that whereas most organizations engage in co-creation to serve current customers better, it also resulted in new customers, even if this was not a goal in itself. This indicates that co-creation can have a snowball effect.

Managing the complexity of co-creation

In literature co-creation is often associated with collaborative Research & Development activities. This can extend from crowd-sourced idea generation to long term development communities. Also, customization of the final product by selecting a set of predefined modules or designs, can still be considered part of the development phase. In practice, and endorsed by our survey, we see most examples coming from companies that pilot co-creation merely owing to reputational motives. The launch of a rather superficial form of collaboration, meticulously controlled by the firm and supported by traditional mass communication, can result in the desired open brand image. One could wonder whether this can be considered as genuine co-creation. If you look at the three most important steps in the co-creation process - who creates, who selects and who benefits?- the effort-benefit balance of this kind of co-creation initiative, tends to be most beneficial for the firm. Therefore you could argue whether this is contributing to client loyalty, which is strongly connected to a ‘win-win’ outcome. Most of the time companies are not willing to change processes, because this also means a decrease of control.

Collaboration on the front-end always calls for a transformation of the back-office. The firm has to provide full transparency and has to share risks as well as profits.

But does this matter?
Why should we have a theoretical discussion about what is ‘genuine’ co-creation? Is a superficial co-creation form endorsed with mass communication, like an idea competition, worth less than a small-but-deep open source development community? For a large company an idea competition or for instance customization, can help to experiment with customer collaboration and client centricity. You can compare it with ‘green’ environmental activities, at first used to manipulate the common corporate image, but nowadays integrated in core processes and part of the corporate strategy.

At the moment there are just a few examples of companies that adopted co-creation in multiple processes along the development and usage value chain. We expect this is not because of a clear strategy, but due to the lack of focus on
co-creation and internal competition with other priorities.

Superficial with mass vs. profound with a selection of people

Capgemini research has revealed new insights in the building of a strong co-creation strategy, by managing the complexity of co-creation, in order to ensure its success. Managers should make dedicated choices on the level of co-creation and the number of organizational functions involved.

Co-creation has the most impact on product and service innovation when the organization focuses on an organization-wide low level of co-creation (co-creation on many business levels but under strict control and with strict conditions), or when organizations engage in high level of co-creation and involve a small number of organizational functions (completely customizing one small part of their offering on which customers can co-create their experience). What both strategies have in common is that they both enable organizations to maintain control over their co-creation activities.

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The global publishing industry is going through a period of turmoil, as broadband penetration rises and new devices for delivering digital content arrive on the scene. Our new study Moving into multiple business models: Outlook for newspaper publishing in the digital age examines the outlook for newspaper publishers, advertisers and media buyers, as they adapt to the digital revolution and deal with a global economic slowdown.

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