Donald Hamilton

Having finally managed to register for my brand new Apple iPhone 3G, I woke up this morning like a kid at Christmas only to find that Apple had delivered nothing but frustration. Is my pre-ordered phone (which I already paid cold hard cash for may I add) waiting for me?

No.

It seems Apple didn’t have the foresight to stock the right number of phones despite knowing how much demand there would be. Why else was I made to pre-register….and PAY up front?!

Could it be that a brand who prides itself on building a fanatical customer base, really understands nothing about that very audience? Did they not know that their committed fans would flock to the site to register and did they not consider that as a result they should probably think about building a website that didn’t crash under the sheer volume of demand? From my experience on Monday, apparently not…

I’m getting sick of these arrogant brands that treat their customers with no respect – don’t they know it’s the customer with the power not them?! If they want my money in future they’re going to have to work a lot harder for it. For now, I’m abandoning them.

Are you as disillusioned with Apple as I am? Leave me a post and let me know I’m not the only one!

Following Viacom’s lawsuit against YouTube, a court in the US has ordered YouTube owner Google to hand over records detailing the personal viewing habits of millions of its users (front page news in The Guardian). Naturally this has caused outrage amongst privacy campaigners who worry that the ruling is just one more example of personal privacy being invaded on the internet. Working in an industry haunted by this very problem, I can’t help but worry about the possible consequences.

The reason privacy campaigners are worried, as they should be (!), is that Google is being forced to hand over YouTube’s entire log dataset. This contains the computers’ IP addresses, individual identification numbers, videos watched and in some cases even personal login details – information that could easily allow for the identification of the user.

To be fair, Google fought this ruling hard so at least they can see the potentially damaging effects of yet another privacy scare on the online industry. If companies’ have privileged access to personal data they have a duty to safeguard that data and ensure there are no opportunities for individuals to be identified.

People want to know their data is safe and it is up to those of us working online to reassure them that there are safe ways to surf the web. The fact that YouTube did not have a copyright licence for some of the content they were broadcasting is nothing to do with the viewer. Why should they be the ones to suffer in the aftermath of a corporate tug of war between Viacom and Google?!

Rant over –thanks for sticking with me!

So, here we go again…

Yet another report has been released this week heralding the era of mobile advertising (PricewaterhouseCoopers’s latest Global Entertainment and Media Outlook). According to PwC the rise of mobile broadband, especially in emerging markets, will fuel a surge in advertising on mobile phones leading them to predict a 44% rise in sales by 2012 to a massive $16.4bn.  Whilst I hate to be a kill-joy, I have to ask the question – am I the only one who thinks mobile advertising might not be quite the success story everyone seems to be predicting?

What exactly are advertisers going to do? Call me up every hour to play me a 30 second pre-recorded ad to promote the latest flavour of cat food? Send me a text message advertising the latest in-store discounts on cheese every time I pass my supermarket? What if I pass it five times in one day?!

As far as I can see, the mobile phone doesn’t offer anything that online ads can’t already do in a much less intrusive manner. Well, certainly nothing positive anyway. Advertisers are in danger of being seduced by the technology and the money involved in mobile advertising - they need to stop, take a step back and consider whether mobile advertising is actually something people even want.

I just hope I don’t come back to regret these words in five years time when everyone else has made their millions from mobile advertising…

London is my hometown: I know it, feel it, smell it and long for it when I’m away. Up until recently I also thought that I’d seen it all as well, but I guess that’s no longer true.

To me London is one of those cities in the world that keeps changing, evolving, growing and becoming increasingly more people-focussed. From Portobello to Camden and from Brixton to Chelsea, London is a town for the people.

Leake Street, five minutes walk from Waterloo station and under the railway arches, has become a modern day art gallery with paintings covering the walls and ground. In my day it was simply called vandalism and kids from north-west London would spend hours drawing on the back of trains, walls, buildings – whatever they could get their hands on. They’d leave their tags, their ‘art’, and then run as fast as they could, scaling down the sides of buildings and running across train tracks in order get away from the police – all just so they could leave their personal stamp on the big city.

However, with the sudden rise of Banksy and others like him, vandalism, sorry ‘Street Art’, has suddenly become cool.

But to me this means it’s lost its rawness - part of the fun must have been the chase, the knowledge that you could get caught or hit by a train – well, maybe not quite that.

No more running away from the police - in modern clean, cuddly Britain you can join a workshop or class and then work on a special “underground” project (funded by The Mayor) to change the view of some rundown arches in Waterloo.

But it is cool – clean and cuddly perhaps - but still cool.

Research released by the Advertising Association earlier this week shows what those of us in the industry have known for a long time – there’s money to be made in online advertising.

With 40% growth in the past year, there are even rumours among some analysts that the online market could soon overtake its TV rival. So what exactly does the internet do better than anyone else?

Well, there is one thing I can think of.

People are finally waking up to the fact that they shouldn’t have to waste their time looking at and listening to irrelevant ads. Just think how much extra time you’d have if you didn’t have to sit through hour after hour of ads trying to sell you yet another credit card. If I get just one more flyer through my postbox trying to sell me yet another MBNA credit card I won’t be responsible for my actions!

On the other hand I wouldn’t mind a few more for Arsenal football club…

If brands are to avoid turning off potential customers (trust me, even if I needed a credit card, there’s no way I’d ever even consider approaching MBNA after the forest they’ve probably destroyed trying to persuade me to buy theirs!) they have to start thinking carefully about who they put their ads in front of. This is something advertisers can do on any platform but it works particularly well on the internet where, with a little bit of effort, advertisers can make use of consumers’ habits and serve them ads for things they’ll actually be interested in.

Smart advertisers will soon see that sending the right ads to the right people is the way forward – after all, there’s money to be made.

My wife, like most of the female population in the UK, recently went to see the Sex and the City film. Luckily I wasn’t invited to that particular shoe-fest, but she did report back that in a theatre packed out completely with women (an experience in and of itself I would imagine) whilst 99% of the trailers were for Rom-Coms, chick flicks and period films as you would expect, she was rather surprised and turned off when up popped a trailer for The Forbidden Kingdom…..

For one Boy.

The Journey.

To become a Man.

Is an Adventure.

Hmmmm….a super bad case of targeting by the media planners of that particular Jackie Chan flick me thinks. But a useful lesson that illustrates the imperative of knowing your audience…and delivering relevant advertising messages at the right time and in the right place.