Malcolm Turnbull has made a fair criticism of the proposed Australian National Broadband Network; 100Mbps of FTTH. Fibre To The Home. He says the Government is asserting commercially viability when they haven’t yet done the feasibility study. The best approach, Turnbull says, is to work out what speeds are feasible at what costs and from that, forecast the demand. And I would agree with Malcolm if 100Mbps broadband delivered the same services that we get from 1Mbps. However, that infrastructure is going to lead to new applications, not just faster uses of existing applications. That makes accurately forecasting demand impossible. The normal Australian approach is to be prudent and wait until everyone else has taken the risks. But because we are so remote, and because the internet reduces this remoteness, it’s a ‘good’ risk to take as a country. No other investment has the capacity to so drastically affect our future balance of trade.

I also read Paul Murray in the West Australian voicing sensible concerns in strident tones. He quotes a “some experts” forecast of $150/month for super-fast broadband and asks this question: “what do we get from this other than faster downloads in our homes for mainly entertainment purposes?” This is a valid question. You can stream video at 10Mbps; why do you need 100? Yes, people now have bigger screens and that will require more bandwidth but I don’t believe that streaming today’s internet content on to bigger screens is a strong justification for a $43B investment.

The difference between the Internet on dial-up and the Internet on 1Mbps was CONTENT. And CONTENT will be the difference between 1Mbps and 100Mbps. As soon as the bandwidth allowed for it, we got Skype. We got Napster and Bit Torrent. And we got YouTube. These products did not exist before broadband. Some were not foreseen. First comes the bandwidth, then comes the content that gives people a reason to use the bandwidth. When enough people start using the new applications you get the new business models and the social change that justify the costs.

At 100Mbps we will see some applications completely different to what we currently have. I’ve written before about how faster broadband and processors are going to deliver incredibly compelling experiences that blur the lines between reality and imagination.

100Mbps will allow real-time processing of visual data. That’s not to be sniffed at. It will allow us to overlay video and the environment we live in. It will put realistic animated life-sized avatars in our lounge rooms. Those avatars will be real people in other parts of the world with whom we will have normal conversations.

Interactive video will immerse you convincingly in any landscape or fantasy world. The merging of animation and a real-life environment will allow your friends to appear in your lounge room, dance like Fred Astaire, remove their head from their shoulders, then turn themselves into flying donuts. Do you think that might represent a significant change in communication? Do you think that might suggest new ways of demonstrating and marketing products? 100Mbps would put us at the forefront of that development.

The difference between 1Mbps and 100Mbps is holograms. It’s the replacement of passive, 2D information with immersive 3D environments that connect people in compelling, real-time interactions. It will change our sexual behaviour, it will change our social behaviour and it will change the power structures in society. It’s ‘entertainment’ Paul, but not as we know it.

Three years after this network is constructed, 100Mbps will not be enough.

Image by Radioflyer

Mischief. The first twelve Advertising Agency web sites I looked at are making no effort to attract web traffic. Either they have as much work as they want or they don’t believe that potential clients search the internet for advertising agencies. Maybe they rely on being in the Yellow Pages.

All sites run fancy Flash animation; none of them deprecate properly for people with JavaScript turned off. The full Flash sites are extremely annoying for users. Hit the Back button in your browser while visiting The Brand Agency, Campaign Palace or Naked and get thrown out of the site. Oh good, I get to look at that animation all over again!

None of the sites have Title tags that include any reference to ‘advertising’, ‘media’ or ‘marketing’. This is part of the reason why none of their sites are found when you type “advertising agency” into Google.

None of the sites have Description tags. Which means that when you type ‘saatchi‘ into Google it tells you this about the company:

Saatchi & Saatchi PR in Romania has been appointed by Alpha Bank, a leading name in the financial sector, to handle its PR account. READ MORE > … Compelling content for English-speaking people interested in Romanian bank Public Relations – alas, I’m one of the few …

Saatchi’s site was broken when I visited; none of the links worked. I tried IE and Firefox and re-downloaded Flash but still nothing. I emailed their webmaster. Waiting on a response. Update: links now working.

When you type GPYR into Google it tells you this about the company:
home; about us · work · services · tools · contact us · brand partners · careers. George Patterson Y&R is Australia’s newest (and oldest) advertising agency …

‘Wunderman‘ gives you this:
Welcome to Wunderman : Welcome to the site for Wunderman, the original direct marketing agency. To get our conversation… Welcome, welcome. Should be called Doorman, not Wunderman.

Clearly none of the agencies understand that you can control the way Google presents your search result. Many of the sites don’t work if you omit the www; this can be fixed with a simple re-direct. And it seems none of them know how to get a full Flash site properly indexed by Google, thereby increasing web traffic. I digress.

DDB have a one page site that allows you only an email link. Times are tough. The design of many sites, such as BMF and Clemenger has not been updated in years. The gratuitous use of sound is particularly 1990s.

JWT, Grey and Singleton Ogilvy make up the twelve.

It’s as if they created their sites before Google was invented.

Oh! Found one traditional agency who know what they’re doing: Marketforce use the words “marketing” and “advertising” in their Title tag and have written one Description tag. As a result, they come up at #12 when you search for “Advertising Agency”. A bit of tweaking would put them in the top couple.

I’m running some half-day seminars on web promotion shortly in Perth. If you’d like to pre-register, give me a yell.

FREE. More than any other word, this word gives marketing a bad name. The most recent example to cross my virtual desk was a ‘Sponsor Update’ from WebProNews, a source of huge volumes of Search Engine Optimisation information; small portions of it useful. A ‘free’ offer for Brad Callen‘s book, SEO Mindset: The Real Secrets To Getting #1 Google Rankings For Whatever Keywords You Want, Whenever You Want. Also cures cancer.

If you have to pay postage and handling, it’s not free Brad. If the book is free for those who pick it up in Podunk, Idaho, great. Say that it is a FREE PICK-UP in Podunk. If it’s free with an Amway Toilet Bowl Cleaner it’s a FREE WITH offer.

By the way, you say that the book has a value of $97. Have you sold it to people you don’t know for $97? Because otherwise you are scamming me. You say you are offering almost $470 worth of other products also ‘totally free’. They may be fantastic value but they are not ‘totally free’.

The marketing profession (American Marketing Association, Australian Marketing Institute – I’d link to them but their website doesn’t work) should delineate FREE, FREE PICK UP and FREE WITH. They should set parameters for establishing the value of a product that is not retailed. The practice of calling things free when they’re not and the practice of inventing ridiculously high values for your products should be the subject of industry attention and scorn.

You make us all look bad, Brad. Check your mindset.

Henry Ford is credited with the insight “I know half of my advertising works really well. I just don’t know which half”. The success of Google, the leader in online advertising, is largely due to the impressive accountability that they give advertisers.

Having done the online training course provided by Google, I sat for (and passed) the Google Advertising Professionals exam. The course covered Adwords, cost per click marketing (CPC), cost per impression (CPM), pay per click advertising (PPC), contextual advertising, placement advertising and a slew of other web marketing devices (WMDs; I made that one up).

It all amounts to a fantastic amount of control for the advertiser.

You can start with a tiny budget. Try that on television.

Not only can you select individual web sites that are of interest to your market, you can target based on demographics and/or keywords. In the case of search marketing, you can confine your advertising spend to people in the Perth area who type “model cars” and exclude people who search for “models”, though why you would do that is beyond me.

The system rewards relevance. If you write ads which contain words irrelevant to the web site you send them to, your cost of advertising increases.

You can experiment with different campaign wording and compare the effectiveness of alternatives. Most of this experimentation costs you not a cent.

Having done all that, you can then monitor and adjust at a micro level every aspect of every alternative whenever you want. For example, you can increase your advertising on the weekends or in a particular time-slot. This contrasts sharply with the way NineMSN sells advertising for example. Theirs is a conventional media package: Buy this product, pay this amount, call us if you need a change.

Serious advertisers can also use the Google API to automate keyword changes and daily budgets.

Finally, you can track the conversion rate of every aspect of a web campaign. How effective was each banner ad, Adwords ad, Yahoo ad … in generating an online sale or a page view? Then compare each to your cost of advertising. It’s a system which combines with Google Analytics to give you a comprehensive method of measuring what works and what does not.

Here is one of the sixteen AdWord variations Henry and I are using to launch the Model T:

Ford: Universal Car
Model T; Open Touring & Roadsters
$300 only. 20HP 4 cylinder. Black.
www.ford.com

Call to Action: let me know if you’d like a hand using online advertising. In Australia: 040 990 8133. In the US, 714 656 4001.