US Down, AU Up

This morning on Bloomberg the newsreader announced that US Internet consumer spending has dropped by 18% for the Christmas period of 2007.

While back here in Australia, The Financial Review had a story about the ACMA's recent research on how Aussie kids spend as much time online as they do watching free to air TV.

While they are very different market indicators, they are none the less important trends to keep a eye on.

The US market is being affected by the Sub Prime meltdown and in economics, consumer's confidence can further drive a market down. The US Internet market should be able to bounce back.

While here in Australia, consumer confidence is on the up and up and the cost of having an internet connection is relatively affordable. Good news for the Digital media industry in Australia and the flow on to other sectors.

Mobile Web Applications

When I founded my 1st Internet Start-up circa 2001, I vividly remember reading a story in the Financial Review about Louis V. Gerstner, Jr.

Gerstner, who was CEO and Chairman of the board of IBM from April, 1993 until December, 2002, made the following statement in the article; "Picture a day when a billion people will interact with a million e-businesses via a trillion interconnected, intelligent devices."

While that vision is not yet complete at the time of this entry in December 2007, with the announcement of the of 3 Skype mobile device, we are certainly a lot closer.

What makes the device quite unique and closer to Gerstner's vision is that consumer will be expecting more and more device to be ubiquitously integrated into digital devices that we use on a daily basis.

Mobile devices should have a seamless YouTube application that allows you to upload a video file directly. It won't be long till we we have high end SLR and consumer cameras with an embedded Flickr upload application.

Design Touch Points

Jonathan Ive, Claudia Kotchka, Yves Behar and David Butler.What do they have in common?

They are masters of design.

Jonathan Ive is Senior Vice President of Industrial Design at Apple Inc. He is the man behind the mp3 player called the iPod as well as MacBook Pro, the machine that I am using to write this entry.

Claudia Kotchka is Vice-President for Design Innovation and Strategy at Procter and Gamble and has evolved the P&G company to become more focused on design and innovation and thus become more profitable.

Yves Behar is the founder of Fuseproject, a design firm that has won countless design awards in Silicon Valley and now is working with Coca Cola among many Fortune 50 companies.

David Butler, is Vice President of Visual Identity Design for the Coca Cola Company and has hired Behar to reposition Coca Cola's brand.

These individuals believe that Design is more important than Engineering or Marketing. They convincingly argue that if your organisation leads by design the rest will fall into place.

"Design is not a short term fix, it's a long term engagement that requires you to think about how design affects everything that touches the consumer - from product to packaging to marketing to retail to the take home experience." - Yves Behar.

Results speak for them selves.

Co-Creating Amateurs

For an excellent article on how to leverage your customer base for an effective viral campaign, read the Fast Company article Amateur Hour, Web Style.

It highlights that the key ingredient in every successful viral campaign is the recognition from marketers that for an effective campaign, consumers will be wanting to advance their own interest, be it showcasing their video production skills, acting skills, or some other unique skills that they wish to put on display. Case in point being the Diet Coke and Mentos guys.

So for marketers wanting to effectively use User Generated Content co-creation viral campaigns, they must be willing to understand, motivate and reward consumers narcissistic behaviour.

After all the word Amateur is French for "lover of." Defined in Wikipedia as: The word comes from French, and can be translated as "lover of", reflecting the amateur's motivation to work as a result of a love or passion for a particular activity.