Source: Marketo Releases RPM for Microsoft Dynamics CRM

It’s fascinating to watch how quickly things are moving in the world of digital content and distribution. Those that understand the importance of time as an asset are moving as fast as possible. This is another example of the benefits of having a sense of urgency. Those that have a bunker mentality and yearn for the way things were will forever be left behind.

BY ALEXIA TSOTSIS

Google confirmed the existence of its YouTube Movies service earlier today and has just released more details on which studios and movies will provide the 3,000 titles in its repertoire. YouTube has partnered up with Universal, Sony Pictures and Warner Bros and others to offer full length feature films on YouTube.com/movies. Fox, which we mistakenly reported had joined the brood earlier, is noticeably absent.

From the YouTube blog:

“Today, we’re announcing another step in our goal to bring more of the video you love to YouTube: the addition of thousands of full-length feature films from major Hollywood studios available to rent in the US at youtube.com/movies. In addition to the hundreds of free movies available on the site since 2009, you will be able to find and rent some of your favorite films.

From memorable hits and cult classics like Caddyshack, Goodfellas, Scarface, and Taxi Driver to blockbuster new releases like Inception, The King’s Speech, Little Fockers, The Green Hornet and Despicable Me. Movies are available to rent at industry standard pricing, and can be watched with your YouTube account on any computer. The new titles will begin appearing later today and over the coming weeks to www.youtube.com/movies, so keep checking back.”

Google also sent us a helpful YouTube Movies FAQ, which I’m including below.

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This is fascinating research. I do a lot of work with companies that have software that can predict what might be through the science of modeling. The work generally yields extraordinary value. But, when you apply it to the human dimension like we see below, I wonder how can leverage this kind of work for the greater good.

Important debate that deserves to be surfaced…especially for marketers. Can the ad business take on the technology business?

Photo: Jonathan Fickies / Bloomberg via Getty Images

Martin Sorrell, the chief executive of WPP and, arguably, the dominant voice in the advertising business, recently gave an interview in which he challenged the basic efficacy of social media as an advertising tool.

Mind you, this is against a backdrop of the entire advertising industry in a manic dither to stress its social media bona fides. What you want to be right now is a social media agency—because every other agency network or holding company has to buy you. Buddy Media, a social media advertising agency slash technology company, even took a round of VC investment. Advertising, heretofore, is not a business the VC community has ever looked at with anything more than contempt.

But Sorrell told the Royal Television Society that he had “some fundamental doubts about the ability to monetize social platforms.”

“We used to write letters to each other,” he continued, “and now we correspond through Facebook and Twitter and other forms of communication. If you interrupt that with a message, you may run into trouble.” Of course, he added with artful humility, he had once said that Facebook was overvalued at $15 billion whereas it is looking at a public offering near $100 billion.

Now, in some sense, Sorrell is merely making a contrarian argument—and hardly a far-fetched one. The Web itself, once expected to be the ne plus ultra of advertising, has returned much more equivocal results. Its cost keeps going down instead of up. And social media is more complex and less linear and more anarchic than the Web. There is no straight path for a message to get through.

But Sorrell is wily and, we can assume, his point was something more than just polemic.

Facebook, like Google before it, is about to usher in another great depression in the value of the ad market. Its billions of user views which it can sell for fractional pennies will create, for Facebook, a cash gusher. But for everyone else, it will cheapen the value of digital media. By once again letting the technology guys control the advertising play, the chance is great that they will take volume instead of spending the time and effort to develop a more particular and exclusive branding play.

Sir Martin, in other words, is trying to put a stake in the ground.

The digital world is surely the future of advertising, but, as surely, the digital guys are fucking it up. Worse, the big digital kahunas have come up with a way to make money for themselves, at the expense of everybody else. Worse yet, the forms of advertising they’ve created don’t even work very well—so the entire craft becomes devalued.

It’s war—of a sort.

Curiously, WPP is Google’s biggest client (and it will, no doubt, if it is not already, become Facebook’s biggest client), but, because of AdSense’s fundamental democratization of the medium, this means that WPP is still a small overall contributor. Large ad agencies hold large sway over television; they don’t over big digital platforms.

Uncle Martin is jawboning.

He is at last trying to take back the discussion. The technology guys, not least of all because they understand technology, have controlled the conversation, even when it’s about advertising, a subject they don’t much understand at all (or particularly care about). The advertising guys, trying to placate cowed clients worried about their uncool digital strategies, and unable to truly talk the technology talk, have gone along.

A business that supports itself with advertising, that, effectively, has only one revenue stream—advertising—is almost entirely run by people who, effectively, want to cut out the advertising pros.

It’s a war whose time has come.

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Bleeding Retailer Scrambles Ahead of Make-or-Break Holiday Season, Specifically in Women’s Tops

My take-away from IBM’s marketing study is that marketers (in their role as buyer and user) seem to be experiencing what happens in any hot, cluttered category: Noise creates confusion. What’s needed is a place to think, a place that makes sense of the madness. What’s needed is a thought leader who understands the industry problem, and can help guide the way forward. That thought leader role can just as easily be filled by a solution provider as by an industry analyst. I’ve spent time in hot, cluttered categories — open source, middleware, PLM, digital content, cloud computing. The patterns very definitely repeat. My post, Noise, talks directly to this issue.

BY STEVE OLENSKI

Results from the recently released IBM State of Marketing 2011 show that while many new marketing channels and mediums are opening up – social media and mobile media chief among them, there is also a sense of confusion and information overload among marketers who are asking for better analytics and the corresponding tools to turn findings into action to drive meaningful results.

STUMBLING BLOCKS
The three biggest obstacles facing marketers in terms of processes today are:

1. Measurement, Analysis & Learning

• In years’ past, IT support was the #1 obstacle; this year over half of the marketers surveyed have clearly identified their new #1 priority: Take collected data and turn it into action; real, measurable action

2. Lack of Integration

• Over half (53%) said they want more integration across all channels and to do that…
• 87% said they want a more integrated software suite

3. Better IT support of technology needs

• Despite its being overtaken as the #1 need among marketers, IT will always play a vital role in marketing as witnessed by the over half of respondents who cited technology as the key to productivity.

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