The New Age Financial Advisor

In a recent revelation, Compeer talks about how the demand for financial advice has fallen to great depths in the last four years. In a survey conducted for 2000 people in 2003 and in 2007 again, it is revealed that while 28% regarded their bank as their main financial advisor earlier, only 4% feel the same way now in 2007. A far lesser number of people have financial advisors at all, from 69% in 2003 to 47% in 2007. With absolutely no dearth of information, people are turning to online price comparison websites and even friends and family through social networks. And with the banks commoditizing most of its products and services, it will be no surprise to see these numbers dip further. More on this here.

The Big Banking Shift

Tom Groenfeldt highlights four predictions in a recent Gartner report, that suggest mammoth changes to the banking sector as we know it. Worth a mention out of these is the fact that Gartner states that by 2010, 10% of banks’ revenue from retail payments will be supported by competitors such as PayPal. In the last post as we spoke about how convenient the consumers are finding alternative payment options, this Gartner report brings to light that in fact, even businesses may be getting more comfortable with the liked of PayPal because it is cheaper and easier to use than a credit card account. More on this here.

Newer Payment Options

They have been available for a while now, and in a recent survey by Forrester Research, 74% of online shoppers have given a thumbs-up to alternative payment methods like Google Checkout, PayPal and Bill Me Later over traditional Credit Card payments. PayPal pioneered the trend, by drawing online customers on eBay into getting comfortable with alternative payment methods. So what is critical in shifting a consumer’s focus to explore these newer forms of payments? Find out in the Forrester survey authored by Sucharita Mulpuru and her team here.

Loan Learning

There are many new web services that help you understand your money better. For the many who are looking to buy or mortgage property there’s Quizzle, a new website powered by Quicken Loans that will give a simple understanding of their home and money. With “Don’t guess. Know.” as its tagline, Quizzle gives a free evaluation of credit, home value, mortgage, budget and more, important tips on how to make the most of all this. Quizzle does all of this and more, in simple layman terms without any fancy financial jargon. Reaching out to a vast audience, especially the younger generation that is keen on using every resource to evaluate their home buying decisions, Quizzle reaches out through Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and its very own Quizzle Blog.

Small Agencies Lead

Campaign Magazine’s annual roundup of agencies show that most network agencies have seen a decline in revenues. AMV BBDO is down 7%, JWT is down 25%, Publicis down 24.4%, DDB down 10.7%, Ogilvy down 11.9%, Lowe down 14.76%, McCann down 5.5%, and Grey down 2.6%. Only two network shops bucked the trend: Euro RSCG up 32% and TBWA up 19%. Meanwhile, big growth came from Fallon, up an impressive 150% (on a much smaller base that the biggies), WCRS up 87%, DLKW up 20%, VCCP up 17.9%, Miles Calcraft up 24%, BBH up by 13% and Wieden + Kennedy up by 12%. The WK London blog has a write up.

Ad Network Of Newspapers

Four of the largest newspaper groups in the US have forged a partnership to sell part of their online advertising jointly through a newly created sales organisation. Tribune Company, Gannett, Hearst Corporation and The New York Times Company have all invested in the creation of quadrantONE to target premium advertisers looking for high-quality audiences. Read More.

Media Is The New Creative

When a repentant Cannes Advertising Festival awarded BMW Films a Titanium Lion a year after it was originally entered, something changed. The award shifted the center of gravity of the advertising industry from the creative department and put it into the hands of media visionaries.

Now it is easy to confuse the statement above and think that it is media planners who are calling the shots just now. Media is not about which channel, what time and the likes, but about the distribution (across an extremely fragmented world of touch points), relevance and timing of a marketing message, as it is about the creative idea and execution.

In the case of BMW Films, while the execution, idea and everything “typically creative” about the work was superlative, the fact that the idea put branded entertainment at the centre stage and gambled with the web as a no cost distribution model that makes any new piece of web enabled, long format film making a BMW Films clone.

Media as creative has spawned a new breed of advertising thinker, the communications or transmedia planner. His job is not to take the existing creative idea and find ways to put them out in as many places as possible. But to help the creative and the client find new expressions of the brand’s POV and spread these views.

One of the most interesting examples of media as creative thinking came from Adidas in the form of the Adicolor sneaker. Even the product was conceived to tell a story. The all white shoe originally released in 1983 was re-released in 2006 in a kit that included the original plain white shoes, paints, brushes and a wooden palette. The ensuing campaign was a masterpiece in new age storytelling. Simple interactive billboards that had a white sheet pasted it, inviting scrawlers and graffiti artists. A few days later a layer would be added to the board to reveal the shoe with custom created graffiti under each one of them. The idea was taken into film where film makers explored different colours, with little or no reference to the product and its benefits.

One of the problems with using a media idea as the creative itself is that once a brand uses a format successfully, it becomes very difficult for some other brand to use a similar format and do it well. While there are many examples of using YouTube as a TV channel to create a miniseries, LonelyGirl15 will always be the benchmark that will be difficult to beat.

At a time when consumer attention to advertising is flagging and technology is spawning new ideas there is a need for a bunch of thinkers who can understand the possibilities of science and the needs of brands to help create ideas that will solve marketing problems.

Logo Evolution

The Funtacious blog takes us through an interesting journey on how some of the biggest brand logos have evolved. Wonder if any of these brands believed their logos could exert such a big influence the day they were conceived. Take a look.

Posted originally on the Neatorama Blog. Here and here. Thanks Mattus

Saving On Ebay

Just when there are reports of eBay concentrating on the sale of fixed price goods rather than its traditional auction model, a study by ISB Hyderabad and the Smith School of Business in Maryland have quantified the consumer surplus that eBay has never shared data on. Consumer surplus is the difference between what people pay and what people are willing to pay. For the study, consumer purchase data from about 4500 eBay auctions in 2003 was taken and studied using Cniper, a sniping agent. What was identified could be of immense help to eBay in relooking at their auctions business. Read the article on an NY Times blog here.

Send A Check By Email

If dropping your check at an ATM was not a convenient enough option, here’s another – scan your checks and send them to your bank by email. After the Check Clearing for the 21st Century Act, Saul Hansell reports that most banks scan checks instead of shipping them to other banks on which they are drawn. Like is expected and true of all new techologies, fraud is an issue here too. Fiserv, the transaction services company that has annouced a new software that will enable banks to let home users deposit checks by scanning them, has also brought in software meant to analyze images for signs of fakery with other models that look for suspicious patterns of behavior that may indicate fraud. There are of course many more perspectives that one can think about – saving costs of cheque collection for the bank and not having to go anywhere to deposit a cheque for the consumer are just a few. Read Hansell’s article here.