The battle of the brands 2: new global brand survey just more deck shuffling.

There's nothing very surprising in BusinessWeek's annual survey of the 100 Best Global Brands, just that Google isn't already closer to the top of the pack and that it pre-empts the rapid decline of some world's major financial brands.

In its latest and eigth iteration, the brand rankings compiled from data from JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and Morgan Stanley, see little shift in the dominance of global brands with the exception of Disney's failure to grow, Mercedes-Benz departure (down to 11) replaced by Google's (10) much anticipated entry into the top ten.

What's most interesting in this list is the fact that $157 billion Google hasn't already surpassed Microsoft (ranked 3) and that Swedish megaclothing retailer H&M is rocketing up the charts(22) while Thomson Reuters (44), Blackberry (73), Ferrari (93), Armani (94), FedEx (99) and Visa (100) are all marked as new entrants to the pantheon.

Behind Google, Apple (24, up from 33), Sap (31, from 34), Nintendo (40, from 44) and Amazon (50, up 62) all signalled significant growth off the back of strong sales and increasingly focussed efforts of true and marked differentiation via technology.

In what must have anticipated the seismic shocks in financial markets, big value declines were posted by Merril Lynch (-12%) Citi (-14%) and Morgan Stanley (-16%), while old school brands such as Ford (-12%), Gap (-20%) and Motorola (-10%) all struggled to hold onto their market and customer relevance.

Outside of the financial giants, Ford, Gap and Motorola have all been characterised as so bogged down in moribund cultures that their ability to innovate has had significant effects on their share price and caused subsequent declines in brand value.

Indeed for Ford, Gap and Motorola it must signal that lessons can be learnt, not from big ticket investing in advertising but in building cultures that are imbued by technological and design innovation, which big risers Google, H&M, Amazon and Zara already know.

Yahoo, slow death of a portal?

Microsoft's increasingly aggressive stance on its Yahoo bid looks certain to be bolstered by recent figures on Yahoo’s overall performance as a search vehicle.

According to SearchEnginewatch nearly 10 billion "core" searches were conducted in the US in February, accounting for a 6 percent decline from January search activity.

Altogether search queries were down at all the major search engines. Google serving 5.9 billion search queries, down 5 percent from January. In February, Google's share of searches was 59.2 percent, up from 58.5 percent.

Yahoo's search share slipped from 22.2 percent in January to 21.6 percent in February. Overall, it served 2.1 billion searches, down 8 percent from the previous month.

In March, much the same scenario has also been played out over at Hitwise, whose measures have Google owning around 67.25 percent of all US searches for March. Yahoo! Search, MSN Search and Ask.com each receiving 20.29, 5.25 and 4.09 percent respectively.

In 2007 Hitwise had Yahoo with 21.26% of all searches and the year before that 22.30%. It represents not only a continuing rout by Google but also plays into suggestions that Yahoo’s market position is being eroded.

In Australia, the Yahoo7 alliance has been criticised for its inability to find focus with advertisers increasingly shunning the joint venture (See DIFFUSIONblog 23/10/07) and relegating it to a second tier advertising status.

In February Nielsen//NetRatings Yahoo!7 in third place in the market with 5 million unique users, though this figure is an aggregate and does not represent search only. It cites its recent content deals with Bebo and Disney as proof that its a real challenger to Google.

The Australian operations focus seems to be on stretching the width of advertising, rather than increase the range of opportunities for users and increasingly gain traction from engagement with the brand. In a mature market such as Australia, where Neilsen claims internet usage has peaked at 80%, the effort may go unrewarded and probably unrecognised.

This scenario is mirrored in almost all aspects of Yahoo’s attempts to rescuscitate its ailing brand.

The simple fact, as the statistics show, its market relevance with users and with advertisers is declining. From a content, usability and experience side, Yahoo now does little to differentiate itself from its competitors. Its competitors, particularly MSN, do nothing more than mimic the same.

Portals, like Yahoo, and before that Excite, Lycos and AltaVista (remember these!) all experienced year-on-year declining relevance and consequently market share as their brands no longer provided users with differentiating content and experience. It wasn’t about building advertising platforms, it was as Google worked out, about building a brand that delivered differentiating and innovative content and usability for users.

I'll let the statistics speak for themselves. According to SearchEngineWatch in 2001 Yahoo was the top search engine, referred the most traffic to web sites in the US, accounting for more than 38% percent of search referrals with MSN 15.9 percent, the nascent Google 11.3 percent and AOL 7.8 percent. Internationally, Yahoo referred 41.5 percent of all traffic, followed by Google at 13.9 percent, MSN 12.9 percent and AOL 5.4 percent.

As everyone knows, its a numbers game. And the numbers are real.

Can Facebook get social advertising right?

Facebook is ratcheting up social commerce and wants to turn every member into a promoter for advertisers.

The New York Times reported overnight that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg announced the site would now feature what it describes as “social ads.”

On September 24 the company filed in the US to protect the trademark “SocialAds” in relation to “advertising and information distribution services, namely, providing advertising space via the global computer network”.

The new feature will be included in the news feed section of individual profiles and will enable advertisers to create their own profile pages and that will will let users identify themselves as fans of a particular product or service. For example, it might be that I might identify myself with Apple and so a newsfeed would be produced that says "Stephen Byrne is a fan of Apple". This message may also be featured in banner advertising which may include my picture or in single line text advertising that often runs as you load applications.

Facebook says it will initially offer social ads to advertisers for free but would continue to charge for banner advertising which could run with the endorsements.

“Nothing influences a person more than the recommendation of a trusted friend,” said Zuckerberg.

Facebook is also going allow advertisers to tap into the vast stores of data that its users provide, allowing advertisers to target users along geo, socio, demographic and psychographic.

In Australia Facebook has just over 1 million users (I checked) and is growing fast. Zukerberg was quoted as claiming it had 50 million global users with 25 million users visiting Facebook each day. It loads 65 billion pages on which advertisements can be displayed each month.

Zuckerberg is short on any projected ROI or effective measures of both the existing advertising and the proposed social ads but on the back of the recent $240m Microsoft investment, it's a direct threat to Google's highly successful AdSense network and surely competitor MySpace won't be far behind in developing a similar offer.

What's clear is that, as I noted in the previous DIFFUSIOBlog Intrusion vs seclusion, the move represents a new phase in the development of social exchanges. It will be interesting to see whether Facebook users will embrace it or whether it will be shunned.

IPTV, is it "better TV" or just "more TV"?

TV is dead, long live TV.

Certainly, that's the view of Microsoft founder Bill Gates, when he delivered the keynote address to Microsoft's yearly gathering of its advertising partners from around the world at the company's eighth annual Strategic Account Summit, early this month.

And strangely Gates might be right.

According to Nielsen Media Research what is called prime-time "viewership" for the four biggest broadcast US networks, fell from 40.3 million to 37.6 million people.

What this means is that people seem no longer beholden to network television to determine both the time, programs and place of viewing. Soon it will also be about the the media they use to view TV.

And Gates, who's been catching up on his more visionary outpourings ever since he missed the initial internet bubble, sees a new media landscape dominated by internet protocol TV (IPTV), where people will own single, high-performance wireless devices, download high definition television from anywhere in the world (but using Microsoft middleware) and viewing becomes more social and personalized.

The sorts of macro changes he predicts includes portable computing devices (we're thinking something not unlike Apple's iPhone with huge amounts of storable memory pluggable into home networks), which work anywhere and in any environment on any platform.

"We need to make things more user-centric", said Gates.

He thinks too much of digital media is designed on a per-device basis and he sees that changing, both in terms of the development of single devices that DIFFUSION believes can be used in all environments - home, office, play - as well as in all contexts while running on seamless various Web-based communication platforms.

Gates is obviously an avatar for IPTV, which Microsoft has made significant investments in. Microsoft is working with 16 customers in 15 countries on four continents around the world with nine of those customers commercially deploying IPTV services including AT&T U-verse, BT Vision, T-Home from Deutsche Telecom and Bluewin TV from SwissCom

"There's no way broadcast infrastructure over these next five years will not be viewed as competitive. The end-user experience, and the creativity, the new content that will emerge using the capabilities of this environment will be so much dramatically better, that broadcast TV will not be competitive, " he said.

"In this environment, the ads will be targeted, not just targeted to the neighborhood level, but targeted to the viewer. And more and more as the viewer is coming to a TV set, either through just choosing off a menu, or recognizing voice, or some video type thing, it will actually not just know the household that that viewing is taking place in, but will actually know who the viewers of that show are."

Microsoft demonstrated how IPTV worked at the presentation, including its capacity for virtual tuning, instantaneous recording of up to four programs from a digital EPG, true video on demand, high definition display and recording. They wrapped it in the moniker of "better TV".

Gates made similar bold predictions for the future of gaming, which is already seeing the Xbox combine with a set top box to enable new forms of social gaming.

So what will happen? When will we really see what Gates calls "better TV"?

Most people, in Australia and the rest of the world, still receive traditional broadcast TV. IPTV and on-demand video won’t change typical viewing behavior for some time (only because we're never going to get it real soon) but TV is changing and will continue to change, because the Internet is forcing it to. However, we're more likely to see a more cumulative change, as is being reported by Neilsen, rather than massive, dramatic change.

Certainly Australia hasn't been very exposed to the joy of TiVo and Foxtel's IQ is limited to subscribers and companies like ICTV has struggled, but programming, the product and carefully synced ad placement is something the networks in Australia have already started toying with.

However, three strands of broadcasting will emerge - traditional network broadcasting, subscription TV and narrowcasting using IPTV, the last we believe will become the most dominant. Companies like YouTube and Google Video will embrace IPTV and start to mimic traditional network programming in much the way Pay TV channels do but with more user centric programming. In addition, new companies like Vquence will provide the kinds of advertising solutions which allow narrowcasters to integrate real clickable advertising into programming.

Gates is right when he says that convergence is a key area driver for future television. IPTV will be broadcast across all types of devices but via a single platform (something he's hoping that XBox is a harbinger of). But it's also going to be influenced by digital rights management and the whole IP debate around content ownership. And that's a very fluid area right now, particularly on the heels of YouTube's capitulation to US content owners (the networks and studios). While we're not likely to see a repeat of Napster, we are likely to see IPTV circumventing the four/five channel monopolies in this country.

While there certainly is demand for IPTV services in Australia. In 2005 Australia, the second biggest group of TV downloaders in the world, was responsible for 15.6 per cent of illegal downloads of mainly US content.

But we're not likely to see a commercial IPTV platform in Australia until the kind of broadband networks with fibre to the node and in the home is a reality. And that seems to be what some of the argument between Telstra, the G9, the Australian Government and the ACCC is really about. The reality is we need to be able to get speeds up to 26 megabits per second, when most home systems run at 256 kilobits and therefore unable to support three high definition channels, VOD, VOIP and full internet access.

For the time being we're going to see viewers struggle along with video over the internet (JumpTV or iTunes, for example) and more makeshift offerings from Telstra and Foxtel, who initially promised IPTV in 2005. In the meantime, the traditional networks, both in the US and Australia, will continue to see the kinds of change Neilsen has begun to report.