Today I am leaving the english speaking blogosphere after having a tremendous time with it since my first blog. But it's time for me to get back to the Frenchies, my professional universe has moved from the north to the sud and the italian sun, so it's a new step and a new adventure.

To make the bridge between both, I am stopping in the french language, and perhaps will I jump once into the Italian one ?

I keep a lot of great souvenirs and friends from the PR blogosphere, many good things happened, so I am hopping to bring the moovement with me on my new blog, www.guillaumedugardier.fr .

All the best to all of you !

Cheers. 

I've been attending today a full day seminar on eMarketing organised by the french Electronic Business group, with about 200 big accounts from Disneyland to Nescafe, Philips, L'Oréal Paris... and many others. It has been a long time since the last time I got so many insights bumping into my mind while attending such a conference I have to say, so the conclusion is that it was definitely worth attending.

Here are some of the insights I got from speakers and attendees, I'll quote the brands rather then mentioning the exact names of the people.

Session I : Speaking to your audience, at it's location (where it is located):

Cortal Consor said they are allocating 80% of their communication budget to the online world, within 2 main activities: display, search and affiliation.

Virgin Mobile explained the acquisition cost is less expensive online than offline. 90% of their investment online is dedicated to recrutement. They've made 2 campaign within Dailymotion and FaceBook at this stage. The idea was to give a participatory dimension to the brand, to go where the consumers are. One of the challenges : impossible to really estimate at this stage what the brand gets back.

Voyages-SNCF.com was very interesting: 25% of their revenu is generated online, which means 1.6 billion EUR, they've increased of 21% in 2007. Goal: doing 50% of their revenu online in the next 5 years. They want to reach the audience of young people, but this population request real content and "experience plus being in placed in a situation of meeting other people. Which life experience does SNCF bring to them ? The expectation is no more a speed one rather meeting people, life experience. Having wifi on the TGV-East led to new expectation from travelers who are demanding new services: this is leading to a new life experience. TGV brand is planning to launch a social network which will be called TGV Move, on the topic of mobility, meeting within sustainability values. Something else than traditional marketing has to be activated to ensure they can stay connected to the young audience which will be more and more key for them knowing that the french rail market will be open to competition in the next 5 years. To reach the young audience, SNCF has been staffing its team with young people who are talking the same language.

AOL: Internet has forced brands to accept dialogue with consumers and put their brands in the hands of consumers.

Session II: From media planning to cross-media

We got here the case of Mir (a wash brand belonging to Henkel) which was very interesting: they've been launching a buzz campaign via a website inviting people to vote at the time of the french presidential election for their favorite wash brand, creating candidates profiles and blgos for each of them. A special ad has been shooted for TV with a signature to get people back to the website, plus a set of very funny films featuring clothes describing the benefits of the wash brand behaving in a human way... Difficult to describe in text but very well done. Of course, all the communication sets in shops were also promoting the global campaign to reach the shopper. Mir's speaker described how difficult it was internally to get approval for this new kind of campaign but they succeed in getting the "go". They've also partnered with Yahoo! to sponsor a web tv shw and customize the home page to their campaign code.

Disneyland Paris Resort: the speaker was the VP Com Europe and he was really great. He shared his vision and understanding of the changes that had to be brought to Disneyland when he came and his story was definitely worth listening, He is starting with identfying precisely the brand DNA then he is following the process below:

1. Know your target, very well

2. Know what their media consumption is exactly

3. Know the steps of the buying process

From his words, coming to Disneyland Paris is all about living an experience, not about discovering a new attraction. It's about turning ordinary things into magic ones and to lead to dreams.

Regarding investments, 3 years ago, DPR was spending 1% of its advertising budget on Internet. Today it's 17%. The new websites has 25 millions unique visitors per year.

They've been producing a serie of shows with key stars for the the french TV around the idea of "tell us what your dreams are all about" in 2 minutes length interviews, of course the french TV have been more then keen to host these programs which were in fact presented as "sponsored by" rather then making pure ad placement as we are all doing in the vast majority. They've been creating a real content there.

The consumer has been placed back in the center of Disneyland. As a golden rule, he described the fact that we, as brand have the responsibility or our brand DNA, it's not the agencies which are working for us that have to do so. It's our mission.

He is by the way a strong believer in the fact that the agencies fee model has to be rethink from scratch and replaced by an incentive based one. Why should media agencies get 10% fee on their buying whatever successful the campaign they are orchestrating are ? The actual model is suffering from an internal competition within agencies services, each one fighting against the other to get the biggest part of the budget.

Internet is the only medium to be at the same time "medium and transactional".

L'Oréal Paris has been launching a website fully dedicated to people using iPhones to browse through it.

That's it for the first part, enough for today, back soon for the second part.

..........................

Globally, everyone was agreeing to admit that web 2.0 campaigns were experimentations at this stage and that no one was able to show any transformation ratio to the buying act. You can not measure precisely how many people bought your product because of a campaign hosted on the web (except of course of you're a pure web player). Those who have been experimenting Second Life campaigns have all been disappointed, what I can easily understand. I don't believe in SL neither, knowing that the reach is so low and the technical barriers so numerous.

Disclosure: that's not at any point a personal reflexion, it's just a summary of key points I've collected today, more in disorder than in any order... It's about keeping track of these discussions and talks before moving along to thinking.

"On a cold Saturday in New York City, the world’s largest train station came to a sudden halt. Over 200 Improv Everywhere Agents froze in place at the exact same second for five minutes in the Main Concourse of Grand Central Station."

A great scene orchestred by Improv Everywhere in New York.

End of DLD08 this afternoon, I am back to Paris with pictures and videos from these 3 days in Munich.

First, the videos below, without too much editing to ensure they go live asap:

Panel Exploding Media

- Bradley Horowitz, Yahoo!

- Peter Hirschberg, Technorati

- Jeff Jarvis, Buzzmachine

- Clay Shirky, New York University

Panel TV reloaded

- Dina Kaplan, Blip.TV

- Patrick Walker, Google

The page with the videos shooted by the DLD team is here, the pictures of the conference on Flickr are available here.

I am at the end of my first day at DLD08 which has been quite fascinating I have to say. The place is fantastic, the organisation seems to be very well handled and last but not least, the list of speakers is tremendous.

As usual with this kind of conference, it's a very good networking place, one out of these annual opportunities to meet online and offline friends between to sessions (already met Andrew P, Andrew C, Rodrigo, Loic, José, Nicole, Gabe, Heiko...). There is a free open wifi which is working with some interruptions, so you'd better blog quick...

I've spent some time scanning the speakers bios and the list of the company they are going to represent during these days, some of them are below, with very interesting models and projects:

• allofme.com
• Admob.com
• Mydeco.com
• Noovo.com
• Bebo.com
• Outblaze.com
• Pangeaday.org

I've had to setup a new Flickr account to host the pictures I'll take during these 3 days as Yahoo!/Flickr have not been able to help me recover my old account except via an automatic answer and recovery system which is of course never working when you've lost both password and ID... So my new one is here.

Very short and non prepared discussion with José on social media in Spain below, not to be taken too seriously, the main idea was to get some details about his next project but he didn't say any word, damn...

(sorry for the background noise...)

I have the chance to be in Munich for 3 days to attend THE annual european conference on the digital world, DLD08. I am going to try to cover it via my blog, hoping I took enough geek stuff with me to do so:

Question is: when will I be able to travel with less cables...?

Update: photos live from conference on my Flickr Album

Forrester Research owns it's channel on YouTube with a collection of videos coming from the 2007 Consumer Forum and Finance Forum. About twenty of them are online now, one of my favourite of course is Charlene's Li on emerging technologies and participation. Hoping more will be released here.

I can't believe it, I just can not believe they made it, it's tremendous !

French President Sarkozy handled a big press conference yesterday in Paris with more than 600 journalists from 40 countries around the world. He made several announcement regarding his politic and precisely one regarding advertising: he wants to see the end of advertising on french national public TV.

If this really happens, and we'll see that in the next weeks, this will bring a big change in the TV advertising space and in the way brands communicate. From a PR perspective, this is a good news as this will certainly lead to a focus on content driven communication rather than on a messaging driven one. But without preaching for one or another church, in the life of every brand, there is time for both advertising and for PR depending of the moment in the life time cycle, so I am not going to focus on this side of the question.

Rather, I'd like to make the point on the change this wil bring to advertising and the new challenge for brands. I am not addressing neither the issue of "how will broadcast be able to produce valuable content now, who is going to pay for the production etc...".

First point and the easiest of course, there will be less space for message, so the space is going to be more difficult to get, more expensive, the fight is going to be hard to get the slot you want. This will give more power to TF1 and M6, the 2 biggest channel/broadcast in the French private sector, that's evidence. Without consideration for the cost of the time on air, the selection of the appropriate message to be distributed via the appropriate channel will be also increased as there will be less space to say as much things as before.

The good news is for alternative channels/broadcast (the digital TV channels ...) and for the digital world, say the Web. This will certainly kick off the interest for alternative media and probably also accelerate the evolution of brands to become their own media. If you don't have enough space to reach your audience via the old mass media, let's focus on the long tail and address people depending of the place they are used to go to get their news. Podcast, web TV, social networks, gaming, customized desktop, widgets, RSS readers, the social media world is wide open for brands to start experiencing new communications, more often based on content then basic messaging I have to say, but there is a huge potential.

This means also entering a world led by active consumers rather than one led by passive consumers. I also see there a big potential for an acceleration of "contentainement" based campaign. Although I can easily understand that not everyone is going to be happy by this change in the advertising landscape, once again, a lot of habits and old rules are going to be broken, it remains a very interesting change, as sooon as it really comes to reality, and that is what we'll see probably soon.

So some more deep thoughts on the topic certainly soon here.
 

I am about to leave tomorrow evening for 4 days vacation in the south of France, so I am updating my iPod to ensure I have the right shows in  my pocket.

Some of the main ones I am used to from traditional media on the topic "digital, web etc..." are below (in French):

BFM: Atelier numérique

BFM: Interviews de Good Morning Business, I am selecting each time the shows depending of the guest speaker

LCI: Le journal du Web (videopodcast)

Europe 1: Nouvelles Technologies

RTL: Le Mag Numérique 

Wishing you a Happy New Year !