I am on holiday. During my holiday I will be disconnected.

However I did plan my holiday online. See you in a few weeks.

Seems like the luxury Brand debate is coming to an end. Luxury Brands often do have a problem with the transparency and accessibility of the web. Because they do have a reputation to protect. And they need to stay exclusive.

However this does not mean luxury Brands can ignore the the fast evolving changes in digital branding. Research shows that the luxury consumer is ready for 2.0 and they do have very high expectations.

Not meeting this expectations will definitely harm your brand. For a luxury brand, just ‘keeping up’ is not enough. You have to be outstanding.

Beth Uyenco, Research Director for Microsoft Advertising comes with the following Luxury Brand Engagement Model:

• ‘Awareness’ To stay in line with the offline communications, and to deepen the brand experience with interaction, your web presence needs to be of top quality.
• ‘Admiration’ Luxury Brands need to exceed expectations and do also have to communicate on an emotional level.
• ‘Exploration’ Similar to the in-store communications. Luxury customers will want a personalizes way of exploring the Brand and its products.
• ‘Consideration’ After the exploration phase, it is important to create engagement. In this stage it is very important to know who your future customer is, to deliver an exceptional service and to invite the customer to join the Brand.
• ‘Purchase’ Integration of offline and online will give the possibility to enrich the purchase experience. It is about helping to buy more efficient and/or making the purchase a remarkable moment.
• ‘Ownership’ There are many digital ways to keep and strengthen the relations with your exclusive customers.

(Thanks to Microsoft Advertising and frankwatching.com )

I do believe performance based marketing has a bright future. For anyone involved in advertising it is very attractive to pay per sale, per lead etc. in stead of just buying reach without any further guaranties.

Publishers have the opportunity to place ads while sharing the revenue. Customers get to see more relevant ads because ads that don’t pay will disappear.

Affiliate networks will however face a hard time to stay relevant. As tracking software will become free and available for everyone. Affiliate networks will have to compete with affiliate managers within the advertising companies to find and built relations with relevant publishers.

Why would you still pay the affiliate network if you can do it yourself.

Google is already offering Pay per Action advertising in beta and I guess it is just a matter of time before Google starts offering this tracking solution for non-Google ads as well (similar to Analytics campaign tracker). By then anyone can start his/her own affiliate program for free.

If the tracking software is for free. Affiliate networks will need to show their relevance by delivering better tracking and/or better publishers then we can find ourselves. In this situation they can’t afford to charge monthly fee’s. They will probably have to work performance based themselves.

People are spending more and more time on the Internet, right? But the front runners, the heavy users are more and more facing the problem of information overload. They are disconnecting in stead of connecting.

The next trend is going Off line.

We will see more and more (lab)topless meetings, topless holidays etc. And people are trying to find ways to use their free time more effectively (lifehacking). Gmail labs comes with a new feature the TakeABreak option which effectively removes you from all Gmail functions for 15 mins.

For Brands this trend is one to consider. Besides the fact that being relevant will be the only prevention against customers disconnection with your Brand. Brands have to start thinking about how to offer disconnecting experiences, lifehacking widgets and more TakeAbreak tools, products and the like. Customers will love you for it.

It is about a delivering sounds, sights, smells… for a well deserved holiday . It is not about selling it there. It is about people taking it home in their systems. That’s what I call a good Brand association.

Youtube is getting more functions. It gives us, users, more and more control and insights. Now there is this new feature in beta, Annotations.

• Explanation here
• Video instruction here

So you can now ad text in after uploading. I don’t see the whole point yet. Why not ad in text while making the video? But I think this is just the beginning of opening up video content to, for example, customers. And I guess this is just one step in the direction of easy self made interactive video’s. Just watching video’s is coming to an end.

I see now… That some interactivity is already possible right now since you can put in links to other youtube pages. Check out this demo.

(thanks to Dutchcowboys.nl)

It is possible to protect your Brand name in Google Adwords.

A nice example you find if you try to make a text-ad with the term  “Euro 2008″ in it. You get the following message (see picture):

Trademarked Term.

Due to trademark reasons we do not allow advertisers to use “Euro 2008″ in their Google Adwords ads.

If this is a wise decision for all brands, I don’t think so. It has an effect on your distribution which you should consider. However it can give you some Brand control.

Last Thursday, 29 may, there was the second e-Business Convention in Geneve. It was a small conference and the aim was not to be inspiring, I guess, but more to inform new prospects and clients.

I was surprised there was a photographer instead of some flashy podcast and or back-channel experience. Must valuable of the convention was, in my opinion, the list of companies serving Geneva and it region in the online marketing field. So here is a list of companies based in our region.

1. www.b3b.ch
2. www.b-i.com
3. www.businessdecision.ch
4. www.cobweb.ch
5. www.cross-systems.ch
6. www.dotbase.com
7. www.emailvision.ch
8. www.everial.ch
9. www.ic-agency.com
10. www.mediapost.ch
11. www.opi.ch
12. www.optaros.com
13. www.rsd.com
14. www.smallbiz.ch
15. www.zoovista.ch

Affiliate marketing can be a great way to get relevant traffic to your website. You only pay a commission when this traffic is giving some result.

I always compare affiliate marketing with offline retail. Retail is making money by selling your product and keeping a part of the revenue. For Brands it is always wise to have this distribution channel in place. But just like with offline retail you must have a strategy.

When you are for example a luxury brand. You only want to see your product sold in exclusive shops. Otherwise you harm your brand. On the Internet this issue is even more relevant.

Good affiliate networks always let you, as advertiser, review each website to decide if a website is a suitable match for your brand. But still this is not enough. We have seen examples of big brands getting in very bad places. (check German examples here).

To prevent Brand damage you should always manage your affiliate programs properly. Is there anything strange going on in your program. Affiliateblog.nl (in Dutch) comes with a lot of things you should look at. In short, ask yourself this questions :

• Check your top-10 affiliates. Do you know them? Where do they get their traffic from?
• Check your stats. Are there any affiliates delivering huge amounts of traffic with a low conversion and/or high bounce rate?

To start with affiliate marketing in Switzerland you can start with Tradedoubler.
More basic info about affiliate marketing on wiki.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) can be found in most European countries and in various other countries of the world, even in South America. There are now attempts to launch the first Asian IAB in china.

Strange though that there still is no Swiss IAB.

Asking IAB Europe about it, they confirm that IAB Europe is in conversation with a group of people about opening an IAB here. They hope to make a formal announcement about it before June. That is in about 10 days!

Mission of IAB is accelerating the growth of e-commerce, interactive advertising and online marketing.

When you look at the structure of digital companies you often see something like a ‘labs’. Nice thing about these labs is that you create a platform for innovation and that you share this process with the outside world. If done properly it is a great tool in product development and it also has growing involvement as a side effect.

A good ‘lab’ is more than just asking people to send in ideas. It is about sharing information and asking for feedback from experts or consumers.

10 examples of labs:

1. TBWA has a Media Arts Lab, you can find it on TheBigWhatAdventure.com. Besides that the website is a sleep (last update from 24 January 2007) I do not really consider this a Lab. It seems more a ’send in an idea’-thing like openad.net. Unfortunately it has nothing to do with product/advertising innovation. Sharing the process of innovation in advertising could give TBWA (or any other traditional agency) some valuable feedback and involvement from digital experts.
2. The famous Google labs now has a sister called Google creative lab. It is all about Google trying to serve the Branding market. And, as you can read, it is looking for collaboration with advertising agencies. Interesting project, curious when we get more insights.
3. Msn adlab. I like the Coming soon! parts. The video hyperlink tool looks similar to videoclix.tv . I don’t see really experimental stuff though.
4. Advertising Lab. More like a blog about The future of advertising. But the blogger is working for an ad agency which gives it a lab function.
5. American express is doing nice things within their Labs. They are even transparent in their discontinued experiments.
6. Nokia Trends Lab. Typically a consumer lab. Inspiring project. Urges creative thinkers to use mobile technology.
7. BBC Innovation labs. Series of creative workshops for interdisciplinary teams of professional creative technologists, application designers, software developers and interactive media designers, working across both Future Media & Vision platforms.
8. Swiss mobile labs. (I mentioned this one before)
9. Innovationlab.dk
10. and of course Liftlab.com

If you know more, feel free to mention.