If there is a company that can be seen as a true innovator in the field of online advertising, it will definitely be Uniqlo. Uniqlo is Japan’s, and in the mean time Asia’s, main clothing retailer. Best to be compared with Zara or H&M.

It seems that out of the box, out of room and even out of the building thinking is the starting point for each Uniqlo online campaign. A couple of years ago they drew attention with Uniqlock a widget streaming images of Chinese dancers. At the end of 2009 they brought a new campaign again challenging competition and innovating the field of online advertising.

To support its end of the year promotion where they gave away lucky tickets in store, Uniqlo created a banner campaign that distributed lucky tickets literally everywhere. They created a blog widget containing a button, when consumers pushed the button the images on every website changed into lucky tickets. The winning tickets received a price. Despite this, bloggers were given incentives to put the widget on their website. When a winning ticket would be obtained through their blogs they received a present as well. This resulted in a lot of bloggers putting up the banner for free.

You can already imagine the great results this yielded.

Again this comes to show that online advertising and banners are still in a premature phase. Nothing should be taken for granted and everything should be challenged. Or how in this field creativity can be seen as a strategy. Plus it seems to become a golden rule that you can’t expect to get any benefits from online advertising if you don’t give anything back in return. Uniqlo understood this by offering presents to both consumers and bloggers. That is why marketing has to evolve into a service and why the Internet is so well equipped to support this.

Yes we have the first ever social drink! And who else than Vitamin Water would be the brand to create a drink socially. The new drink is called connect and is the result of a competition run on Vitaminwater’s Facebook page. Consumers were invited to design their own flavors. They could do this by voting on the most talked about flavors or make a flavor themselves by combining several others and putting that one up for votes. The new flavor is a black cherry-lime combination. The packaging of the connect vitamin water is also a tribute to facebook. It carries the Facebook logo ad descriptive text, using references to untagging, friend requests and photo stalking. One of the people who helped in creating the connected flavor was also granted a grant price of $5.000.

              The new connected Vitamin water flavor

So basically a good sample of marketing as a service. You can create you very own flavor. But the other side is much clearer of course. Using the consumer as a resource. Coca-Cola, who bought Vitamin water from Glaceau in 2007, not only gets free market research but also directions on the implementation of that research in combination with loads of exposure. So you see R&D, marketing and advertising is getting very closely related today. As it should be of course. Although I don’t think any R&D department would be very happy with this job of monkey see monkey do.

Steve Nash as the Vitamin water endorser

A couple of weeks ago Rupert Murdoch announced that he wants to stop the free lunch principle for all of his news sites. In 2010, he says, everyone will have to pay for online news coming from NewsCorp. This of course as a last resort to find new revenues. In the second period of 2009 NewsCorp made a loss of 2 billion dollars.

Mr. Murdoch has a good point. The free lunch principle isn’t a great match with the media business model. Traditionally a newspaper is paid for 40% by the people who read it and for 60% by advertisers. So the fact that almost everyone can reach behind the net and get news for free is hurting the industry. So why do newspapers offer people the possibility to access news for free? Well due to severe competition from other internet based news sources. They figured that it was a good move because the content was already there and no extra expenses had to be made to offer it online. The online advertising revenues would offer an extra profit.

So far so good. But why did this fail? Well because online advertising is failing. Extremely low click through rates don’t justify the high prices a lot of news sites are charging for advertising space. According to the NYT you need fifteen people reading an advertising online to equal the advertising revenue of one person that reads the paper version. Currently there is only one company that is able to make a profit from online advertising and that is Google. And also for Google this isn’t unconditionally. They offer a huge range of free lunch products plus they have a lot of third party contracts, like for example with AOL.

So we can understand Mr. Murdoch’s reaction but making people pay for content isn’t working either. The NYT tried it but no one seemed interested in paying even a small amount for top content. Even worse was that due to the wall of payment they created a lot of search engines were unable to search the NYT content.

So the main question is whether it is possible to make people pay for something that was free?

The general answer is no. People won’t pay for content that they can find somewhere else for free. The big problem general newspapers have is not that people don’t want to pay it is the fact that their product, general news, has become a commodity. Although there still are a few occasions when people are willing to pay. Heidi Cohen, president of Riverside Marketing Strategies, gives a good overview of them. The most important are:

• Real time data
• Niche content
• Offering extra products

Of course it is obvious that these are most of the time related to news for professional use. The main question remains. When are general consumers willing to pay?

According to me it will be only by rethinking the entire newspaper business model that this problem can be faced. Of course I don’t have the answer, otherwise this blog post would make room for writing a million dollar book. But I think that this problem asks for a creative solution. Making people pay for your content isn’t such a solution. Rupert Murdoch is stuck in black or white thinking. Either they pay or they don’t pay. What is much more important according to me is investing in news beacons. Creating such a beacon is all about branding. Why is the only running shoe I trust a Nike shoe? People shouldn’t be thinking in newspapers they should be thinking in brands. News is not news until it is made by an institution. Your offering might not be premium but when people think it is they will pay none the less. Screaming that people have to pay isn’t helping it is in fact harming your brand.

To quote Charles Kane in Citizen Kane

“I don’t know who to run a newspaper I just do everything I can think of.”

Well I think the people in charge of newspapers can definitely run a newspaper but they do everything they can think of when it comes down to branding. Besides this I also believe there is still a future for the written non-digital paper. You only have to make it part of everyday life again. Of course I don’t have the answer on how to do that either but these are at least two different options instead of screaming that people should be paying.