Jan 27 2012

by Brice Le Blévennec

English version of a comment published in Datanews.

I surf a lot, the digital universe is my passion. Lately I’ve grown particularly fond of applications to feed my insatiable smartphone, but I still pass a lot of my time every day hooked to a huge screen, to ‘watchdog’ evolutions in technology, explore the web, dig up the latest innovations, sniff at new trends, in short to be inspired.

I must say I’m supercharged with suggestions from my 350 colleagues, who post daily links on our wiki, or exchange them through various email lists, that drive our working groups. As I’m too curious, I signed up for all our groups and I cannot resist exploring each new link I find there.

The experience it offers is broad: from online high impact experiences to sites with creatives’ portfolios, apps integrated with Facebook, interactive videos, games in 3D with CSS3, WebGL or Flash, new frameworks for web development or HTML5, new social networks, fresh online services, with API’s that allow us to do digital magic tricks, etc.. In short, each day of my life is packed with discoveries and I’m a very lucky person.

Yet when I scan the wiki, I notice a peculiarity. There is hardly any link to be found leading to exciting Belgian online work. The Belgian web is desperately boring. There are not many innovative projects. Few e-commerce sites. Rare original mini-site experiences. No Web services or  API’s of interest … In short, there’s not much happening on the web in our kingdom at the heart of Europe…

Yet our creatives are highly respected in the international advertising world, as are our engineers in the field of information technology and communication. How can we explain this striking poverty?

In fact, Belgium is a victim of its size, of the linguistic and cultural fragmentation of its population and of the high cost of Internet subscription and Mobile Internet.
A bit like Switzerland or Luxembourg.

Most sites have to be available in French, Dutch, often in English too and even in German. This complicates the creation and updating of sites. The CMS must be configured with workflows that take into account the availability of translations of content, often increasing costs of implementation and slowing down updates.

This fragmentation of audiences has a large impact on projects based on communities, like networks and social media, when they feed on written content generated by users. It increases their costs of managing and moderating the participants. Very few community projects have reached a decent national size, or else they had to ‘balkanize’ their public by language, as Netlog did.

The small size of our audiences slows down risk investments. To be a profitable venture, investment in design and development must be returned by interaction with a large enough audience, a market of a sufficient critical scale.
For example, to achieve the same ROI on a project In  the french-speaking part of Belgium, the penetration ratios must be ten times higher than a similar project in France.

Imagine the same project with equal ‘traction’, an online service capturing 1% of the Internet audience. In France, it could be a huge success, generating sufficient funds for the startup to develop and grow. With the same 1% adoption rate in Belgium, that initiative would not even cover the development costs; the project could easily collapse.

This may explain a certain reluctance of venture capitalist in this country. They tend to invest in projects that have already proven their business model abroad, rather than betting on real innovations.

Finally, the high cost of Internet subscriptions, especially mobile internet subscriptions, and – although the law allows it – the fact that mobile operators all strangely agree not to subsidize the terminals, combine to slow down the adoption of the Internet and its frequent use.

So in short, if you are a web entrepreneur, think from the initiation of your project to (also) attack a market outside of Belgium.

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Jan 27 2012

AIDS is a gift we all want to avoid. To increase awareness of Belgians and motivate them to get tested, the advertising agency Emakina created a series of actions for Sida’Sos, using original, unconventional media.

We decided to convey our message in the same way as the disease spreads. We developed media carriers that can be transmitted unknowingly.

Our media campaign centered around 3 unexpected channels:

-          Stickers on coins: hundreds of coins were distributed during events this summer, on festivals, and at the city ‘Apéros’, casual outdoor get togethers.

-          Free Hug Stickers: at various events, people who enjoyed a good hug, carried a Sida’Sos sticker.

-          Wrapping paper: an original and especially designed wrapping paper was created to wrap Christmas and New Year’s gifts. The paper contained a small message, cleverly repeated in the design. This information was only discovered when paying attention and looking at the wrapping paper up close.

These three actions clearly raised awareness of the AIDS issue in Belgium, reaching over 1.000.000 contacts and increasing the number of people tested in the country by several thousands.

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Jan 13 2012

Belgian marketing is clearly going digital, a new study by Emakina’s agency in Ghent, The Reference, indicates. 150 decision makers of digital marketing initiatives in Belgian companies participated in the survey.

In 2012, Belgian marketers will focus on social media marketing, mobile sites and monitoring performance.

Their main challenges will be to turn data into actionable insights and creating sufficient return on investment. Companies that claim to be leading in terms of digital marketing are planning to invest significantly more in social media monitoring and social/ mobile advertising.

This study indicates that the future of marketing is digital, with 20 % of marketing budgets already allocated to this domain and further growth ahead despite the crisis.The social media hype and the rise of mobile internet are still going strong and will continue. It also shows that a main challenge ahead will be to find the right expertise to get the job done.

The slideshare presentation gives a detailed overview of the trend in websites, traffic, social and mobile.

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Nov 24 2011

Over half a million apps to choose from…which ones would be smart to upload to your smartphone or tablet?

In their latest issue, Knack and Le Vif magazines present the Top Applications for smartphones and tablets in the Belgian market. Belgium being the complex market it is, the list of course is different in the Dutch and the French version…

Out of the jury of five members two experts came out of  Emakina Group companies. Emakina’s Chief Visionary Officer Brice Le Blévennec felt right at home in helping to create this special. Mobile Competence Center Manager Thomas De Vos from the Reference in Ghent also let his light shine on the mobile apps.

So with their colleagues they went to work and made a list of criteria, a selection of categories and then each added their favorites.

Our mobile experts  shared their knowledge in this large constantly evolving field of different kinds of Operating Systems : iOS (iPad, iPhone), Android, Symbian (Nokia), Windows or RIM (Blackberry).

Thomas De Vos of the Internet company The Reference says an app must be to the point, relevant and fun. Also, it should avoid superfluous functions.”Keep it simple; when you start it up you have to be able to do right away what it was made for. App makers tend to pile on functions with updates, but these should stick to the essence of the application.”

The list combines international favorites such as Flipboard, Foursquare, Dropbox and Plants vs Zombies with local gold, like TV Overal, Radio.be, Resto.be, KBC banking, Taxis Verts and Electrabel.

Wether you are ‘the connected senior executive’, ‘the organized teacher’ or ‘the active retired person’, wether you’re living a business Lifestyle, interested in entertainment or food, the two specials guide you to the must have apps.

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Aug 29 2011

- By Brice Le Blevennec -

Online television, it’s the next great battle. Already today, it’s making the minds of many race.

Announced some fifteen years ago already, the infamous convergence between Internet and TV is becoming a reality today. By the end of the year, the major TV manufacturers (Sony, LG, Samsung …) prepare to flood the market with machines permanently connected to the web. For their part, telecom operators also prepare the merger between the two media.

Social tv

As you read this, Mobistar launched its platform close to the Apple AppStore, which adds features such as Facebook, Twitter and Flickr to the electronic program guide. And major players in the video game market like Microsoft and Sony have never hidden their dream to transform their respective consoles as privileged centers of all forms of digital entertainment.

Always online, television of tomorrow will also be mobile. Smart phones, tablets, laptops: the images begin to appear on all screens, a trend that will profoundly transform the way we consume television. Telenet launched Yelo, an application that allows you to watch (via wifi) a selection of channels on your iPad. Mobistar makes the same move, with 3G customers gaining access to a variety of broadcasters through an iPad/ iPhone application. And  Belgacom launched its mobile platform as well mobile in June. So  in short, welcome to television “AnyWhere, AnyTime, AnyDevice”, freed from the living room and dictated by the ceremonies linked to the schedule of TV programs.

A concept that we experimented with at Emakina in 2006  with VW EscapeTV, the first TV show that could be viewed via download on any mobile device.

American startups are already a step further and want to use mobile to combine the power of television with that of social networks. They are called IntoNow, Yap.tv, Miso, Philo, GetGlue … Some have already been bought up by large US “networks” or receive the  support of Internet giants (eg Miso is financed by Google Ventures).

Closer to home, the WizzChat application for the iPhone focuses on European channels and allows you to specify the TV program you are watching, share that information on Facebook and chat live with other users.

The beginnings of this trend arrived in 2008, during the U.S. elections. For the first time, televised debates did not stop at the end of the TV show; they continued on social networks. These social media became the natural ‘fora’ for comments and discussions between the viewers.

Mobile further accelerates this change: a study by Nielsen and Yahoo made ​​last year, indicates that 86% of mobile Internet users use their mobile device to talk live about a TV broadcast while they’re looking on their on their small frame.

Connected, mobile and social: these are the three attributes of the television of the future.
For advertisers, the consequence of these many changes is that the consumer’s attention is more fragmented than ever. Besides airing a 30-second TV spot, it will now necessary to be present at the same time on the major social platforms, if you want to activate your  brand by covering its entire target group.

For broadcasters, this “Television 2.0″ will also be a new, very different playing field. Regardless of the “format”, TV will have to be considered as an ongoing conversation with the audience, where both of these media mutually benefit from these interactions. Even if it was an abysmal idiocy, “Carré Viiip”, the already deceased reality TV show on TF1, was a fine illustration of this coagulation between two media: when the show ended, social networks took over and were used to generate content that was part of the next part of the competition.

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