英國知識產權dissertation|英國知識產權保護dissertation，1 Thelegal protection of databases in Europe
What’s the problem?
6 Social classifieds
Building a buzz around
classified advertising?
9 Viewpoint
Murdoch grabs the internet nettle – again
11 Spotlight on … SMS marketing
14 A month in digital media
September 2005
The legal protection of databases in Europe
What’s the problem?
by Laurence Kaye, Laurence Kaye Solicitors
Even before we all set foot on the ‘information superhighway’ in the early 1990s, the European Commission had recognised the importance of protecting investment made by database producers. This led to the 1996 Directive on the Legal Protection of Databases (“the Directive”). The Directive was implemented into UK law in 1998.
The idea underlying the Directive seemed clear enough, at least conceptually. It introduced a ‘two tier’ level of protection for databases. Copyright protects the intellectual creativity in database structure. The Directive then introduced an entirely new right – the database right (also known as the ‘sui generis’ right) - to protect the investment made in database production. To be precise, it applies to investment in obtaining, verifying or presenting the contents of a database.
Now fast forward nearly twenty years to the judgments of the European Court of Justice (“ECJ”) in the William Hill and Fixtures Marketing cases in November 2004. As we will see, the ECJ judgments have created a significant gap in database protection and left information lawyers scratching their heads about what exactly is protected by the database right. The ECJ’s judgments were followed by the UK Court of Appeal in July this year when it finally decided the case brought by William Hill against the British Horseracing Board (“BHB”) for infringement of their database right in their database.
Here’s the problem
The ECJ decided that database materials which the database maker creates, rather than obtains from a third party source, are not protected. So all of the investment made by the BHB (circa £4m p.a.) and by the Football Association in creating their official fixture lists is not protected.
At the time when the Directive was going through its various stages, everyone thought that as long as substantial investment was made in putting the database and its contents together, the maker would be protected against its unauthorised use. However, we now find that obtaining data is protected but creating
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database content is not. Of course, few databases consist wholly of data obtained from third parties. Publishers and information providers need to add value to their database products by creating original data. Is this now unprotected? If it is, then the licensing income generated by database producers may have lost its legal underpinning.#p#分頁標題#e#
So here we are, nearly ten years after the introduction of database right, with a very large question mark about protection for added value data. In the remainder of this article, we will look at what the ECJ decided, the impact of these legal decisions and what publishers should do to protect their investment in this changed legal landscape. But first, we will start with a very quick refresher about the Directive.
A brief refresher
Before the Directive was introduced, there was a mixed bag of legal protection for databases. In the UK and Netherlands, databases were protected by literary copyright as tables or compilations. But in other European Union countries, such as Germany, they were often unprotected because they did not meet the higher threshold of author’s intellectual creativity that those countries required for copyright protection.
What is a database?
The Directive gave a very wide definition of ‘databases’. A ‘database’ is “a collection of independent works, data or other materials arranged in a systematic or methodical way and individually accessible by electronic or other means.” So web sites, online databases, collections on CD-ROMs and print directories are all capable of being databases. However, just because they are capable of falling within the definition does not mean that they qualify for protection.
Copyright and database right
Under the Directive, copyright protection applies to databases “which, by reason of the selection or arrangement of their contents, constitute the author’s own intellectual creation.” However, merely extracting data from a database is unlikely to infringe copyright. So in the recent ECJ cases, the issue of database copyright was not even considered.
In contrast, database right is a producer’s right. It applies where there is a substantial investment – in time, money and human resources – in obtaining, verifying or presenting the contents of a database. It is interesting to note that there is no reference to ‘making’ or ‘creating’ database contents. This reflects a ‘pre-Internet’ vision of a database as a passive electronic storehouse of pre-existing data and of the database producer as essentially a mere gatherer of that data.
If the maker of the database has made the required substantial investment, then any unauthorised copying or distribution – ‘extraction’ or ‘re-utilisation’ in the Directive’s language - of the whole or a substantial part of that database will infringe the right. The right can be infringed if ‘small but regular helpings’ are taken. So the Directive provides that repeated and systematic extraction or re-use of small ("insubstantial") parts of a database's contents can, cumulatively, amount to infringement of the sui generis right where this conflicts with the maker's legitimate interests.
The database right lasts for fifteen years but is renewable if there are substantial changes to the database in question during the fifteen year period. The first owner of the right is the person who is the ‘maker’ of the database. However, only ‘makers’ who are nationals or habitual residents in a Member State may qualify for protection. So a US producer of a database cannot qualify for database right protection.#p#分頁標題#e#
Separate protection for copyright works in a database
It is worth remembering that copyright and database right protection under the Directive are quite separate from any copyright protection in any materials contained in the database. For example, the musical works in an online music service and research articles within an online journal will have separate copyright protection, as well as potentially benefiting from any copyright and database right in the database in which they are stored.
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What the ECJ decided
The ECJ decisions are not good news for database producers.
The ECJ ruled on four cases referred to it by EU national courts. Three cases involved Fixtures Marketing which, on behalf of the UK football leagues, licenses the fixture lists outside the UK. These cases concerned the use of football fixtures' data for pools betting in Finland, Sweden and Greece. The fourth was a referral by the UK Courts of the BHB v. William Hill case. This involved the use of information from the BHB database on the William Hill internet site for online betting. In all cases, the database owner alleged infringement of its sui generis right in its database by the unauthorised use of its data.
The common factor in all four cases was the ECJ's ruling that the “investment in the obtaining, verification or presentation of the contents” of the database refers to “the resources used to seek out existing independent materials and collect them into the database and not to the resources used for the creation of such independent materials”.
Put simply, the ECJ decided that if a database is a by-product of the database maker's principal activity and that the investment goes into that activity and not into the gathering together of pre-existing materials, then no sui generis protection is available! So in BHB's case, the ECJ decided that its investment went into the creation of the lists for racing, checking the identity of the person making the entry for the race and other information about the race and its entrants. All of this was part of its principal activity of organising horseracing and took place before the database was created. A similar line of reasoning appears in the three cases involving Fixtures Marketing.
There is further bad news for database owners in the BHB v. William Hill judgment. BHB argued that although only tiny amounts of the data in the BHB database were used each day by William Hill, it cumulatively amounted to infringement (see comments above regarding ‘small but regular helpings’). But the ECJ decided on the facts that there was no possibility that, cumulatively, William Hill could reconstitute and make available to the public the whole or a substantial part of the contents of the BHB database. William Hill did not therefore prejudice BHB's investment in the creation of the database.
The impact of these decisions
For certain types of databases, there can be little doubt that the ECJ decisions significantly undermine the scope of protection. Those are databases where the data is unique to the database producer and where the database producer is the sole source – like fixture lists.#p#分頁標題#e#
When the Court of Appeal considered the ECJ’s decision in the BHB v. William Hill case, it said that in contrast to a “mere database of existing materials…if one asks whether the BHB published database is one consisting of existing independent materials, the answer is no. The database contains unique information – the official list of riders and runners.”
So at one end of the spectrum, databases consisting of this type of unique information are unlikely to qualify for database protection if Member States’ courts follow the ECJ decisions in a similar way to the UK Court of Appeal. At the other end of the ‘protection spectrum’, databases which consist entirely or substantially of data obtained from third parties will be protected by database right.
Third party and created data
The really difficult area is databases consisting of a mix of third party data and data which is created by the database producer – the ‘added value’ data. For these ‘hybrid’ databases, the position may not be quite as bad as it seems. In the BHB v. William Hill case, the database on which the ECJ focused was the ‘official list’ of runners and riders. It was therefore a database which consisted wholly of material which was created and compiled by BHB.
However, if a database consists of a mixture of third party data and created data – it should be much easier for the database producer to show that the database qualifies for database right protection. This is because the database will have consisted of investment in obtaining third party data as well as investment in creating data. As long as there has been ‘substantial’ investment in that obtained data, including any investment in verifying the accuracy of the data and/or in its presentation within the
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database, the qualification criteria will be met.
So it follows that if a mixture of ‘obtained’ and ‘created’ data is taken without authority, the database owner can argue that the database right has been infringed because, at the very least, some of its investment in the database – the ‘obtained’ data – is protected under the database right.
Of course, the real value in the database may lie in the created data. So what is the legal position if only the created data is taken? This is the most difficult scenario on which to express an opinion following the ECJ cases. This is apparent from the following statement in the ECJ judgment in BHB v. William Hill. “Consequently, …..if the materials extracted and re-utilised by William Hill did not require BHB and Others to put in investment independent of the resources required for their creation, it must be held that those materials do not represent a substantial part, in qualitative terms, of the BHB database”.
As a result, it seems that there is a real risk to database producers that they have no protection where substantial parts of the content of a database are taken which consist only of created data.#p#分頁標題#e#
Even here, there is a little chink of light for database producers, at least in the UK. Before the Directive changed UK copyright law, copyright protected the contents of tables and compilations as copyright literary works. UK law still protects copyright in tables and compilations, other than databases. So a producer of a database may be able to argue under UK law that if its database is not protected as a ‘database’ because of the ECJ judgments, old style UK copyright law still protects its product as a table or compilation. But this argument really is one for the lawyers!
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What publishers should do
If a publisher produces databases which include created data, then it is clearly in the danger zone. Here are a few concluding thoughts about what database producers should do. Please bear in mind that none of these represent formal legal advice!
1. ‘One man’s created data is another man’s obtained data’. It may be possible by appropriate arrangements within a corporate group to separate out the creation of the data from the obtaining of that data. Any such internal re-structuring needs to be undertaken with care as it could have tax, employment law and other implications!
2. Make sure that your database products contain a copyright and database right notice.
3. Ensure that you have the necessary contracts in place to enable you to demonstrate your chain of title to your database, especially where any part of your database production is outsourced.
4. ‘Business as usual’ should be the principle applied to all database contracts with your distributors and users. Ensure that the scope of data use is clearly defined and written in plain English so that no-one can hide behind legal jargon. Think about the use of ‘no challenge’ clauses in which rights of termination may arise in the event that the database producer’s rights are challenged.
5. The Database Directive is due to be reviewed by the European Commission. Publishers should actively support the lobbying activities of their trade associations.
6. Watch this space! The law will continue to develop in this area.
© Laurence Kaye 2005
From the EPS Archive
Open law: free legal content online, EPS Insights, 12 May 2005
European Court of Justice (ECJ) delivers blow to database owners, EPS Insights, 15 November 2004
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Author Information
Laurence Kaye is a leading media lawyer and one of the first in the UK to become actively involved in Internet law issues. He combines day to day practice in these fields with substantial industry participation. As advisor to the European Publishers Council, he has taken an active role, including appearing before the European Commission, on Directives in the intellectual property field, including the Database Directive and the Copyright Directive. He advised a cross media industry group on the implementation of the Database Directive into UK law and participated in numerous DTI-sponsored cross industry group meetings on the implementation of the Copyright Directive, particularly in the area of ISP exemptions from liability and digital rights management issues. He advises the Digital Content Forum on a range of issues and is currently chairing its Working Party which is responding to the DTI Consultation on the Electronic Commerce Directive. He is also co-Chairman of the Internet Interest Group of the Society for Computers and Law.#p#分頁標題#e#
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Social classifieds
Building a buzz around classified advertising?
by Rebeca Cliffe, associate, EPS
The story of social networks so far is laced with hype, speculative investment and, for the most part, a lack of profitable business models. During the past two years, services such as Friendster, Orkut, LinkedIn and Tribe have built growing communities based on the opportunity to ‘work the network’, allowing individuals to meet friends and contacts online and to make referrals for business and pleasure. While many of these services now have thriving communities, the sector is still young and on the lookout for revenue streams. Display advertising and subscriptions are among the models being explored but a number of recent announcements point to an emerging trend: the pairing of social networks with classified advertising services.
For online classifieds players, weaving social networks around their listings is looking increasingly like common sense. The recent announcement by Yahoo!’s HotJobs that it will scrape job ads from employer’s sites, adding these to its search results below its own premium listings, highlights how easy it is for classifieds players to acquire job ads from other sites. The past year has seen the rise of meta-search engines such as Oodle and Indeed comprised solely of listings scraped from a variety of sources on the web, including online jobs boards and employers’ sites.
In recruitment advertising, the launch of the dot jobs domain name is likely to make it even easier for meta-search engines such as these to collect listings from employers’ sites where vacancies are listed at a jobs address. If classified listings can be easily scraped from other sites in this way, the coverage offered by different online classifieds will become more and more similar and it will increasingly be the quality of the user experience that will provide differentiation between the various classifieds players. Some are already looking to social networking features to add value to the process of searching for classifieds and mark themselves out from the crowd.
User reviews, recommendations and referrals are well suited to being integrated with classified ad listings. Traditionally, local consumers have turned to their trusted circle of friends and family to find good restaurants, plumbers or to ask about the experience of living in a particular area or working for a particular company, either instead of or as well as picking up the yellow pages. Integrating user reviews with online listings is an attempt to replicate this well-established, informal offline approach. Various listings sites have long incorporated some element of user interaction of this sort but the integration of social networks with classifieds listings could take this to a new level. And perhaps nowhere more so than in recruitment, where recruiters are looking for high-quality leads at minimum levels of effort and job-seekers are looking to target firms that they will be suited to. It is no coincidence that two recent developments in the emergence of what some commentators are labelling ‘social classifieds’ have occurred in the recruitment space.#p#分頁標題#e#
LinkedIn and SimplyHired
The recently announced partnership between Simply Hired, a meta search engine for jobs and social networking site LinkedIn, will mean that when a user searches for a job on Simply Hired, they can see if any of their contacts on LinkedIn work at the company. LinkedIn will also allow its members to search Simply Hired jobs from its site.
The deal makes sense for both parties. The Simply Hired service currently features approximately four million job ads, gathered by scraping them from various jobs boards such as Monster and Craigslist. Hence it has a good depth of coverage, focused on active job seekers but could benefit from some additional differentiation against competitors such as Indeed.com. The
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LinkedIn networking site is one of the best-known social networks, oriented exclusively towards business users. It claims to have 3.6m professionals on the service at present and allows subscribers to build their own network of contacts and ask contacts for referrals to other individuals within the overall network. Individuals are only linked to each other if they agree to be, resulting in a network that is marked by a high degree of trust. The appeal of the service is its ability to deliver leads to employers through referrals, rather than inundating them with a mass of CVs as might be the tendency with the big job boards such as Monster or HotJobs.
Jobster and WorkZoo
The purchase of WorkZoo by Jobster in July of this year offers another example of the convergence of social networking and classifieds. Workzoo allows users to search for jobs across a wide range of job sites and features around 40,000 listings a day. On Jobster, employers and headhunters use online referrals and an applicant tracking service to target ‘passive’ candidates, people who are employed but are open to other opportunities. Recruiters send job notices to their contacts, who can either apply or forward the notice to someone they know. Workzoo will be integrated into the Jobster service and the listings will have an interactive map showing a job’s location.
Adding value to local search
User input is being used by a variety of local search companies to enhance the services they offer. For example, IAC’S CitySearch delivers over two million editorial and user reviews and ratings of local businesses in cities across the US, and for selected cities in Australia, Canada, Scandinavia, Korea, and Japan. It includes features such as restaurant and entertainment listings, hotels and travel information, classified ads, and a yellow pages directory. The big-name players have dipped their toes into this area with Yahoo! letting users rate and review businesses as part of its local search service and Google aggregating reviews from the Web within some local results.
Among the smaller players innovating with social features and classifieds is US local search provider Insider Pages, which last July launched a beta site in the Los Angeles area where users can register to submit reviews about local businesses. Users who wish to submit reviews must register and can build a network of friends of friends within the service. When the user searches for reviews, those written by individuals within their social network are prioritised and displayed higher in their search results. Users are offered small financial incentives of around $5 to write a review. The Los Angeles site has grown quickly, with around 24,000 reviews at present and inspired by its success, Insider Pages has been building similar services in twenty local US markets during the summer of 2005.#p#分頁標題#e#
Judy’s Book is another start-up that has attracted users with a combination of classified listings and personal recommendations. Members enter details of their favourite local services, be they restaurants, doctors or travel agents and can search their friends’ listings to find suitable local service providers. Judy’s Book is based on the idea that individuals often look for personal recommendations when trying to locate a local service rather than picking a company out of a yellow pages directory and is trying to replicate this online. The beta service in theory covers a large number of US cities, although many still have a very small number of listings and recommendations and attracted $2.5 million in VC funding last year,
Bringing democracy to the market?
In theory, enabling user feedback, comment and referral around listings will see businesses that provide good service rewarded with positive feedback within the network and attract more new customers. Those that perform less well will come in for negative word of mouth and suffer as a result. In this online democracy, the people’s preferences would define the marketing message. As a result, social networks could enable classifieds advertisers to build a sense of trust between their users and their service – banishing any consumer suspicion over the manipulation of search engine rankings by businesses that understand how to work the system.
However, to leverage these relationships of trust, the reviews need to be trustworthy and accurate. There is always the danger that reviews by biased parties, such as the businesses themselves or their advertising agencies, could slip through the net. Some services offer financial or product-based incentives to users to write reviews to
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reward and encourage participation. But if, for example, this is linked to the number of reviews contributed there is an obvious risk of compromising the quality of user content. Here the desire to build good coverage will need to be balanced against damaging the value proposition of the service.
‘Social classifieds’ – who stands to gain?
Local search players can certainly be expected to layer social networking around their existing offerings. The small business market for advertising dollars is a fragmented but huge one and it is this that has driven initiatives in local search over the last year by the major players in web search. There is clear potential to harness social networking tools and location-based functionality such as maps and mobile devices to embed local search services deeper in the locality, increasing their relevance for both users and advertisers. Players with good social networks will be in a stronger position to enter any emerging ‘social classifieds’ space. Yahoo! owns strong social networking assets in My Web 2.0 and Yahoo! 360, while MSN could harness MSN Spaces. Although Google appears in slightly less strong position, it recently acquired Meetroduction, a location-based social networking utility and also has Dodgeball and Orkut.#p#分頁標題#e#
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Companies such as Simply Hired are obvious acquisition possibilities for the big search engines but it is probably more likely that they will choose to build their own crawlers that will integrate better with their core algorithms. Newspaper sites or yellow pages trying to build their presence in online classifieds might be more likely buyers, as they will want to compete in this space to supplement falling print classifieds revenues.
The integration of social networks with online classifieds would be another boost to the online classifieds industry but newspapers could take advantage of this to boost their own online revenues. We have already seen a $6.3m investment by Knight Ridder and Washington Post in Tribe.net, a social network which the two US newspaper groups believe offers opportunities for classified advertising initiatives. For print yellow pages directories, any move to internet ‘social classifieds’ would be another draw to online services. However, marketers are unlikely to rely on online word of mouth alone. In any case, real-world word of mouth has long been an alternative to using the yellow pages and simply trying to replicate this online may not have much additional effect.
Utilising social networking features will allow online classifieds players to make their service distinct, marking it out by the interaction between the multitude of personalities that make up the network, reviewing and referring around the classified listings. They will be working with the grain of the network, which is naturally decentralised and ad hoc and, by putting control in the hands of users, make their service a trusted and relevant resource – at least, in theory. However, it is worth sounding a note of caution. While Craigslist has shown that harnessing the power of community can pay dividends, it is also an example that highlights that the most successful online communities have grown organically. Any attempt to leverage trusted communities for commercial gain is likely to demand careful handling if it is to be a success.
Author Information
Rebeca Cliffe is an associate at EPS. She can be contacted at [email protected]
From the EPS Archive
Judy’s Book: More trouble for yellow pages?, EPS Insights, 21 July 2005
News Corporation embraces self-publishing and social networking, EPS Insights, 20 July 2005
Local online classified advertising: Who’s going to win out?, imi, March 2005
Viewpoint: Networks get social, imi, January 2004
Online corporate recruitment activities: How is the recruitment landscape changing? EPS Focus Report, June 2005
Classifieds online: Where now? Where next?, EPS Focus Report, February 2004
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Viewpoint
Murdoch grabs the internet nettle – again
by Tony Feldman, editor, imi
“There is no greater priority for the company today than to meaningfully and profitably expand its internet presence and to properly position ourselves for the explosion in broadband usage that we’re now starting to see”.#p#分頁標題#e#
Rupert Murdoch, vintage 2005, could hardly be more emphatic about a corporate internet vision for the 21st century. But this is not the first time he has had an internet epiphany. Ten years ago, News Corp had just purchased Delphi Internet, the proprietary consumer online service that was among the pioneers of internet services for the masses. It was text based and, by today’s standards, primitive but it was a potential heavy hitter, ripe for development in a market where competitors like AOL, Genie and CompuServe were faltering. Murdoch was convinced that Delphi could become a great platform for News content and sealed a $2 billion deal with US telco giant, MCI, to tap the carrier’s technical services and bandwidth and accelerate developments. But within a year or two, the strategy had unravelled and Murdoch’s internet enthusiasm had begun to wane. As it turned out, Murdoch’s enforced scepticism about the internet blossomed at just the right time. When the great bust of 2000 came, News was minimally exposed and one of the smaller losers among media majors.
But timely retrenchment had not been driven by sage foresight. It was to a degree the result of Murdoch’s disappointment that just building an internet platform was not enough to create an effective new channel for his gold mine of proprietary content. The internet of ten years ago was, of course, predominantly text-based – modems were too slow and bandwidth too scarce for anything much else. So Murdoch was focused on how he could use the new platform to leverage his newspaper content. The driver here was surely fear as much as commercial ambition. Murdoch had certainly seen the internet as a business opportunity for his newspaper brands but he had also understood enough about it to fear for the future of his newspaper advertising revenues.
This kind of concern hits a newspaperman where it really hurts: indeed, the history of newspapers’ forays into online investment has been shaped largely by their publishers’ fears for their financial lifeblood. In Murdoch’s case, it galvanised him more quickly and more aggressively than most. But what went wrong -- and inadvertently saved him a fortune -- was his belief that an accumulation of content principally from News’ own stable would be a rich enough pot to attract customers to his online services. In reality, even in those early days, the fledgling community of internet users wanted to enjoy the freedom of the information highway not just a pipeline to a bundle of proprietary content derived mainly from one company’s offline assets.
Since that early and troubled time, Murdoch’s attention has moved to the shrewd development of his TV businesses. But with Murdoch’s eye on other prizes, News Corp’s global internet strategy has largely drifted. Now it seems that the internet has reappeared at the top of Murdoch’s ‘to do’ list and he is ready to follow the ad dollars online in a big way. Characteristically, he has grasped the nettle firmly and is starting to spend freely to build a stable of assets including, most recently, Intermix for a cool $580 million and IGN for $650 million. With online advertising set to rise about 50 per cent this year while offline is headed towards only single digit growth and with audiences shifting away from newspapers and even broadcast TV in preference to online, there is a raw urgency about Murdoch’s newly articulated vision.#p#分頁標題#e#
But is Murdoch shooting from the hip or do his recent moves and declarations add up to a potential long-term transformation of his global business? News Corp has one unique factor working for it and one unique factor working against it: both are called Rupert
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Murdoch. Working for it, is Murdoch’s famous propensity for getting his own way. Complex media groups facing dramatic change are much more likely to move quickly and decisively if there is effectively one man calling the shots. More strategies probably fail through getting bogged down in long chains of decision making than by being bad strategies. With Murdoch at its head, News can respond with a single, clear vision largely unmuddied by consensus management. But that same singularity of decision making can be just as much a bear trap as a launch pad. Murdoch’s brilliant autocracy will work in driving News Corp’s internet strategy towards success so long as Murdoch gets the basic strategy right and stays committed to backing it.
It is too early to judge just how right or wrong Murdoch is getting it so far but his pronouncements carry mixed signals. His view that broadband is changing everything – quoted above – is spot on. The emergence of high-speed connectivity is transforming the network, creating a real tipping point in internet usage and changing forever the traditional markets of media businesses. But Murdoch has also offered a vision in which News Corp’s content can be shaped – in Murdoch’s words – into an “original type of portal”. While it is not yet clear what he means by this, there seems to be a hint in his words of the kind of misapprehension he brought to his internet strategising ten years ago. If he believes he can disintermediate the current generation of online intermediators – such as the search engines and other important audience aggregators – he may be riding for a fall. Ten years ago News appeared to believe its stable of brands and content would be so appealing that internet users would be drawn inevitably to its internet presence. But the lesson of today’s aggregators is that they act as true portals. In other words, they are doorways to other places and other content. Although Murdoch has good reason to know that the ‘walled garden’ can work in certain interactive TV applications, it is a largely broken model for internet-based content more generally and his talk of an ‘old fashioned’ portal play sounds ominously like a touch of hubris in the face of the lessons of commercial experience.
One other downside of having a brilliant entrepreneur running the show is that entrepreneurs are not always the best people to create smoothly integrated strategies based on well staffed and managed teams who can genuinely synergise, innovate and – above all – subordinate personal ambition to corporate will. Moreover, integrated media strategy is complex and demanding to determine in the first place as well as to implement. To create the impetus for this change in a language that is both comprehensible and inspiring to a large and complex work force is no mean task -- even for a man with the formidable talents of Rupert Murdoch.#p#分頁標題#e#
One thing is sure: ‘Murdoch watching’ promises to become an even more intriguing past time in the coming months. And who knows: along the way, we may learn some lessons that usefully inform the future strategic thinking of us all.
Author Information
Tony Feldman has been centrally involved in the interactive media industries since their inception about twenty five years ago. Today he is an independent new media consultant, writer and trainer. He is also a non executive director of EPS and the editor of imi. He can be contacted on 020 8444 3557 or via e-mail at [email protected]
From the EPS Archive
News Corporation embraces self-publishing and social networking, EPS Insights, 20 July 2005
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Spotlight on … SMS marketing
by Majied Robinson, associate, EPS
What is SMS marketing?
SMS (Short Message Service) marketing is simply the use of mobile phone texting services to distribute marketing messages. In many ways, SMS is an ideal format. It has been calculated that in a typical US campaign, each text cost just $0.05 to send. A direct mail campaign on the other hand would cost about $0.50 per letter. Text message based marketing also appeals to advertisers because the user cannot ignore the message. Forrester Research in a report of 2002 found that there was an average11% response rate to texts, while 2-3% of people would be a highly acceptable response to direct mail campaigns.
Is it all good news?
SMS marketing is cheap but it is not free. This has a benefit: it deters spammers. Buying a database of mobile numbers gleaned from a variety of sources and mailing information on a product to all of them indiscriminately and without prior permission generates intense ill will and dismal response rates. This makes spam campaigns commercially unattractive and consequently they are nowadays rare. This was not always the case. In recent years, when mobile networks were connected internationally, there was a problem of some SMS spam being sent cheaply via Far Eastern networks but the networks have now been disconnected. The spamming that did take place, however, stimulated self-regulation in the industry and two codes of conduct are now in place and widely observed, one from the Mobile Marketers Association and the other from the Direct Marketers Association.
How can SMS be used effectively?
A key starting point is getting the user’s consent to receive messages. One popular means of doing this is the creation of mobile ‘clubs’, built around a brand – often a magazine or a radio station. Prospective club members are attracted by either advertising within the pages of the associated publication or on air if the prime mover is a broadcaster. Increasingly, these offline initiatives are supplemented by online ads and promotions, particularly where there is a pre-existing site associated with the mobile campaign.
Who uses SMS marketing?#p#分頁標題#e#
Magazine publishers have been keen users. They have the advantage of an established, loyal readership which they can leverage into club membership. But a problem they face is that this readership is often forgetful. One of the first successful clubs created was EMAP’s Smash Hits Mobile Club, an SMS campaign linked to a young people’s magazine which was launched in 2000. For a good overview of the development of mobile clubs see Working Knowledge. An important part of the SMS service was messages alerting club members whenever a new issue of the magazine was published. Additionally, there were also messages inviting subscribers to enter competitions and contribute to opinion polls. The club was highly successful with nearly a quarter of the magazine’s readers signing up and has become a benchmark for this kind of marketing.
So far, SMS marketing in the publishing industry has so far largely been limited to consumer magazines. But it now looks as if book publishers are becoming interested in the medium too. Harper Collins has launched a mobile club in the United States to support their top selling author, Meg Cabot (writer of the Princess Diaries series and other teenage hits). Signing up for the service means that the club members get no more than two messages a week alerting them to book signings, new title releases, competitions and opinion polls.
How is Harper Collins likely to fare?
It is too early to assess Harper Collins’ initiative. The club has only just been launched -- to coincide with the start of the school year -- and the real test will be in December when Cabot releases two new titles. If it looks like the mobile club is driving more sales than usual, we can expect more publishers to follow suit.
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The Harper Collins campaign is using technology supplied by the mobile marketing specialist, Flytxt. Flytxt is an industry leader in mobile marketing and supports Harper Collins by providing it with both technology and strategic expertise. The company, established in 2000, ran the Smash Hits Mobile Club for EMAP and was also a founding member of the Mobile Marketers Association. It has since been involved in some of the most successful and familiar SMS marketing campaigns includings Coca-Cola’s TXT for Music, mobile fundraising for Comic Relief and Orange Wednesdays which led to Flytxt winning a series of industry awards.
The Harper Collins campaign also benefits from Meg Cabot herself. Books by an moderately popular author may not look like ideal candidates for SMS marketing. After all, new titles appear relatively infrequently and there is no new information that can be provided by the service in between publications. Cabot, however, is a literary star, effectively a brand in herself. She is also prolific with dozens of titles to her name. Her books have also had movie spin offs. As a result, a service centred around Cabot herself is rich with opportunities for news, information, ring tones and, perhaps in future, some exclusive Cabot content previewing a forthcoming title.#p#分頁標題#e#
Although Cabot looks a strong focus for a campaign, the fact that it is limited to the United States may make success more of an uphill battle. Compared to Europe, SMS usage in the US is modest and many users are unfamiliar with the concept. But things are changing. It is only in the past eighteen months that US mobile phone users have been able to send text messages to people on other networks and, in that time, the number of people using SMS has doubled. Speaking to EPS recently, the CEO of Flytxt, Carsten Boers, pointed out that the US benefits from having less stringent marketing laws than Europe – he cites Germany as being particularly problematic in legal terms for those wanting to run an SMS campaign. Flytxt opened its first US office two years ago and Boers is convinced that it will prove a fast-growing market. Americans are culturally more open to direct marketing and US companies are far keener than their European counterparts to use new technology to sell their products.
What else can SMS marketing be used for?
SMS is a surprisingly effective market research tool. Flytxt has been involved in large scale market research exercises using only SMS responses and their data analysis software. The market research can also be attached onto a normal SMS campaign. Responses from a club’s members can be analysed to generate accurate demographic data in real time, which is openly visible to Flytxt’s clients. SMS can also be used not merely as a marketing tool but as a delivery channel for extending the content and functionality of published titles. Random House, which recently bought a minority stake in wireless technology company VOCEL, is experimenting with SMS by sending questions as texts to users of its Living Language series in the language they are learning. They then respond to the questions in the same language and the service replies with an assessment of the answer and another question. The user can check his or her overall progress online.
How much do SMS campaigns cost?
Costs can vary depending on the nature and coverage of the campaign At the most basic level, a publisher can lease the technology and run the campaign themselves. Many companies offer the required technology at prices ranging from £1,000 to £1,500. There is no need for a specialist technician to run it. Flytxt’s Boers reckons it takes about twenty minutes to learn how to use Flytxt’s platform adequately and an hour-long booster lesson raises the user to an advanced level. The interface is simple and is a lot like Microsoft Outlook. The user writes the message and selects the individuals or groups from the mobile phone database who he/she wants the message to go to. The SMS messages themselves cost no more than the carrier charge, which is normally between £0.03 and £0.05, plus VAT.
Two factors raise the price. The first is strategic consultancy. Many companies may be unfamiliar with marketing practices or they may want to market their product in an innovative way. Rather than going to an advertising agency, they can use the strategic services available at companies like Flytxt. The second factor is analysis. The usage data generated by responses from mobile club members can be of critical importance but analysis can be complex.#p#分頁標題#e#
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The cost of this depends on the level of data required. At the highest end of the scale, a multinational may be willing to pay tens of thousands of pounds for SMS based research on one of its products. At a more modest level, a publisher may just wish to collect gender and age data. In the Meg Cabot club, for example, prospective members signing up are asked to text or email their name, gender and birth date. The cost of assessing this data is negligible.
The future of SMS marketing
SMS is far from becoming an integral part of marketing strategies in publishing. But Boers sees a number of ways publishers in fields like B2B, STM, LTR and ELT can take advantage of SMS marketing. Aside from new product/issue alerts and demographic assessments as outlined above, corporate and academic publishers can use SMS for customer relations management as well as providing time sensitive content to subscribers. Payment can be managed through reverse billing at premium rates. There is also potential for advertisers to support content either by paying for it or running enterprises with existing publishers (e.g. a drug company advertising a conference through a medical journal’s database, with a discount or prize for early respondents). SMS marketing may seem an unlikely way to sell content but with implementation easy and costs low, we can expect to see more publishers, especially those in niche markets, using it in increasingly innovative ways.
Author Information
Majied Robinson is an associate at EPS. He can be contacted at [email protected].
From the EPS Archive
The mobile content market: Drivers, trends and technologies, EPS Focus Report, August 2005
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A month in digital media – August 2005
Corporate and Financial News
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Second quarter profits at Wolters Kluwer were down by 11%, to €140m, following restructuring costs and investment in new products. Performance has improved at the group's European legal, tax and regulatory unit, and the company still expects 2% organic growth over the full year at its education business. Wolters Kluwer has spent €295m on acquisitions for the health, corporate finance and worldwide tax divisions in the first half of this year.
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Yahoo! announces that it will pay $1bn in cash to acquire a 40% stake in Alibaba, the Chinese e-commerce firm. Under the deal, Yahoo! contributed its China business to Alibaba and the two companies will work in partnership to advance the Yahoo! brand in China. The deal makes Yahoo! and Alibaba a major player in online auctions in a number of key Asian markets.
STM
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STM publisher Thomson Scientific, in collaboration with five universities, sets out to develop a new application called the Collection Development Manager. The web based tool gathers usage data in order to judge the influence a journal article or the journal itself has in an institution.#p#分頁標題#e#
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Health care media company HCPro acquires HealthLeaders Media from Decision Resources. HealthLeaders Media operates monthly magazine HealthLeaders, e-mail publications, live events and a health care business news service. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
B2B
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Clarity Partners and ZelnickMedia Corp. announce the acquisition of Naylor Publications, a b-to-b media and advertising services company. Media investment bank Jordan Edmiston Group represented Naylor and financial terms of the deal were not disclosed
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Total B2B media spending is expected to reach $27.68bn in 2009, up from $20.91bn in 2004, according to Veronis Suhler Stevenson's 19th Annual Communications Industry Forecast & Report. The report suggests B2B media spending will increase by 5.8% on a compound annual basis between 2004 and 2009.
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UBM purchases three online and events businesses for $56.5m. US chemicals events business Informex was bought for $24m, and UBM paid $5.5m for TechOnLine, a US online electronics business media platform. Online publishing, live events and research and analysis company Light Reading was picked up for $27m. Analysts predict further acquisitions by UBM to follow.
Education
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Ten US university bookshops offer downloadable versions of a number of textbooks from this autumn. The e-books will cost 33% less than the print version, can only be used on one PC and will expire after five months. McGraw-Hill Higher Education, Houghton Mifflin, John Wiley & Sons, Thomson Learning and Sage Publications are all participating in the project. Following complaints about the lease length, the expiration date was pushed back to nine months.
Legal, Tax & Regulatory
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After two years of customer consultation and testing, LexisNexis Butterworth's launches a new online research tool. The service provides a single point of access to a comprehensive array of LTR primary sources such as All England Law Reports, FSA Handbooks and Inland Revenue Manuals. This information is accompanied with an online news and business service providing content from news sources from 100 countries across the world. The service represents the UK implementation of the Lexis Nexis global platform.
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Company and Credit Information
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Experian announces its acquisition of Baker Hill, a credit and risk management software provider for the financial services and banking industries. The company will enhance Experian's provision for small businesses and will operate as a business unit known as Baker Hill within Experian’s Business Information Solutions division. Financial details were not disclosed.
News Information
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It is announced that the newsrooms for the print edition of the New York Times and the online edition are to be merged after ten years of being separated. The merger aims to integrate three media as NYTimes.com will be edited by the print newsroom and the web site will also be used as a platform for the New York Times' burgeoning video operation. The merger will take place when the NY Times moves to its new headquarters in spring 2006.#p#分頁標題#e#
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Akamai Technologies launches a new news mapping service that will show the level of demand for news across the world at any given time. It will monitor 100 news sites to rank interest in news, displaying the results on a map of six world regions. To arrive at a measurement of average daily demand, Akamai measures the number of visitors to news sites per minute and per week within each geographic region.
Advertising
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Yahoo! launches a contextual advertising program similar to Google's AdSense. Unlike adverts generated from the words a user enters into a search bar, contextual advertising analyses the words used on a web site to generate text only advertisements relevant to the site's content. The advertiser is only charged upon click-through. The aim is to compete with Google on the small web site front, predominantly personal sites and blogs.
Content Law and Regulation
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The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) rules that digital subscriber lines (DSL) are an information rather than a telecommunication service, and that phone companies should not be required to provide high-speed internet lines to rival companies offering similar services. The next 12 months will be a transitional period, when phone companies must continue to provide network access to rival internet service providers. The ruling will allow DSL to compete more effectively with cable modem services.
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Google suspends its digitisation programme of copyrighted books at the university libraries of Stanford, Michigan and Harvard, and New York Public Library. Following publisher concerns about the scanning of copyright works, Google announced that it would pause the scanning of copyright titles until November to allow publishers to inform them which books should not be included in the programme.
Content Technologies
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A team of web innovators develops a system called COinS (ContextObject in Span) that opens URLs to allow seamless connections to citations found on web sites. The development was a response to a common problem. When a user comes across a citation on a web site and wishes to read the document the citation refers to, they will have to open another URL in order to do so, even if the user in question has subscribed to a service allowing them to access it. COinS is available as a plug-in to the Mozilla Firefox web browser and is also compatible with Google Scholar.
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LexisNexis launches a plagiarism detection solution called CopyGuard in collaboration with iParadigms. The LexisNexis service contains over 6.1 billion documents from five years of archived web pages and provides the user with pattern matching technology to find plagiarised material. A full search takes only a matter of minutes.
Communication Technologies
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Second-quarter results from US cable TV networks highlight internet telephony as a potentially major source of new revenue. Time Warner recorded 242,000 new internet telephony subscribers (far exceeding their prediction of 180,000 new users) in what is#p#分頁標題#e#
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normally the weakest quarter. The market leader in Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is currently Cablevision Systems, but both Time Warner and Comcast (The US's largest cable operator) say they are ready to market the service aggressively.
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Opera Software releases a version of its Internet browser designed for non-smartphone handsets. The Opera Mini Browser will allow phones that could previously only access WAP enabled sites to access real web sites. The browser will not be available for general download, but only through partner companies.
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EPS customer research and consultancy services
The EPS service range is divided into two distinct areas - the EPS Market Intelligence and Advisory Service and market research and consultancy services.
The EPS Market Intelligence and Advisory Service is a subscription package of market intelligence publications and briefing services tracking developments and strategies in the digital content marketplace. The Intelligence Service divides into a number of core elements. Further information is available on our web site (www.epsltd.com) or can be obtained by contacting us directly via Nicola Foster, Strategic Account Manager on telephone number 020 7837 3345 or via e-mail at [email protected].
EPS also provides a wide-range of custom market research and consulting services. Its core competencies include:
• Data and competitive analysis
• Postal and e-mail questionnaires
• Desk research
• Due Diligence
• Strategy briefings and presentations
• Company introductions
• Interviews (face-to-face and telephone)
• Seminar organisation and facilitation
The EPS Market Monitor
The EPS Market Monitor reports cover four sectors of the information marketplace:
• Scientific, Technical and Medical
• Legal, Tax and Regulatory
• Education and Training
• Business to Business
Every quarter, EPS Market Monitor provides updated coverage of the these global publishing markets, with consistent market-size and growth estimates, assessment of leading players’ performance, and analyses of market trends. EPS Market Monitor programme subscriptions also include telephone and e-mail support, including interpretative assistance, and on-demand industry/market query resolution.
英國知識產權dissertation|英國知識產權保護dissertationEach sector-focused EPS Market Monitor report includes:
• Market sizing and segmentation
• Analysis of the financial performance of publicly listed providers
• Rankings and profiles of the leading players
• Systematic tracking of:
o Mergers and acquisitions;#p#分頁標題#e#
o Alliances and agreements;
o New products
• Analysis of current strategic issues
• Market outlook and forecast
For further information
Nicola Foster, Strategic Account Manager
Telephone: 020 7837 3345; Email: [email protected]
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