Created and launched in Thailand in 2006, Admax Network has quickly become the leading online advertising network in Southeast Asia with offices now in Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam. According to Malay newspaper The Star, Admax Network accounts for some of the highest percentage of ad network spend in the Southeast Asia region with high-profile clients like Malaysian Airlines, Nestle, DiGi, U Mobile, Nokia, Honda, Prudential, Singapore Tourism Board, Apple, Microsoft, Samsung and Dell.

Their impressive portfolio expands beyond just that of their clients too. Earlier this year Facebook appointed Admax as their official sales rep in Indonesia, Philippines and Thailand. Given the shear size of Facebook in that region, Admax seems quite happy serving as the B2B liaison for online advertising. Stephen Dolan, Commercial Director of Facebook said this of the alliance: “Admax has an exceptional understanding of the Southeast Asian market, and their solid on-the-ground presence will provide brands with strong local support to successfully implement their marketing campaigns.” (Martin)

Admax’s network combines over 4,600 of the region’s top local and international websites. They’ve executed thousands of campaigns and their brand is recognized as a respected partner for dozens and dozens of advertisers, agencies and publishers alike. I’ve summed below all of their core competencies and strategic pillars.

Customer Service

Admax believes in the building and fostering of long-term partner and client relationships. They built their business on delivering top-notch service and they attribute their low client attrition rate to their outstanding service. Their website states that every client is assigned a dedicated account manager who works closely to ensure that their ad campaigns reach the desired results.

Optimized Results

Their Adrenaline platform is the backbone of their advertising platform. When a client provides them with multiple ad creatives, this system determines which one drives the best results. In addition, they can optimize a campaign across several websites to ensure that specific campaign goals are being met. In short, their ad optimization is based on the following: reaching the most unique users, banner clicks, display frequency, and the actions or conversions the user takes (typically either sales or registrations).

Reporting

Admax only works with advertisers and agencies that have secure logins in place where each client’s campaign dashboard can be monitored for progress. Each login is client specific so that all current and future campaigns are visible, along with any campaigns that may be pending an upcoming launch. With the ability to export reports directly from the dashboard, Admax makes campaign monitoring and reporting easy.

Targeted Audience

Admax claims to reach over 86.3 million people across 4,600 websites in Southeast Asia. Their network combines the best local language websites with the most popular international ones, allowing clients to reach their target audience no matter where they spend their time online. They serve ads in 15 different vertical channels like Business, Youth, Women and Travel – all of which allow their clients to effectively target environments that are contextually relevant to their brand and message. Each ad placement is individually categorized by their media team to ensure that the actual page (where the ad is displayed) matches the desired environment.

Admax Certified Inventory

Admax strives to give their customers confidence in displaying their brand in network that are certified. This makes for an inventory that is brand-safe, relevant and transparent. Additionally, their media specialists hand-vet every single website and webpage before awarding their publishers with their Admax Inventory Certification. The Admax team also routinely monitors their inventory to ensure ongoing compliance of the certified program.

As far as I can tell with the research I’ve done, Admax has done astoundingly well for themselves. Though a young company, Admax seems to be in the right place at the right time. Digital marketing is heating up all over the globe with more and more people gaining access to the Internet each day. The Southeast Asian region is definitely one to watch in the coming years with regards to online advertising.

References

Rick Martin. (April 13, 2011). Facebook Appoints Admax as Official Sales Rep in Indonesia, Philippines and Thailand. In Penn Olson – In Asia Tech News For The World. Retrieved November 8, 2011, from http://www.penn-olson.com/2011/04/13/facebook-appoints-admax-as-official-sales-rep-in-indonesia-philippines-and-thailand/.

Undefined. (September 19, 2009). Emergence of online ad networks. In The Star Online. Retrieved November 8, 2011, from http://biz.thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2009/9/19/business/4715493&sec=business.

That site can be found here: digitalmusicdisruption.wordpress.com

For information about the class, you can go here, though I’m not sure how long the professor will have the site up in it’s current state.

Excerpt from my final paper:

On May 10, 2011, software company and search giant Google announced a new service that allowed consumers to upload their entire music collection to a Google server so they could access that music collection from the cloud using a PC, MAC or Android device. The service is called Google Music and while it’s still only in private beta and not accessible to Apple devices like the iPhone and iPad, it would become yet another disruptive technology in the music industry. Before we look closer at how we got here and what disruptive technology means, I think it’s important to take a look back in time when music distribution was more controlled and one-dimensional.

The year was 1982, nearly thirty years ago. Sony Corporation had just introduced the first Compact Disc audio CD player on the market with a retail price of nearly $900. Up until then, consumers only had analog playback options like the cassette player, record player and beta tape player. The technology behind the audio CD (officially Compact Disc Digital Audio or CD-DA) was actually a joint effort Sony and Philips two years earlier in 1980.

Data stored on CDs are made up of frames that consist of 33 bytes and six complete 16-bit stereo samples. That only equals 24 bytes though. The other nine bytes consist of eight CIRC error-correction bytes and one subcode byte, used for control and display. A byte is one unit of digital information. This information is necessary for establishing the transformation of music distribution at the time. Prior to this new digital format, audio cassette tapes, Stereo 8-tracks and vinyl records were prevalent.

With the advent of the CD and CD player, consumption of music slowly began to change. For the early adopters, compact discs and compact disc players made it easy for listeners to skip to their favorite songs at the press of a button. Not only was the technology of the CD revolutionary, so were the very features themselves, features like “repeat”, “skip”, and “shuffle.” Now consumers could control what they listened to like never before. Many of the early CD players all came with remote controls as well – putting even more control into the hands of the consumer. There were no remote controls for record and tape players at the time.

Olivine Wai-Yu Lo and Louis Leung (2009) surveyed 236 college students and asked them which communication tool they preferred more: IM or email? Some 78% of the respondents answered that they prefer IM. The study showed that the students loved the reciprocal and back and forth nature of instant messaging. In short, IM was more gratifying than email and seemed to improve their social relationships with one another.

I completely agree with the study’s finding that IM is more gratifying and alluring to college students for communicating when compared to email. However, I do not believe this study supports any idea that IM will someday replace email altogether. As undergraduate students quickly find out upon graduation, the world still revolves around email.

Email is less intrusive. You can receive it and you are not expected to reply back immediately (sometimes you are) like an instant message. It’s also easier to manage and store the conversations and data for retrieving later. IM programs today do have “archiving” options to store your previous conversations, but not like email. There is no pretty little inbox. No robust UI. Not with IM. These are things that the business world will always need.

Reference:

Effects of gratification-opportunities and gratifications-obtained on preferences of instant messaging and e-mail among college students. Telematics and Informatics, May 2009. doi:10.1016/j.tele.2008.06.001

Now, I’m not going to disagree with Bagdikian entirely as I have watched television shows get progressively more provocative over the years. Moreover, I’m a new parent so I should be concerned with the type of garbage that’s on TV now – because it will probably only get worse. But! Bagdikian doesn’t seem to want us to take any responsibility for what we watch. As we we’ve seen with television shows that come and go, the ones that stand the test of time are those that are enjoyed by a lot of viewers!

Bagdikian writes that “there is a growing gap between what a majority of citizens have said they want and what television gives them.” He doesn’t cite or point the reader to any studies that can support this though. Honestly, I myself fall into this category of wishing for something to be on TV – but not getting it. But this is a capitalist market that we’re in,
and someone other than me is watching Snookie on MTV, someone who’s making MTV’s advertisers VERY happy. It’s just the way it is. I don’t have to watch it – and I don’t.

Citing other examples problems in our society like the lack of  funding in education, lack of universal healthcare, pollution, unemployment and more, Bagdikian is just regurgitating others have said in the past. It’s nothing new really.

I do wish to focus on one thing that I absolute agree with him on. He argues that a “national habit” of staying indoor to take in free news and entertainment was set after the introduction of the TV. I agree. Though, now that’s shifted from TV to the Internet. The bottom line is, the family unit is different than it was in the mid-1950s, we don’t all do things collectively as a family after dinner like playing games or socializing with
our neighbors. We just don’t – buit we should.

In short, I think Bagdikian would agree with a lot of the same ideals if we were to have a beer together and talk about this. It maddens me that these corporations have the power that they do and I too get sick and tired of all the smut that’s on the TV. However, its up to us to change it. Not the government as he has suggested.

My dad actually called me the other day from out of state and told me that the SR 99 Tunnel Project had been in question once again after a bid by a state contractor was secured and building was already underway. How had he heard? My father is an avid reader of Internet news online.

Getting back to the Riedel study, their proposition was simple: “news sources on the Internet are linked to learning about politics, as indicated by increased levels of political knowledge.” To put this to the test, they formed three hypothesis’s.

Hypothesis one states that the relationship between local and national news is not balanced. Basically, those who know local news tend to stick to and read more local news than they do national news. Those who read national news also tend to stick to just reading national news.

How has digital music consumption changed over the last thirty years? What supervening social necessities lead to its evolution from Compact Disc to .MP3 to online streaming? It’s this evolution of music over this timeframe that I’ve focused my project on.

Theories

The framework for my project is centered on the course theory of Winston. I plan to argue that the supervening social necessity that brought us from CD players to peer-to-peer .mp3 file sharing was the personal computer, coupled with household Internet access. Personal computers and Internet access slowly began to change the way we consume music. I believe personal computers became the conduit to a whole host of innovations that the music industry could not foresee. In essence, personal computers played the role of technology and change that lead to a whole host of new ways to consume music: peer-to-peer sharing, home CD burning etc.

Christensen’s theory of new-market disruption also plays a huge role in my analysis of music consumption. The music industry initially viewed website Napster.com (1999) to be a ‘trivial’ technology at first – but it turned out to be industry changing. High-speed Internet and personal computers, particularly those with the ability to transfer the contents of a CD to a hard drive, became the disruptive technology that lead to further music piracy and online distribution. This would ultimately help disrupt the music industry altogether.

Timeline developments

As I alluded to above, the most important development in digital music consumption was the advancement of the personal computer. As soon as software was introduced to play music on PCs, innovation was sent on an uphill trajectory that was and continues to be advancing at light speed. It’s this technological innovation that slowly began to pull us away from our stereo systems (starting in the mid-90s) and eventually bring us to our computers, laptops and MP3 players to listen to music.

The second most important development was the availability of the Internet for home use. Not just broadband either – plenty of users were still on dialup accessing P2P networks at the turn of the century for music. The Internet played a huge role in changing the behaviors of how we listen to music – and it continues to do so.

The third development on my timeline is the introduction of the portable MP3 player. When Apple introduced the first iPod in 2001, the music industry was forever shaken up. While they weren’t the first to come out with such a device, they did help catapult it into near worldwide adoption with the pairing of it and iTunes. I will look at how the MP3 player forever changed behaviors and opened up the doors for even more technologies like the iPhone, iPad touch and the iPad. These latter devices, all now Wi-Fi enabled, allow users to access music services ‘in the cloud’ for free and paid subscriptions.

The final part of my project will focus on the future of digital music consumption with some dialogue on how the cloud is affecting and paving the way for new ways to consume music. I will discuss how we seem to be steering ever more towards paid subscription models for music to be accessed at any time. We are in this timeline now, but it’s going to evolve even more with some of the futuristic models I will suggest towards the end of my paper.

Wireframe for Past, Present and Future

Past

Hardcopies. Music consumed with CD players on large, bulky stereo systems. Expensive. Not portable. Pre-personal computers and Internet.

Present

Electronic copies. Stored by us still in external drives, our hard drives etc. Shared via peer-to-peer. Purchased via iTunes, Amazon, etc. Devices – iPod, iPhone, iPad, etc.

Music is rented – subscription based. Listen to what you want, when you want – Pandora, Grooveshark, etc.

Future

All stored in the cloud. Music is rented. Subscription based. Listen to what you want, when you want. Instant gratification at the touch of a button, or via voice command in your house or automobile. Neighborhood digital libraries accessible via Wi-Fi – to house music, books, movies, television shows and more.

Partial Works Cited (still in development) 

Alexander, P. (1994). New Technology and Market Structure. Journal of Cultural Economics. 9, 113-123.

Gandhi, S. (2009, December 15). Digital Music Consuption Around the Globe. Retrieved February 4, 2010 from Forrester database.

Katz, M. (2004). Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Knopper, S. (2009). Appetite for Self-Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age. New York: Free Press.

Napster. (2010, March 2). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 18:29, March 6, 2010 (Wikipedia).

McQuivey, J. (2008, February 15).  The End of the Music Industry As We Know It. Retrieved February 4, 2010 from Forrester database.

Mulligan, M. (2010, January 15). Music Industry Meltdown: Recasting the Mold. Retrieved February 2, 2010 (Forrester Research).

Sanjek, R. (1996). Pennies From Heaven: The American Popular Music Business in the Twentieth Century. New York: De Capo Press.

UMG Recordings, Inc. v. MP3.com, Inc., 92 F. Supp. 2d 349 (S.D.N.Y. 2000). Winston, B. (1998). Media Technology and Society. New York: Routledge.

According to Benkler, the starting costs of founding a newspaper increased dramatically in the mid-1850s. The Herald had been founded in 1835 for five hundred dollars and just some fifteen years later the same startup costs were $100,000 or more. Benkler credits much of this to the innovation of higher-cost equipment and the transformation of the press into a professional organization. In a short amount of time we see that it was now impossible for one individual to start a newspaper. Sound familiar? This isn’t anything new. Soon this happened to both radio and television as well.

On radio Benkler writes: “The first decade and a half of radio in the United States saw rapid innovation and competition, followed by a series of patent suits aimed to consolidate control over the technology.” We later learn that monopolies quickly ensue until government regulation steps in. The same thing happens with Binkler’s example of “The Sinclair Broadcast Group[,] one of the largest owners of television broadcast stations in the United States.” At the time of Binkler’s writing, they owned or provided programming for approximately one-third of all U.S. homes.  So what though? What does all this mean? What’s the key takeaway here?

My assumption is that the Internet will not see quite the same problems of monopolization, regulation and tension that it’s mass communication predecessors did. I could be wrong though, the Internet just feels like it’s a much more open model and one that’s conducive to everyone having a fair share of the action. Competition with web hosting companies and domain registrars have made it much easier today and less expensive (than 15 years ago) to get a website up. Unlike two centuries ago, technology gets cheaper as it improves.

Ultimately, I believe there are many out there who would fight for Internet freedom and work hard to keep it free of mainstream dominance by a few big players. Facebook is huge, yes, but only by popularity – not because it’s one of three websites to choose from. I just don’t think there’s a dark future in store for the Internet like my colleague suggests. Only time will tell though.

Source:
Benkler, Y. (2006). The wealth of networks: how the social production transforms markets and freedom. Yale University Press.

Just when you think the Internet revolutionized new ways to communicate, lie, cheat, find love and disrupt society – think again. The electric telegraph in the 1800s had already been the instigator of this some 150 years ago and author Tom Standage does an exceptional job painting us metaphorically in his book The Victorian Internet. The similarities between it (telegraph) and the modern day Internet are too remarkable to ignore. In this quick review of the book, I’ll touch on those similarities that jumped out at me as I read it.

To start, Standage writes in a simple fashion. The book isn’t thick by any means, and it’s written in a way that many non-technical, non-engineering types can comprehend. The book starts off with the optical telegraph, which predates the electric telegraph. Claude Chappe, a Frenchman, coined the word télégraphe, or telegraph translated in English to mean “far writer” – in 1791.  This first telegrams were with limitation though as they couldn’t be sent in the dark and required building towers to be in sight of one another and so on.

Much of the book is centered on our American hero Samuel Morse. Morse, we learn, didn’t quite invent the electric telegraph – but he perfected it and would later be known as the Father of the Telegraph. Yes, it’s his name that “Morse Code” is derived. Standage writes: “He had visions of a wired world, with countries bound together by a global network of interconnected telegraph networks.” (p.40) At this point in his book, the tone is aptly set for the comparison of the electric telegraph and today’s Internet.

Like today’s Internet, the telegraph network was “explosive” in growth. (p.57) Standage helps us picture a time, in the 1850s, where dozens of companies were scrambling to get their terminals set up. Sound familiar? In order to engage with the telegraph network, one had to be plugged into it – like a modern computer plugged into the Internet. Once the network was expansive enough and was regularly in use, Standage begins to point out similarities with today’s Internet use and behavior.

We’ve used LOL and WTF-type acronyms for the past 15 years, but those using the telegraph also had their own code and shortened way of communicating. Tweets? Yes – each telegram sent was more or less a 140-character (or less) tweet. After all, it was expensive and you were billed for every word. Hackers and those out to abuse the telegraph system for their own gain were also in abundance. Standage’s accounts of individuals who cheated on horse race betting and stock purchasing seemed like modern day computer hackers. It wasn’t all bad, there was also love.

Chapter nine’s “Love Over The Wires” struck a personal chord and really made a telegraph believer out of me. In this chapter, Standage tells us a story of a couple who got married on opposite ends of the wire – the bride in one city, the groom in another. He also cites multiple accounts of people flirting with one another via telegrams, later meeting each other in real life and getting married. Does this not sound like online dating? I met my wife online, and while we still get slightly embarrassed when telling our story to certain people, online dating seems far less extraordinary now that I know of its analog history over a hundred and fifty years ago.

Perhaps one of Standage’s most important analyses on the history of the telegraph came in the book where he describes its disruption on journalism. Once such example, the January 9^th 1845 edition of the Times, had stories published in it that were up to two months old! (p.147) With the telegrams, communicating important news in an expedited fashion was now made possible. It also allowed journalists to focus on more hyperlocal stories in their regions and neighborhoods. Many of the newspapers began a “developing story” section which was a relatively new idea at the time.

With this new immediacy of information, disruption also came in the form of work life balance. Before the telegraph, merchants dealt with international commerce once or twice a month. After the telegraph, businessmen became addicted and obsessed with information. One such account tells us of a guy who goes home to eat with his family, then receives a telegram from London and has to rush back to work to send a message to California in time to make a purchase for his business. The telegraph had now officially entered our lives on all fronts.

Throughout the book, Standage entertains us with these very personal stories. It’s these stories that we can relate to that make this book so digestible. It’s also these stories that help educate us historically in a simple fashion. If you consider yourself an Internet junkie like I do, this book is for you. You’ll be fascinated by how much history repeats itself – trust me.

According to Winston: “the most unambiguously valuable facility provided by the net is e-mail.” I would have agreed with him 5 years ago before all of the social networks took over the way we communicate online. The fact of the matter is, Facebook is changing the way communicate and write each other messages, particularly with the younger demographic.

A quick online search for the phrase “email is dead” gives us articles on the topic from CNET, the Wall Street Journal, PC Magazine and more. Many contend that competition from instant messaging programs and closed networks like LinkedIn and Facebook make communicating much easier. Personally, I don’t know if I find these systems easier, but I have noticed lately that my peers (and those younger than me) DO prefer me contacting them through one of these rather than sending them a mail.

Winston also writes that: “there is also little to support the idea that the net will become a crucial method for selling goods and services.” Whoa! When I read this I had to flip to the front of his book to see that his book was first published in 1998 and reprinted in 2000. Well, that explains a lot. At that time Amazon hadn’t yet proved itself and Zappos was nothing more than an idea in a young guy’s head who couldn’t find shoes his size whenever he went into a shoe store.

I am not ripping on Winston. No way. He took us through history all the way up to 1998 and he did an excellent job. A week ago I didn’t know what supervening necessities were, nor did I know that these necessities play a large role in directing the process of innovation.