What’s the future of advertising got to do with crowdsourcing? Well, Paul champions the idea that part of the future of advertising is crowdsourcing (using collaborative tools to generate insight to deliver real value) (Paul cites the Starbucks crowdsourcing platform as an example).Crowdsourcing is the Future of Marketing : Clickadvisor
“Convergence” sounds like an idea tossed around in the 1990s that never came to pass. But don’t be fooled. Today, most video consumed online is snackable video—bite-sized entertainment—rather than a complete meal of TV episodes or full-length movies.brandedcontent.adage.com
Word-of-mouth marketing in the U.K. will face radical restrictions starting May 26, when it will become a criminal offense for brands to seed positive messages online without making the origin of the message clear.U.K. Cracks Down on Word-of-Mouth With Tough Restrictions - Advertising Age - Digital
In the back of their minds, brand managers know they SHOULD be doing more digitally — we just haven’t consistently told them “HOW.” As an industry, we sell them brand sites and microsites that are great for educating and informing their consumers on the product, its functional attributes and even “send to a friend” viral potential. We capture registrations, provide promotional offers, and generally tell a deeper, richer story than TV or print can. But here’s one place where we really fall down. Often, for the sake of short-term revenue, we let our online media buyers and sellers suck what little budgets our brand marketers are devoting to digital into the same old banner-based, impression-based effective frequency models that, whether someone clicks through above 1% or not, purportedly work to drive the same positive brand health measures and purchase intent that commercials do in television-only online.Video Insider » Blog Archive » To Change Advertisers’ Digital Aptitude, We Need To Add The ‘How-To’
Just as Sony's Walkman once planted the notion that music can be mobile, the BlackBerry by Research In Motion (RIM), a Canadian firm, has since 1999 made e-mail on the go seem normal. And just as the personal-computer era entered the mainstream only in the 1980s with Apple's commercialisation of the “graphical user interface”, the mobile era arguably began only last summer when the same firm launched the iPhone, with its radically new and user-friendly touch interface. As a result, Google, for instance, has received 50 times more web-search requests from iPhones this year than from any other mobile handset.Nomads at last | Economist.com
Results from Nielsen Online's online video measurement tool, VideoCensus, provide a demographic breakdown of the viewers, and a description of destinationsResearch Brief » Blog Archive » Who’s Watching What Video Online, And Where
Semantic search engine Hakia has begun licensing its technology, the intelligent organizer Twine is readying for launch, and now natural language search engine Powerset is also considering a near-term launch, as TechCrunch recently noted.Powerset: Don’t call us a search engine » VentureBeat
Banners are so great on the Web, they decided to f*** up your phone with 'em too! Eck!
Mobile devices are a new frontier for the Internet in general and for the advertising business that Google and many others are building atop it. The mobile Web has been hobbled by tiny screens, slow and unreliable connections, and carriers' data-access fees, but a new era is arriving.Google brings display ads to mobile devices | Tech news blog - CNET News.com
The New Yahoo: Sticky, Viral, And Most Of All, FriendlyYahoo wants to turn itself into one big social network-driven site, and simultaneously open many of its core services to get users and developers thinking of Yahoo as their Internet hub. They’ve been talking about parts of this since last November. First were details about how webmail will serve as the social networking hub, followed by more tidbits in January. In March they joined the Google-led Open Social initiative. And they’ve made a series of announcements around Search Monkey which will allow third parties to enhance Yahoo search with structured data.
While different people use it to mean different things, the broadest definition refers to any situation in which computing is done in a remote location (out in the clouds), rather than on your desktop or portable device. You tap into that computing power over an Internet connection. "The cloud is a smart, complex, powerful computing system in the sky that people can just plug into," says Web browser pioneer Marc Andreessen.Cloud Computing: Eyes on the Skies
Speaking at a Westminster eForum on web 2.0 this week in London, Jim Cicconi, vice president of legislative affairs for AT&T, warned the current systems that constitute the internet will not be able to cope with the increasing amounts of video and user-generated content being uploaded.Web Could Run Out of Gas by 2010
He said: "The surge in online content is at the centre of the most dramatic changes affecting the internet today. In three years' time, 20 typical households will generate more traffic than the entire internet today."
Mr. Duffy had discovered that over-the-air digital signals behave differently from analog signals. That won’t matter to most Americans come the switchover. They either own a digital TV or get their signal through cable or satellite. But 17 million households have an analog TV that receives its signals over the air — 13 million of them use a rabbit-ear antenna. That means that not only do they have to buy a digital converter box; they may have to buy a new antenna. An additional 18 million homes have TVs that get over-the-air signals, but the residents have other TVs that are connected to cable or satellite services.Estimates from a computer simulation run by Centris, a market research firm in Los Angeles, found that more than nine million households that now get programming over the air could lose one or more stations they now receive.A Downside to Digital TV - New York Times
Forget focus groups. Consumers are giving it straight to brands, and each other, via online social media in big numbers, according to a recent study by the Society for New Communications Research, Palo Alto, Calif."Exploring the Link Between Customer Care and Brand Reputation in the Age of Social Media" surveyed more than 300 active Internet users during February and March.The study found that 74 percent of respondents choose companies or brands based on customer service experiences shared by other Web users on the Internet. Eighty-one percent of those polled said they believe blogs, online rating systems and discussion forums give consumers "a greater voice" in customer service. However, only 33 percent of respondents felt that companies take customers' opinions seriously.Survey: Web Generates Consumer Feedback
Burger King is extending into casual mobile games with the launch of “BK City,” a set of handset games that users can download for a monthly subscription fee of $2.99.The games, developed in partnership with Seattle-based licensee Mobliss, offer a multi-level series of challenges in several virtual worlds. Players complete puzzles and skill games to earn a place in the Burger King’s court, completing tasks such as remembering how to make a Whopper, squirting ketchup while racing through a BK outlet, the King’s mansion and a goal called BK City.Burger King Brands Subscription Mobile Games
MediaPost Publications - Newspaper Ads Spur Web Activity, Say NAA, Google - 04/24/2008Newspaper AdNewspaper advertising drives consumers to the Web to find out more information about products, according to a report from the Newspaper Association of America.The report, based on research commissioned by Google, found that 30% of Internet-using newspaper readers went online to research a product they saw in a newspaper. Within that cohort, 70% (21% of the total) then made a purchase.Google commissioned the study as part of its ongoing development of the Print Ads platform.
MediaPost Publications - P&G Unit Chief Lights The Way To Entertained Consumers - 04/18/2008"The danger zone no marketer should inhabit is brands or products that are highly amplified but not advocated: never use the term 'buzz marketing.' Buzz marketing is the danger zone." He says the Office Max Elf buzz campaign--in which consumers create and email to friends, animated dancing elves of themselves during the holidays last year--is an example of sound and fury signifying nothing. "Some 123 million people 'elfed' themselves," he says. "It got incredible viral amplification. But same-store sales declined 7.5%. Don't go for the head fake."
Consumers get valuable information with a snap of their camera phones and marketers get to create a targeted brand conversation in the processSnapTell - Image recognition based mobile marketing
Google is testing an emerging barcode technology in its print ad program, along with several other response options aimed at tracking results of newspaper ads placed through the system. Though newspapers may be making less for ads sold through Google Print Ads than they might selling those placements direct, advertisers that wouldn't be buying paper ads otherwise are testing them.Google Tests New Barcode Tech in Newspaper Ad Program - ClickZ
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A discrepancy between Google click data and comScore's estimates of those data before they were released caused the Web-measurement firm's share price to plunge last week. But on Madison Avenue, the difference wasn't much of a shock. Rather, it was another reminder that the science of tracking Internet usage is still far from perfect.Agencies Know the Score on Web Tracking - WSJ.com
Digital-advertising executives say they have long taken comScore numbers with a grain of salt and don't plan on curtailing their use of the Reston, Va., research firm because of the Google flap. "We have not expected the numbers to be 100% accurate," says Sarah Fay, chief executive of both Carat and Isobar US, ad companies owned by Aegis Group. "I think that comScore has been as good as anything we've had previously."
The question in my mind is, Should we allocate media spending to mirror the "influence" of each channel?
TV stations could see tougher times if one research company's advice is heeded. BIGresearch, a Worthington, Ohio-based consumer research company, says top automotive advertisers are spending too much on TV compared to the influence that TV has with its consumers. It says 17% to 18% of consumers are influenced by TV marketing--but in aggregate, automotive makers spend 40% of their media on TV.MediaPost Publications - Study: TV Doesn't Deliver Bang For Carmakers' Buck - 04/21/2008
For example, Ford Motor had 41% of its media budget going to TV, according to the researcher, with 18% of its consumers influenced by TV. All other media spending figures show that Ford under-spends, compared to their influence. BIGresearch says 16.5% of Ford's customers are influenced by newspapers, but that Ford only spends 5.9% of its media on newspapers.
With the Internet, 8.4% of Ford's consumers are swayed by Internet sites--but Ford only gives that media 3.9% of its media dollars. Radio brings 6.7% influence, but 1.5% of media spend. Outdoor sits at a 12% influence rate, but Ford only gives it 1% of budget.
Ford comes closest with magazines--where influence is at 17% and spending is at 13%. That also rings true for General Motors and Toyota.
When it comes to word-of-mouth (WOM) buzz about products--and specific brands--across a wide range of categories, expectant and new mothers are the champs, according to a new study from online resource BabyCenter and WOM-focused market research firm the Keller Fay Group.Overall, pregnant women and new moms engage in one-third more WOM conversations per day than women in general or consumers as a whole, and almost two-thirds of their conversations include brand recommendations, the study found.MediaPost Publications - Brands Are Big Word-Of-Mouth Topics Among New Moms - 04/21/2008
Social networking sites appear to be breaking out of their winter downturn. After a two-month slide in traffic, Facebook bounced back by increasing to 35.5 million unique U.S. visitors in March from 32.4 million in February, according to comScore.Social networking rival and category leader MySpace also saw a traffic spike to 72.7 million after languishing around 68.5 million for the last three months. Even old school social site Classmates.com got a bump to 14 million visitors in March--up from 13 million the previous month, and 10 million in December.Blog networks also posted strong gains. Blogger climbed to 42.3 million from about 39 million, and Six Apart jumped to 13.7 million from 9.7 million. Bebo, acquired by AOL for $850 million in March, on the other hand, remained basically flat, increasing by only about 100,000 to 4.9 million.MediaPost Publications - Traffic To Social Networks Bounces Back - 04/18/2008
MediaPost Publications - CW Relies On Sex Text To Sell 'Gossip Girl' - 04/17/2008Using a rough-looking action shot--somewhat out of focus--of two key characters having sex, CW's copy blares the letters "OMG" in its print ads and "OMFG" for its TV promo commercials. New episodes of "Gossip Girl" start up Monday, April 21 at 8 p.m.The controversy exists because OMFG is a prevalent teen text message that is shorthand for "Oh My Fucking God." As a result, some media rejected it.
Here's a case study in how to reach busy, grown-up women without relying on a media diet of TV, TV and TV.
Print ads in publications like Style, Us and People and online ads running on sites such as InStyle, iVillage and Epicurious direct women to a campaign site, GetAHappyFace.com. There, EVB combined product research information with portable digital content. Each product is paired with a widget or piece of content that fits with its purpose. For instance, the St. Ives protective cleanser information also includes a downloadable desktop weather widget that shows users the sun-intensity for the day. The warming scrub has an offer for a getaway weekend sweepstakes. The olive cleanser information offers bedtime happy-thoughts text messages. Other content includes a widget tracking personal goals, workout guide and e-card to thank friends and family.St. Ives Puts 'Happy Face' on Aging
Invention Lab Powered by RadioShack® 
Who says "traditional" brand marketers can't join the Web 2.0 revolution?!?! RadioShack has joined forces with make: magazine, itself a paragon of hipness and kewl-o-city, to demonstrate DIY home electronics you can make yourself from common, pedestrian parts found at your local RS store. They're asking people to upload project ideas and fostering community. Nicely done.
I found this by clicking an ad banner (e-gad!) on boingboing - the gadget site - because my good friend and UXD expert Mike Brooks sent me a video link.
So, there you have it. Social interaction leads to spontaneous discovery leads to brand renewal for an "old" retail brand. There's hope for this whole "Net" thing after all.
In a new study, Forrester reports that 83% of marketers believe that mobile will become a more effective platform over the next three years. But at present, consumers' lack of familiarity with the format remains a barrier. For instance, only 7% of mobile users trust ads on their cell phones.MediaPost Publications - Study: Biggest Barrier To Mobile Ads Is Unfamiliarity - 04/14/2008
Still, the research firm suggests that advertisers look at the kinds of things people are using their phones for in addition to talking. Some 42% are text-messaging, nearly a quarter are exchanging picture-messages, and 15% are using mobile e-mail.
Furthermore, almost one-third have interacted with some type of marketing on their phones, which Forrester calls a "sizeable minority" that will grow as mobile is increasingly added to the digital mix. Despite frequent claims of high click-through rates for mobile, however, only 1% said they had clicked on a banner ad while browsing on their cell phones, according to Forrester's data.
Visible World works with advertisers to target different creative on the network level, on the market-by-market level, and on the zone level (cluster of ZIP codes).In addition to deals with 13 TV networks, it also has all six of the big MSOs signed on: Comcast, Time Warner, Cox, Charter, Insight, and Brighthouse.The key for many advertisers in future years is having addressable set-top boxes deployed at the cable system level. Some test markets, such as Huntsville, Ala., have boxes installed. Visible World, according to advertising executives, has some 200,000 addressable set-top boxes in Brooklyn, NY.MediaPost Publications - Visible World Grows Addressable Ad Biz - 04/14/2008
The retailer recognizes that 75% of Wal-Mart's customers go online, but not all shop at Walmart.com, according to Cathy Halligan, Walmart.com CMO. "Our engagement online is too low, compared with growth rates seen in social network sites," she told Marketing Daily at last week's Forrester Research Marketing Forum 2008 in Los Angeles. "We're growing at two times the industry growth rate, but when you look at what else is growing, such as non-transactional sites, we're not growing as fast we would like."MediaPost Publications - Walmart.com CMO: We Want Our Customers Talking Together - 04/14/2008
If Web 1.0 was about old-media companies making half-hearted gestures at that online thing and Web 2.0 was a brisk reminder that, dot-com bust notwithstanding, the internet is a very real and open thing where walls and control don't work well, then part of Web 3.0 will be about figuring out how to monetize that openness. Euphemisms aside, the next chore for media outlets will be trying to sell ads against other people's content in addition to their own. Aggregation, not as a sidelight but as more of a focus, is a mission change for media, and there's a case for it, to be sure. Time and attention have limits, but the universe of content, it seems, does not. So finding a way to quickly and cleanly deliver relevant news is important. But there are also potentially large societal costs, and success is by no means guaranteed.It's Web 3.0, and Someone Else's Content Is King - Advertising Age - Digital
McDonald’s is dialing up mobile coupons for a regional test at 113 locations in Utah, Wyoming and Nevada. Consumers can receive one of the chain’s new iced coffees for free when they use a Cellfire mobile coupon at participating stores between April 7-27.Customers are asked to go to cellfire.com or text “mcd” to 22888 to receive the Cellfire application. Upon signing up, they receive a unique redemption code that consumers show the McDonald’s cashier. Once registered, they can receive future offers from other Cellfire merchants as well.McDonald's Begins Mobile Coupon Test
A fresh site for aggregating links to the hottest news stories is coming courtesy of Barry Diller and Tina Brown.
Diller and his InterActiveCorp business will bankroll the effort, which doesn't have a name or a launch date. The site will be run by Brown, the so-called "Queen of Buzz" famous for having once been the editor of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker.
Brown also authored The Diana Chronicles, her tell-all book about Princess Diana, and is writing The Clinton Chronicles for release in 2010.
Diller, IAC, and Brown aren't discussing details of their venture, though published reports have former Wall Street Journal deputy managing editor Edward Felsenthal as the site's planned editor.
Americans are tuning into online radio in increasing numbers, according to a new survey of over 1,000 adults from American Media Services. Thirty-three percent of respondents said they had listened to Internet radio at least once before, and 53% of this cohort--about 17.5% of the total survey group --had tuned in at some point during the previous month. Recently, a separate study by Arbitron Edison Research found that 13% of Americans over the age of 12 had listened to online radio in the last week--up from 11% this time last year.MediaPost Publications - Listen Up: Americans Tune Into Radio Online - 04/10/2008
MTV'S XFIRE HAS PARTNERED WITH Exent Technologies to launch an ad-supported prize competition that exists wholly within the "Call of Duty 2" PC game.The treasure hunt-style promotion, which runs on Exent's AdMuse dynamic content insertion platform, tasks gamers with finding and redeeming secret codes for a chance to win a copy of the newest game in the franchise, "Call of Duty 4".Members of Menlo Park, Calif.-based Xfire's online gaming community can access the treasure hunt while playing through the first five missions in the single-player version of "Call of Duty 2". The AdMuse platform is able to track the secret ad codes (or impressions) on a number of levels, including exposure time, how large the code appeared on screen, the angle it was viewed from and what percentage of it was seen. The data is periodically transmitted back to Xfire and the code sponsor.MediaPost Publications - MTV's XFire Teams Up With Exent To Launch In-Game Ad Promotion - 04/10/2008
The Internet will usurp television as the biggest advertising medium in Britain by the end of 2009, according to a report published on Monday.Britain has the most developed online advertising market in the world which the report by the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB), PricewaterhouseCoopers and the World Advertising Research Centre said was worth 2.8 billion pounds ($5.6 billion) in 2007.UK online ad spend to overtake TV: report | Technology | Internet | Reuters
It said last year's 38 percent online ad growth was driven by the rising number of people online, the introduction of cheap laptops and the growing popularity of catch-up TV on the Internet through services such as Channel 4's 4oD."With broadband speeds on the up and consumers spending more time on more sites, the outlook for online advertising is rosy -- in fact we expect it to overtake TV in 2009 when it will become the UK's biggest medium," IAB chief executive Guy Phillipson said in a statement.
Robots could fill the jobs of 3.5 million people in graying Japan by 2025, a thinktank says, helping to avert worker shortages as the country's population shrinks.Robots seen doing work of 3.5 million in Japan | U.S. | Reuters
Cookies have gotten a bad rap. They are a little bit of Internet technology that has been associated in some strands of popular discussion with the darkest strains of Big Brother online. In fact, cookies do help some Internet companies track some information about users, but there have been significant limitations on what they could see.One interesting aspect of the plans by Phorm, a company building an advertising targeting system, is that it has found a way to make cookies do what so many feared they could: track every page you visit on the Internet.Phorm has deals to work with the three largest Internet service providers in Britain, and it is trying to establish similar arrangements in other countries including the United States. Because Phorm’s system can actually watch all the traffic to and from your computer, it can modify cookies in ways that haven’t been used before.The point of all this is to follow users around the Web without tapping into the I.S.P.’s database of user names and other personal information.Phorm’s All-Seeing Parasite Cookie - Bits - Technology - New York Times Blog
The first response to what Verizon plans to do with its newly acquired UHF bandwidth (formerly known as television!).
VERIZON WIRELESS UNVEILED PLANS FRIDAY to roll out a fourth-generation (4G) wireless network over the next three years with its newly acquired slice of spectrum.MediaPost Publications - Verizon 'Supercharges' Growth With Nationwide Clear Spectrum - 04/07/2008
Amazon TextBuyIt, which launched late Tuesday, lets people text the name of a product, its description or its UPC or ISBN to 262966 (that's "Amazon" on the keypad) from anywhere their cell phones work — including from inside physical stores.Amazon launches text-message shopping - Yahoo! News
What's a friend worth? It's the question marketers are asking more and more as they plow into social media in the hopes of finding new customers in welcoming environments while going beyond simple messaging to the fuzzy notion of "engagement."But with the rapid growth of social media has come the challenge of measuring the new ways consumers are interacting with and sharing advertisers' content and brands. In many cases, the biggest difficulty is not just figuring out what to measure but what to ignore -- and how to square the need for metrics-driven accountability with the more qualitative feedback endemic to conversation-based channels.Conversation Quotient
The problem with open frontiers is that the people seeking to colonize them, to borrow a quote from Ms. South Carolina, simply "don't have maps." Which is why, almost two years after lonelygirl15, no Web series has established a viable, let alone profitable homestead.But this week, more wagons are arriving.Hiking the trail blazed by lonelygirl - Los Angeles Times
On Monday, Sony Pictures Television launched C-Spot, an online comedy channel featuring six sharply produced programs with enough short episodes to fill a 13-week season.And today, it's Jessica Rose herself. The almost-21-year-old actress from New Zealand will soon return to the online world as the star of "Blood Cell," a new horror-thriller from Web TV studio 60Frames Entertainment, directed by Eduardo Rodriguez. The show, whose trailer went up Tuesday night at deadcelldeadfriend.com, follows Rose's character, Julia, as she contends with an unseen murderer who will talk to her only via her fancy photo- and video-enabled cellphone. Which hopefully gets good reception because, as the name of the website suggests, if Julia's signal goes dead, a blond somewhere gets it.
Going along with the conventional wisdom about online audience-building, C-Spot and 60Frames will "syndicate" their shows, allowing them to play on several platforms. C-Spot shows will appear on Sony's Crackle, Hulu and AOL Video, while 60Frames can be seen on Bebo, Blip.tv, iTunes, MySpace and others. And everyone's on YouTube.
Revenue-sharing deals allow the creators to get a piece of the advertising pie no matter where their shows get watched.
Hitwise: Hulu Is Big With Boomers - Silicon Alley InsiderThe company says 47% of visitors to Hulu are 55 and older, compared to a mere 17% between the ages of 18 and 34, according to data collected during a four-week period ending March 15.That contrasts sharply with Nielsen Online numbers from February that said only 14% of Hulu's viewers were 55 and over, and 31% were between 18 and 34
