Camera Toss (The Blog)
The coolest part of growing up in the dot com era has been the incessant invention of new forms of expression. Today, my colleague Martin Serra turned me on to Camera Tossing. It's a form of digital photography in which the photographer sets the camera on auto-timer and tosses it in the air. What happens, happens. The images are wonderful.
The blog is a great resource. But there's a wild world of camera toss images on Flickr as well.
"People go online to do many things," says early Internet pioneer Esther Dyson. "One of the reasons they go online is to create a presence. With Geo Cities, you had your presence in one place. With Facebook, you are distributing your presence to anyone who is your friend."MediaPost Publications - The Future Of Media: The Internet - 09/23/2008
Dyson says this extends well beyond the cross-linking aspect of Facebook pages to include widgets and even real-time applications such as Twitter.
"With Twitter, people are distributing their presence incessantly. Personally, I think that is a little obsessive, but what people are really doing is collecting social interactions," she explains. "If we had a biological urge to spread our genes, now people have the means to spread their presence."
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So what's the future of the Internet? Well, technology, regulation, business models will surely be important factors, but if you look at what has really been shaping the Internet - both past and present - it is people. And some day, we may even send one over the Internet.
So what might be a strategy going forward? As an avid watcher of television, particularly political news, complex dramas, and reality shows, I could imagine many scenarios in which incentives are created to watch shows in real time – viewers pose questions for the guest, guide alternative dramatic scenes, or decide what challenge the players have to perform. How cool would it be to watch Donald Trump, Sr. using Twitter on a BlackBerry in the middle of the live Apprentice finale? And the advertising underbelly is that you are statistically more likely to purchase paper towels, basketball sneakers, or a dream vacation cruise.Will New Media Save Television Ads? - Mashable
MediaPost Publications - Video Ad Study Shows High Engagement Rates - 08/18/2008Completion rates for pre-roll video ads approached 90% and click-through rates averaged 10% in a new study of video ad units by Break Media and video ad technology provider Panache.
A redesign of Last.fm, the CBS-owned free online music platform, is giving advertisers the ability to create "smart ads" that can, among other things, move to the beat of whatever music a user is listening to.New Ads on Last.fm Respond to Music - ClickZ
Game-playing in all of its emerging digital forms appears to be the one media sector that could be impervious to economic malaise. It has even slowed the meteoric growth of online advertising and caused Google to miss some of its quarterly targets for the first time. As it turns out, video games have become the escapist elixir for hard times that moviegoing and television once were in a passive, analog world.Diane Mermigas: On Media » Blog Archive » Money Spot: Video Games Are Having Banner Year
From the Wall Street Journal: "...Model.Live tracks three models as they navigate casting calls, catwalks and airports for fashion weeks in New York, London, Milan and Paris. The first of 12 eight-minute episodes will debut Aug. 19 on-demand on Vogue.tv, a site that runs advertiser-sponsored videos and allows consumers to buy the featured products."Vogue Models a New Reality Series - WSJ.com
Honestly, this isn't immediately comprehensible to me. I need to read more. So, join me will you?
Cerf expects that video will be downloaded rather than streamed over time. With gigabit for second speed, users could download an hour of video in 16 seconds. "It's like the iPod--you can download music faster than you can listen to it," he said. Cerf also said that broadcasting, rather than downloading a separate copy to every user, is a good delivery model, and that users will have more control over which ads to watch.Vint Cerf: Video streaming to give way to downloading | Outside the Lines - CNET News.com
Traditional Media Not Dead Yet for Marketing, Study Says - TV Decoder - Media & Television - New York Times BlogA study to be released on Wednesday finds that advertisements appearing in traditional media like television are still “much more likely” to have made a positive impression with consumers than ads running in digital media.
The study, called “When Advertising Works,” was conducted by Yankelovich in association with Sequent Partners. The Center for Media Design at Ball State University in Muncie, Ind., provided assistance.
The study covered 16 types of media. Besides TV, the traditional kinds included billboards, magazines, newspapers, radio and movie theater commercials. The digital kinds included e-mail messages, Internet banner ads, social networking Web sites, video games and video-sharing Web sites like YouTube.
When asked what kind of an impression the ad made, 56 percent of survey respondents said traditional media ads made a positive impression, in contrast to 31 percent who said that about digital media ads. Thirteen percent reported a negative impression of traditional media ads versus 21 percent for digital media ads. Thirty-two percent said they had neither a positive nor a negative impression of traditional media ads, in contrast to 48 percent who said they had neither a good or bad impression of digital media ads.
Nielsen's long-awaited service to track out-of-home viewing, a co-venture, will begin yielding data later this summer. The system offers the tantalizing prospect of measuring viewing in bars, hotels and workout gyms--something networks have argued they don't receive credit for from advertisers. What will be called the Nielsen Out-of-Home Report--a joint venture with Integrated Media Measurement Inc. (IMMI)--was announced in April 2007 with an expected launch that September. Then the debut was postponed until this past April, and now again until this summer. It will be the first time that Nielsen provides any out-of-home viewing data. The data that covers viewing of national broadcast and cable networks will be culled from a panel of 4,700. Panelists will carry cell phones from AT&T that run the software that allows tracking of the exposure to programs (participants receive $50 a month). In addition to the national service, Nielsen will begin offering out-of-home data in six local markets by the end of the third quarter, according to a presentation by Nielsen Senior Vice President Kevin Svenningsen at the Promax industry event Wednesday. The six local markets--with 500 panelists each--to be tracked are New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, Houston and Denver.
MediaPost Publications - Nielsen To Debut Out-Of-Home Viewing Data - 06/19/2008
“We continue to experience significant growth and vitality in interactive marketing, media and advertising,” said Randall Rothenberg, president and CEO of the IAB. “We expect growth to continue, as consumers spend more and more time online, and marketers find more – and more innovative – ways to reach them through digital media.”Internet Advertising Revenues Up 18.2% YOY, $5.8 Billion for Q1 ’08, Second Highest Quarter Ever
How It WorksTracking Video: How Audience Behavior Measurement Works
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Among other things, he confirmed that Microsoft's discussions with Yahoo have continued, predicted that in 10 years all media will be delivered via the Internet and professed that he is confused by Google's moves in the mobile-phone market.Microsoft's Ballmer on Yahoo and the Future - washingtonpost.com
This year’s upfront selling season seems to have come with its own wrinkles that haven’t exactly continued the pattern of the past few. Instead of the continual devolvement and advertiser mutiny that we’ve seen in the past couple of years, what seems to have occurred is exactly the opposite — advertisers returning to spend upfront dollars, despite continued network ratings declines and further ad skippage.Video Insider » Blog Archive » As Recession Ensues, Will Most Advertisers Default To Easier-To-Justify TV Buy?
This seems to be happening for several reasons. First, those same advertisers that held out in years past wound up paying even more in a scatter market that produced windfalls for select broadcasting and cable networks last year. Strike or no strike, they had to advertise somewhere — and the scatter market strategy wasn’t exactly value-priced. Not so sound a strategy for this year, it seems.
Second, we’ve got a ratings mess — complete with everything from program ratings to C3 ratings to average live commercial ratings — even to exact minute ratings. From the creative sidelines, it seems like there’s a free-for-all of buying criteria out there that makes locking in a TV CPM upfront… well, a lot less free for all.
Third, and perhaps most significant, is the acknowledgment that we’re headed towards a deeper recession — leading most traditional advertisers to forgo the whole “shift to digital” trend and simply fall back on the ol’ tried and true TV schedule that they figure will at least keep retail sales going and maintain their brand health measures in this uncertain economic/election year into next.
If you’re an advertiser, put all three factors together and you’re left with fear and control as your buying motivations. Which is not exactly a great place to be if you’re reliant on an industry in as much chaos and entrenched thinking as the agency business is. Combine the two dynamics and it’s not exactly a setup for guerilla-like innovative planning and gutsy creative execution either.
The real challenge for us agency folk is, instead of just taking the money, we should be out there helping lead the more enlightened advertisers to see that more inventive digital and enhanced TV programs can actually out-engage pure impression-based models based on effective frequency if they’re crafted correctly. That means demonstrating how to leverage the digital channel as more than just a vehicle to top off television awareness measures with rich-media banners. It means showing how we can truly immerse consumers in deeper, richer storytelling that is driven by their TV buys and helps activate more trial and sampling, e-couponing and sales results than simply telling the same old brand health measures and purchase intent story.
In these recession-facing times, those who lean into digital by going way beyond the brand site and rich-media banners is one way to separate the marketers and agencies on offense… from those just playing awareness defense. Even the networks themselves, notably ABC, NBC and Turner, have leading-edge, robust custom digital program offerings to help augment even the most defensive TV schedule with tremendous online engagement opportunities.
Meanwhile, if you’re like most agencies feeling the pain of marketer CFOs freezing or cutting budgets while they move to keep cash on the balance sheet and take a wait-and-see posture until Q4, your answer isn’t “wait and see” before you can truly judge whether the digital shift is continuing to expand. The answer is for us all to go on offense and prove why a more engaged consumer is more valuable than a mere impression.Otherwise, for most marketers, the move to digital will simply amount to Searching for more answers… and keywords.
The Magazine Publishers of America is set to release a new study showing that including URLs in magazine ads drives readers to advertiser Web sites. The analysis of 833 print ads in seven magazines, performed by VISTA's print effectiveness rating service, showed that ads with Web addresses were up to three times as likely to drive readers to a Web site, depending on the magazine category.The biggest increases came in the home, women's service and travel categories, where ads including URLs were 103%, 98% and 186% more likely to drive readers to an advertiser Web site. Ads with URLs in the fashion category also did well, producing a 52% bump.New research from VISTA Print Effectiveness Rating Service, based on an analysis of 833 ads in seven different magazines, reconfirmed that ads with URLs are more likely to drive readers to advertiser sites overall, as well as across the range of magazine genres. Less spectacular gains were found in the financial category, with a 22% lift, and men's, with a 38% lift.According to the MPA, the VISTA findings corroborate a meta-analysis of nine earlier studies by Marketing Evolution. This meta-analysis showed that when URLs were included in magazine ads, they boosted the percentage of study subjects who visited the advertiser Web sites 6%, to 19% of the test group.MediaPost Publications - Site Seen: URLs Prove Valuable In Print Ads - 05/28/2008
The survey found that young consumers get their news in an irregular fashion, and generally have no ritual of news consumption, like reading the newspaper or watching the evening news every day. However, the survey also found that young people, in addition to facts and updates, wanted the news to be presented with context. “They wanted to find a path to the backstory,” said Kennedy. “And they wanted to find a path to what’s going to happen next.”AP About to Release Results of Young Media Consumers Survey
Other significant findings of the survey included the fact that most of the survey group shared news with each other, whether via text message, e-mail, or social networks, like Myspace and Facebook. Also, the survey found that 16 of the 18 participants got their news through e-mail, a medium which traditional media like newspapers rarely employ.
USTelematics is skipping the satellites that KVH Industries and Sirius Backseat TV rely upon and betting on WiMax wireless technology to bring TV to your car. It will deliver IPTV to its Voyager in-car entertainment systems and has announced a "mobilecast" program called 4VDO that will deliver broadcast and video programming.Internet TV Will Let You be a Couch Potato in Traffic | Autopia from Wired.com
MediaPost Publications - Advertisers Get Buzzed On YouTube With New Targeting Capability - 05/14/2008With the latest targeting tool from YouTube, companies like Lionsgate have begun to ride the buzz on the video-sharing platform, running their in-video overlay ads on clips that are surging in popularity. Google quietly rolled out the tool on Tuesday, although it had been in development for several months, with Lionsgate as one of the pilot advertisers.YouTube buzz targeting works on an algorithm that looks at a number of viewer activities, including how many times a video is chosen as a favorite, how favorably it's rated, and how quickly it picks up views, to determine which clips are about to "go viral."
Coming Soon: A Web-Wide Social Network? - Advertising Age - Digital
Sites are blendingThe moves are unrelated, according to the companies involved, but they all suggest what many web watchers and pundits have been expecting: that social-media tools and services would spread throughout the wider web, rather than stay contained within a single service.
Time Warner Inc's HBO cable network is expected to start selling shows on Apple Inc's iTunes digital entertainment service, with flexible pricing, a source familiar with the discussions said on Monday.HBO seen selling shows on Apple's iTunes - Yahoo! News
Episodes of some HBO shows are likely to be sold at more than the standard price of $1.99 per episode, the source said, marking the first time Apple has agreed to selling content at different prices in the United States.
