Contests can be seen as a stunt. In my opinion - a stunt is something new and out of the ordinary that catches peoples attention, and when it comes to marketing, if done correctly a stunt can generate a lot of positive attention.
Contests can be used to attract people to your website, to build [...]
Every month an estimated 200 million people play casual games, and the casual gaming industry is seeing a 20% increase in both audience and profits year after year.
The Casual gaming market it expected to surpass $2 billion in 2008.
Casual gaming gained popularity with games like Solitaire, Tetris and Bejeweled played on the PC and Nintendo video game system.
The internet has now become the main source of distribution for casual games and social networks like Facebook are playing a major role in their rise in popularity and profitability. Casual games share a few basic characteristics; they offer simple gameplay and simple graphics that can be enjoyed in short burst like during coffee breaks or while on public transportation.
People like to consume their media in many different ways. When it comes to getting our daily dose of news, some people like to read their morning paper over breakfast, other people listen to the news on the drive to work, and many of us check the headlines online as soon as we get to work.
MSNBC.com shows that they are aware of our diverse media habits, and they are offering us even more ways to experience the news via www.NewsWare.msnbc.com. MSNBC.com has added Spectra, Newsblaster and Newscroller to their existing collection of podcasts, RSS feeds and mobile applications.
If you are looking for a great example of online video I recommend you check out the Fiskars Cinema Series. This series of three documentary style videos tells the story about a 360 year-old artisan enclave and “company town” called Fiskars Village.
These videos are telling a story, it is obvious that these are promotional videos, but they exude passion and craft and do not feel like commercials. These videos remind me a lot of the TV version of “This American Life” and some of Hillman Curtis’ artist series videos.
These videos are presented on a flash heavy site with very little text. I would recommend that along with all this great video they include some text. This would improve their organic search results and give people who liked the videos, more information about the village.
f you want to reach a large audience with your online videos, it is always a good idea to post your video to several video sharing sites.
Posting you video to youTube is a no brainer, but with over 300 other video sharing sites to choose from, where do you begin? I recommend posting your videos regularly to 5-10 different sites, and before you decide on which sites best suit your brand of video you may want to start posting on 20-30 sites and narrow them down to the top 10 after a couple months of testing.
If you are serious about online video, and plan on producing a lot of video and building an audience. You should also factor in your ability to monetize your videos on each site.
One video sharing site I recommend you consider is…
When we think of successful social networks we (North Americans) immediately think of MySpace and Facebook. But have you ever heard of Tencent.com or their social network brand QQ.com? In 2007 they made 523 million USD in revenues, nearly 4x what Facebook made during that same period.
Tencent’s user base has grown to 300 million active IM users, and 741 million users in total. Tencent is more than just a social networking platform. Since developing an IM application 9 years ago, they have developed various online outlets including a web portal, online game, blog and wireless portal.
As Tencent and QQ’s user base keeps expanding, they are quickly becoming an everyday tool for the Chinese. Many Chinese companies are even using QQ to communicate with their clients.
If you’re like me and you read a lot of blogs and listen to a lot of podcasts then you have probably noticed that there has been a lot of discussions going on about Twitter.
Twitter is quickly establishing itself as an alternative communication medium that may soon become as common as email, instant messaging and blogging. Twitter was designed as a broadcast medium that makes it easy get short text messages out to friends and fans. All you have to do is type a short message, and anyone who is watching your Twitter feed will immediately get the message.
If you want to have a quick peek at what Twitter is all about I recommend trying out Tweetscan. Tweetscan is a search tool, that gives you real time access to public Twitter streams…
Todays post is not necessarily about endorsing one companies line of products, but more importantly how internet marketers can use a variety of products and mediums to enhance their internet marketing.
Using design, photography, and video can significantly increase the effectiveness of an online marketing campaign. And now that Google and the other major search engines are embracing universal search, both images and video will begin to have a greater impact on search engine optimization.
Adobe was already a leader in design and photography applications, but when they bought Macromedia in 2005, and acquired Flash, Dreamweaver, Director and Fireworks, they instantly became the leading provider of website creation applications as well. Becoming familiar with the different tools that are available can be useful to online marketers, even if you never plan to be hands on with them yourself.
Yesterday, Yahoo launched its social news site Yahoo! Buzz. It has immediately been labeled a Digg clone, but the one major difference is that all the stories will not be user submitted, but instead, they will be selected from a set of pre-approved publishers. The list of publishers will include both large news sources and niche blogs.
The buzz rating of a particular story will then be determined by a combination of users clicking on the “buzz up” button next to the story, as well as search patterns and trends. This may not generate the same variety of stories that are found on sites like Digg, but it will probably help weed out stories that are obviously spam.
Each day a few of the top Yahoo! Buzz stories will make it to the Yahoo’s main page. This would mean huge traffic boosts. While testing, Yahoo reported that a wired.com story it had promoted to its homepage, generated over 2 million unique hits in 2 hours…
Tax season is fast approaching, and I was impressed to see both TurboTax and H&R Block using internet marketing as a way of promoting their products and services, in two very different ways.
TurboTax has partnered with YouTube and BrickFish to create “Tax Laugh” a unique online video contest.
There are two parts to this contest. The first is to submit a funny tax related video for chance to win $10,000 and open for comedian Joy Moh.
The second part of the contest is the “Taxlaugh Promoter” campaign, where TurboTax has created incentives for internet promoters to take an active role in driving Word-of-Mouth about the contest.
HoneyShed.com is the furthest thing from traditional online advertising I have seen.
When you arrive at the site a large video stream will begin playing, starring a bunch of 20 something guys and girls who look like they’ve just been pulled out of a 1980’s fashion magazine.
At first it might seem that they are just hanging out and goofing off, but you will soon realize, they are trying very hard to sell you products.
If you like the product they are promoting, there is a link off to the right side of the screen showing the price, and giving you the option to buy it or stash it for later…
IKEA agreed to let comedian and filmmaker Mark Malkoff live in their store for a week while his New York city apartment was being fumigated.
Mark has flipped the typical scenario of a brand using a celebrity or sports star to endorse their products, and instead, he is using a brand to promote himself.
Mark set up the website www.MarkLivesInIkea.com, and has posted nearly two dozen videos on it so far. He is also inviting people to become his friend on MySpace and Facebook…
Buffalo Wild Wings have come up with a clever way to promote their “Boneless Thursdays”.
The new Wild Messages website allows users to select from three vocal characters (a sexy teacher, a referee, or a drill sergeant) to created a personalized message, inviting their friends to meet them at Buffalo Wile Wings for “Boneless Thursdays.”
The humorous message can be sent to their mobile phone or their email address…
On Jaunuary 7th Jimmy Wales the founder of Wikipedia has launched his latest open source project called Wikia Search.
Wikia Search is currently in Apha and can be found at alpha.search.wikia.com. So far the reviews have been overwhelmingly negative.
Michael Arrington of TechCrunch calls it “a complete let down” and Stan Schroeder of Mashable calls it “miles behind the competition”, I say give it a year or two and see what the open source community can do with search. They have surprised the world with the success of Linux and Wikipedia, so succeeding at search may still be possible…
We will be taking a break from posting over the holiday season, so check back with us in January ‘08 for some fresh new content. Thanks for reading, and if you haven’t already, subscribe to our RSS feed.
WebVideoReport.com did a great survey on the cost of online video advertising. The prices range from $90 CPM for a 15 sec preroll ad at WSJ.com to $15 - $35 CPM for an overlay, pre roll or in video bug at Break.com.
mirates has created what is sure to be the longest commercial of all time, to promote their non stop flight from Dubai to Sao Paulo.
The flight is 14 hours and 40 minutes long, and so is the commercial. They hired Fernando Ferreira, aka “Non Stop Fernando” to talk for the entire duration of the flight about Brazil, Sao Paulo and of course the benefits of flying Emirates.
The video clip below shows of a few moments from Fernando’s 14 hour performance…
This week Google/youTube announced it is expanding its partner program that allows for creators of original videos to share in a portion of the ad revenue that these videos generate.
youTube ran a pilot program earlier this year, and based on the success of that trial anyone in the United States or Canada can now apply to become a partner.
Anyone can apply, but only those who upload videos on a regular basis, already have a significant audience, and comply with the youTube terms of service will be accepted.
‘m sure you have all heard of the online virtual world Second Life, but have you heard of Zwinky?
While Second Life averages 250,000 unique users a month, Zwinky boasts well over 4 million.
Zwinky started out as customizable social avatars that were part of the MyWeb Searchbar. In April 2007, “Zwinktopia” was launched. It is an online virtual world that has quickly grown to over 11 million registered members.
Zwinky, appeals primarily to a young teen demographic, and one of the ways that Zwinky has managed to grow such a large user base so quickly is through some creative online music events and activities. Zwinky has attracted some of today’s hottest rock, hip hop and R&B stars to participate in their community.
By creating free games for Facebook, Webs.com has generated a billion page views since they launched their first game in August. The games are generating ad revenue with just about every view.” Read the full article at Mercury News. You can check out all the games at The Social Gaming Network.
Last week Scott Timble’s blog post What’s my name, #$%&*? made it onto the del.icio.us hotlist, his subscribers doubled, 325 people bookmarked his site and he had an extra 5000 visitors. Find out how at
Brandon Murphy is Strategist for 22squared an agency who has driven Friendship Marketing initiatives for clients like Lincoln Financial and Buffalo Wild Wings.
Brandon was kind enough to answer some questions about friendship marketing and how it relates to internet marketing.
Virtual Marketing Blog: What is Friendship Marketing? Brandon Murphy: It’s marketing brands the way people make friends. It’s not a channel or a specific piece of a marketing mix (like viral, WOM, TV etc.) and it’s not a scheme to trick people into thinking the brand is a friend. It‘s…
acebook has responded to all the negative feedback it has received over its new advertising program, by changing Beacon to be opt in rather than opt out. The NY Times wrote an excellent article about this today.
Dan Ackerman Greenberg did a guest post on TechCrunch this week called “The Secret Strategies Behind Many Viral Videos“. The post received a lot of negative feedback for some of it’s more questionable tactics. Dan wrote…
Here is a short video of Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s Webspam team, discussing snippets.
A snippet is the information that appears about your web site when it appears appears on a search engine results page. A snippet will usually contain your web page title and meta description, but there is more to it than that. In this video Matt uses Starbucks as an example to explain a few things about the information that appears in a snippet.
The one thing to take away from this video, is that no matter how well your site ranks in Google, your snippet can be the deciding factor on whether someone visits your site or not. So the more you know about them them the better…
Apple’s “Get A Mac” TV ads have had an intentional second life on the internet. Apple has created a page for them on their web site, and they have also received millions of views on youTube.
Recently Apple has taken this campaign on step further by making an ad that ties together a web site’s online video ad space and banner ad space. The result is far more powerful than just a video ad alone.
This isn’t the first example of synchronizing multiple display ads that I’ve see, but it is definitely the best.
Fathom SEO released an Internet Video Production and Marketing Guide. The guide and accompanying video can be found here.
RedAlkemi an online marketing solutions provider, shares its solution for time and effort distribution to maximize your internet marketing strategy. there is even a pie chart.
The Wall Street Journal wrote a great article on how Nescafe teamed up with BlogBang.com to promote…
couldn’t decide what to post about today, so here are 3 things I thought were worth sharing.
MoveOn.org Fuels Backlash Against Facebook’s Beacon
Beacon, the most controversial element of Facebook’s newly released Social Ad Program that automatically shares information about books, movies, or gifts you buy online with everyone you know on Facebook, is drawing privacy complaints. On Tuesday, social activist site MoveOn.org started it own Facebook group called “Petition: Facebook, stop invading my privacy!”. The group has already grown to over 10,000 members. MoveOn is also asking people to sign a petition demanding that Facebook protect people’s online privacy…
Here is an example of a well crafted and well funded online marketing campaign. That ties together a campaign website, online video, and the most expensive commercial that Guinness has ever produced.
The treasure hunt begins at the Guinness contest website. There you will be challenged to unlock 11 dominoes. Each domino represents a scene from the new Guinness ad.
To unlock the dominoes, you must look for clues hidden in the video clips and visit additional contest websites to find the hidden codes. Once you unlock all 11 dominoes and put the ad together you win a golden domino.
A Century of Self is a 4 part documentary series directed by Adam Curtis for the BBC.
A Century of Self examines how the ideas of Sigmund Freud (the founder of psychoanalysis) influenced his cousin Edward Bearnaise (who invented public relations) and Anna Freud (Sigmund’s daughter and PR guru), and the influence their ideas have had over the last century.
This series covers a lot of ground including public relations, marketing ,advertising, business, politics, war, and world events. It should be of interest to anyone interested in the history public relations, psychoanalysis, and marketing in general.
In my opinion this is one of the best documentaries ever made, even if it is a little heavy handed…
oday I am happy to bring you an exclusive interview with Sam Marks the Marketing Director at Colleges.com.
Sam was gracious enough to answer a few questions and give us some insight into one of the fastest growing social networks, and where College.com fits into the world of internet marketing.
College.com is a social and academic network that combines the academic elements of college with a student’s social life. It is aimed exclusively at college students with a .edu mail account.
College.com may have arrived just in time to fill that void that Facebook left behind when it opened its doors to allow anyone to join. Let’s hear what Sam has to say.
Virtual Marketing Blog: What is College.com?
Sam Marks: College.com is a social and academic networking site for College Students only. We are focused exclusively on one of the most marketable demographics- College Students. We are developing and positioning our site as an absolute necessity for college students, not just another account. The applications we have developed come directly from the minds of College student around the nation. The features were designed to not only help students get connected and involved at their campus, but also to help them with their daily tasks.
One of the good things about internet TV and internet video in general, is that you don’t have to spend all your money in one place. Unlike broadcast TV you are not forced to create a show that appeals to everybody, that more often than not ends up appealing to nobody.
With internet TV You can create smaller shows, with smaller budgets, aimed at smaller audiences and still have the potential to succeed. Internet producers and broadcasters are still going to have to rely on advertising to fund their show, but they will need far less of those dollars to make a go at it.
The deadline for the LG Life Is Good video contest is this Saturday Nov, 10th.
With a grand prize worth over $18,000 and over $30,000 in total prizes LG has provided enough incentive to get people’s attention. LG has also worked hard to generate consumer interest by making sure the contest has been getting a lot of press, and encouraging both viewership and submissions.
To date there has been over 800,000 video views, over 800 subscribers to the LG YouTube channel, and nearly 750 video submissions.
On Tuesday Facebook announced it’s new advertising strategy to the world.
It comes in the form of Social Ads, Facebook Pages, Beacon, Insights, Platform and Polls.
Social Ads - allow marketers to create an ad and target it precisely to the audience they choose. Ads can be displayed in the left hand ad space, as well as in a news feed when attached to a relevant social story. Simply write an ad, choose a target audience, and
decide where you want to drive traffic. Social ads can be purchased based on number of clicks (CPC) or number of impression (CPM).
Facebook Pages - is free, so any business wanting to market themselves on Facebook will start by creating their own Facebook page. Facebook users can become fans of a business and interact with them just as they would their friends. Those interactions become stories that are sent across news feeds and can be seen by a businesses fans and their friends.
Google has been making waves with two noteworthy announcements.
The first is the announcement of the Open Social api that would allow developers to create a single application that would work across multiple social network.
This is in direct contrast to Facebook applications that are written in FBML (Facebook markup language) and are only designed to work inside Facebook.
Many big names have already announced their plans to adopt the Open Social standard including LinkedIn, NewsGator, Ning, Hi5, Orkut (Google’s own social network), Plaxo, and most notably MySpace, the world’s biggest social network (Google has secretly been in talks with MySpace over the last year). Six Apart, the owners of Moveable Type, TypePad and LiveJournal have also annouced they will adopt Open Social.
Rather than each social network having to develop its own markup language, it appears they have decided to line up with Google in favor of Open Social. If Open Social takes off, Facebook will have to give serious thought to adopting it.
Also, SEO experts Rand Fishkin of seomoz.org, Brian Mark of toolbarn.com, David Brown of Top SEO Consultants, and Eric Enge of Stone Temple Consulting share some SEO tips in this video from webpronews.com
18 year old freshman and apple fan Nick Haley created a home made iPod Touch commercial and uploaded it to youTube. He pieced it together from clips he found at apple.com and timed his edited to the fast paced and catchy song “Music Is My Hot, Hot Sex” by CSS.
Imagine his surprise when Apple contacted him, and told him they liked his video and wanted to create a TV commercial based on it. Nick was then flown to LA where he got to work with long time Apple agency TBWA/Chiat/Day on a broadcast quality version of his spot.
The people over at Tubemogul wrote a great report on why you should include video marketing into your internet marketing mix, and they follow if up with some best practice tips on how to get your video in front of your target audience.
Tubemogul provides a free service that allows you to track videos across several video sharing sites. I have been using and testing their services (as well as their competitors) over the last several months. Considering we are still in the early stages of video tracking and analytics, I have been quite impressed with their services so far. With this in mind, we should all be interested in what the people at TubeMogul have to say when it comes to internet video marketing.
Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, is using video to raise money for the Wikipedia Foundation and to help foster the growth of Wikipedia in the languages of developing countries around the world.
This video benefited from some excellent footage from the documentary film “Truth in Numbers”.
I was very impressed with quality of the video, and predict that this video will be a very effective fund raising tool.
n theory a MySpace web series starring eight young and attractive women just out of college probably sounded like a good idea to Ford when they decided to lend their name and marketing dollars to “Roomates”.
The problem is, “Roommates”, looks really, really bad. I can’t say I was expecting much of a story, but throw in bad writing, bad acting, bad production value, and most annoyingly bad audio and it’s hard to see how Ford is going to benefit from this.
I’m sure the series will be filled with shots of the 2008 Ford Focus as the girls take trips to the beach and travel to shopping malls, but I’m sure whatever audience this show has will be watching the girls not their cars.
The sad truth is that TV shows exist mainly as a vehicle to sell advertising, but I wish more people would realize that quality content benefits both the audience and the advertiser.
Does Your Web Site Need a Workout?
Over at Search Engine Guide Kalena Jordan has a 20 point checklist to help you asses if your website is working hard enough for you.
Are You Hard Core?
Over at SEO-Theory Michael Martinez offers up 20 hard core SEO tips and then explains the benefits of them all.
When it comes to internet marketing it seems that holding a youTube video contest has become as acceptable as setting up a web page and buying Google Adwords.
Now that Panasonic, Heinz, Doritos, Chevy, Coke, Mentos, HP, CBS, Subaru, and even the State Bar of Texas have held youTube video contests. It appears to be an easy sell for marketers to include a youTube video contest as part of their marketing mix.
5 reasons why youTube video contests are so popular:
1) They are relatively cheap and easy to set up. Create a low budget video announcing the contest, create a youTube channel, and if you want create a simple contest web page.
2) You can promote your contest as much or as little as you like. Offering a good prize will usually be enough to generate word of mouth promotion and encourage participation.
3) Having a youTube video contest can make your company/product/brand appear modern and relevant…
Internet marketing has proven to be very effective when it comes to promoting social, charitable, and environmental causes, and blogs have played a major role in making this possible for marketers who are on a small budget.
Blog Action Day is a great example of an initiative with next to no funding, that has gone viral by asking bloggers to do what they do best, talk passionately about a subject.
Blog Action Day was started by Collis Ta’eed, Leo Babauta, and Cyan Ta’eed based on the idea of how great it would be if bloggers all around the world were talking about the same issue on the same day. All three are passionate about the environment, and they knew it was a popular subject, so they decided to make the environment the theme for Blog Action Day 2007.
Collis Ta’eed wrote a great post on the NorthxEast blog that describes in great detail how Blog Action Day got started.
He describes how they turned an idea into a global internet campaign in less than three months.
Adsense Video Units are the newest addition to Google’s Adsense lineup. Video Units are now available to web site publishers in the US, along with Adsense text and display ads, Adsense referal ads, Adsense search, and Adsense mobile ads.
The Adsense Video Unit is an ad supported video player that you can embed on you website or blog. Just like Adsense text and display ads, Google will choose what ads to display based on the content of your web page.
Sony’s most recent ad for its line of Bravia LCD TVs is riding high on the viral video charts.
This collaboration between Fallon and Passion Pictures is Sony’s third ad in their “Color Like No Other” campaign.
Chris Willingham Group Account Director at Fallon London said that color “is the most important thing in people’s minds when purchasing a new TV”. Throughout this campaign Sony has forgone any technical or feature based pitch, and focuses solely on color. The beauty of color and the emotions that color can stir up.
Sony has also released making of videos for their bouncing balls, and paint ads, and in the case of Play Doh they released a short making of video as a teaser even before the ad aired.
I discovered the report on Guy Kawasaki’s Blog. For those of you who haven’t heard of Guy Kawasaki, he was an Apple evangelist turned entrepreneur. Check out his blog it is worth the read.
For those of you who haven’t seen youTube’s overlay ads in action you can experience one about twenty seconds into this Dandelion Weird-Out music video.
There was no embed link with this video, so I didn’t get a chance to see if the overlay ads work when the videos are embedded in web pages or blogs. I don’t see any reason why they wouldn’t.
These overlay ads are pretty rare at the moment, and they seem to disappear soon after they appear, so check it out while you have a chance. I posted two images below, one of the overlay ad for the movie Halloween, and one showing the picture in picture movie trailer that plays if you click on the overlay.
Compile a 2 minute (or less) short video based around the theme Lose Yourself. This video should express a moment where you felt connected to nature or completely free - a moment of escape. You could compile the video from previous footage you’ve shot or create new footage to express your escapist moment.
The submission deadline is October 23rd 2007 and the winner will receive an adventure vacation courtesy of NOLS, TravelWorm, and lonely Planet TV.
Nielson Co. one of the worlds largest marketing research companies, and the people who bring us our TV ratings and Nielson NetRating has launched their own social network called Hey! Nielson.
I applaud them for the transparency of placing “Nielson” in the company name, because they could have just as easily kept this affiliation a lot more low key.
The new social network is a place for users to share their opinions on TV, movies, music, personalities and the internet. All the things that Nielson writes marketing reports on.
With the release of Halo 3 fast approaching, I thought I’d take a look at how Microsoft and Bungee used the internet to promote the third iteration of its most popular title.
Microsoft and Bungee followed a 5 Phase campaign, involving both online and offline marketing. It started with a TV ad that aired during Monday night football called “Starry Nights”.
The commercial was soon uploaded to youTube, and has received 3,781,245 views at the time of this posting.
Google has introduced yet another advertising technology called Google Gadget Ads to its Adwords advertising network.
Google describes Ad Gadgets as a “mini version of your webpage”. A gadget ad is basically a rich media ad that can include data feeds, maps, images, audio, video, Flash, HTML and JavaScript. They can be made to fit within any current Adsense size.
Google will let you choose specific sites to run you Gadget Ad, or you can leave it to Google’s ad targeting to place your ad on relevant web pages.
I imagine it will take a while for these Gadget Ads to catch on with advertisers and publishers because it take a lot more time, money and expertise to create a rich media ad than to create an Adwords text ad. The time will definitely come when Google Image ads, Google Video ads and Google Gadget Ads are a lot more common, but text ads have the advantage, because anyone with a computer and internet access can make one.
The New York Times was the first to announce that it will no longer be requiring its readers to pay for its TimesSelect service.
The Wall Street Journal followed suit with Walter Murdoch announcing that the Wall Street Journal Online will be offered free to its readers as well.
By making their content free, both papers predict a small loss in newspaper sales but both the NYT and the WSJ foresee a large increase in their online readership. By chosing to monetize their content through online ads and contextual search instead of a paid subscription model, both companies appear to agree that the paid subscription model was just not working.
In the face of easily accessible free news content all over the internet, it would be hard enough for the two companies to maintain their loyal readership and near impossible for them to convince new readers to pay for news on a subscription basis.
And the $57,000 goes to “Heinz the Kissable Ketchup” created by Andrew Dodson who runs a one man production shop out of Wheelersburg, Ohio.
His winning user generated commercial for the Heinz Top This TV Challenge aired during Sunday night’s Emmy Awards.
The four runner up videos each received $5700 and their commercials all aired on the Today Show Sept. 17th.
Heinz plans to run a second campaign in august.
Hungry for more? Due to the impressive number and awesome creativity of the commercials you all submitted, we are excited to announce the Heinz Top This TV Challenge Take Two-coming this October. Stay tuned for details.
Here is 5 part video I found on youTube this weekend called “Behind the scenes: Hollywood Goes Hypercommercial”. It is a critical look at how product placement is affecting movie making.
The video was created by the Media Education Foundation in 2000, so it may feel a little dated, but it is as relevant today as it was 7 years ago.
Product placement has become more prevalent in film and TV since then, not less. And online video is no different. Both professional and user generated content on sites like youTube and Revver are already being used by marketers to display their products.
Sometimes the product placement is transparent and out in the open like when companies post their commercials online, or run contests. But quite often marketers are looking for stealthier ways of integrating their products with popular content.
There are already several companies including Brandframe, WePlace, and InShot that are publicly offering their product placement services to help marketers get their product seen on user generated video sites on a pay per view basis.
Dan Meth created this short animated video feature the “Internet People” who have now become part of pop culture thanks to viral nature of internet video.
The video has become a viral video success of it’s own, with over a million views on youTube so far.
If there are any clips you don’t recognize, or if there are a few you want to revisit, Buzzfeed has created a comprehensive list of all the viral videos and memes mentioned in the video.
Hyudai has just launched a new ad campaign, and instead of featuring its cars it has opted for an honest and somewhat sarcastic approach to marketing itself.
The “Think about it” campaign is challenging people to think about what really makes a good car and to also reflect on how cars are being marketed to them.
The campaign by Goodby, Silverstein & Partners will include online, print, out of home, and TV ads, as well as the web page www.thinkaboutit.com.
This book is a great primer on advertising, and media buying across multiple platforms.
Have you ever wondered what a 30 second commercial cost on American Idol ($340,000), or a full color page in Sports Illustrated ($128,683) or what Yahoo! earn from it’s 25 million unique visitors a day ($250,000 - $425,000)?
This book has been thoroughly researched and by comparing old market ideals with emerging technology, gives us insight into what drives these numbers.
Yahoo has announced that it plans to acquire the online ad network BlueLithium for $300 million. This is an important and expected move by Yahoo to keep pace with Google, Microsoft and AOL who have also been aggressively buying advertising technology and networks.
BlueLithium is ranked as the fifth largest online advertising company in the US. It’s network grew based on the strength of its performance based display ads, meaning that advertisers only pay when people respond to a banner ad by taking some action like participating in a promotion or agreeing to receive more information about a product.
Facebook groups have become the single biggest story in internet marketing and PR over the last few months. When Facebook first started out as a student only social network, Facebook groups were small gathering places for students to look outside their circle of friends and find people with similar interests and discuss anything from their favorite bands to their favorite sports teams.
Students soon realized the power of these groups and began using them to organize and even protest. Now that Facebook has been opened up to the public the number and variety of Facebook groups has exploded.
Here is the final version of the partial user generated - partial Google staff created Gmail video.
The video is far from polished, and isn’t trying to deliver some finely crafted corporate message. It’s simple, fun, and after being online for only 2 days has 1.4 million views and growing.
This is a great example of what can happen if you invite your audience to participate.
If you have a niche product or service that doesn’t get a lot of search traffic, you need to figure out alternative ways to get attention.
Commenting on relevant Blogs and Forums, and participating in social networking groups are all great low cost ways to try and generate interest in your business. But have you ever considered good old fashioned postering as a low cost alternative to generate awareness and Drive traffic to your site? Here is a video created by…
Social Networks are hot right now. This summer, I can’t imagine any one company or brand getting more free PR than Facebook. Reporters are falling all over themselves to find Facebook related stories. I’m sure I’m not the only one who grins every time I hear “Are you on Facebook?”
Social Networks have gone from popular to pop culture, and Facebook, youTube, and mySpace have all entered the general lexicon. With all their success and millions of monthly visitors, the one problem all social networks seem to share is how do we make money? And the answer everyone seems to be coming up with is targeted advertising.
After months of testing youTube has finally rolled out its inVideo ads to the public. 15 seconds into a video, an overlay ad will appear over the bottom 20% of the video. This overlay will be 80% transparent and will animate for up to 10 seconds before disappearing on its own. You will have the option of closing the overlay ad immediately if you want. These overlay ads will contain links that can trigger a video ad. If you choose to watch the video ad, the video you are currently watching will pause, and then the “player-in-player” video ad will begin playing, and disappear once it is finished. Google estimates that 75% of people will watch the full player in player ad.
There has been a lot of buzz over the last couple days about Seth McFarlane (creator of Family Guy), and Raven Symone, (star of the Disney’s That’s So Raven) deciding to use Google Adsense to distribute their original video content. Seth McFarlane is planning on creating 50 animated shorts and Raven Symone is producing a series of short “how-to” videos. The videos will appear in a video box on a targeted webpage that the viewer will have to click to play. Each video will be accompanied by banner advertising and either a pre-roll or post roll video ad. There has not yet been any mention of product placement, or specific brands tied to the project.
With it’s latest Gmail promo video, Google shows us once again, that simple ideas are viral ideas. The catalyst for this collaborative video campaign is “help us imagine how an email message travels around the world”.
Google set the ball rolling with a short somewhat comical clip of google employees passing around an oversized Gmail M-velope. They invite people around the world to download and print the M-velope and create their own 10 second clip to ad to the video. Google will select it’s favorites to complete the video, and the video will then play on the Gmail homepage, via youTube of course.
Heavy.com has created the Husky Network to market it’s own brand of ad supported video network. It consists of surrounding or wrapping a video player with a large static ad.
Publishers would have a choice of embedding the ad supported video into their web pages, or alternatively having the ad and video open in a pop up or an overlay. Anyone familiar with watching videos on the Heavy.com will already be familiar with the format.
I highly recommend anyone interested in online video read a recent Adam Curry intererview by Jack Myers, over at the Mediapost TV Board. Adam Curry, ex MTV VJ, current host of Podfinder and partner in the social audio/video network www.podshow.com compared the recent online video explosion to the early days of MTV, and argues that the future of marketable online video lies in episodic content.
YouTube, with millions of single-click unlinked video fragments, is not the future of broadband entertainment. ITunes, with a closed business model focused exclusively on selling iPods, is also not the future… The future is “serialized episodic content that bridges the gap between TV networks and YouTube.
While giving a speech at the Seoul Digital Forum, Eric Schmidt, Chairman and CEO of Google, was asked by a member of the audience “What is Web 3.0″? Watch this quick clip for the answer.
He starts by making a jab at the term Web 2.0, but then responds with a very insightful answer, that probably has more to do with Google’s than Web 3.0, if you can differentiate the two.
Here’s how it works, an advertiser has a video ad she wants you to see, the magazine publisher has a magazine he wants you to subscribe to, and you want that magazine. This is where AdPerk comes in.
They’ve created a web page where people can watch video ads in return for free or discounted magazine subscriptions. You can earn a free subscription to Popular Mechanics or 50% off Dwell Magazine. It looks like Ode and Alternative Magazine are on board and will be available soon.
Time is running out to enter the latest user generated ad contest. The deadline is August 6th. The top 15 will be voted on by the public starting August 26th. The top 5 will be seen on TV and the winner will receive $57,000. Is the user generated ad just a trend, or is it on its way to becoming a standard advertising practice?
At this point there doesn’t seem to be a lot of online buzz around this campaign unless of course you visit youTube.
MSNBC.com is partnering with Pulse 360’s Publisher’s Vertical Network (PVN), to launch a MSNBC.com Politics and a Today Show advertising network. Both networks will offer a combination of content, advertising and sponsored links.
They are touting this as an alternative to Google’s Adsense for small online publishers that want to increase their revenue and “enhance their webpage”. They are offering a variety of content and advertising formats including; video boxes, stories boxes and sponsored link boxes.
Here is a video of legendary adman David Gunn presenting his favorite print and TV ads at Cannes 2007.
The handheld footage is a little anoying at times, but if you’re a fan of international advertising and you’ve always wanted to visit Cannes for it’s annual advertsing awards conference, here’s your chance for a cheap sneak peak.
A spoof McDonalds commercial featuring a couple guys rapping about Chicken McNuggets has been featured almost unedited in McDonalds latest TV ad. The original video surfaced on youTube over a year ago, and is now being credited with increasing McNugget sales in the New York area where the the ad has been running for the last two weeks.
What more could an advertiser want, a medium with a large highly targeted captive audience with seemingly very accurate viewer and listener data. But why aren’t advertisers flocking to podcasting like they do to so many other new mediums. Podcasters who attract weekly audiences numbering in the tens of thousands still struggle to find advertisers or sponsors if they are not affiliated with large media companies.
The common complaint by many advertisers has been that there is no way to really know if their advertisement has been seen or heard, and they also want the ability to swap out old advertisements from shows once the ads have run their course. To ad to the difficulties, podcasts are as unpredictable in content as they are in length, and the content creators range from seasoned pros to outright amateurs.
The common complaint by many advertisers has been that there is no way to really know if their advertisement has been seen or heard, and they also want the ability to swap out old advertisements from shows once the ads have run their course. To ad to the difficulties, podcasts are as unpredictable in content as they are in length, and the content creators range from seasoned pros to outright amateurs.