When Disney took to YouTube, it was clear that a line had been drawn in the sand. But there’s more to the YouTube effect than the fact that its’s all about the users. Here’s what Charlene Li of Forrester has to say about the Samuel Jackson movie, Snakes on a Plane advertised on YouTube.
Live Buy It and the power of sms
SMS marketing is an area that hasn’t seen a lot of movement, especially in the US. But a new program called Live Buy It will be an experiment worth watching. The New York Times reported yesterday how Lucky magazine will begin offering readers in September a way to buy from eighteen marketers. If it sounds a lot like PayPal’s Text2Buy, it there’s a reason. The service is powered by PayPal.
Expect to see other media companies adding similar programs as a value added service for their advertisers, allowing a marketer to create a campaign that can be tracked in terms of sales, rather than impressions. Publishers, especially online publishers have begun to look for ways to keep advertisers more loyal. They may not have seen the connection between cell phones and their product at first, but they will. With SMS, the possibilities are endless. TextMarketer in the UK, has a feature where someone can conduct a reverse auction via SMS!
Podcasts take it away
In a recent survey, 72% of respondents said they downloaded or listened to podcasts on technology topics on more than one occasion. That’s a very high number, and a sobering one, considering it comes from a Universal McCann survey. Reported by Marketing Vox.
I feel vindicated about the insights into white papers and reports, as I have been encouraging many people to think of podcasts as the better delivery system for content we traditionally dump into PDFs. According to the study, nearly 60% of respondents said information on business or technology topics via white papers would be "more interesting" if they were delivered via podcasts. But not just in B2B marketing. How about internal marketing? I believe that much of the content that gets lost on company intranets would be better used if employees were given the podcast alternative.
Just watch slogan for CBS, lame
I can’t see why CBS News would use such a lame slogan, "Just watch," for the transition of Katie Couric. There’s so much more to news today, even on the CBS site, which ironically tries to get viewers to do more than just watch. It’s more like just customize on their site with RSS feeds, cell phone alerts, podcasts, and my favorite the build your own broadcast, that allows you to add stories as playlists. Someone should have told them, too, that Fox news has been using ‘just you watch’ for quite sometime now. I would’ve thought the ‘just’ (do it) sloganizing was in retirment by now.
Thomas Friedman delivers
Another an ad stunt on Amazon Fishbowl. Starring Thomas Friedman dressed up as an UPS driver on a delivery run. It plugs the expanded version of The World is Flat.
If you’ve read the book, you’ll know why Amazon teamed up Friedman with UPS. In the first edition, Friedman has a section on UPS ("the ones who wear the homely brown shorts and drive those ugly brown trucks") that illustrates his flat-earth theory –how the company’s huge logistics operation makes small companies compete better. Now if only an ugly brown truck were to pull up outside my house…
The Youtube effect on the ratings debate
User generated media is definitely rattling the cages of mainstream TV. Not just because people on the fringes are creating and uploading content that highly paid content creators are doing, but because sites like YouTube are contributing to the time-shifting phenomenon. I listened to a San Francisco Chronicle podcast about how even studios are uploading their clips to create some buzz, and a reporter saying that she loved YouTube because she can find episodes of programs that she missed on TV.
This brings in the advertising part of the equation. How to measure the time-shifted program audience (and charge adverrtisers for the viewers they attract?) Nielsen has a plan to ‘regain playback’ according to Media News Daily. This is a result of a push by the major broadcast networks "to seize the upper hand the next TV ratings debate."
MediaNewsDaily cites a Nielsen report that reveals how 18% of prime-time viewing was done in playback mode. As the time-shifting phenomenon grows, and alternative ways of getting our ‘non-live’ programs emerge, the ratings debate will heat up even more. Time to pull out all the measurement tools at our disposal. If I was an advertiser, I won’t wait for third party reports -I’d track my audience myself.
Unintentional stereotyping
Very good analysis in MediaPost, by Larry Dobrow about the challenges and faux pas of marketers targeting and stereotyping Asian-American males*. I should know. Being part of this demographic, I have to add to this and suggest that technology plays a big part in how to reach them/us.
Asian-Americans may not be marketing-averse, if you find ways to relate to their interests. The numbers may be small –11.8 million by one count, or 12.3 million by another— but growing fast (37.6 million by 2050). As the article says, Asian-Americans may gravitate toward mainstream media once they have lived in the US for about 10 years. But what it doesn’t say is how we also subscribe to informal, highly influential, hard-to-reach social networks. It’s not something marketers better get used to.
* One more stereotype to break here. How could anyone not see the important role females play in this demographic?
Coke and football in blog-speak
From an apartment in Berlin, a few bloggers, turn this sports event into a memorable event. The blog, "We all speak football," is sponsored by Coke. Which makes it an interesting exercise in branding –user-gerated content meets sports meets brand. Click on the icon below to go there. Great video footage! Downloadable to video iPods, too.
Teens, mosquitoes and ringtones
Never thought there could be a connection between ringtones and teenagers this way. It’s a high frequency mosquito repellant, now a ringtone, that adults cannot hear –but teenagers can. Used, aparently by young people who want to et around cellphone restrictions in schools. Story here.
Ubiquitous computing meets media measurement
At the company I work for, iCrossing, we like to say that "if you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it." For years, people pooh-poohed measurement because, of course it was nearly impossible to measure what people did after they watched a commercial, or read a story about a product. Ubiquitous computing has changed. People do provide feeback, if you ask, and if you know where to look.
So the news of Nielsen Media launching into tracking not just online, but out-of-home behavior, is more or less extpected. New meters will evolve to track how consumers interact with messaging on mobile devices. They call it A2/M2 which stands for Anytime Anywhere Media Measurement. Now, not only can we measure the post-media experience, but we can measure what customers do while being engaged in the medium. Multi-media-tasking is rising, and we know that people do use mobile phones or go online while watching TV, or while reading a newspaper. Smart advertisers can leverage this, if they engage in what Google calls ‘dayparting.’ That’s the ability to turn on and off keywords, so that searchable keywords are available only at the times the advertiser expects it’s specific target audience to be searching.
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