Friday, June 15, 2007

Widgverts

Jeff Jarvis quotes a pal:

Simply put, widgets are the most recent embodiment of highly distributable Web media. Widgets permit users to separate the content from the Web page, permitting users to implant them on all types of pages, from personalized portal home pages to blogs to personal pages on social sites like MySpace or Facebook. I believe that over the next three years, widgets will change online advertising as we know it today. . . .

Are widgets the next search? I don’t think so. However, I do think that the concept of highly portable, object-oriented content that is personally and virally distributed will redefine how we think about Web pages, and how advertisers think about using the Web to communicate and interact with consumers.

He also rediscovered a related post he wrote two years ago: Feedthink meets Widgethink. “Most content is a feed and feeds can fill many widgets and that adds up to a new architecture for pages and content.” Cool!

Friday, June 08, 2007

YouTube Embedded Videos interface updated

Google Blogoscoped:

Embedded YouTube videos have now received the new interface that had been around for a while, as Daniel Garcia reports in the forum. For a live sample, have a look at the two promotional videos posted here earlier. The time line navigation has been optimized so that you can now jump ahead in a video even if that part hasn’t been loaded yet (Google Video already did this before). The time control is still flaky when it comes to certain details – e.g. jumping back to a specific point in the video by clicking the control doesn’t always work. Also, embedding the code on your own site has been made easier through new buttons displayed at the end of a movie.

The bigger change in this roll-out is the related videos feature; when you hover over certain parts of the video (which may happen accidentally), an array of related videos pops up at the bottom, represented by video stills. Clicking a thumbnail seamlessly opens the new video in the same player. This change might ensure that people stay longer and longer on embedded YouTube content, jumping from clips they wanted to see to clips they didn’t even know existed. As soon as ads are rolled out into embedded YouTube content – something we can be quite certain will happen one of these days as a good way for YouTube/ Google to create revenue from all the free hosting they provide – this will also be a way to expose viewers to more ad time than before.

Via ZDNet’s Garett Rogers, who calls the related videos feature a money machine. “As soon as it becomes second nature for users to use the tool, we should start to see sponsored results mixed with these related videos. These advertisements stay out of the way and are only seen when users are actually looking for something - the reason Google’s other ads are so effective.

Sunday, June 03, 2007

Rocketboom & YouTube flip the ad model

Monday Rocketboom will be launching a new sponsorship model:

To our suprise...we learned that companies weren’t really interested in us having complete conviction in them anyway.  Ultimately, they really were big fans of Rocketboom and they wanted us (and our audience) to know that.  *They* had the conviction in *us*.

So that’s why we took that original model and flipped it. Our relationship to the sponsor now starts off with a sign of gratitude for their support.

In return, we have a great, critical audience that a sponsor can leverage to provide feedback and insight into their situation. While the system may not be right for many other environments, I think it will be extremely effective on Rocketboom. The entire program was designed to match Rocketboom as it already is.

I’m extremely proud to kick off this Monday with YouTube as our first sponsor. Regarding the broad topic of “video online”, in my personal opinion, there is not a single other group in the world that has done more to democratize the moving image. We finally got a Rocketboom YouTube account up and running as well. It’s amazing to think we have made it this far without any flash distributions. YouTube will make Rocketboom much easier to share, obviously.

This is terrific news! It’s not crystal clear to me how it will play out but I’m enthusiastic because both YouTube and Rocketboom understand that preroll ads don’t work for the format. They both want to find an ad model that does and I trust that if anyone can, they can.

Via NewTeeVee, “The show has made a number of groundbreaking distribution deals for TiVos and the like, but has done little to utilize the viral capabilities of web video.... With YouTube, Rocketboom will not only get in front of the biggest online video audience in existence, but also be much easier to share, embed, respond to, and subscribe to through the web browser.”

Sunday, May 27, 2007

The Happiness Factory

Coke’s chairman and chief executive E. Neville Isdell’s favorite commercial. More from the NYTimes story:

Since Mr. Isdell took over, Coke’s research and development budget has more than doubled. And Mr. Kent says the company is counting on a beefed-up innovation laboratory to deliver new products and packaging to lure customers. The lab is tucked away in a rather unsavory corner of the company’s sprawling headquarters, at the end of a cracked driveway at the back of a low concrete building that looks more like an elementary school than a tech center. A sign on a plain steel door reads “KO Lab.” [...]

The lab also displays all kinds of new products. “Mother” is a natural energy drink that has been introduced in Australia, while Nanairo Acha, a tea sold in Japan, changes color depending on its temperature. Coke Zero was created here. The lab is also exploring new ways to market Coca-Cola. A “super coolâ€Â� vending machine keeps soda colder than its freezing point, so that when the cap is opened the bubbles form tiny ice crystals.

Friday, May 25, 2007

Hyundai’s image problem

Hyundai sent a mailing today encouraging me to save a tree. I can switch to email mailings from the car-maker but not opt out. So we kill a couple more trees and they blame me. My take is that the cost of the mailings is the only disincentive I can send!

I bought my second Hyundai last year. I’d have rather bought a Camry, but $5,000 and half the warranty convinced me to stick with Hyundai. Their goal must be not just to keep me as a customer but to make me choose them again next time based on something other than price. If anyone can do it, this guy can:

As senior vice-president for global marketing at Nissan in Tokyo and vice-president for marketing at Nissan’s North American operation before that, [Steve Wilhite] was used to looking at Hyundai as a competitor. He’d seen its quality improve “to scary levels,” he says--and sales stall. It was clear that the company needed a new “big idea” to redefine its brand and move it away from an association with cheap, tin-pot vehicles. Wilhite had reinvigorated brands before, earning marketing-guru status at Volkswagen in the 1990s when he led the German carmaker’s comeback, largely through clever advertising. Then he’d gone on to become Apple Computer Inc.’s top marketer. That Hyundai chose Wilhite to run its entire U.S. operation says volumes about how critical a strong, new brand identity is to Hyundai’s future.

Apple & VW; those are great associations. But the job is a tough one:

Wilhite is focused on repositioning Hyundai as an overachieving, underappreciated brand that smart people are discovering. While briefing the ad agencies bidding for the new Hyundai campaign, he evoked the “Drivers Wanted” ad campaign that Arnold Worldwide created for Volkswagen in the mid-1990s, as well as the classic VW ads from the 1960s, that “made consumers look at a brand through a different lens.” Says Scott Goodson, CEO of ad agency Strawberry Frog: “Even when you show a consumer that quality is higher than Toyota, they don’t believe you.” [...]

In the end, Wilhite and a committee of managers and dealers opted for San Francisco-based Goodby, Silverstein + Partners. Goodby helped to define Hyundai’s problem using research involving 200 people who sized up the new Veracruz crossover. When a group was shown the vehicle without any identifying logos on it, 71% said they’d buy it. Once the Hyundai logo went on, however, that dropped to 52%. In the same research, a Toyota logo lifts intent-to-purchase by more than 20%.

Goodby’s campaign, due out by June, is expected to blanket TV, the Internet, and newspapers with data about safety ratings, quality, and value pricing using a tone that agency CEO Jeff Goodby describes as one of “disarming honesty.” The idea is to create an environment, he says, where neighbors and co-workers of Hyundai buyers completely understand why they bought a Hyundai. “Hyundai,” he notes, “has no social currency today.”

I hope they succeed. A freind’s Mercedes broke down, again, in the parking lot at lunch the other day (actually, it switched to “limp mode” so that it could hobble home) and still I feel defensive the logo on my grill. But I love the car. Highest safety rating, great gas mileage as prices soar, bumper to bumper warranty and roadside service.

Monday, May 14, 2007

Harmony or Chemistry?

More on the squabble, and eHarmony’s rejection criteria, from the WaPo. Interesting to note that Chemistry.com is part of the Barry Diller empire. 

Saturday, April 28, 2007

Matt Bai: The Post Money Era

Matt Bai says DeVillis is the future of political ads; that PVRs and the Internet spell the end of political advertising as we know it. He expects online ads will get more expensive “as well-trafficked sites and Internet consultants dream up new ways to cash in on the migration of politics to the Web; where there’s money to be made, someone generally makes it.” But by the 2012 election cycle money will matter far less than ever before:

It’s arguable that, beyond a certain base line, how much you stockpile as a candidate - whether you have $75 million in the primaries, or even $100 million - will soon matter less than ever before. You can use that money to throw up ads on every late-night lineup in the Midwest, or spend it on plush offices or layers of consultants, but what does all that really get you, other than an inflated sense of your own success? Ask Howard Dean, who outraised all his 2004 primary opponents and ended up winning one state: his own.

“The need for money is probably going to reach some diminishing return, and it’s probably going to be a pretty low ceiling, compared to past campaigns,” predicts Peter Leyden, president of the left-leaning New Politics Institute. In other words, the emerging high-tech marketplace may yet bring us closer to what decades of federal campaign regulations have failed to achieve: a day when candidates can afford to spend less time obsessing over the constant need for cash and more time concerned with the currency of their ideas.

I look forward to his book, The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics. He was interviewed on On The Media yesterday.

Friday, March 30, 2007

AdSense nonsense

Those of you who read me regularly will know that I am a Google fan; I’ve even waxed on about the appeal of Google ruling the world. I hate to be fickle but yesterday I got this email from the AdSense Team and now I’m having second thoughts about a Google ruler:

Hello,

While reviewing your account, we noticed that you are currently displaying Google ads in a manner that is not compliant with our policies. For instance, we found violations of AdSense policies on pages such as http://atypicaljoe.com/index.php? /site/comments/support_for_gays_in_the_nba/.

Publishers are not permitted to encourage users to click on Google ads or bring excessive attention to ad units. For example, your site cannot contain phrases such as “click the ads,” “support our sponsors,” “visit these recommended links,” or other similar language that could apply to the Google ads on your site. Publishers may not use arrows or other symbols to direct attention to the ads on their sites, and publishers may not label the Google ads with text other than “sponsored links” or “advertisements.”

Please make any necessary changes to your web pages in the next 3 business days. We also suggest that you take the time to review our program policies (https://www.google.com/adsense/policies) to ensure that all of your other pages are in compliance.

Once you update your site, we will automatically detect the changes and ad serving will not be affected. If you choose not to make the changes to your account within the next three days, your account will remain active but you will no longer be able to display ads on the site. Please note, however, that we may disable your account if further violations are found in the future.

Thank you for your cooperation.

Sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team

I have to say I am taken aback. Click through to the offending post and you’ll find that it simply quotes another blog with very little commentary of my own. I have no idea what the Googlebot found but I have NOT edited the page and there’s certainly nothing that violates the Google policy.

I’m hardly going to bother urging my humble hundred-plus readers to click an ad. What am I stupid? Like I’d think that would make me some money?

Their ads run on this site but they sit there ignored by me. Google owes me one hundred thirty something dollars for a year’s worth of ads; I’ve never bothered doing the tax form necessary in order for them to send a check. I don’t care about their piddly few bucks (if I did I’d want to know something about their payout formula).

So now I stand accused and now I do care. And what recourse do I have? Not much! I wrote back asking for clarification. I’ll let you know if ever I hear back from them.

UPDATE: Two business days later, I heard back. Indeed I had violated the policy:

Hello Joe,

Thanks for following up with us. For clarification, the following language is found on your site in the “Joe’s AdBar” section of your pages that we feel may encourage users to click on the Google ads that you’re displaying on your site:

“Please support my sponsors”

We kindly ask that you remove either the ads from pages with the previously mentioned language or remove the language from your site.

Sincerely,

[name omitted]
The Google AdSense Team

I’ve removed the offending language. While I see now that it clearly was a violation, I thought of it as such benign boilerplate that I really didn’t remember it was there even after rereading their policies to see what I’d done wrong. The request couldn’t have been more polite. I am chastened and contrite.

Monday, March 19, 2007

Hillary 1984 whodunit: Maybe it was Limbaugh

After all, the anti-Clinton conservatives have been high on Obama lately:

The fact that Hillary Clinton took something of a pounding last week wasn’t big news. But an examination of the talk outlets revealed an interesting twist to that pattern. Whatever the motivation, some of those conservative hosts are not only using their microphones to blast away at Clinton. They are also embracing, or at least saying nice things about, Barack Obama, a liberal Democrat whose primary virtue in their eyes may be that he can defeat Clinton for the nomination.

Whether heartfelt, strategic or simply faint praise, this Obama mini-love fest may strike some as sounding strange coming from some icons of conservative talk.

Via Romenesko.

SEE ALSO: Adam Conner’s excellent parsing of the viral explosion, Anatomy, Mystery, and Impact of The Obama 1984 Ad.

Thursday, February 22, 2007

Viacom Joost

NYTimes:

Fear not, MTV fans. Episodes of “Laguna Beachâ€Â� and “The Real World” will soon be back on the Internet, free of charge. But this time, viewing is on Viacom’s terms.

Viacom, the parent of networks like MTV and Comedy Central, which produce the types of programs that are ideal for watching on the Web, said yesterday that it had reached a deal with the Silicon Valley start-up Joost to distribute video online.

The agreement came a little more than two weeks after Viacom demanded that YouTube remove more than 100,000 clips of its programming.

The Joost partnership gives Viacom something it pressed with YouTube but never received: a share of advertising revenue. Neither company disclosed the terms of the agreement, but media experts said a 65-35 split in Viacom’s favor would be reasonable.

Programs will have commercial breaks, but the number of commercials in each episode will be fewer than on regular network television.

The Joost deal also provides a level of control for Viacom that it lacked with YouTube. Joost will not allow users to upload any of their own content.

Exactly the kind of deal media giants like: they get the lion’s share of the ad money, they can clutter up their content with as many ads as they want, and the environment is not sullied by any of that user created content. Fine with me. Let them set up their space; the more they limit the availability of their content (whether through technical limits or ad clutter that makes a viewing experience all that much less appealing) the more room they leave in the media space for you and me to get ours seen.

SEE ALSO: YouTube’s media relationships going south fast. 

Tuesday, February 20, 2007

An MTV renaissance?

Robert Young at GigaOM says MTV is poised for a comeback.

Generally speaking, I’ve bought into the mainstream blogosphere wisdom that it was a big mistake for Viacom to pull its clips from YouTube. I still see the move as nothing more than a negotiating ploy. But what if it is more?

Young says, “Viacom is doing absolutely the right thing” and quotes this press release as evidence:

You won’t find clips of comedian Jon Stewart’s “Daily Show” and MTV’s “Pimp My Ride” on YouTube any more, but Viacom Inc. is laying the groundwork for its videos to be available to hundreds of thousands of other sites… In the next few months, Web users will be able to grab videos from nearly all MTV-owned sites and post them on their own blogs or Web sites, lessening the need to go to YouTube, the top online video service that Google Inc. acquired last year.

MTV’s newly-appointed President of Global Digital Media, Mike Salmi, says, “The move is part of a strategy to bring Viacom’s Web sites up to “Web 2.0’ standards… Part of that is allowing people to take our content and embed it and make your own things out of it, whatever they want.”

I might ask why Viacom is pulling the clips before they’re ready with their own site; that doesn’t seem “absolutely right” to me. But I could imagine that by making their “vast video libraries archived within MTV, Comedy Central, Nickelodeon, SpikeTV, etc.” available, exactly the “kind of “video snacks” that are so popular on online video-sharing sites,” we could see MTV reshape the web-video landscape the way MTV Networks did cable in the 1980s.

My two caveats are, 1) if they were going to, the roll-out should have been done differently - making fans mad by pulling videos from YouTube with only talk of an alternative doesn’t work for me, and 2) how are they going to handle advertising? Pre-roll ads of the kind the television-types use all over the net now are rejected by fans.

The ad industry itself should learn that interruption, clutter and irrelevance alienate viewers. The TV industry must learn that their content’s not worth half as much as their greedy little broadcast-monopoly manufactured-scarcity models suppose. They can make a bundle in small increments. Just look at Google.

Sunday, February 18, 2007

Why use Gmail?

Friday, February 09, 2007

“I’m a PC. I’m a Mac. I’m Linux.”

Via TechDigest.

Viacom plans for ComedyCentral.com

Old BIG media thinks it can beat new BIG media. Let’s watch:

Viacom representatives have been quietly telling industry insiders this week that they plan to aggressively promote their revamped ComedyCentral.com Web site. Viacom executives here at the Media Summit Conference won’t say exactly what they plan to do, but it’s already apparent they plan to put some power behind the promotion.

The company recently began offering so-called embed code that allows fans of popular programs such as the The Daily Show and The Colbert Report to post clips to their MySpace.com pages or blogs. That embed code duplicates one of the more popular features of YouTube: the ability to easily post videos on other Web sites and blogs.

The idea behind the strategy, experts believe, it is to find a “workaround” to YouTube.

Their “work around” lacks community - rate? favorite? share? comment? They ain’t got it. And it takes more than technology to get it. What they want is to make their cake and eat it too:

That Viacom is essentially encouraging its Web audience to repost its materials is also the latest indication that big media companies are trying to glom onto Internet concepts such as viral marketing and community sharing while still maintaining some control over the shows they create.

Tone deaf:

By allowing people to post their shows on their MySpace pages and blogs, Viacom is convinced it will generate just as much interest in funny snippets from the company’s shows as someone posting a clip on YouTube.

“We definitely feel that video on the Web is a huge tool,” Flannigan said. “It drives word-of-mouth discussion about a show.”

Offering the embed code also allows them to generate advertising revenue, and some of the clips on Comedycentral.com already feature 30-second advertisements.

30 second spots???

These guys have no clue about the new audience dynamic. Those 30-second spots are a glaring indication. Steeped in their oligopoly practices, they imagine a fan loyalty that is not there and that they do not deserve. They arrogantly presume the audience is theirs to own and that they can just port it right over to the web.

Chad Hurley has long resisted the commercial interruption; it will be interesting to see the impact of Google but the hope is that together they will have more ad savvy than that. I love advertising, I’m happy to have ads. I don’t want clutter, interruption or irrelevant ads and I don’t value old BIG media content anywhere near what they do. 

Thursday, February 08, 2007

Viacom v YouTube & the thin blue line

Terry Heaton:

The chest-beating from Viacom and now NBC Universal are the inevitable tactics of an industry that’s fighting for its life as wave after wave of disruptive technologies and innovations threaten to crush the ship that has kept us afloat for so many years. As content creators, these entertainment companies have the right to do whatever they wish regarding “their” content. The problem is that once it has aired, people think of it as theirs.

This is not a new twist to human nature. We’ve been able to tape programs for decades and share them with our friends. What’s new is this digital thing; it’s just so much easier now. And the graph below from Alexa shows the problem for Viacom. I’ve compared YouTube’s traffic (the red line) with comedycentral.com (the blue line). The comedycentral.com line is jammed to the bottom by YouTube - so much so that you can’t even see it.

Terry goes on to explain how YouTube is the new spectrum and, after observing that at any given time 3 to 5 of the top 100 videos are ads, concludes that broadcasters “ought to be experimenting in this space. After all, it doesn’t cost a dime to do it.”

Via Steve Safran, “When you pull clips from YouTube, you don’t get them at your site. You just lose them, period.”

Monday, February 05, 2007

Rate the SuperBowl ads

On YouTube.

Right now Snickers is number 4. (John?) Bud Light’s Class Mencia is 1.

I could care less about the ads. But the YouTube implementation is really slick.

Snickers

What were there ad people thinking? I didn’t watch the game so I missed the ads. But I just can’t imagine this selling a Snickers bar. Newsday:

The Snickers ad shown during the first half of the game featured two male mechanics working closely under the hood of a car. When one pulls out a Snickers bar and begins eating it, the other locks his lips around the other end and also begins to chomp away. Their lips meet, horrifying both of them. They ultimately pull off tufts of chest hair and scream.

Via SoVo Blog, “If the guys had run into a nearby Hooters, I could understand how that might be perceived as an antidote to “unmanly” behavior. But I’ve always thought of chest hair removal as pretty gay.”

SEE ALSO: Seth Stevenson in Slate, “Another year, another Bud Light ad to kick things off.” And later, on Snickers:

1) Ripping out chest hair is manly? I thought chest-hair removal was a firmly metrosexual move. 2) Once again, disgusting hair imagery appears in a food/beverage ad. Not appetizing! 3) Apparently, knee-jerk homophobia is still grounds for comedy.

I didn’t find it homophobic. I didn’t find it funny. I just thought it was bad.

UPDATE: The Mars site had four versions of the ad. Aravosis argues they are homophobic (I didn’t watch the one he finds most offensive). Mars pulled the website. And the ads.

LATER: I had linked to the Mars site above. Since it was pulled, I substituted a YouTube link to the version that ran in the SuperBowl.

Thursday, February 01, 2007

1,160 pixels per square foot

I don’t watch football but I sure would like to see this field:

ALEX GOLDMARK: They call it “Turf TV” because, well, it can turn football field turf into a television.

MARK NICHOLLS: Not, you know, high definition, but it’s comparable to a regular television screen. There’s 1,160 pixels per square foot.

Mark Nicholls is CEO of Sportexe, the company that makes the field. They put fiber-optic “straws,” as he calls them, inside each little strand of fake grass. But besides that, he says it’s a normal turf field.

NICHOLLS: Plays the same, looks the same, has the same durability. The difference is is shooting up through the middle of that straw is light. And when we can determine what and in what configuration those light up in, with the push of a button it can look like a football field. And with the push of another button it can be a soccer field.

And a Saturday Night Fever-style flashing floor for a halftime show even...And fiber optics have some other potentially useful properties.

NICHOLLS: So as you walk down the field, I could essentially light your footprints behind you. When that receiver is . . . is catching the ball and sliding out of bounds, I can actually light exactly where they touched the ground.

More from Forbes.

Ad hoax bombs

Lost Remote’s Steve Safran was the first to figure out that the ten blinking devices that had Boston in a tizzy all day yesterday were, in fact, part of an outdoor marketing campaign for Adult Swim’s Aqua Teen Hunger Force.

Asked Steve:

After an ENTIRE day of live coverage and city-wide disruption, Turner Broadcasting has released a statement explaining that it is indeed a Aqua Teen Hunger Force marketing stunt. I just did a phoner on the news to explain a little more. There is a BIG question here: why didn’t the police know? Why didn’t they get information from the other cities where this happened? How come it took Turner all day to tell Boston what was going on? The story was on national channels - didn’t any officials in other cities think to tell Boston officials?

Later, Turner issued a statement. It’s worth noting that local TV stations (reacting, no doubt, to the new realities born of the FCC) photoshopped and/or pixelated images of the devices, little LED Moominites, to obscure the three lights that indicate an extended middle finger. Notes Steve:

By “protecting” us from the image of the character, TV missed the opportunity to show the audience exactly what it was. The police and the stations would have, doubtlessly, received tons of calls explaining the harmless nature of the character.

The clincher, arrests:

Boston authorities are still angry. They arrested two men who put up the electronic promotions and vowed to hold Turner accountable for what Menino said was “corporate greed,” that led to at least $500,000 in police costs.

Turner said the devices have been in place for two to three weeks in 10 cities: Boston; New York; Los Angeles; Chicago; Atlanta; Seattle; Portland, Ore.; Austin, Texas; San Francisco; and Philadelphia. As soon as the company realized the Boston problem, it said, law enforcement officials were told of their locations in all 10 cities.

James Joyner, “It’s not clear what crime has been committed. Did the company call in a bomb threat?”

Steve Safran, “Police described the light-up signs as having construction “consistent with an explosive device” which, if you count a circuit board, some lights and a battery taped together, means I have several potential explosive devices in my kids’ playroom.”

I’d be watching Steve on Good Morning America right now (we turned off NPR to watch) but apparently the Atlanta equivalent of a Boston bomb scare is “about a quarter inch of wet snow.” The ABC affiliate there (the only one we get here) has pre-empted the entire program.

Saturday, January 27, 2007

3 second YouTube ads

The news is that YouTube will share ad revenue with those who provide video. Good. But what interested me more was the notion of a three second ad:

The audience of the YouTube website will not have to put up with overly long “pre-roll” adverts. Mr Hurley said a clip of three seconds length was one of the options, although the details had not been worked out yet.

I’ve been ardently opposed to pre-roll ads. But three seconds may be fair and reasonable.

Via Fred Wilson:

To date, they’ve showed a good feel for what will work in this emerging medium. We will soon see if they have a similar feel for how to monetize and compensate everyone in the ecosystem. As always, I am rooting for them.

Monday, January 15, 2007

TiVo brings back fast-forward ads

I complained about them but never even saw one last time around. Now TiVo’s said to be bringing them back:

There’s nothing that DVR owners like more than a good commercial, so TiVo subscribers will be overjoyed to learn that the company has once again begun overlaying advertisements to entertain viewers during those interminable seconds it takes to fast forward from one TV segment to another. Wait a minute, that’s not right. There’s nothing that DVR owners hate more than commercials, which is one of the reasons that they pay a monthly fee for the privilege of zipping through Madison Avenue’s wares. Well despite the fact that reactions were pretty negative the first time TiVo decided to drop banner ads on top of the fast forward screen, apparently the still shots (and their resulting revenue) were popular enough among company execs to warrant a second go-round. Unlike the initial implementation, however, these new ads supposedly mirror the commercials being skipped; so if you’re zooming past a BMW ad, for instance, you’ll likely see pics of a German luxury car superimposed on the content being ignored. Also back on the scene are the little green on-screen “thumbs up” icons that allow you to use your remote to access—you guessed it—even more commercials. With all the menu screen, post-roll, and now fast forward pitches that TiVo owners have to deal with, we’re wondering if the company should take a page from Web 2.0 and drop the subscription fee altogether in favor of a strictly ad-based model.

It’s soon time to upgrade to HD; it’s either TiVo or an ad and subscription free MythTV on the Monolith Media Center.

The Times had a piece today on advertisers filling up every imaginable space. Here, my zip code keeps me off the grid. I actually miss the energy advertisers used to use to grab my attention. TiVo’s got my zip code, I’m wondering if that’s why I didn’t get any ads last time around?

Thursday, December 28, 2006

Video ads that work in a YouTube world?

Earlier I read this Chris Anderson 2007 prediction in the LATimes:

I’M WILLING TO bet that 2007 is the year that somebody figures out how to make video advertising work in a YouTube world. And if I’m right, the TV industry is going to get very rocky, very fast.

Later I came across this from Cory Bergman at Lost Remote:

Earlier this year, Google rolled out click-to-play video ad units as part of its AdWords network (demo here).  Now Google is testing in-stream video ads, a sort of video AdSense for content publishers.  Here’s how it would work: Publishers upload video to Google Video, embed the players on their own sites and the Google-powered ads are embedded in the streams (currently as post-rolls).  The revenue is then split.  Google has been testing the in-stream ads on Beet.TV (although I didn’t see them when I checked today) and also working with MTV.  Add YouTube to this equation and you have a massive network of video blogs that are shooting, posting and embedding video content, a market ripe for video advertising.

Hmm.

Saturday, December 09, 2006

RIP: Pre-roll ads

Without Fred’s pedigree, I’ve been pleading in the blog wilderness for online video services to use only click-to-play ads, and banish forever pre-roll ads. Today Fred predicts it:

Pre-roll ads are going the way of popups and other intrusive ads. They won’t be around in a couple years. And the online video services that use them to monetize their audience won’t be around either.

Because the thing you have to understand about digital media is its pervasive and abundant. There is always somewhere else to get the same thing. Digital is write once, read everywhere. Digital media is like a virus. It spreads like crazy.

So if you want to build a business around digital media, you have to be the best place to view/consume the media. Being the only place to see it is a naive strategy that won’t work. You have to make digital media easy to find, easy to watch/listen/view, easy to comment/tag/share, and easy to replicate/reblog/republish.

That’s the way two way media works. If you don’t understand/accept that, get out of the business because you’ll be out of it sooner or later.

He’s ok with post-rolls. Me too. He says mid-rolls may have a chance. I hope not. More from Online Media Daily.

LATER: Fred’s no more optimistic about the network TV collaboration to come up with a YouTube rival.

Thursday, November 30, 2006

Comedy Central expires

I was happy to hear of the new Comedy Central embedded player and I agree with Steve who pledges he’ll “embed video directly from the source when the source makes it as easy to share as YouTube.” But now he finds:

The embedded clips from The Daily Show and The Colbert Report expire. That’s right: they only allow them to live online for about two weeks. I was about to embed a clip in this space from The Colbert Report when I noticed fine print that says “This clip expires 12/14/2006.” Why let it expire? ... In order to be a YouTube beater, they’re going to have to renegotiate those licensing agreements. Blog archives go far deeper than two weeks.

Of course, I can imagine the same limits imposed on YouTube videos. Have they never heard of The Long Tail???

I want the Google ad model applied to video. Embed the ads in a border around the player, include click-to-play ads but DO NOT make us sit through an ad to watch the video. And match the ads to the video content. I think that’s advertising magic - or at least as magical as adsense.

REMEMBER: You’ve heard this all before.

Tuesday, October 17, 2006

Commercial culture

The future of advertising, attraction then promotion:

In some ways, marketers on these sites are treated just like any other member. On MySpace they can have a profile page and a group of friends. Facebook allows marketers to use a feature that lets any member create a group that other members can join.

Advertisers can add features to their MySpace profiles and Facebook group pages like video clips, quizzes, downloadable goodies like ring tones, and, of course, links to their own Web sites.

These approaches run the risk of generating a sour reaction from the online community if site members feel marketers are going too far in trying to fit in.

The risk is not advertising, it’s bad advertising. Young people have always embraced ad campaigns that speak to them. In fact, we all like advertising; we want advertising; we even need advertising. We don’t know it because we’ve been overwhelmed with ad clutter, ads that assault and interrupt us and irrelevant ads. Advertising can’t get away with that anymore and so must learn another way.

Unilever, for example, has turned its Axe deodorant into the No. 1 brand in less than four years by promising to help men attract more women. This spring it created a promotion around a group it called Gamekillers - people who get in the way of a seduction, like a guy with a British accent who gets all the attention. The pitch is that Axe helps men stay cool in the face of the Gamekillers.

The campaign included an hourlong program on MTV and a page on MySpace devoted to the topic, with message boards where people could trade complaints and tips about Gamekillers. Its online host was Christine Dolce, a busty model who was already a celebrity thanks to MySpace, where she has accumulated more than a million friends. [...]

As they start to build up advertising sales operations, the social networking sites are starting to develop offerings that let marketers take advantage of some of their features.

For example, Chase has a promotion on Facebook that implicitly uses a person’s friends to endorse its credit cards. When people join the Chase “+1” group on Facebook, they see a list of their other friends who have joined the group. The program gives members points when they do things like apply for a card and get others to sign up. Those points can be redeemed for prizes, donated to charity or given to other friends on Facebook.