Suzuki Films Campaign Website

Suzuki has started a video clip website in the style of Nissan and BMW: The Suzuku Films Website. The movie is split into separate episodes, spread out over time.

There are a number of characters – each one gets introduced separately and is somehow directly linked to a Suzuki car or motorcycle that gets “introduced” on the same screen. Nice idea, but I can’t wait for each episode to “air”, I will just set myself a reminder for in a few weeks time and then watch the whole story in one go…

You can watch also watch individual webisodes.

Links & News – 11.01.07

links of today (one is actually quiet old…):

Can you make Money in the Long Tail

Chris Anderson, who wrote “The Long Tail” looks at the question concerning most of the small longtail bloggers: Can you make money in the Long Tail? This post is interesting in itself, as it looks at the different participants of the long tail: producers, aggregators and consumers – and how each one might benefit from the long tail.

But: He also quotes a Valleywag blogpost in which a website owner is cited to complain about Google:

I’m beginning to have my doubts about Chris Anderson’s long tail, the proposition that cultural boutiques can make a living on the Internet. One disgruntled publisher complains she’s owed less than the minimum Google can be bothered to pay her. And, as fast as she makes money, Google lifts the threshold. [She writes:] “When I started with Adsense in late 2004/ early 2005 the minimum was $25. Just when was about to hit the $25 minimum, they raised it to $50. Now that I have $45 in my account, the minimum is $100. Granted, I have a site with very low traffic, but how many website owners are getting screwed by Google? If the long-tail theory holds out, there could be millions of dollars of unpaid Google ads.”

I can see where this website owner is coming from. I wonder, how much money Google earns with the money they centrally collect from advertisers (I assume, there is no threshold) and invest at, well, 5%-10% on any capital market. It will only be a few dollars each, but the sum of all the blogs probably results in big money.

I guess we have no way of imagining the amount of money one can make by deploying the long tail market. But someone at Google knew and implemented the threshold of payments. Very clever.

Links & News, 21.12.06

Some Links & News I haven’t had time to blog about in the last couple of days:

  • Tim O’Reilly was interviewed by German Spiegel Online (one of my main news sources). One of the questions: would Mr. O’Reilly show the current wewb 2.0 content (and here: mainly youtube videos) to aliens, in order to show how far we’ve gotten with our civilisation… He would show Google though he said.
  • Adverblog writes about Coke „invading“ YouTube with a brandchannel, where you can upload you own season greetings and send them to friends. Good idea in general… But why would you want to do that through a coke brand channel and not a standard YouTube account? They aren’t the only ones, either. Levi’s allegedly also opened a brand channel.
  • Some more CGM: In Spain Pepsi asks users to design a can – the best design will actually be produced as a can and distributed across Spain.
  • The new Second Life Newspaper „Avastar“ of German tabloid „Bildis selling for 150 Linden Dollars. This shows in some respect, that market prices in Second Life haven’t quite equilibrated yet. Just recently I bought a T-Shirt for a third of that price. The language will be english, apparently, which makes sense considering that the majority within Second Life won’t know German.
  • The new book title of Joseph Jaffe will be „Join the Conversation“. This makes absolut sense considering the contents of this podcasts and blogposts, this is the (his) current topic.
  • PayPerPost makes disclosure mandatory. Good. Now bloggers have to disclose if they are publishing a blogpost with brand or productreviews. This improves transparency and even though they might loose some advertisers and bloggers it should help them in the long run.

Some more Marketing Trends 2007

Bob Liodice of ANA has posted his 10 trends of how marketing will be transformed in 2007:

  1. Consumer in control: brand marketers will radically reinvent their approaches, putting the consumer in the driver’s seat and unleashing a tsunami of interactive campaigns across all media forms.
  2. New agenda for agencies: Marketers will expect them to integrate strategic brand management, creativity and innovative media management – and to deliver big, game-changing ideas.
  3. Hail to Chief: The role of the CMO will increase and take over even more parts of the business.
  4. Unconventional Outreach: Marketing will become increasingly unconventional – tapping into social networking, word-of-mouth, local events and more – to break through media clutter, consumer multi-tasking and the growing cacophony of marketplace noise
  5. Media buying metamorphosis: The old, antiquated ways of doing business will give way to new, automated, highly transparent processes, as demonstrated by the growth of online media buying exchanges.
  6. Let the fighting end: Government policymakers, consumer advocacy groups and brand marketers will begin to find common ground, aligning business goals with public policy needs
  7. Organizational Overhaul: The marketing organization will undergo a top-to-bottom reinvention.
  8. Research Renewal: Marketers will insist that macro measurements (Nielsen, Arbitron, ABC), marketing mix modeling and brand performance research become far more relevant to and aligned with critical brand accountability goals.
  9. Blow up the Back Room: Archaic business systems and back office operations will be overhauled to lower costs, increase efficiencies and redeploy non-working dollars to hard-working, productive investments.
  10. Continuous Marketing Reinvention: Continuous marketing reinvention will become the mantra of marketing executives and the cornerstone philosophy for successful brand building, integrated marketing communications, marketing accountability and the marketing organization.

He will take each point and look at it in greater detail in his blog in the months to follow. Should be interesting.
(via jaffejuice)

Nice Treo Microsite

I just found a funny microsite by accidentally (!) clicking on a banner. It did, however, entertain me for a few minutes, trying to explore what’s possible on that site.

The site shows a typical street crossing with people walking around in all directions.
Then, clicking on the treo options (the orange arrows), the scenery changes slightly. When selecting the Yahoo! chat option, for example, the people walking around suddenly have a yellow smiley icon instead of their head.

treo.jpg

In this example, I selected fandango, a site for movie and theatre tickets:

treo1.jpg

Or, choosing Google Maps:

treo2.jpg

And here I chose Orbitz, a travel site:
treo3.jpg

Nice idea to demonstrate the everyday capabilities of the Treo.