So Google has launched „buzz“, which is a social network simulating extension to GMail, if you ask me. You can share photos, videos, status messages – and people can follow your profile, see what you share and comment on it in real time. Apparently. I haven’t found anyone yet to „buzz“ with.
It’s supposed to be an attack on sites like facebook or tools like twitter. I just wonder, if it is strong enough to get people of these two other services. They are quite sticky already, especially facebook, since they’re offering lots of functions, games, content upload options, etc. – and quite many people have established their network on facebook, it will take some persuading luring these network-settled people over to a new network.
Anyway, how does that align with Google Wave? Will they integrate the two at some point? Or will Buzz just be for sharing, chatting and connecting while Wave will be more about real collaboration? We’ll see… And see this video here, it explains the main points in less than 2 minutes:
I am badly hooked on the series „lost„, as I wrote in my German Blog already. The sixth and supposedly last season started yesterday in the US (the parts are available in Germany always one day later), however in the last couple of days / weeks a few marketing gigs have already taken place. Such as this one: you can book a flight on Oceanic 815 from Sydney to L.A. on kayak.com – for a horrendous price, of course. Quite a nice idea!
This is a real challenge for ad experts. The following video is a huge collection of TV spots. It was made as part of the launch of the new identity of the Creative Circle awards in the UK. As adverblog writes, there are more than 78 spots referenced in this single video. Or, at least, that’s the highest number found so far. How is your score? (Mine is pretty bad)
There is a lot of talk about augmented reality. But the following stuff is way beyond anything I have seen sofar, it looks more like science fiction. Pranav Mistry about the thrilling potential of SixthSense Technology:
Let’s hope that technology makes it mainstream within this decade…
Steve Rubel has an embedde scribd in his lifestream, as well as a short video about 4 of the main points underlying the 10 ideas mentioned in the paper:
Global (technology, consumers, applications, etc.)
Mobile (mobile devices, use cases, etc.)
Companies (can’t stand on the sidelines any longer)
Data (driving everything, smarter decisions, data privacy).
Not quite digital marketing, but similar rules surely apply to creating well selling online web pages. The NY Times has a piece on how restaurants are trying to improving their menues. Things like highlighting the most profitable items on the menue via putting boxes around them, display prices without a dollar sign, etc. Some restaurants seem to be continously testing how to best design menues so that revenue and profitability increases.
“If admen had souls, many would probably trade them for an opportunity every restaurateur already has: the ability to place an advertisement in every customer’s hand before they part with their money.”
There has been a lot of talk about the end or decline of the destination sites. Mainly about the big portals as well as brands sites – the decline in daily visitors happens at the same time as visitors to social media sites are steadily increasing. Here is a blogpost that nicely visualizes this effect for a few famous brands and social media sites.
Coca-Cola and Unilever now announced that they’ll start shifting their online campaign activities from dedicated microsites to sites, profiles or channels on social media sites. Makes sense, considering the users are already there and they can tap into a ready community:
The FMCG giants are moving away from sites created on a campaign-by-campaign basis in favour of investment in existing communities.
Coca-Cola: “We would like to place our activities and brands where people are, rather than dragging them to our platform,”
Unilever: “You’ll see fewer brands creating a site for one campaign and then throwing it away. Certainly we won’t do that at Unilever any more. It’s natural online to go to the place where people are already consuming media,” she added. “It’s less effort to ask people to leave an environment they’re already in.”
They won’t do that for all campaigns, and certainly not immediately, but given the current change in the media landscape it does make a whole lot of sense for some brands to move closer to where their customer are.
Wo ich sonst so bin...