It is common knowledge, that we are moving away from pure interruption advertising on to engagement marketing. Or something along those lines.
In order to engage users and invite them to check out the latest advertising, companies now seem to use YouTube to announce advertising campaigns. Here is the latest example of Adidas telling us that a new segment of the „impossible is nothing“ campaign will start on the 6th of March (so stay tuned!!)
Another name for a „new“ generation – this time it’s all about „C“
Gen C is a generation of people defined not by age but by activity. The story of how I heard of it has involved two appropriate C-words already: Community; Connectedness.
There are more:
Creativity
Content
Control
Complexity
Gen C make their own content. Gen C form strong communities, and care about communication. They want to be connected. Gen C take on broadcast media on their own terms: They get involved, and are happy to make their own celebrities. Gen C control their own lives; they’re happy with complexity and continuous partial attention. Gen C work and live creativity: they work in creative industries, don’t look down on making and crafting, and want to adapt mass market products in acts of co-creation.
The article at Schulze & Webb (Pulse Laser) goes on about the empowerment, expectations and responses linked to this thought…
(thanks)
Sometimes things hit you with several punches at once.
I was listening to an episode of the „six pixels of separation“ podcast by Mitch Joel, and just before I came home he praised twitter. Half an hour later, on his blog, I found a post about twitter, and then, later while going through my feeds, I found another post by Adpulp about twitter.
So what is it? As Mitch Joel writes, …
It’s being called a micro-Blogging platform. […] Simply put you can send a text message (SMS length) either through a website, instant messenger or mobile device to your own customized Twitter page.
There are many people now, who constantly update twitter (and with twitter-widgets, this also appears on their blogs). I am not sure why peole would do that. But Mitch has some thoughts on this:
As consumers take more control of the media, these individuals are building tremendous personal brands and the people who are connected to these personal brands want more connections and information. Twitter takes this idea and brings it down to the core: what is that person doing right now. Imagine how many millions of people buy magazines to read about their favorite celebrity. Now imagine if those celebrities were using Twitter. Micro-chunks of information that keeps everybody in their loop.
And then, again not much later, I find that Meish muses about twitter and classifies some profiles of twitterers (is that what they’re called?)
The Briefers, who provide only bulletins relating to current location or status. Example: Waiting for the bus. Cold.
The Detailers, who use Twitter to give an insight into what they’re thinking, eating, listening to, looking forward to, planning, and so on. Example: Wondering what to have for tea tonight. Pasta, maybe.
The Kitchen Sinkers, who use Twitter as a new form of blogging, recording thoughts and links and opinions and ideas, addressed to no-one in particular. Example: Traffic lights broken at the corner of high street. Phoned work and told them I’ll be late. That’s the fourth time this week. Sigh.
The Pongers, who respond publically to other users whose updates they are receiving via Twitter (so called because they return each IM ping with a pong). Example: @Jim: Hahaha! Yes!
But it’s not just for people. Technorati and Google News also have twitter channels.
As if blogs, MySpace profiles, videos on YouTube, podcasts and everything else is not enough already. Now we can let the whole world know what we’re doing – every minute of the day.
I like blogs, and I publish some of my photos on flickr. But that’s about as far as I would go. Not sure why I would want to tell everyone about my whereabouts all the time…
When Arnold Schwarzenegger first came to the United States, he started a small bricklaying business with fellow bodybuilder and immigrant Franco Columbu. The business wasn’t off to a good start.
They quickly re-invented their business model into a service that was much more expensive than the competition and sold themselves in a way that played up their European heritage. They would seduce their LA customers by saying that their method of bricklaying was different because it was „Austrian Bricklaying“.
I didn’t know this. Neither did I know, that Arnold worked as a bricklayer, neither did I know, that he was such a clever guy in marketing. Or was it only his fellow bodybuilder? But then, it’s Arnold, who’s now a Governor, isn’t he?
David Armano, bringing us back to marketing, concludes:
Sometimes the best marketing involves exaggerating certain „truths“
Occasionally brands are built not from strengths, but from turning perceived weakness into strength
And asks us:
Have you figured out what your weakness is? Is there a way to turn it into a differentiating strength?
Adfreak points me to a nice Nokia Advergame. You are the driver of a French Lady who apparently needs to take care of some dubious business in Paris. So you drive her around the beautiful city:
Instead of re-creating the city using computer animation, they shot actual footage on the Ile St. Louis. While you’re driving, you can fool around with Nokia’s car kit by using its GPS features and changing the music.
On the site, it takes ages until the game has loaded…
And the game controls seem a little sluggish – but maybe it’s just my PC.
And it’s well worth it. The grafics are brilliant, and having lived in Paris for a year, I actually recognised most of the spots.
On the financial news site StreetInsider.com, for example, videos from The Wall Street Journal, a Dow Jones property, are running within ads on the site. In one, Emily Friedlander, a Wall Street Journal reporter, narrates a video feature on the TKTS booth in Times Square; Sam Schechner of The Journal speaks about marriage in TV shows; and Jonathan Welsh visits a motorcycle show.
After the three videos, a commercial from Pantene Pro-V, a hair conditioner, appears. In that case, Google shares the ad revenue with StreetInsider.com and Dow Jones.
This is a step of Google to move away from pure text and image based advertising to the segment of big money: TV adverts. And quite possibly, a first test of acceptance since they’re probably still working on all sorts of ways of how to monetise YouTube.
Founded as a text-based search company, Google’s early advertisers were smaller companies and advertisers who bought ads to generate direct sales rather than to build brand recognition.
Large brand advertisers still spend the bulk of their money on television advertising, but Google sees potential for them to spend more online through the use of video ads.
Wo ich sonst so bin...