von Roland Hachmann | Aug 30, 2007 | Ad News, Blog, Digital Marketing, Digital News, Marketing, Online Advertising
Martina from Adverblog writes about a new site for a new Diesel Fragrance. It’s based on a series of videos and on the omnipresent shout out „I am alive“.
Throughout the whole site you find lots of this „I am alive“, it can get anoying at some point so be ready to turn the speakers of.
Of course there is some user generated content possible, you can upload a video of yourself shouting „I’m alive“ or upload a picture of yourself. There is also a „Chatroom“ looking like a cinema. But it was first empty and soon entering guest1237 and guest 1218 wouldn’t answer…
There is a lot more to explore, so try it out!
von Roland Hachmann | Aug 29, 2007 | Ad News, Blog, Digital Culture, Digital Marketing, Digital News, Marketing, Online Advertising, Social Media Marketing
Dave Weinberger, one of the authors of the cluetrain manifesto („markets are conversations“) expresses his concerns over the increasing wrong adoption of this idea by marketeers. In a comment to this post by Chris Heuer, he writes the following:
Marketing has to change. It has to recognize that market conversations are now the best source of information about companies and their products and services. It has to recognize that those conversations are not themselves marketing — you and me talking about whether we like our new digital cameras is not you and me marketing to each another. Neither is our conversation a „marketing opportunity.“ But the temptation to see it as such is well nigh impossible for most marketers to resist.
Fortunately, the people leading the thinking about this generally do honor the conversation as the thing that must be preserved. How the meme gets taken up, however, should worry us. We need to help marketers resist their deeply bred urges. We need to make preserving the integrity of the conversation as central a marketing tenet as is not lying about product specs or prices.
This point is critical, some elderly agency folk still get this mixed up sometimes. Markets are conversations, but not all conversations are marketing. And marketing isn’t necessarily a conversation (even though a lot of marketing could be, in the future).
Marketing also isn’t about „letting the crowd decide everything“, in fact conversational marketing is not about „wisdom of the crowd“ at all. This also gets mixed up often by elderly agency folk.
As Chris writes:
More broadly, I think what is happening is really about Market Engagement – how companies interact with the market’s they serve – how companies relate to the people within those markets through product experience, conversations and media.
This doesn’t mean that brands need to open up completely loosing their identity (because of some „wisdom of crowd“ interfering with brand communication) – but it does mean that brands need to engage in 2-way conversations instead of keeping up a monologue irrespectively of whether people want to listen or not.
von Roland Hachmann | Aug 29, 2007 | Ad News, Blog, Digital Marketing, Digital News, Marketing, Online Advertising, Social Media Marketing
Google introduced video overlay ads for YouTube, as this article on read/writeweb says. As a user I don’t like the idea of these ads“interrupting“ me, but it will infact be a good way of better monetizing the video experience. They’re offering it on a CPM basis for now, which seems odd to me, but I guess that might change once they know how well it is accepted?
Also, they don’t seem to be the first to launch this (by far not), as this Tecrunch article states.
von Roland Hachmann | Aug 22, 2007 | Blog, Digital Culture, Digital News
Shel Isreal has asked Facebook about their numbers, since there seems to have been much speculation on the net:
- Over 150,000 registrants daily. That’s 1 million a week since January.
- 35 million users today. Of course that number will be off a million one week from today.
- Half user are outside college. That number was zero in Sept. 2006.
- 0ver 40 billion page views in May 2007
- Average visitor stays 20 minutes
- Most growth is among people over age 25.
- 47,000 Facebook groups.
- #1 photo sharing app on the web. 2.7 billion photos on site.
- More than 2000 applications. The Top 10 are: Top Friends, Video, Graffiti, MyQuestions, iLike, FreeGifts, X Me, Superpoke!, Fortune Cookie & Horoscopes. The smallest of these has over 4.5 million users.
The figures were posted on the 14th of August, so with these growth rates, Facebook should have 36 to 37 million by now.
(via here)
von Roland Hachmann | Aug 20, 2007 | Ad News, Blog, Digital Culture, Digital Marketing, Digital News, Online Advertising, Social Media Marketing
Just a quick note: this could be interesting: apparently, after all the bookmark, photo and video sites, there is one new „user generated content“ thing for which VCs put up their money: online games.
Sofar, we have two sites racing for the jackpot: Kongregate and YoYo Games.
I doubt the potential is as big as for any of the other typical Web 2.0 sites, simply because it is so much more difficult to conceptualise a computer came, with all its rules, scenarios, player modes, levels, etc.
At the same time I am sure the market is still big enough for good advertising potential, since people will probably spend even more time on these online games portals than they will on Youtube.
(The only thing the sites need to make sure: that the players will see a range of ads, even though they are most likely spending a lot of time on a single page. Remember the discussion about the death of the page view?)
Wo ich sonst so bin...