I have already mentioned the TED Talks a couple of times – very inspiring 20 minute presentations you can watch on the web. Now there is a good one by Larry Lessig, who talks about 3 stories in support of one central argument concerning paradigms shifts necessary in todays copyrights setup:
The Net’s most adored lawyer brings together John Philip Sousa, celestial copyrights, and the „ASCAP cartel“ to build a case for creative freedom. He pins down the key shortcomings of our dusty, pre-digital intellectual property laws, and reveals how bad laws beget bad code. Then, in an homage to cutting-edge artistry, he throws in some of the most hilarious remixes you’ve ever seen.
Sofar, advertising on joost has only been in the form of short ads at the beginning or end of clips. Sort of like the traditional ad model.
Now we have the first attempt at actually providing added value through a marketing tactic. In this case, a widet:
On Thursday, Joost announced that Coca-Cola’s European division has created the first „commercial widget“ for the software. Called „Coke Bubbles,“ the downloadable advertising widget lets you choose a clip on Joost and then send it to fellow Joost users, appended with a note in the form of a „bubble.“
You can download it at „Coke Bubbles„. While I am unsure about whether this is a really clever idea, I do support the fact that Coke does not just run ads in the clips, but does try to provide added value. It’s a first step in the right direction.
A lot of marketing efforts will have to provide a clear added value in the future. Either through real product information at the points where consumers are seeking information. Or, alternatively, if consumers are not seeking product information, brands can help to provide plattforms, contents or tools for entertainment or networking – two of the other main things people seek out in digital media these days.
Android is the first truly open and comprehensive platform for mobile devices. It includes an operating system, user-interface and applications — all of the software to run a mobile phone, but without the proprietary obstacles that have hindered mobile innovation. We have developed Android in cooperation with the Open Handset Alliance, which consists of more than 30 technology and mobile leaders including Motorola, Qualcomm, HTC and T-Mobile.
It appears to carry very similar objectives as OpenSocial which was announced only last week. Google seems to favour open standards, so that the web as a plattform and mobile phones as the future personal device for everything will stay open and free. This should enable innovation to the benefit of the user, no doubt about that! But it might also serve Google quite well.
Why? I can only guess: Googles revenue models are still mostly built on advertising. So Google needs scalability in customer reach, which they can only keep increasing with ready access to information and users. As social networks are obviously becoming the dominating platforms for users to interact with, and mobile devices probably being the first choice for going „online“, then Google needs to be able to freely play on these grounds.
In the future, I think the key to revenue will most likely not reside in just delivering content, i.e. producing or transporting it, since there will be soooo much of it. And it is very labour intensive to produce it. Instead, it is much more efficient to
intelligently aggregate and sort content (which Google already does)
adequately aligning this content to the needs, preferences – and most importantly: intentions of the users.
Regarding the second point, I think it is fairly obvious that Google should be way ahead of the competition in gathering the necessary user data. Think about Google Toolbar, Google Analytics and Google AdSense, nevermind the main site, the search engine itself. They should have better tracking data than anybody else, which they can put to work for solving the second point above.
One thing that can stop the (nearly) endless scaling of Google’s model into the long tail of every single social media profile and mobile device is „artificial“ restrictions such as walled gardens and operating systems. So: very clever to launch initiatives to at least partially open up social networks and mobile phone operating systems.
At the time of writing this, the ad had been viewed more than 440.000 times, 388 comments, and 569 favourites.
This success is probably also due to the case that big shots like the NY Times, Wired, Gizmodo, and MacRumous picked up on the story… And the fact that „User Generated Content“ has become a rather familiar concept since 2004 – apparently even for „divas“ like Apple.
(But if you ask me: it’s a horrible ad, especially the music!)
We expected it, didn’t we. Facebook offering advertising targeted to peoples interests and likes. Now they offer this kind of advertising via their facebook flyers, reports TechCrunch.
The targeting offered covers the following sofar:
the Flyers let you target by country, city, gender, age range, political views, relationship status, education level, workplace affiliation, or any keyword in a person’s stated interests. It’s that last option that could be really powerful. For instance, simply putting in different keywords into the Facebook Flyers ad-targeting page reveals that of the 19,951,900 Facebook members in the U.S., 101,000 are into rock climbing, 411,000 are into cooking, and 706,160 people are into traveling.
Regarding Facebook: there are already many rumours spreading. And depending on who is seen with whom in photos (which are so blurry you can’t see anything), the valuations for Facebook are going up and up. Currently at $15 billion.
According to the this article, MySpace is going into the same direction offering targeted advertising.
Wo ich sonst so bin...