Daan's shared items
I've been thinking quite a bit lately about advertising on the internet. More specifically about how the economic downturn could signal a breaking point for banner advertising. So we know about banner blindness and dismal clickthrough/interaction rates, yet people keep buying up the stuff. Mainly it's because it's the closest thing the web has to do with scale. There are no other good ways to get your message in front of a lot of people (whether or not they look at it) that doesn't take a lot more work (like PR/outreach).
With that said, I had another thought the other day: Maybe the answer is that advertisers need more variations on their creative. What I mean is, I think part of the banner blindness problem (and this is all speculation without any data behind it so take it with a grain of salt) is that we're all trained to recognize when something doesn't belong and, in the case of the web, to ignore it. Banners tend to be a different color, font and they move all around, add in the fact that they sit along the edges and they're just too easy to quickly spot and dismiss. But once in awhile someone like Apple comes along and does some fancy custom unit where they pay attention to everything including getting the NYTimes.com typeface right. That kind of stuff must make more of an impact than your run of the mill banner, no matter how cool it might be. Right?
Of course, doing a whole bunch of custom units that match to both the look/feel of the site and the audiences mindset is a whole lot more expensive from a creative development perspective. But isn't that kind of targeting what the web does best? If advertisers are so desperate for people to pay attention, maybe they should try a little harder.
Droga5 has launched a new video for Guitar Hero World Tour under the guise of it being done by madflux. It's not their first foray into launching a video initially presented as being created by a real person.
Since getting uploaded yesterday, the "Bike Hero" video has over 518,998 views and 2,238 comments. Of the comments I clicked through on YouTube, only one suspected it was an ad so far. (I only clicked five pages deep though.)
Curious how people will react if / when they discover it was done by an agency and not an enthusiastic fan. From various posts with comments so far, it appears the few who suspect it don't really care - they respect the creativity of it.
For me, it shows how the lines are blurring between creating advertising and simply creating content that attracts and engages an audience. If you create something that helps make someone's day just a bit better, it doesn't really matter.
What are your thoughts?
2007 person-to-person music downloads were worth a staggering $69 billion, and movie/television piracy continues to grow, says a new study.
And all that free promotion didn’t cost them a penny.
At least, that’s how Techdirt sees it. And I agree. Instead of embracing what might be the largest free marketing giveaway in the history of the world, the music labels instead sue their customers.
And ask the social networks for handouts.
Somebody over there needs to put their thinking cap on, quit screwing around and just give the damn music away for free with no lawsuit strings attached. Then use 360 contracts to find a way to survive on other revenue stream. Or even thrive.
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There's been lots of excitement and thinking triggered by Chris Anderson's theory of The Long Tail aka the prevalence of the power law curve. Well, perhaps this isn't as prevalent as we first thought. The first empirical study of digital music sales suggests that removing physical constrictions has had little impact on sales. To quote the study:
A few weeks ago Mike looked at the CEMP statistics of the CEMP community and noted a big spike in traffic. Rather sheepishly, I admitted that was because of something I did.
In this post I’ll tell you how I did it, why it worked and if it was worth the effort. Plus, I’ll get to defend myself, as the quality of traffic was not quite as bad as Mike made it out to be!
First of all, what is StumbleUpon - here’s what Wikipedia has to say:
StumbleUpon is an Internet community that allows its users to discover and rate Web pages, photos, and videos. It is a personalized recommendation engine which uses peer and social-networking principles.
Basically, this is what happens:
You sign up and provide a list of preferences. You hit the stumble button and SU will take you to a random web page which is aligned with your interests. If you like it you give it the thumbs up, if you don’t it’s a thumbs down.
Now for the experiment….
How I did it
Before doing this little experiment I had already built up my SU profile, so if you try this your results may be slightly different. In this post I will outline some best practices in order to drive as much traffic to your site from StumbleUpon. Whereas simply signing up and voting can generate some traffic, it is unlikely to have long lasting effects.
The first step is to sign up to StumbleUpon
I also suggest you install the toolbar that SU offers, as it will make it a lot easier to use.
Your profile
After signing up I recommend you create your profile. You can create a fake profile just to try and drive traffic and whilst this may work in the short term, you will suffer in the long term. An fake profile is easily identified and will simply get ignored, meaning no more spikes in traffic!
You don’t have to use your real name, but I would suggest using an avatar. Again, this does not have to be a picture of you - in fact, more often than not it won’t be.
After you have signed up you can list your preferences. This enables StumbleUpon to identify sites that might be of interest to you. Whilst it will not help drive traffic directly, it can help you locate interesting content and network with other users.
Adding content
You can add your own content. Ideally you would get someone else to submit your content for you, otherwise you might lose your credibility with the community. Generally, adding your own content is okay as long as you make sure that you occasionally add other stuff as well - just so you don’t come across as a spammer.
My ratio is probably about 10-1, so 10 other websites for each of my own pages submitted.
To add content you simply go to the page you want to add and hit the thumbs up button. If the page has not been submitted yet you will be shown the discovery screen. Here you decide in which category you want the website to appear, you can write a brief review and add some keywords. Try and make it all as relevant to the page you are submitting if you want to achieve the best results.
Wait for the traffic to come in
If you have a new profile and you have no friends on there this is the time when you anxiously wait for Google Analytics to start providing some data. If you do already know people on there I suggest you ask them to vote for the page you have submitted. The more votes you get, the more often the page will be shown and thus the more traffic you will generate.
The results
I posted the article on the 23rd of October and submitted it to StumbleUpon on the 26th of October. A day later it had nearly attracted 370 visitors. After the initial spike the traffic kept trickling in and this are the figures as it stands:
Pageviews: 660
Unique Pageviews: 433
Average time on site: 2:02 mins
Bounce Rate: 50.47%
Let’s compare that to some general CEMP stats:
Average time on site: 6:19 mins
Bounce Rate: 37.97%
Was it worth it?
That depends. I didn’t set any objectives beforehand, so I have no criteria to judge it on. But it has been valuable as an experiment.
We now know that StumbleUpon can be a great source of traffic. But we can also tell that the traffic is not as valuable as the average visitor of CEMP.
However, the average visitor of CEMP is likely to be one of us - one of the studens on the unit. And we get judged by our involvement in the site, so it’s likely we spend a lot of time on there. The results would really be valuable if we could compare them to the average, non student user.
Generally speaking StumbleUpon is a tool to kill time/boredom. This means you have very little time to convince them your site is worth further investigation before they hit the stumble button again.
StumbleUpon is a great tool to drive traffic, especially if you’re business model revolves around page view advertising. However, if you are looking to attract sticky traffic and people who might become part of the community (which is what we want on CEMP) it’s probably not the right tool to use.
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Well, it happened. Google’s voice recognition mobile app finally arrived today on the iPhone App Store. Until today all we had to go by was the demo video that Google created showing it in action.
And that video shows something that quite simply changes the way I’d use the phone. Instead of clicking buttons on the virtual keyboard to search the web or my contacts, I’d just hit a button and use the Google Mobile App. And it really is just one button - it knows, via the accelerometer, when you put the phone to your ear and when you take it away. Voila! Cool stuff happens.
Here’s the video, narrated by Mike LeBeau on the Google Mobile team:
Let’s compare that video to my actual results. First, the big letdown is that you can’t search contacts by voice - you have to type for that, and it’s not really worth using the app just to do that when the normal contact application works just as well.
Also, it’s important that there is very little background noise when you use the app. A steady hum from an electric heater six feet away from me confounded the app on speakerphone. The noise from a car, certainly, will prohibit speakerphone usage while driving. The results below were done in a silent room with the phone held up to my ear, and I spoke as clearly as I am able. The demo results are shown on the left, my actual results are on the right.
First query: Pictures of the Golden Gate bridge at sunset: Results were perfect.
Second Query: How big is a giant squid?: Crazy results - I got “public citizen times square”
Third Query: Movie Showtimes: Results were perfect, and it used my location
25 degrees Celsius in Fahrenheit: Results were perfect
The contact search also went exactly as the video showed, but it’s a little misleading. You can’t search contacts by voice, only by typing. The video shows that, but by that point you’re all hopped up on voice goodness and you don’t really realize that its all typing at that point, which is little better than using the normal contact app that comes with the phone.
Overall, other than the one snafu with the giant squid, everything went well. But the voice recognition is far from perfect, as the demo video suggests. And the limitation on contact search is a letdown.
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There's a lot of chatter out there, how do you know when to listen and when not to?
This one's been germinating for awhile now. About a month ago I was having drinks with my friend Matt and he made a point I hadn't heard before about the election: "Sarah Palin's handlers let the chatter get to them." Basically what he was saying is that if they had really been good at their jobs they never would have let her go on with Katie Couric and that the only reason they did is because everyone (media talking heads, DC folks) was saying that you can't have a VP candidate that doesn't do any interviews. But who says so? Who makes the rules?
Now I don't know whether I agree with the hypothesis or not, but I think it nicely frames an issue which seems to be coming up more and more lately (thought its really not new). In some ways its related to Alan's Nascar Blindness (the ad industry's tendency to miss out on that which they can't see) but in the opposite direction. This is actually about paying too much attention to the chatter and losing site of your goals. In the case of Sarah Palin, it seems safe to say that her role was to sure up the base of the party (I don't even think that's a controversial statement at this point). So if that's the case, what do you get out of putting her on with Katie Couric other than the potential for harm?
Take another example, those Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld Microsoft ads (video for those that missed it). Immediately, online folks started ripping at the flesh of Microsoft and their agency, Crispin Porter + Bogusky. (The most ridiculous thing I read was from Information Week and suggested "The effectiveness of brand-driven advertising died about the same time Seinfeld hit syndication." That's so dumb I'm not even going to bother with it.) Now, according to Gizmodo, "there's even more of an indication now that Microsoft aggressively cut the Gates/Seinfeld spot production short, canceling the shoot for a fourth spot just three days into production. The spots were intended to be part of a running series with up to 12 planned spots conceptualized. Now it's unclear whether or not we'll even see the last spot air, let alone Seinfeld come back for a reprisal."
But why? It couldn't have been because the ads didn't get attention: As AdAge pointed out, the Seinfeld/Gates ads were getting 14x as many views per day as the new "I'm a PC" spots. What's more, that same article points out that much of this came from all the chatter online and "The Seinfeld/Gates ads had more adjectives in them, while comments in PC ads had more nouns, suggesting a more emotional response to Seinfeld/Gates ads." Now my argument from the start is that the goal of Microsoft advertising right now is to reposition/humanize the company. From my original Seinfeld/Gates post:
Anyway, let me get to my point. I think there are a lot of problems at Microsoft, most of which can't be solved with advertising. For one, it won't solve the fact they put out a dud in Vista is something they're not going to fix with an ad campaign (OS 9 ring a bell??). However, what it can start to do is make people think about Microsoft in a slightly different way. It starts to soften the company around the edges. As I wrote in an IM to Alan earlier today, you can't just jump from super-nerd (Microsoft's perception) to cool guy (Apple) without at first rolling up your sleeves. The ad humanizes Microsoft by making one of the world's richest men seem like an every day guy.
It's precisely those emotional comments that the ads should have been aimed for and seemed to have succeeded at. So why did they drop it? Well, my theory is that it's because a bunch of people with blogs and such started talking about how they didn't like/didin't get the ads. Lots of people were saying that Microsoft needed to respond and listen to what the consumer was saying, but I call bullshit. In a quote for PRWeek I explained, "Other than the Super Bowl, how often do people talk about ads? Microsoft should let this play out. I think there are times to listen to everyone and there are times not to listen to everyone... the people talking about this may not be the audience for this ad. They may not be talking to early adopters." And I stand by that.
In the end I guess my point is that there are times to listen and act upon what you've heard and times to listen and respectfully ignore the feedback. As a small example, I've been asked a ton of times to add logos to brand tags for companies that have just started/don't exist yet. Every time I've declined because I've explained that the site is about measuring brand perception and that if you don't exist yet, you don't have a brand perception. What these people want is for consumers to give them feedback on their logos and I basically just think that's useless. What are people going to tell you? That your logo is too blue? The reality of the situation is that logos, like brands, don't exist in vacuums and people's feedback on your logo without holding your product or seeing it on the shelf is pretty much 100 percent useless (unless you're missing some giant thing like you're selling mens deodorant and your logo is pink with flowers, but some basic testing/a decent design firm should clear that up).
Commercials are different that products. If your product is hurting someone you've got to do something about it immediately, if your commercial is offending their sensibilities think carefully whether anything really needs to be done. Brands need to ask themselves, is this the a vocal minority speaking or are they actually a reflection of our target?
Sometimes too much listening is a bad thing.
Well, the elections are finally over and I believe that the most of us will be very happy to see Barack Obama announced as the 44th American President.
I thought this would be a good time to reflect on, in my opinion, some of the best virals that have appeared on the net.
These virals are not listed in any particular order.
McCain wins
This is a clever, fun video created to remind people to vote for Obama. This video was created and then allowed people to personalize and it send to their friends and family in aid to draw out young voters. As of Friday 7th November, 15.6 million people had sent a version of the video to a friend, relative or acquaintance.
Yes We Can
This Obama video was created by Will.i.am and was created with a compilation of exerts of Barack Obama’s speech on Jan 8 2008.
This video was released in February and has been viewed over 45 million times since.
Starbucks Viral
This was another good viral, offering people free coffee as a reward for voting. It’s a shame that people need these sorts of incentives to make them go out and vote in one of the most important elections in modern American history but still a very clever idea from Starbucks.
McCain Dance Off
This is a great video in which the two candidates took their fight for the white house onto the dance floor. The video obviously didn’t feature Obama and McCain, actors were used and was very well directed by David Morgasen and Yaroslav Kemnits.
Google Map
To encourage Americans to get out and vote, Google very cleverly created a map in which you could enter your address and it would show you where your nearest voting location was.
Wassup 2008
It had been eight years since the original “wassup” advert for Budweiser and all the guys were back but this time they were supporting Barack Obama. This was very clever in managing to gets across the problems that a lot of Americans are facing whilst still making it light-hearted and fun.
5 More Friends: Don’t Vote
Apparently the first “5 Friends” viral telling Americans to vote was not effective enough, so a second was created featuring a whole host of celebs in an attempt to try and encourage American youth to vote.
Jack Nicholson Hillary Clinton Video (Parody)
This is an older viral from when Barack was up against Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination for President, but it is still a very clever video and deserving of being put on this list.
Please feel free to add any virals that you believe were funny, inspiring or clever.
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8 Best Presidential Election Virals
