Advertising Lab: future of advertising and advertising technology

Blog on the future of advertising and media technology.

Bantr Replaces Ads with Tweets

Monday, November 30, 2009



Bantr is a Firefox extension that replaces some 300x250 banners with tweets from your friends. The site says the tweets are matched to the context of the page whose ads it's blocking. I didn't really notice, but I am not following thousands of people, so maybe that's why.  It doesn't replace every single unit, just one, and not on all sites, although it does on AdLab.

Wouldn't it be a fun ironic twist if the tweets Bantr displayed were affiliate ad tweets?

Or you can replace banners with art.


- via

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10 Advertising Inventions Of The 19th Century

Monday, November 30, 2009



The original tweet ads (!), shoe printers, an improved advertising brick and much, much more in this list of ten new media patented in the 19th century, for the fans of our retromedia series.

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eBay Banner Knows What I Need

Sunday, November 29, 2009



It's as if the Big Brother were wearing a gray flannel suit and had three-martini lunches.  One banner knows were I'm going, another -- what I'm looking for.  This display unit from eBay showed up on YouTube on an unrelated search page and scrolled through half a dozen active auctions for photo gear, including one for a remote cable release for a Canon I've been looking for. The images are actual auction thumbnails. If the banner freaks you out, you can click on the AdChoice link at the bottom that takes you to an explanation: "We sometimes use information we have about you to help ensure the ads you see on eBay and elsewhere are as personalized to you as possible."

I usually find myself in the camp that defends this kind of targeting, but once, an overzealous travel company banner almost ruined a surprise trip by shouting "So, you are going to Vegas?" on a computer I was sharing with the surprisee. Caution, people, caution.

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Power150 Roller Coaster

Wednesday, November 25, 2009



With all due respect, any ranking system that suffers wild daily swings like this is probably off. Is AdLab really almost twice as good today as it was yesterday, all because of a bunch of retweets of a single post?

It's one thing when Power150 was Todd's generous but private enterprise, but now that it's the industry's sort of official (and copied) "Who Is Who", there's gotta be a better way.

Would people go for a traffic tracking code?

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How To Build Brand Cults

Wednesday, November 25, 2009



There's a flattering amount of retweeting of the There Is This Company post and the follow-up going on (thank you!), and one of the angles people suggest is that you don't really need involvement in social media to succeed in the marketplace if your products are as good as Apple's.

Maybe there is something else going on.
 
A reader sent me an email today asking about the book I mentioned in the comments to one of the posts but couldn't remember at the time. It's Douglas Atkin's The Culting of Brands (aff link), where he draws parallels between different religious cults and brands that enjoy very enthusiastic following, Apple in particular.

What you see above is a screengrab from a deck I presented years ago on the Cult of Mac, and the ten "easy steps" of brand culting (click image to zoom) are from the book's now defunct but archived microsite. 

The point about exclusivity is dead on.

And so is the part about creating an enemy -- maybe that's what all those Mac vs PC spots really are?

Here's the book's summary I found on Book Rapper along with a bunch of interesting charts. Also see this Business Week's article from back when the book came out.



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Pavement Ad Printer from 1930, and Modern Printer Robots

Wednesday, November 25, 2009



Remember Nike's cool Chalkbot (a descendant of StreetWriter) that printed SMS messages for Tour de France cyclists on the road surface? Here's a similar idea: a drum of water, a stencil, and an ad message. Done in 1930 in Spain to promote a wine merchant.

And a modern-day "sea-tagging" campaign to promote an aquarium in London through sea-water prints on pavement:



A few other writing and drawing machines:



Hector the Graffiti Robot (from, like, 2004).




A wall-climbing printer.




PixelRoller (we wrote about it a few years ago).

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The Real Future of Augmented Reality: SixthSense Demo at TED

Monday, November 23, 2009



A new and impressive demo of Sixth Sense, a project from MIT Media Lab's Fluid Interfaces Group. The real magic starts at 6'24".

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There Is This Blog Post

Saturday, November 21, 2009




Sometimes, when you have people listening and nodding  in agreement, they may be hearing something very different from what you think you are saying. 

Chris Anderson's tweeted about the There Is This Company post. Many people who read it see it, as Chris does, as a call to Apple to embrace some flavor of social marketing.  After all, it's 30,000-people company that doesn't have anyone I could find on LinkedIn with "social" and "media" in their title.

I don't think that's what I meant.

Apparently, Apple hasn't become the most admired company  with healthy sales growth, good margins, a nice stock rally, and lots of fans because it's social. 

What if Apple is what it is precisely because it isn't?

And maybe traditional advertising isn't too dead? At least as long as your banner ads actually drive people not only to your site, but also to the page that displays them?

(follow-up)

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Branded Biographies

Friday, November 20, 2009

If you had only 160 characters to introduce yourself, what words would do you pick?

Would any of these words be a brand name?

I've looked at how people associate themselves with brands in their Twitter bios using a nifty Google query ("bio * keyword" site:twitter.com). And chances are that if your tiny blurb includes a brand name, you either sell it, work for it, or really, really like it.

On Twitter, people like Apple. Lots of "apple fans",  but no "IBM fans". And yes, there are "Microsoft fans". Eight of them.

Microsoft, people work for.

Mazda, and Chrysler, and Toyota, they sell.

Once you omit duplicate results, fewer than a hundred people have Walmart in their bio. Even fewer have Versace. But that probably isn't surprising.

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Graph Media Activities With a Wheel Chart

Friday, November 20, 2009



This hand-drawn "media wheel" shows what media people consume when and where, based on data points from a syndicated research.  Here's how me made it. 

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