A couple of years ago I was wowed by a smart banner from Orbitz that knew where I was flying. Just came across a very similar executioin from Travelocity. Do people respond better to this personalized targeting, do you know?
For those of you who enjoy reading about how ideas evolve from a whiteboard mess to a finished product that sometimes gets people excited (definitely not a linear path), I've posted a small set of archive pictures from my experience on the team at Hill Holliday behind the Dunkin' Run application. In hindsight, I should've also graphed all the coffee and donuts that were consumed during testing.
Very cool: search hours of recorded and indexed TV content for daily brand mentions and trending topics with SnapStream's new service TV Trends. An opportunity: overlay these data with rating numbers to get some sort of reach or influence index.
There are days when it feels like iPhone apps are the new microsites -- every campaign has to have one. And on the surface it seems the numbers stack up just right: a healthy range of demographics, 50K apps, one billion downloads, 40 million devices (source), all going strong. But before you pitch an app to the next client, consider these usage stats from Pinch Media's deck on Slideshare (February 2009) and Greystripe’s Q109 Consumer Insights Report (April 2009, pdf):
-- Minutes per use: 9.6 (Greystripe)
-- Uses per user: 19.9 (Greystripe)
-- Only 20% of users return to use the app after the first day (Pinch Media)
-- After a month, this number drops to 5% (Pinch Media)
-- "39% of iPhone users cited weather-related apps as one of the three kinds of applications they use most frequently (Compete via MediaPost, April 2009)
A few thoughts about the recently unveiled (and heavily commented) Digg's new ad format that makes ads "diggable" and puts them in the general news stream.
1. The "sponsored post" about Sims3 on the mock-up was an actual story that appeared on Digg in February. It got 606 diggs and 110 comments. I wonder whether the same post would show comparable numbers if it had been an ad, as mocked up. In case you are wondering, all other stories on this screenshot have been made up.
2. I really like how the format fits the primary user behavior on the site -- reading and commenting on news. Techmeme's "sponsored RSS feeds" format is similar. I wrote (and someone else has commented) about this before: "Content in different media is consumed in different ways. Ads are content. To work in a different medium, ad formats should reflect the medium's particularities."
3. Advertisers will have to become content producers. That means headlines, not slogans. Not every brand produces diggable content.
4. Finally, a legit (as opposed to otherwise) mechanism to pay your way to Digg's front page.
5. What happens if someone else -- someone with a large network of Digg friends -- submits the same news with a link to a different page?
6. As one Digg commenter puts it, "Most ads will probably get buried anyway. Much like this comment. Cue the [bury] brigade." Which means "the more an ad is buried, the more the advertiser is charged, pricing it out of the system."
7. Back to #4: If before, underground networks of diggers like Subvert and Submit charged money to promote someone's story to the front page, now they will charge money to digg ads, if the math works for the advertisers.
8. Brands favorited by powerful well-connected diggers (say, Apple) will pay less then brands that are not liked as much (say, Microsoft).
9. For the reasons above, I think it would work better if Digg tacked its voting and commenting mechanism onto the more traditionally placed ads instead of sticking the ads into the content stream. I'd keep the rest of the social functionality, too, like letting my friends see if I dugg an ad.
10. On the mock-up, there's no username associated with the Sims3 ad. I'd actually let people placing ads create user-like accounts so that they could build their own social networks within the site and earn reputation points.
Sure someone apart from horoscope sellers has thought of segmenting people according to their zodiac signs before, right? If they can match two people based on their signs, and since each sign has its own assigned objects (stones, amulets), and each self-respecting brand has "brand personality", why not match people to their lucky products then? It seems like a perfect product placement opportunity for enterprizing horoscope writers. Plus, if you know site users' birth dates, does it make sense to show custom sign-appropriate ad units?
In 2001, according to Gallup, 28% of people believed in astrology and 18% weren't sure.
Showtime is offering a free Kindle download of the pilot script of the upcoming TV show Nurse Jackie. AdAge quotes: "The idea of using Kindle, a text-based electronic reader, to promote a TV show may seem odd, but it falls directly in line with Showtime's typical modus operandi when it comes to hyping a new series, said Stuart Zakim, VP-corporate public relations at Showtime."
If you don't own a Kindle but have an iPhone, you can download the script through the free Kindle app.
Coffee Company in the Netherlands is giving away free coffee to students who sneak in a branded slide into their homework PowerPoint decks.
-- via Media Post
Grumpy Brit on how web start-ups misunderstand the ad biz:
"Advertising hasn’t proven the monetizing panacea it was assumed to be because the people who fund, develop and manage web-based businesses know the square root of buggery bollocks about advertising. Which is a bit like the people responsible for laying track being ignorant of anything to do with trains. Despite this modest shortcoming the geeks act like they invented it."
-- via Ad Contrarian (Related thoughts from Seth Godin and Brian Morrissey.)
And wtf is buggery bollocks?
Since I got my webcam upgraded anyway, I thought I'd do a follow up on the Augmented Reality is The New Second Life post and spend a lunch break looking at a few recent implementations of augmented reality in promo microsites.
I looked at Eminem's Relapse UK microsite, GE's Plug Into The Smart Grid, Nissan's Good Decision, USPS's Virtual Box Simulator, and two Star Trek promos at Join Star Fleet Academy and Experience the Enterprise. All these require that you print out a piece of paper with an image (a trigger) and dangle it in front of your webcam for something to happen. I also tried Ray-Ban's Virtual Mirror (via Cory's earlier post; the AR thing is tucked into the un-deep-linkable Flash), which draws glasses straight over your face.
Here are the notes and pictures I took. If you are on RSS and don't see the slideshow, click over or see the pics on Flickr.
1. The good news: the wow factor is undeniable. I had colleagues standing over my shoulder commenting on how cool it was.
2. The bad news: it's jaw-dropping only the first time you see it. After that it quickly regresses from "neat" to "meh".
3. The usability of most implementations is pretty horrendous. You have to hold up a letter-size piece of paper in front of your web cam just so or the whole animation goes away, and then you have to peek around it to see what's happening on the screen. I suspect it works better with smaller objects (I want to try one of those Topps cards next), or with mobile devices.
4. Only Eminem's AR animation was interactive beyond simple rotation -- you have to spray graffiti over it with your mouse. Not very easy either.
5. The biggest question I had was why. For all the trouble they make you go through (download, print, and in case of Star Treck, install a plug-in), you'd expect a somehow more rewarding payoff. From the "useful, usable, desirable" list, most implementations check off only "desirable" for, like, the first two minutes.
7. The Ray-Ban's Virtual Mirror (img1, img2) was the best of the bunch. It does require installing a separate app on your machine (tech by Fitting Box), but you have a pretty clear reason, and while the app is not without its share of glitches, it's pretty entertaining, potentially useful and point at the true potential of the technology.
8. It probably makes sense to make AR experience more exclusive and tie it to purchase. According to WSJ, Papa John's will be putting an AR trigger on its pizza boxes to let users drive the company founder's Camaro. Again, baseball cards with players coming to life in AR make sense. I wish Eminem had included an AR trigger into the CD box (or maybe he did, I don't know).
It's pretty obvious that we are going to see more of this stuff, and we'll soon move beyond the disposable eye-candy toward something with a longer shelf life. I am hoping for a Rolling Stone AR cover with a band jamming in 3D.
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