Irving Wladawsky-Berger, IBM's vice president of technical strategy and innovation, writes on his blog about virtual world's potential for business and communications. Quotes:
"About two years ago, a study conducted by the IBM Academy of Technology concluded that technologies and capabilities from the gaming world would have a very strong impact on all aspects of IT, and made a number of recommendations for follow-on activities, which we have proceeded to implement."
"Another exciting area of study is e-commerce in the virtual world. The original, and now very successful concept of e-commerce, is built around the metaphor of a catalogue, which fits the page content notion of the Web and of browsers very nicely. But in the emerging, highly visual virtual worlds, commerce could be conducted in virtual stores, the allure of which would be limited only by the imagination of the virtual store designers."
"I believe that using such virtual, highly visual capabilities to help us design, simulate, optimize, operate and manage business activities of all sorts is going to be one of the most important breakthroughs in the IT industry over the next decade."
A few more details on the blog of Business Communicators of Second Life. Eightbar covers related IBM's projects.
-- clickable culture
Data: Good News -- Some People Do Watch Ads
Ball State Uni's Center for Media Design just announced a new installment of results from their media consumption study. This part deals with TV ad avoidance. Some snippets:
" - About one third (32.7%) of all ad pods were watched in their entirety.
- Over one half of all ad pods (57.9%) were interrupted by advertising-related scene shifting or attention shifts.
- Nearly half of the ad breaks were watched for one minute or less, as 15.4 percent of commercial blocks were viewed for 31 to 60 seconds before interruption; 12.1 percent lasted 16 to 30 seconds; 11.8 percent were between 6-10 seconds; and 9.1 percent lasted 5 seconds or less."
-- via lost remote
" - About one third (32.7%) of all ad pods were watched in their entirety.
- Over one half of all ad pods (57.9%) were interrupted by advertising-related scene shifting or attention shifts.
- Nearly half of the ad breaks were watched for one minute or less, as 15.4 percent of commercial blocks were viewed for 31 to 60 seconds before interruption; 12.1 percent lasted 16 to 30 seconds; 11.8 percent were between 6-10 seconds; and 9.1 percent lasted 5 seconds or less."
-- via lost remote
Campaign: Nikon Prints User-Submitted Pics in Ad
If you want your share of consumer-generated content (buzz! buzz!), then you have to give people the right tools and the right incentives (and talk to the guys at MIT C3). Nikon sent out a bunch of new D80 cameras around and asked people to take pictures. Then Nikon collected the pictures and put together an ad that appears this week in Business Week. Besides, check out the "stunning gallery" photoset on Flickr.
-- thanks, Chris
Netflix Battles Paradox of Choice with $1M Award
Netflix is giving away one million bucks to anyone who comes up with a better movie recommendation system than what they are currently using. NY Times explains: "Recommendation systems, also known as collaborative filtering systems, try to predict whether a customer will like a movie, book or piece of music by comparing his or her past preferences to those of other people with similar tastes. Such systems will look at, say, the last 10 books, movies or songs a customer has rated highly and try to extrapolate an 11th."
Very interesting for at least three reasons. First, just like Lego did earlier (and many other companies, too), Netflix is turning to the wise crowds to solve a specific engineering problem.
Second, it shows how important the paradox of choice is, especially for the market segments with an overwhelming number of products (the paradox lies in the fact that after some point, a wider the variety of offerings leads to lower sales as customers become too confused). If you can't remember 10 kinds of toothpaste, how about tens of thousands of movies?
Third, it's just an interesting problem. What do we know about how people make choices about movies? Are the decisions based on genres, cast, directors, soundtracks, box art? What about the less tangible variables such as mood (which is likely to change by the time the Netflix order arrives anyway) or particular social occasion (you rent the last season of Lost for a Sunday Lost marathon but probalby wouldn't otherwise)?
The cynics at Digg suggested that the whole thing is just a marketing stunt for Netflix to show how great their suggestion engine actually is. Might be. In any case, the 100 million movie ratings that Netflix is making available is any researcher's goldmine.
Anyway, here's a good book on the subject of consumer choice.
Earlier:
Burger King's Wheel Solves Paradox of Choice
"Missed Call" Phone Marketing
I don't get any telemarketer calls, but quite a few of what is known as "missed call" ads. I never thought they were doing it on purpose, though. Despicable but admittedly clever spam.
"'Missed call' marketing is the term that has been given to the practice of calling a mobile telephone for such a short period of time that the owner cannot answer the call. When the marketer disconnects the call, most mobile phones present a 'missed call' notification with the marketer's number. The marketer intends that the owner of the phone will think that they have missed a legitimate call and ring the number back, in which case they hear a recorded promotional message."
-- Cellular News via Textually
"'Missed call' marketing is the term that has been given to the practice of calling a mobile telephone for such a short period of time that the owner cannot answer the call. When the marketer disconnects the call, most mobile phones present a 'missed call' notification with the marketer's number. The marketer intends that the owner of the phone will think that they have missed a legitimate call and ring the number back, in which case they hear a recorded promotional message."
-- Cellular News via Textually
Rebtel Offers International Calls Via Local Numbers
Ok, this is an offtopic public service announcement that isn't yet related to advertising. If you think Skype is great (I do), try Rebtel, a new Swedish start-up that offers cheap international VoIP calls from your mobile, putting all those underused plan minutes to work. The company just got some press in SF Chronicle and Red Herring after snagging $20M of VC financing.
Rebtel offers users international calling at local rates from their mobile phones for $1 a week. Registered users of Rebtel’s web site fill in their phone number and the phone number of the party they want to phone. In a nutshell, for every international contact you have, Rebtel will generate a local phone number that you can dial from your cell phone at whatever rate your operator charges (free nights and weekends count). You pay $1 to Rebtel for every week in which you use the service plus a variable per-minute fee (2 cents for Canada, 14 cents to the more exotic Moldova). I'm yet to test the quality (nobody's home on the other end), but the convenience is unbeatable. And no, this is not a paid plug.
Techmeme Offers Ads Updateable Through RSS
Techmeme offers a new ad format: sponsor posts. Here's their own explanation about how it all works: "A sponsor's blog occupies a permanent place in the "Techmeme Sponsor Post" area of the site for the duration of the sponsorship. The technology is simple: a sponsor's blog feed is polled every few minutes, the latest post of which appears in its assigned slot (first, second, or third) along with a logo image that links to the sponsor's site."
TechCrunch and BuzzMachine say Techmeme has just re-invented advertising. To be precise, it's a good idea but not a new one. I wrote about BBC producing RSS-powered ad units exactly a year ago.
TechCrunch and BuzzMachine say Techmeme has just re-invented advertising. To be precise, it's a good idea but not a new one. I wrote about BBC producing RSS-powered ad units exactly a year ago.
Reebok Launches Interactive Ads on Dish Network
Reebok launched an interactive ad campaign on Dish Network running commercials embedded with an interactive overlay that allow consumers to "click through to a fully branded, interactive Rbk iAd, which is a web-like screen on the television where viewers can watch long-form interviews of an individual Rbk NFL star of the week" (press release, pdf). "They [viewers] can also play football-trivia games in an attempt to win pro jerseys and, later in the campaign, order replica jerseys by entering credit-card information via their remote controls" (Multichannel News).
-- via Convergence Culture
-- via Convergence Culture
Integrated Advertising Across Google Services
NY Times writes about the new Saturn campaign that spans a wide range of Google online services: keywords, maps, videos, and Earth:
"Visitors to a variety of Web sites in six cities around the country that are home to 22 Saturn dealerships will see what look like typical banner ads for Aura, a new Saturn midsize sedan. Clicking on an ad will produce a view of the earth that zooms in on the dealership nearest to the computer user.
The doors to the virtual dealership fly open, revealing the general manager, who introduces a brief commercial about Aura. After the spot ends, the general manager returns, standing next to an Aura and offering choices that include spinning the car 360 degrees, inspecting its engine, printing a map with directions to the dealership and visiting the Web sites of Saturn (saturn.com) or the dealer."
-- thank you, Chloe
"Visitors to a variety of Web sites in six cities around the country that are home to 22 Saturn dealerships will see what look like typical banner ads for Aura, a new Saturn midsize sedan. Clicking on an ad will produce a view of the earth that zooms in on the dealership nearest to the computer user.
The doors to the virtual dealership fly open, revealing the general manager, who introduces a brief commercial about Aura. After the spot ends, the general manager returns, standing next to an Aura and offering choices that include spinning the car 360 degrees, inspecting its engine, printing a map with directions to the dealership and visiting the Web sites of Saturn (saturn.com) or the dealer."
-- thank you, Chloe
Air Force Takes Down MySpace Profile
The Air Force has taken down its profile on MySpace because of "concerns about associating the service with content that it deems inappropriate" (Air Force Times) . An official quote: "The danger with MySpace is we got to the point where we weren’t real comfortable with the potential for inappropriate content to be posted [on the page of] a friend of a friend." The profile was launched in late August. Here's another official quote from an article that came out when the MySpace page went live: "In order to reach young men and women today, we need to be in tune and engaged in their circles."
Anyway, the Marines are still up.
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