Quote of the Week

"It’s not all that bad, really, to get ads for diapers when you’re having a baby, or ads for cars when you are looking to buy a car. Life will go on."

Michael Arrington on Techcrunch about the WSJ's story on Facebook "data leak".

Now You Really "Like" This Banner

Continuing the topic of bookmarkable advertising: not sure how Mountain Dew integrating Facebook "Like" buttons into their display ads is "the first time the social-networking behemoth will extend its social/sharing functionality to ads appearing on other Web sites," in Adweek's exclusive words. You can roll your own Likeable and Shareable banners with Spongecell; in-banner sharing functionality via third-party services has been offered for a fairly long time now.

Farmers Insurance Insures Farmville Farms

Saw this blimp on Farmville's spash screen today. It turns out that "The Farmers [Insurance] in-game integration will use the likeness of its Farmers Insurance Airship, a 246-foot long Zeppelin. When players place the Farmers Airship on their farm, they receive free "wither protection" for the crops on their virtual farm. In a nod to the security that Farmers Insurance offer its customers, this protection means players crops won't wither for the 10 days of the promotion."

Might be too perfect of a fit. It took me a while to register that Farmers is an actual insurance company and not a Farmville in-game reference.

Farmers's Facebook page says theirs is the "largest Zeppelin in the world", and the company raffles out rides.

This is me in my blueberry garden, waiting for the airship to arrive. I'll park it next to my McDonald's balloon.

Update: It's here!

ZOMG! iPhone Games Eat Away at TV Audience!

...says a company that puts ads in iOS games. Here's you daily dose of self-serving numbers.

"Social games on iPhone, iPad and iPod touch devices are competing for television viewers. In fact, these apps, tracked on the Flurry network alone, comprise of a daily audience of more than 19 million who spend over 22 minutes per day using these apps. Treated as a consumer audience, its size and reach rank somewhere between NBC’s Sunday Night Football and ABC’s Dancing with the Stars, and only 4 million viewers shy from beating the number one prime-time show on television, FOX’s American Idol."

Which, of course, means that "compared to a top television series, which airs 22 episodes a season, advertisers can reach a larger consumer audience through applications 15 times more frequently."

Which, of course, is coming from "a leading smartphone application analytics and monetization platform."

There's lies, damn lies, and statistics, and then there's stuff that doesn't make any sense at all, like comparing a number of people who have spent 20 minutes, on average, over a course of one day playing any of a number of games with the audience sizes of individual shows that are broadcast within a time window.

Good thing this is coming from an "analytics" company.

Art Project Removes Logos From Videos, Photos

"Unlogo is a web service that eliminates logos and other corporate signage from videos." An art project by Jeff Crouse, it is, technically speaking, "an FFMPEG AVFilter that attempts to block out corporate logos using OpenCV 2.1 and an awesome 'plugin' framework for FFMPEG." Unlogo is open sourced; its code-in-progress is available here.

The artist also talks about an iPhone app that "can be used by individuals to identify logos that may occur in photographs they take with their phone and to replace them with images drawn from an online databank."

A Kickstarter campaign was organized to support the project, but it fell short of the $4,000 target.
- via

Finally, Bookmarkable Banner Ads

The big Monday press release was about the unveiling of AdKeeper, a company whose technology adds a "bookmark" (or "keep", as they call it) button to banner ads of participating advertisers. The idea is based on the fact that people do bookmark advertising if a) it's easy, and b) there is an expectation of future value. Clipping coupons, for example, is both. Until today, banners haven't really been designed for any kind of delayed gratification, being instead all about "click here now" reward mechanism. With AdKeeper, users will be able to clip online banners into a repository for later viewing, which probably means that the creative can be updated with new offers depending on the history of interactions with the ad.

An excellent idea, which I hope takes off.

Here's the demo video:

Coming Soon: Video CAPTCHA Ads

Update [Oct 25, 2010]: NuCaptcha has just launched its advertising offering (here's a promo video).

If you liked ads in CAPTCHAs brought to the world by Solve Media (formerly AdCopy), you'll love NUcaptcha, a company that has developed technology to replace the usual squiggles with animations and videos and that is apparently working on an advertising solution.

Recent (Oct 6) updates to the company's downloadable files talk about how "NuCaptcha can push ads right into a Captcha field, providing a new, highly visible ad space." The description for the WordPress plugin describes NUCaptcha as "a multi purpose product which provides industry leading security combined with brand messaging, advertising and unique user engagement."  The image above with the WestJet spec shows up when you browse to the site on an iPad as a replacement for the default Flash sequence.

I'm curious about the patent side of the story. Last March, I wrote about a company in Germany trying to patent video CAPTCHA ads. Microsoft, too, had submitted an application for a patent that describes a CAPTCHA ad system similar to Solve Media's where users type in ad slogans. One of the examples of Solve Media's ads are for Internet Explorer 8; Microsoft's application is illustrated with an ad for Xbox.

Even though CAPTCHA advertising has been a recurring topic on AdLab since 2005, I'm not sure I'm convinced it's a good idea as it may create strong incentives for publishers to opt against the optimum user experience, similar to breaking up articles into multiple pages and slideshows to ramp up page views.

On a related note, I would love to see a reCaptcha-like system used as a foreign language instruction tool, where you are given a word in one language and are asked for a translation in another.

Play Zork on Kindle

Point your Kindle's browser at portablequest.com and relive the classic text-based adventure  -- a versatile genre also playable via Twitter, with spoken commands on the phone, or on the iPods of yore.
-- via Gamepr0n via Suncho

McDonald's on Farmville - Screenshots

Do you know how many bloggers jumped on the "Old McDonald('s) Had a Farm(ville)" thing for their headlines today?

Anyway, here are some screenshots of this one-day promo. Visit the McD's farm from your neighbor bar today and get two prizes - a cup of coffee that speeds you up and a pretty hot air balloon that takes up space and does nothing I could figure out.  You can get the gifts on the market, too.  A fan blog had noticed many of these items on the server a couple of weeks earlier.

From GAP to ZIP

Instead of doing whatever it is that they are doing with their logo, I wish GAP would become ZIP for a week in a nod to the huge audience of Grand Theft Auto that has ZIP stores in the San Andreas installment. Sort of how 7-11 became Kwik-E-Mart.