Monday, November 28, 2005

Ad dollars threaten bloggers' rebel reputations | CNET News.com

CNET News.com
"When Anita Campbell started her Web log about small-business trends two years ago, she thought it would simply be a service for her clients and help her consulting business grow.

Instead, she said, the blog 'just took off,' attracting more readers than she had dreamed of. Then, companies offered to pay her to post advertisements and product mentions on her site. There were enough offers, she said, that she could choose to work with only the ones relevant to her readers. And so, her blog, once just a marketing tool, became a money generator on its own."

WSJ.com - TiVo Users Soon Can Search for Ads

Now that's more like it!
"The same device that helps TV viewers skip commercials will now be prodding them to search for ads. TiVo Inc. is partnering with several big ad firms to offer its users a system that lets them search for commercials centered around a specific topic. Expected to launch next spring, the feature comes as Madison Avenue is contemplating a number of ways to reach consumers who use technology to avoid traditional advertising."

Selling online

Pew Internet & American Life Project Report
"Some 17% of online American adults have used the internet to sell things. That amounts to approximately 25 million Americans.
In addition, internet traffic data show that visits to classified ad web sites has grown 80% in the past year."

The Codex

The Codex is the definitive DIY (and award-winning) machinima poster girl. User-generated content goes postal ...

Sunday, November 27, 2005

Kaboodle

Kaboodle is a social shopping site worth a look ...

Saturday, November 26, 2005

Now all they need to do is freshen up the presidency!

Pew Internet & American Life Project Report
"In the aftermath of the Gulf Coast Hurricanes, 13 million Americans made donations to relief efforts online and 7 million set up their own hurricane relief efforts using the internet."

ON "MY OPML FILE" TURNING INTO A WHOLE LOT OF STUFF

End of the Sustainable Competitive Advantage?

Michael McDerment Blog
"Has Web 2.0 brought an end to the sustainable competitive advantage? Look at Flickr, Delicious, even Salesforce.com (read their prospectus and they admit to have no patents and no sustainable competitive advantage) none of these companies has a defensible technology position. When I speak with savvy business people they ask: 'What is 2ndSite's sustainable competitive advantage?' Well, we don't have one: does that mean we cannot build a successful company and a cash cow? No."

Paper War

PBS | I, Cringely
"Oscar Wilde said that the only thing worse than people talking about you is people NOT talking about you, and it must have been with this in mind that Microsoft recently 'leaked' two company-wide memos concerning the Redmond's new strategic direction -- its so-called Live strategy that I wrote about last week. My plan for this column had been to detail what I believe will be Google's upcoming web services strategy, but that will have to wait a week since these memos are simply too juicy to ignore."

Google-Mart

PBS | I, Cringely
"Play to your strengths. That's the key to success in any industry. This is the week I promised to explain where I think Google is headed, and playing to the company's strengths is key if they are going to do what I think, which is effectively take over the Internet. Oh they won't steal it or strong-arm us. They'll seduce us into giving it to them. And I am not at all sure that's a bad thing."

TiVO Tags Tastes

New Scientist Breaking News
"Californian company TiVo plans to make life even easier for couch potatoes. The company already sells Personal Video Recorders (PVR), which can record hundreds of hours of TV and learn what programmes a person most likes in order to record future episodes. Patents filed in the US show that TiVo plans to take personalised television even further. The company is working on a PVR that will recognise one of several individual users, and respond to their personal preferences."

TiVo to Transfer Shows to iPods, Sony PSP

New York Times
"SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 20 - TiVo, the maker of digital video recorders, plans to announce a new feature on Monday that will let TiVo owners watch recorded television shows on Apple's video iPods and on Sony's handheld PSP game machine."

Slingbox "Placeshifts" TV Viewing

MIT Advertising Lab
"'Slingbox enables consumers to watch their cable, satellite, or digital video recorder (DVR) programming from wherever they are, turning any Internet-connected laptop or desktop PC into a personal TV."

Sunday, November 13, 2005

ESPN taps Sanyo for launch of mobile service

CNET News.com
"Sports broadcaster ESPN fleshed out the details of a long-planned mobile phone service on Tuesday, announcing that it will use Sanyo handsets to launch the service by the end of the year.

Mobile ESPN, in the works for nearly a year, will deliver sports scores, audio and video clips, and headlines to subscribers via their cell phones, the network said. Walt Disney's ESPN first unveiled plans for the service last year, announcing it would work with Sprint to develop it.

As the first handset partner for Mobile ESPN, Sanyo said it will produce an 'MVP' phone that can deliver video, audio and text at high speeds. The phone will also feature a high-resolution display, a 1.3-megapixel digital camera, a video and voice recorder, and an MP3 music player, the companies said."

The advertising implications of Bill and Ray's two-dot-oh-gate affair

I was much pleased to read Ray Ozzie's point re advertiser funding of seamless services for the user. An implication here is something I articulated (largely to myself ...) a little while ago from the other side of this rickety table, the brand and agency side ... that in order to retain and maintain (indeed regain!) any kind of useful traction with the desirable customer, brands need to shift from the (typical above the line) model of sponsorship and interruption of content, towards the sponsorship and enhancement of the consumer experience itself.

If you buy this - and you may not (yet, but wait and see ...) - you begin to see some profound consequences:

Culturally, Microsoft has little understanding of traditional - let alone advanced - branding, and its attitude to the subtleties of user experience has been relatively reactive ... code first, customer later... eventually. This will be a key area of challenge for them, and simply adding rich media ads and contextual/behavioural smarts to their services will be very far from adequate. A solution will be found here, but not I imagine without egg on faces.

The "right to brand" the customer experience, bearing in mind the disappointments of former intimacy-based marketing philosophies, in particular CRM, is a fascinating area to examine. This will come to depend not merely on existing adtech smarts, but on the brands' abilities to deliver experience enhancements ("with OUR document sharing services you get online collaboration capabilities AND we give Air Miles by the word" ...) and ultimately with a customer value-based hacking up of customer domains, according to brands' willingness and abilities to move yet further, beyond service value to to take on "sector ownership".

This probably fluid sector ownership would be contested in an ongoing 2.0 marketing war whose rules would relate to the effective blending and management of folksonomies and taxonomies to balance individual, tribal and domain-specific elements of the customer experience. A particularly interesting zone here will in be the "Search +" opportunity, where issues of personal profile and preference blend with tribal attitudes and trust needs to mandate, as it were, 3-dimensional search criteria and results sorting.

I have quite usefully used the metaphor of a beehive to explain this modern relationship between brand and consumer. We like honey, but we don't speak bee. If we approach a bee inappropriately (easy to do if you don't belong here and don't have the language either) we get stung. If we manage to annoy the whole bee crew - and they are a perfect tribe, these bees - we get stung hundreds of times ... and still no honey! Therefore, we need to support the best possible experience - given our minimal understanding of bee jollies - for the bee tribe. So we build a hive, we adopt a stance of "gentle enablement" in regard to our honey habit, and eventually we are rewarded with the honey.

The key insight served by the beehive model is this: marketing has become a discipline where cause and effect (risk and reward) have become fractured from each other ... there is no "quid pro quo" whatsoever in the relationship between hive and keeper, and the same applies in the brand-consumer relationship.

If the leading marketers in the world are struggling to see, and then accept, this new shape, we can expect the folks in Redmond to need lots of help in the early steps of Bill and Ray's Excellent Ad-venture. More on this soon.

Saturday, November 12, 2005

Sprint lets you phone tunes to yourself

CNET News.com article on the new Sprint music service - sounds pretty fresh.

Peter Drucker dies at 95 - a great man gone

CNET News.com report on the death of a powerful thinker, and a summary of his unique legacy. RIP.

Sony BMG to Suspend CDs With Antipiracy Technology

Sony BMG has been forced to back down on its DRM software, as reported in WSJ.com article ... make of it what you will.

Opening salvo in the Return on Attention marketplace fired ...

... by Root. Take this very seriously - these guys understand one of the very big plays in Media 2.0.

Friday, November 11, 2005

Getting real about money in 2.0

Handy wake-up call from Real Tech News
"There has been plenty of pontificating about Web 2.0 from the high-profile crowd (Nicholas Carr, Tim O%u2019Reilly and, most recently, Ray Ozzie) but what about the entrepreneurs working away with little recognition? How do they view the whole Web 2.0 phenomena as they work to to build businesses in a market where the barriers to entry are fairly low? How are these people different from the business plan-on-the-back-of-a-napkin set of the dot-com era?"

Wednesday, November 09, 2005

Trust declines in advertising and grows in CGM ...

... that's consumer-generated media to you, bub ... see Intelliseek

Sunday, November 06, 2005

Branded clothing for Avatars ...

... detailed in intellagencia.com article. I think avatars are due for a major resurgence, but not as we currently know them, Jim.

How $2 downloads can revive network television

Very useful thoughts in Slate column by Ivan Askwith which re-assess the impact on TV of the Video iPod. Media students read this.

Fund your CV ... with contextual ads ... from Microsoft

Perhaps one of the wilder swings from the big boys in their bid for 2.0 glory, detailed in MIT Advertising Lab blog.

Teen Content Creators and Consumers

Very important and as usual thorough report, downloadable as pdf, from Pew Internet & American Life Project: "American teenagers today are utilizing the interactive capabilities of the internet as they create and share their own media creations. Fully half of all teens and 57% of teens who use the internet could be considered Content Creators. They have created a blog or webpage, posted original artwork, photography, stories or videos online or remixed online content into their own new creations.

Teens are often much more enthusiastic authors and readers of blogs than their adult counterparts. Teen bloggers, led by older girls, are a major part of this tech-savvy cohort. Teen bloggers are more fervent internet users than non-bloggers and have more experience with almost every online activity in the survey.

Teens continue to actively download music and video from the internet and have used multiple sources to get their files. Those who get music files online believe it is unrealistic to expect people to self-regulate and avoid free downloading and file-sharing altogether."

Sony Announces PSP Podcasting Support

Via Steve Rubel, a Podcasting News article lays out up and coming specs for the PSP ... loads of social potential ... maybe games will yet be good for kids!

Wikipedia Traffic Is Trouncing The New York Times

Useful Micro Persuasion piece from ever-reliable Steve Rubel on a startling stat for those of us following micromedia ... planners and buyers take note!

How to spend your marketing and ad budget

Creating Passionate Users piece with simple "old vs new" chart lays out the new deal. Good food for thought, although knowing the marketing community they'll fuss about it and change ... sweet FA!

Shifts in Media and Advertising

Important and mercifully brief (32 pages) report from New Politics Institute ... will come back with review soon.

A sweet taste - or not - of things to come ...

MIT Advertising Lab on Fruitcast, that inserts ads into Podcasts ... interesting to see progress on this.