Month: May 2008

Media Planning in a Web2.0 World

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A very interesting post from Darren Herman (his blog: DarrenHerman.com) over at AdAge.com: How to Plan Media in a Non-Linear World :

We live in a non-linear world but are taught linear business processes. Yikes. We’re doomed. Grab the Starburst and let’s head down to the cellar to hide.

It’s 2008. Wake up. Drink some Patron and lets start thinking rational: How do we harness our non-linear world?

New digital brief given to [insert agency name] by a client.
“Can someone put together a ComScore run?”
RFP the top 25 on the list
Media planning time …
 […]
Linear thinking would lead us to pick the same process over time and usually select the top sites on the list and work with them. Non-linear forces us to work harder and sometimes, chaotic, but allows us to participate in a non-linear world much better. With this said, we need to start developing the tools, processes and technologies to harness our knowledge in a non-linear world. I haven’t seen many tools that do this, but I’m certainly willing to listen.

Darren is asking for input on new ways and tools/technologies to support and tap into the new possibilities which arise in this very fragmented Online world.I think the “chaotic element” is what makes this question really challenging. How do you account = plan for this?

Are you gunning for the big properties or what is your process to target your audience?

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US Blogosphere = Big Business

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The blogosphere in the USs is growing into “big biz” says eMarketer in its recent article called: Who doesn’t read a blog now and then?

US Bloggers 2007 - 2012

So, we would have 16% of the internet users in the US “producing” content! A really significant number which needs to be reflected even more in marketing campaigns in 2012 than what we see today.

Let’s look at the numbers on the “consuming” side of the blogospere:

US Blog Readers 2007 - 2012

We’ll reach 70% of “blog readers” of all Internet users in the US. This underlines the important role blogs will inhabit by 2012 and how important it is for brands to “play nice” with the still young “communication channel”.

Next: What money will be spent on advertising on the pages of blogs in the US 2007-2012?

US Blogs Ad Spending 2007 - 2012

From the eMarketer article:

“A big factor driving the increases is the niche orientation of the blogosphere,” says Mr. Verna. 

“Once a haven for techies to communicate with each other in their own lingo, blogs have long since shed this mantle and tapped into the zeitgeist of American culture,” says Paul Verna, eMarketer senior analyst and author of the new report, The Blogosphere: A Mass Movement from Grass Roots. “There are blogs for virtually everything under the sun, from celebrity gossip to political commentary to the most mundane personal minutiae.”

Are you writing your own blog or contribute to one?

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Google Friend Connect to be announced at Campfire One

marco Leave a comment

 UH!

Google Friend Connect

Techcrunch says:

Friend Connect is a new data portability initiative for spreading social connections around the web. It’s the third of such announcements to be made in less than a week; MySpace Data Availability and Facebook Connect are the other two.

To find out more check out the live coverage over at techcrunch. You’ll find a live videostream broadcasting from the event.

Update: Techcrunch shows now the recorded stream from the event.

A blog post by Forrester’s Charlene Li fits quiet well to this announcement from Google. She writes on her blog:

The future of social networks: Social networks will be like air

“I thought about my grade-school kids, who in 10 years will be in the midst of social network engagement. I believe they (and we) will look back to 2008 and think it archaic and quaint that we had to go to a destination like Facebook or LinkedIn to ‘be social.’

This gets interesting now 🙂

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More Ads to appear in Online Comcercial Breaks at abc.com

marco Leave a comment

Looks like we might need to watch through more ads Online, too. Online viewing moving close to the “TV model”?

MarketingVOX: ABC to Pump More Ads into Online Commercial Breaks

Starting this week, ABC will insert multiple commercials into ad breaks within shows streamed online. Each break typically serves one :15 or :30 commercial.

Because the medium is new, the standard for streaming TV shows is one spot per break. Some sites, like Hulu, give users the option of watching a single two-minute trailer at the beginning of a show, in exchange for an otherwise uninterrupted experience.

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AdAge: Adults Spend 1/2 Their Media Hours With TV & Advertisers Loosing Confidence in TV

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Is this a loosing battle for the TV industry in its “traditional definition”? Time to move your media to the Internet and build a new business model? Or not yet?

From AdAge.com: Adults Spend 1/2 Their Media Hours With TV

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — It seems marketers and TV executives are having a half-full, half-empty kind of argument over TV’s prowess. The results of a survey on consumer media habits commissioned by the Television Bureau of Advertising show that adult consumers spend a little over half of their media hours with TV. Meanwhile, a recent survey of marketers and advertisers by the Association of National Advertisers found many were losing confidence in TV as a medium.

From AdAge.com: Marketers Losing Confidence in TV

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — Whether traditional TV advertising has truly lost its power, marketers and advertisers are already eager to find alternatives. The Association of National Advertisers and Forrester Research’s fourth biennial TV and Technology survey shows a dramatic loss of confidence in the medium as the industry gears up to explore new ad formats and forms of video commercials.

Indeed, two thirds of the C-level-executive respondents said they are watching the medium closely, up from just half two years ago, and 87% of respondents said they were going to be spending more on web ads in the coming year. The study was conducted in January and is based on a survey of 78 leading advertisers across all major industries and categories. 

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Drop.io – Online File Exchange Revisited

marco 2 Comments

Came across a new service called Drop.io which was mentioned on ZDNet: Weekend Gadget Guidance: Send a fax for free — digitally.

Well, no more, folks: Drop.io, a fairly innovative file-sharing service, sends and receives faxes for free.

It works like this: to send a fax, upload a document to Drop.io. Enter the fax number and click “Fax.” Boom — no beeps to haunt you in your sleep.
On the receiving end, Drop.io will generate a cover sheet you then e-mail to the sender. As long as they use your cover page on the fax, it will end up in your Drop.io account as a PDF.

It is true that a free fax service is always good to have 🙂 But on the receiving side for this fax solution to work you need to provide a special cover sheet to receive it in your “drop” and becomes available to download. This makes it not a solution for sensitive data which you don’t intend to share freely (even if you make your drop private…. ).

This is how the site describes its service:

Drop.io enables you to create simple private exchange points called “drops.”

The service has no email signup and no “accounts.” Each drop is private, and only as accessible as you choose to deliberately make it. Create multiple drops, add any type of media, and share or subscribe as you want. 

And it gets even better: Drop.io supports different media types, like photos, videos and (text) posts! You also have the option to embed a widget in your blog or social network of choice. This enables visitors to upload and download files to/from your drop. You get 100MB per drop for free and you can add more storage for $10/GB. Embed the files located in your drop in another (e.g. blog) page and add comment to the files. This makes it a truly social app which should attract further users/traffic.

Please leave a comment and provide your feedback if you work with the service or want to test it out @ Drop.io!

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