Of course we’ve known for five years that YouTube has changed virtual life as we know it. So long are the days where we ask someone “Did you see that last night?” and are out of luck if they didn’t. Within thirty seconds we are pulling a video up on our smartphones and watching it live. What has this meant for adverting? For one, viral videos are becoming household names. You are considered an outcast if you haven’t seen the latest YouTube hit and even the national news programs are showing some of YouTube’s greatest hits on occasion. But the real question is, have you ever noticed just how many of these hits were born out of advertisements?
Advertisers these days are creating ads with the virtual market in mind. They know how significant the replay of their ads on hubs such as YouTube can be and the jackpot it creates if they can produce a “viral ad.” Even the target audience has been geared towards the teenaged techies; take the new (and slightly bizarre) Old Spice campaign for example, adopting the group who are constantly browsing the latest YouTube hits.
So there has been a shift: no longer are people straying away from ads, they are searching for them, trying to find the funniest ones, sending them to their friends and watching them over and over again. Ads can’t be boring!!
Have Americans’ obsession with brands gone too far?
The NBA has released a series of basketball related food products: a toaster that burns a team’s logo into bread, NBA Gourmet Coffee and edible team logos for…a pizza? The toaster and gourmet coffee are currently for sale at store.nba.com. The edible logo will be available for all 30 teams by next season, but they won’t be sold directly to consumers. Instead, the NBA will be selling the logos to individual pizza places nationwide for a lovely logo delivery.
This may be the next step to becoming more of a brand-crazed society. Will food products become the next popular promotional tool for advertisers? This phenomenon just goes on to show that as Americans, we are obsessed with brand identification. Creatively breaking through the clutter is a key element in today’s advertising world, but resorting to utilizing space on food may be taking it a step too far. It’ll be interesting to see if these new NBA products will be successful.
Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced at the WWDC (World Wide Developers’ Conference) on June 7th that Apple’s iAd platform, which kicks off July 1st, has sold $60 million worth of ads after only eight weeks of sales. Apple’s advertising platform that was developed for its mobile devices and allows third party developers to directly embed their advertisements within certain applications has already gained commitments from major companies such as Nissan, Target, Disney and GE. It is hard to believe that they have already managed to claim fifty percent of the total mobile ad spending for the second half of 2010. Or is it?
When will people stop being amazed by Steve Jobs’ capabilities and start expecting these statistics from him? He has proven himself time and time again and these new ads avoid irritating app users by no longer forcing them to view the ads in a new browser but rather allow them to interact with them right inside the app and seamlessly return to whatever they were doing. Jobs was quoted as describing this new advance as offering, “…advertisers the emotion of TV with the interactivity of the web, and offers users a new way to explore ads without being hijacked out of their favorite apps.” I am certainly a believer and I can’t remember the last time I was actually waiting for a day to be interrupted by an ad.
In the B2B advertising world, it’s easy to get caught up in a mundane, unappealing campaign. Most B2B is seen as the “redheaded stepchild” in advertising, but we steer clear of the typical business-to-business campaign. This video I came across seems to demonstrate our perspective and our clients who follow us towards producing more creative and innovative B2B campaigns.
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Start a revolution. Be our follower into more of a creative, interesting B2B campaign. B2B shouldn’t be something monotonous, because after all, businesses are consumers too. In order to break through the clutter, dare to be different. Don’t continue to stick with the boring B2B campaigns that businesses continue to discard. Kudos to you, you crazy dancing man. You’re an inspiration to us all.
Google has done it yet again! The ever-expanding site seems to be developing even further to reach a more diverse and broader range of consumers. Their new service launch makes Google more appealing to the website designer. Just a few days ago, the mega site launched the Google Font Dictionary and Google Font API to the public.
The two services work hand in hand in displaying and offering the code for various fonts available. These free fonts come from a wide range of typography designers and all fonts are considered to be open source. Their newest edition makes searching and utilizing various fonts for web design a breeze. Browse through numerous fonts, witness how they would look directly on your webpage and access the code on Google Font Dictionary. Google Font API then helps you add your font of choice to any web page.
Currently, there are numerous fonts that are left out of the dictionary, but Google appears to have plans to expand the dictionary on a constant basis. Surprisingly, the additions appear to be under the radar and have not received much publicity. Perhaps the newness factor and the services falling under the Google Code application make it easy for anyone to overlook or bypass.
Access the newest editions to Google here: http://code.google.com/apis/webfonts
More goes into a personalized URL marketing campaign than simply sending a potential client a link that has their name incorporated in the web address. There is no “magic trick” that lets you merely send out the PURLs and let them do your work for you. It should simply be viewed as the key that gets you in the door.
To be successful, just like every other marketing campaign, the thought behind reaching a certain segment must be paired with relevance to those customers and a way to creatively grab their attention. If you pair this with intentional follow-ups with the recipients, you are in the making for what will become a truly personal approach.
With all the technology and social media sites out there, it can be easy to overlook the personal relationships that are vital in growing your business. Between LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare (you get the point) there can be little time left over to create and maintain relationships with potential clients.
Earlier this month, The New York Times came out with an article that stated the number of text messages had increased by nearly 50 percent last year. A significant increase had also occurred with the use of e-mail, streaming video and music on cell phones last year, while the average length of time spent talking on the phone had decreased almost 30 seconds from the year 2008 to 2009. Society has become more reliant of technology to connect and interact with others, while the actual amount of time spent conversing over the phone is not as significant.
While the advantage of social media can be extremely significant, don’t just relate back to technology to work for you. We have become an impersonal society, even during our social “networking” era. Be above the norm and reach out on an individual level and actually interact with your clients or potential customers.
What happened to the time when you could pay for a commercial to run in a primetime spot on a major cable network and feel confident that you would gain a wide range of viewers? We are now in the age of TiVo, DVR, and Hulu, presenting advertisers with a new challenge: how to break through all the clutter?
It’s three o’clock central time and The Ellen DeGeneres Show is on TV. She has celebrities giving hugs to audience members to donate money to the Boys and Girls Club of America, “Brought to you by Nivea.” A few minutes later she is giving away a new GMC Terrain to a deserving viewer, followed by free iPods for the entire audience.
The time has come when it is no longer efficient to just put your message in commercials, on the radio or in print. Try watching a show in the next week that isn’t filled with an overload of different products staring at you through your TV.
