May 27th, 2007 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
Today’s award for the most obvious statement about a Web-related issue has to go to the New York Times, which wrote an entire story about how getting “users” to generate advertising actually — audible gasp! — takes work, in the sense that someone has to weed through all the crap in order to produce anything useful. Does this really come as a surprise to anyone?
As a commenter said on Ryan Sholin’s blog, this definitely falls under the heading of “Free Lunch — isn’t one, etc.” If any of the advertisers quoted in the New York Times story were told by a “Web 2.0″ advisor that they could somehow outsource ad production to “the crowd” and wind up with something just as good as what they produce in-house, then they should sue. But I suspect they weren’t told that. They may have wished that was true, but if wishes were horses then beggars would ride, as my mother used to say (actually, she still says that). Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0 has more on the subject.
As a number of people (including commenters on Scott’s post) have pointed out, however, whether an ad is technically or even creatively as slick and well-crafted as a Madison Avenue spot isn’t the only factor that needs to be considered. In some cases, a quirky, user-created ad like the one Global Nerdy likes, or like the Diet Coke and Mentos video, might actually work better. And getting people to “engage” with the brand may be even more important than the actual technical brilliance of the ad.
Let’s put it this way: there are plenty of ads that are slick and well-produced and no doubt cost millions, and do absolutely nothing for me whatsoever, just as there are Hollywood blockbusters with stars up the wazoo and giant budgets that barely even register. But a small, quirky, independent film can really touch you. As Heather Green notes over at the BusinessWeek blog, there has to be some kind of connection there or it won’t work.
Apr 26th, 2007 | Media 2.0 | No Comments
First, we got the news that Joost — the Internet TV venture started by the Skype boys, Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom — has signed three-month advertising deals with 31 major brand advertisers, including Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola, Nike and GM. Joost EVP David Clark said that the traditional 30-second spot “is far from dead” — although I think that remains to be proven. The New York Times has some more details.
Meanwhile, YouTube is also working on rolling out ads, according to its head of advertising Suzie Reider, who spoke at Ad:Tech in San Francisco, according to Red Herring. BusinessWeek media columnist Jon Fine — who moderated the panel that Ms. Reider was on — has some more details on his blog. Red Herring quotes Ms. Reider as saying “We’re looking at executions like a very quick little intro preceding a video, then the video, then a commercial execution on the backside of the content.” She said the idea is to generate revenue that can be shared with the more than 1,000 premium content creators on the site.
To my mind, the main questions are: 1) How will viewers of YouTube clips take to ads? Many observers have speculated that once ads start appearing, viewers will turn away, but I’m not so sure. And 2) What kinds of advertisers will YouTube be able to attract? Critics such as Mark Cuban have argued that most advertisers won’t want to be associated with the kind of content that’s on the site, whereas Joost is much more like regular TV.
Mar 29th, 2007 | Media 2.0 | No Comments
According to something called the Internet Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCooper, spending internet ads in the UK jumped in 2006 and overtook newspaper advertising for the first time, this story at the BBC website says. Online ad spending rose by 41.2 per cent to £2.01-billion during the year, the report said. In contrast, spending on national newspaper ads grew just 0.2 per cent to £1.9-billion, taking a 10.7-per-cent share of the market.
Dec 28th, 2006 | Media 2.0 | 2 Comments
I missed this one due to an excess of eggnog, but the Washington Post says that Google’s newspaper advertising program — which was launched in November, when I wrote about it here — is going much better than the search engine-cum-advertising company thought it would, and so it is expanding it.
According to the Post story, by a tech writer with one of my favourite names (Sara Kehaulani Goo), in just three weeks of the program, Google sold out all the newspaper ad inventory it had expected to sell over a period of three months. The company says it plans to expand the program, which was launched with 100 advertisers and 66 newspapers.
Newspaper executives seem to see it as a worthwhile thing, but something like the Triple A baseball league is to the majors — a good place to start, but not somewhere to stay forever. Says one New York Times exec:
We think it’s a wonderful way to introduce advertisers to the New York Times and print overall… we’d look to up-sell and migrate those [smaller advertisers] to bigger programs and better positions [in the paper] and move them out of the Google system.
Although there is bound to be some resistance from newspapers to the idea of giving some of their business to Google to manage (not to mention some resistance from ad-buying agencies), it seems like a total no-brainer to me. Is running an advertising camapign or maximizing inventory a newspaper’s core competency or purpose? No.
I would argue that handling advertising is merely a necessary evil that newspapers engage in to help pay for the journalism. If someone else can do it better — or even as well — then why not let them? As Don Dodge says in his post, it’s about “an efficient advertising system that satisfies advertisers, content providers, and consumers.” Greg Sterling calls it a “marriage of necessity.” He’s right. Google needs to expand, and newspapers need help.
Nov 28th, 2006 | Media 2.0 | No Comments
There are a few different threads weaving through the blogosphere related to the evolution of media — not just TV but all different kinds of content. One thread is the Bear Stearns report by Spencer Wang, in which he looks at how the TV content business is changing, and the rise of “user-generated content.” You can tune into a conference call, or scroll through a PDF version of his presentation on what Om Malik calls the “fat belly” of the Long Tail.
One of the interesting points to me was that 75 per cent of the top 20 videos on YouTube on one particular day were “user-generated content” of some kind, which goes against the standard argument from people like Mark Cuban and Nick Carr that the majority of popular videos on YouTube and other sites are copyright violations. As Rafat Ali at PaidContent succinctly puts it, the point of the presentation is that “aggregation and context” are the key.
That leads to another thread, which came up while reading Steve Rubel’s Micropersuasion, where he pointed to a new Christmas gadget-shopping hub put together by Federated Media and Best Buy. The site has gadget reviews written by bloggers for half a dozen different websites, including Uncrate, Oh Gizmo, Gadgetopia and PVR Blog. It’s not clear whether the reviews were written specifically for the site, or are taken from the participating blogs, but it’s a pretty smart idea.
Then there’s the New York Times story about Philips sponsoring the entire newscast of NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams. Obviously that isn’t new media, but it’s an interesting move by Philips to cut through the clutter of TV advertising, as Techdirt notes — just as Best Buy is trying to cut through the clutter of Web advertising. In other words, aggregation and context.
