MEDIABLITZ

In this Mediapost article , Alan Schulman, Executive Creative Director of imc 2 suggests that YouTube's decision to use overlay advertising instead of pre-roll or mid-roll video was short sighted. YouTube said that the "roll" ads made viewer numbers decline. Schulman says, maybe the ads weren't any good and maybe they're too long. He advocates a :10 video spot and notes the creative options that can be exploited when the "roll" ads are timely, entertaining, and targeted to the viewer. Personally, I welcome a shorter length but my biggest problem with the "roll" ads is that usually they keep playing the same one over and over again. Many times on high bandwidth sites the content gets stalled and you need to start over, or pause and press play to make it continue. I was watching "Anchorwoman" on the Fox demand site and I saw the same ad for a movie with Dane Cook and Jessica Alba over and over again. I've always believed tha...

On August 28, 2007 Advertising.com released the results of a study based on a questionnaire results and video advertising performance data from it's online video network. The results are from the first six months of '07. 62% of participants watched video online and 69% of these were adults over age 35 who primarily watched news stories. As for video advertisements, consumers accept them as part of the video experience – with 94 percent of respondents preferring ads to subscription fees. However, according to 63 percent of survey respondents, shorter ads would make the experience more pleasurable. Shorter spots also deliver higher percent-viewed rates, according to data from the Advertising.com network. 51 percent of survey respondents would watch a television episode online if they missed it on TV; but 80 percent of consumers say that online video usage does not cut into their TV time. WHAT ARE THEY WATCHING: 62% News clips 38% Movie trailers 36% Music videos (down 11% from se...

Microsoft Corp., Disney's Buena Vista International, France Telecom's Orange, plus Procter & Gamble (Gillette, Pantene, & Tampax), Hewlett-Packard and Paramount are all sponsorship partners for " KateModern" . (this episode features placements by MSN, Orange Broadband, and Tampax. Plenty of room for a pizza delivery company, and a current movie title. Microsoft has expanded it's partnership with Bebo (also mentioned). The producers are the same team that did LonelyGirl15, at that time they thought people would be turned off by commercialism but actually the audience wanted to know where she bought her clothes and what brands she consumed. (?!) The series launched on July 24th and is available on YouTube, Bebo, MSN in the UK, and the LonelyGirl15 site. In the first three weeks the has registered 3 million views and is building an audience quickly -- the first episode was seen by just 23,000 people. The most popular episode so far is one that features...

Looking on YouTube though I noticed that if you go into the community section , many of the featured Groups are advertisers. I wonder if they pay for that. Today they have Rocawear " I Will Not Lose " campaign. Vids with celebrities like Ciarra, Three Six Mafia, and other's "A" list Hip Hop / R&B artists talking about not losing and perservering without obstacles. Which is cool, do gooder advertising. They also have Listerine FreshBurst man on the street interviews which are not very entertaining and unabashedly self-serving. YouTube offers deep opportunities for testing advertising production. These days it seems like online is partnering more and more with direct street teams, a mesh of the international and local.

Slate stepped into the video space in a big way by launching SlateV , a robust collection of videos created by Slate. The front page offers the newest of these videos like "Video Bushisms", "Grading Hillary's First Spot", and "Dear Prudence" an animation of their advice column. The animation and special effects on the videos is incredible, creative and original. Unfortunately the editors themselves are boring, probably in comparison to the lively visuals. Understandably most of these editors are more comfortable in a text based context. "Editor's Choice", has some great, interesting vids such as examples of advertisements for soap made by Igmar Bergman when he was short on cash. Unfortunately, the tone of the narrative makes it feel like a classroom lecture. A blog page "Did You See This" is there roundup of the best in web video, pulling vids from YouTube, LiveLeak, CollegeHumor, etc. Hopefully they'll figure out how...

Facebook isn't a news source, it is a social networking tool and it is debatable on how differentiated advertisements need to be from the user generated content. Facebook is a multimedia tool with video and music but the majority of its content is text. If the company employed journalistic Editors there would be a big wall separating the business side from the editorial side. The business side would push for anything that made the ad more effective and the editorial side would push back to insure editorial integrity by completely differentiating advertising from content. Most Editors take this very seriously and don't want there to be a hint of conflict of interest. Above is a screen shot of the news feed I receive from my friends on my Facebook account. The Army ad I circled is troublesome. It does not look different at all from the messages that I get from my friends which is accented by the fact that its from a very controversial advertiser. Should social web sites be...

In the past few days there has been a bunch of buzz surrounding online video advertising because Google's mega-mammoth brand in the space, YouTube, (which they bought 10 months ago for $1.65 billion) initiated "semi-transparent overlay ads". With room for variation it's a banner that appears at the bottom of the video screen and offers the option of linking to the advertiser's web site. YouTube calls them "In Video" Above is a screenshot of an ad for the movie "Hairspray" on a Ford Models TV video. Hairspray, hairdresser, young women, that's targeting. Unfortunately the screenshot is one that appeared in the New York Times because I couldn't find an example of an ad on the YouTube site. Personally I think the web site for Hairspray the movie a much bigger brand than Ford Models TV but that's beside the point. FordModels.tv is one of about 1,000 large and small media partners that have licensed their videos to YouTube and w...

eBiz MBA : Cool site, apparently in Beta. Divided into 4 main topic areas, Administration, Marketing, Products & Sales. Front page has relevant top tier articles (Wired, NYT, etc.) about social marketing, advertising, etc.

Social Networking Leaves Confines of the Computer (key quotes) Daniel Graf, a founder of Kyte, the mobile social networking service, sees cellphones as personal TV studios. The social networking phenomenon is leaving the confines of the personal computer. New online services, with names like Twitter, Radar and Jaiku, hope people will use their ever-present gadget to share (or, inevitably, to overshare) the details of their lives in the same way they have become accustomed to doing on Web sites like MySpace. Mr. Graf said he was considering several approaches to making money from the service. They include charging companies that want to contribute promotional programming, or advertisements in or alongside the most popular channels. He said he would share that revenue with the channels’ creators. Another company proving the potency of the sharing impulse is Twitter ( www.twitter.com ), which is also based in San Francisco and has lately captured the enthusiasm of bloggers and tech in...

Not. I'm spending more time building profiles than I am being social on these sites. Ken at KenRadio.com provides these snazzy IQ media reports daily. A couple of days ago he distributed " Social Network Marketing, the Sky is the Limit" (Note: You may have to login to view it, Ken is building his own social network complete with yet another profile to fill out, his numbers say he has 15,000 folks). He did an amazingly comprehensive chart of 90 social networking sites with a brief description of their type and their user number. I don't know where he got these numbers you will have to ask him. I sorted them by user number and excluded the "unknowns" and networking sites exclusively for specific geographic or demographic users. I took off any sites with less than 1,000,000 members since that seems to be the magic number for advertising viability. That seems to be his focus, not membership premiums which I'd just like to give a shout out to Flic...