Search Engine auto suggestion function has always amazed me. It populates the most popular search term as you type your query. Today I searched “why” and learned that Google and MSN/Live users have higher relationship issues than Yahoo! users. All Engines do have “Why did I get Married” as a top query and I’m certain not all of them are looking for the 2007 Tyler Perry film…
Today I saw a myriad of great case studies of how advertisers are starting to engage and reengage with the Youtube community. According to YouTube, this community is made up of enough users to be the third largest country in the world, and these users in August ‘08 help YouTube overtake Yahoo! in the number of searches in a given month. Big numbers and even bigger opportunity.
A member on the EA team did a search on their 2008 Tiger Woods game and saw the following video from the YouTube user Levinator25:
The video shows some poor coders mistake of allowing the virtual Tiger Woods being able to play golf while walking on water, hence the name of the video “Tiger Woods PGA Tour 08 Jesus Shot”. It’s cute and cheeky, and garnered a few views over a 8 month period of time since it was publicly posted on 8/30/07.
As the ‘08 game grew in popularity YouTube users heard about or stumbled upon this well tagged video. At around 10-20K video views is the time I’m guessing someone on the EA Sports team must have found the video. I’m sure for the game developers seeing a game glitch highlighted was a hard thing to watch, but instead of ignoring it they decided to use it. Good call EA.
A little over a year after the original (now a little over 50K video views) “Tiger Woods PGA Tour 08 Jesus Shot” was posted EA decided to post a reply on YouTube to the original video that just made the mistake…cool:
Very excited to announce that Overdrive Interactive won “Best Use of Search” for our Harley-Davidson Campaign. Check out the official Overdrive statement, which has a dark group photo of us celebrating the team win. I’m very proud of all the team members who worked on this highly publicized win.
Take a walk up to the Stage for the Win:
*note: yes I did say Vroom on stage, the moment and Harley-Davidson Brand got the best of me.
Search Campaigns are not often given public limelight so it’s nice to get the praise from the Boston interactive community. Overall though the limelight is for suckers; I’d rather show a report with measurable metrics and a positive ROI any day. In someways I’d love to see an award in the interactive community for “Best improved ROI“, “Best Landing Page Optimization“, or “Best Synergy in the conversion path-Adtext through desired action“. As a community I think that would be the better signal to send to our potential client market then “It’s pretty Branding, hooray”.
On November 2nd I completed my 4th marathon by running the ING NYC Marathon. It was cold, windy, and a total blast. The folks of New York graciously came out and supported all 39,000 runners and helped make for a great energy along the course; a special thanks to my future in-laws for standing in the cold even though I missed them along the course.
While running the race was the weekends highlight another fun part of the weekend was having an image of me and the fiance broadcast on the Giant Billboard above the ABC studio in Times Square. As mentioned in a previous post “LocaModa-Free Mobile Interactive Applications” it’s become standard for company’s to tie digital billboards in Times Square with a interactive mobile campaign. Asics a NYC Marathon sponsor footed the bill and hosted the interactive campaign for nearly eight hours.
How it worked:
Photo taken at Marathon Health Expo: given business card with unique SMS number
Walk to Times Square and enter SMS number
System sends back message saying when your photo will post on the billboard
Image posts and you take photos and video of yourself in Times Square and have people ask “Why are you on the Billboard?”
Cross ” be on a Times Square billboard” off your bucket list
Next Marathon: Boston with the Dana-Farber Marathon challenge team. Helping to cure cancer by running. Last year the team raised $4.5 million for innovative cancer research at Dana-Farber.
This Fall several events have taken place that placed Citizen Journalism into the mainstream. It’s no surprise that Old media has been spoon feed news for sometime; just read the PR newswires then watch the news. Even old media news anchor Dan Rather has spoken out against the mass media establishment; albeit because he was pushed out of that system.
To help reestablish there news gathering abilities every major news outlet has adopted some method of using there listener/viewer as a news reporter. A great idea on paper, but it’s very easy for lazy news gathering organizations to not due their own due diligence on a news story.
There are two recent cases where MAJOR news organizations screwed up. The first was the CBS eyemobile.com Iphone application blunder. CBS built a great Iphone app that connected users with each other and CBS news. The only issue was it appears that no one at CBS was monitoring this. The result was many false news reports which boiled over when three ladies making out was sent to users. As the story and images were basically porn, the errors with the system were quickly realized
ChaCha is the greatest party novelty in a long time. As explained from the site:
ChaCha is conversational, fun, and easy to use. Simply ask your question like you are talking to a smart friend and ChaCha’s advanced technology instantly routes it to the most knowledgeable person on that topic in our Guide community. Your answer is then returned to your phone as a text message within a few minutes.
Amazingly enough it works pretty well and has given me the correct information 90% of the time. While I could simply perform a Google search on my palm to find the info there is some prestige in saying I’ll just ask ChaCha and continuing in a conversation. The only con right now is it sometime takes up to ten minutes to get an answer, which is unacceptable. Give it a try the next time you have a random question.
While stumbling around I came across an ad that leverages a great movie authority community directly in their creative:
If you have ever been to a movie and said, Why did I spend $10 on that! then rottentomatoes.com is a great resource prior to spending a wad of cash. Their Tomatometer is a score that factors in a variety of sources (newspaper, online, magazines) and average them into a single score. Its community driven with over 7 million readers and nearly one million reviews of movies (any recent film has certainly been reviewed).
This post has nothing to do with Online Marketing, but the excitement is building.
One Monday I will run the 112th Boston Marathon. This will be my third marathon (2nd official) so some of the first time nerves are long gone, but this is the Boston Marathon so I still have plenty. Boston in the endurance racing world is like the SuperBowl of Marathons: Elite Athletes, Large amount of runners, Newton hills, and the best supportive crowds. The course is gnarley as it can trick the runner to run faster than they should as till mile 17 it is mainly downhill. Living in Boston I’ve done the majority of my training directly on the course, so I know my strong spots and I know where I’m really going to need the Fans to give me a shot of endorphins.
The why I started running marathons is too long for this post, but it’s been an amazing experience to know your limits and then surpass them. Running Boston is a real treat, and doing it with the Dana-Farber Marathon challenge team has been fantastic. The team is extremely friendly and every team member is a real inspiration for better health and helping advance Cancer treatment research. My Flip video camera has been cleared out and is ready to get some great shots of online initiatives in use during the Marathon.
A co-worker led me to this story about the first foray of live video being used in banner ads:
GE last month became the first advertiser to present live streaming video within banner ads, using a new feature developed by rich media company EyeWonder.
GE used the technology, called LiveWonder, to deliver a live webcast of Chairman-CEO Jeff Immelt presenting the company’s annual report to investors in a banner ad campaign that ran on about 10 Web sites.- Kate Maddox, BtoBonline.com
Rich Media has made some huge leaps in the past year in regards to video, but to push live dynamic content through an ad network is incredible powerful. Sharing your annual report is spiffy, but imagine if this was used during “Black Friday”for an electronics boutique. You could have an HSN type setup and sell the latest GPS gear in Real-time. O wait that may be pop under annoying to the user. Maybe not great ideas but it certainly merits a bit more thought and maybe even a test. The LiveWonder does have limited functionality as why would you want to show live content? Only time-sensitive content (News) would seem like the best fit for this tool, as the rest could be created and then distributed with out using LiveWonder.
With great power comes great responsibility
EyeWonder thus far has been a real hero in the rich media world. With increased competition from Google’s no-fee rich media serving I wonder how EyeWonder will stay the dominate rich-media ad server. They may have tripled their market share in ‘07, but Google Video and Banner ads with $0 serving cost is sure cut that share in ‘08.
YouTube, the 6th most popular website is about to get into the Analytics game for the average joe. YouTube plans on offering later this month the following to start:
Geo-specific viewership data- What is the viewership of your video segmented by region.
Relative Video Popularity -A video’s popularity relative to other videos in that market over a given period of time.
The above features are already apart of the YouTube sponsored video platform, so we can assume that some of the other YouTube analytics may be coming soon to the masses. The most notable future feature would be if they added the average length a user is engaged to a video. For more information about the Insight tool or learning more about how you can advertise/ optimize with YouTube, check out the YouTube advertise’s channel.
