Shareable Ads

Why can't ads be more social? This is a thought that came from the Yahoo 'Digital Memories' event at the Soho Hotel this morning. Laura Chaibi, Yahoo's heard of EU Research & Insight, presented some findings showing that in the digital age people were finding that they were remembering less and less, and finding ways of setting up prompts. Examples given included emailing yourself with reminders, setting reminders on mobile phones etc. From Laura's research, lots of people claim to find it harder to remember things than before, and are developing several work-arounds using digital.

She then led onto asking what needs to be done in online advertising to make ads saveable, or to develop some other work around to help people remember the ones that they want to. She showed mock ups of that might be possible - and indeed here's an example (that she didn't show) of a 'share me' function on a video ad:



There was also discussion of how this could work - add buttons to the bottom of ads to save, email, share via Facebook and so on. You could start an initiative through the IAB for publishers to adopt this, and even give the extra space at the bottom of an ad (say 10 pixels) for free as part of the ad booking.

However the thing that occurred to me (& I asked this as a question) was that it was more a case of saving the destination page, not the ad. I'm not that interested in what the ad was saying, or looked like - I'm more interested in the outcome of it.

Ironically Yahoo has the power to own this space, as they bought Delicious a few years ago. Delicious is a social bookmarking site, and lets you save online pages to look at later. I'm a very enthusiastic user. I use it a lot for work and non-work things - for example this set of items is for things I might want to buy either for myself or for Christmas presents, and this set is things I want to either do, or look at at the weekend.

If Yahoo developed a lighter, easier to use version for ads it could be really popular. It would let people save ads or destinations, and the data that Yahoo would have access to would be fascinating - people who liked this ad or brand also like this one etc.

But if they don't... Ad-saving seems like an obvious feature for Google to add to Chrome.

Pingwire

Pingwire shows photos uploaded to twitpic, pretty much live. Can be NSFW (& even more so now people are writing about it. The twitter porn spammers will have a new thing to concentrate on.)

[Update - it seems to be broken, oeverwhelmed by the traffic, but tweetview still works, as does PicFog, which is also searchable]

If you like this, try also Flickrvision & Twittervision, both by David Troy

In B Flat

Very strange experimental project, by Darren Soloman. Multiple musicians playing an individual instrument in Bb. Play as many or as few videos as you want; they all work well together. Or here's a version that plays them all, starting at different points. (This guy's contribution makes it all sound a bit U2)

Very clever, very hypnotic. FAQ here

Via Lost At E Minor

Perez Hilton's record label

Perez Hilton has announced that he's founding a record label imprint, in collaboration with Warner Brothers. A very good example of both a blogger monetising his following and targeted audience, and also the music industry seeking new ways of working. 'Hilton' has always been very active in promoting & hyping new music on his site. See this link for a selection of artists he's raved about in the past.

Harry Potter rap

Brilliant bit of comedy from Dominic Frisby - rapping over the Harry Potter & the Half Blood Prince trailer. Hilarious. (Contains spoilers).



Earlier - Lord of the Rings Rap, Terminator Salvation Rap

Evory ads plumb the depths

There's a brilliant post by Jeff Atwood on Coding Horror about ads for the online game Evory. I'd vaguely been meaning investigate Evory as I kept seeing the ads online, but this is a far better story.

As Jeff recounts it, Evory have been making their ads more and more blatant, to appeal to their young male gamer demographics.

Here we go - ads in chronological order:


Read the full article here. Jeff has a screenshot of the last one in situ, to prove that it ran.

Dave Carroll gets satisfaction from United Airlines

Very nice 'effectiveness of social media' story.

Dave Carroll, from the band Sons of Maxwell, had a guitar damaged in transit on a United Airlines flight about 15 months ago. Someone witnessed the baggage handlers throwing his $3,500 (packed up) guitar around, and when he got off the flight he found that the guitar was 'severely damaged'. He went through the proper channels, but United, while admitting that it happened, refused to compensate him.

He then announced that he was going to record 3 songs about it, make videos of each one, and put them up on YouTube.



The first video was uploaded on 6th July, and within 4 days has had 1.3m views. Dave has also been interviewed on the radio in the US, and a Google news search throws up nearly 400 results for the story. United have now been in touch eith him, and promised to put things right, and even use the video in training (see the tweet here).

[Update] Dave has since responded to their offer, again on YouTube: He's not completely happy with their response, and is still intending to post the other videos:


It shows the power of social media, but it also shows a potentially dangerous digital divide. Dave Carroll was able to acheive this because he had the necessary skills to make it happen. Recently one of my colleagues wanted to get in touch with Clearspring, the application seeding company, and was getting really frustrated with not being able to contact them through the 'normal' channels (i.e. emailing, phoning their office, and trying to get hold of someone who could help. This is their online contact page. He didn't have a name of a specific person to ask for). Within about 5 minutes of tweeting someone had got in touch with us.

Very impressive (thanks Clearspring!), but my point is this: Don't monitor social media instead of having a good phone structure and contact system. If someone without digital knowledge had had their luggage damaged (and clearly this happens a lot), the should still be able to get the same level of service as someone with access to a fast broadband connection. Don't make people get annoyed enough with you that they have to tweet that they are annoyed to see if you reply. Monitoring social media does not replace good internal procedures and systems!

Review, Respond, Record, Redirect

This idea comes from this excellent presentation from Adam Brown of Coca Cola on how they view social media:

BlogWell New York Social Media Case Study: Coca-Cola, presented by Adam Brown

View more documents from GasPedal.

From chart 12:
Review
what the social media community is talking about with strong, coordinated monitoring programs. Take ideas for community participation and video vignettes from them
Respond
to the comments, posts and other chatter with accurate information on the Company and our initiatives with full transparency and disclosure and an approachable style
Record
short video vignettes that respond to the conversation with “purposeful entertainment” that educates and informs in an entertaining fashion that isn’t too slick
Redirect
Online community members to the videos and other social media content, using both search engine optimization/marketing as well as online conversation “cross-pollenization” to improve search rankings and assist others in discovering the relevant content

See also - "I was selling the idea that social media was free..."

So many albums released, so few buyers

As a short follow up to my review of Chris Anderson's Free earlier this week, here is a quote from an article in today's DigitalMusicNews:

"At the recent A2IM (American Association of Independent Music) annual gathering in New York, some scary numbers were floating around. According to Nielsen Soundscan, a total of 105,000, new full-length albums were released in 2008, a fourfold gain from the earlier 2000s. And of that pot, just 6,000 releases sold 1,000 units or more in the first year.
Across the pond, similar information emerged. During a DIY discussion at Musexpo Europe in London last week, industry consultant Keith Jopling noted that over 30,000 albums are released every year in the United Kingdom, a 30 percent gain since 2000. Other markets are undoubtedly experiencing similar booms, based on the ability of any artist to create cheaply, upload instantly, and build fanbases directly."

That figure of only 6,000 selling more than 1,000 in the first year (presumably they only count the first year) is extraordinary.

The same issue of DigitalMusicNews also reports: "US-based album sales during the first half were down 14.7 percent year-over-year, across all formats - CD, LP, digital album download, etc. The tally for the first 26 weeks was 174.5 million units."

Alan McGee's line about the digitalisation of music is that it means that people who make music will be the people who want to express themselves, rather than the ones who are trying to make money is vindicated in this. Music always was a hobby to most, but now even more so.

Beck sings Velvet Underground

This is a really good way for a musician to engage with fans, even when he has no new music or shows.

Beck has been recording tracks from the Velvet Underground and Nico album with friends, in order, and uploading videos to his site. The whole album was recorded in a day, with minimal rehearsal, and one track is uploaded each week. So far three songs - Sunday Morning, I'm Waiting For The Man, and Femme Fatale.

Record Club: Velvet Underground & Nico "Femme Fatale" from Beck Hansen on Vimeo

Also on his site, this conversation between Beck and Tom Waits, and Planned Obsolescence, a weekly mixtape.

Killed Ideas

I've been sent a new book, Killed Ideas Volume 1, to review, by the good people at Blurb.

Killed Ideas is a collection of ad and design ideas that never made it through the approval process. In some cases it's obvious why - many of the product ideas are a bit '30 second slot on Dragons Den' - but some of the ad ideas are quite neat. It's curated by Steve Hall at Adrants.

You can see them online at the site here (but sadly you can't deep link to individual ideas).

Have a look at the Garage Sale Application (map a driving route so that you go past any garage sales).


Or there's the Nike Fight Song Challenge, which tried to get American Football Fans to take part in a mass conference call. Each set of fans would call a different number during half time, then turn their phones onto the loudest setting as the recording at the other end played their team song. I'd like to see that!

Google Ad Planner

Google Ad Planner relaunched recently, and has become a lot more 'interesting' (read 'useful').

Ad Planner is Google's tool for advertisers that lets you see details on different web sites that you might want to advertise on (number of users, demographics etc) and also see top sites for specific demographics. I could play with it all day.

For example their top sites in the UK are:

1 - Facebook.com
2 - BBC.co.uk
3 - Live.com
4 - Yahoo.com
5 - MSN.com
6 - Microsoft.com
7 - Ask.com
8 - MySpace.com
9 - IMDB.com
10 - Bebo.com

Quiz time: Look at the list closely - what's missing? That's right - Google, YouTube, Blogger, and in fact all Google properties. They let you look at the stats for other sites, but not their own, That is *such* a Google thing to do, as they demonstrated when they updated Google Trends last year.

For comparison, here are the top 10 sites according to comScore.

1 - Google.co.uk
2 - Live.com
3 - Facebook.com
4 - Google.com
5 - YouTube.com
6 - MSN.co.uk
7 - BBC.co.uk
8 - Yahoo.co.uk
9 - Yahoo.com
10 - Ebay.co.uk

See also - Google Trends - the big catch