Viral Vid: Pietastrophe!

October 08 Search Shares Are In, And The Winner Is...

Baited breath, people. It's Google. What a surprise!

Digital Marketing Factoid Of The Day: Top 50 Sites In The US

GoodRec: What's A Few Recommendations Between Friends?

I love recommendation sites, though I am also conscious of the fact that people have different tastes and ideas of fun.

GoodRec is an online and mobile (iphone app) service that makes it easy to make and share recommendations among friends.You can also look at a broader set of recommendations, but having the ability to see what your friends think adds a great deal of credibility and value.

Here's how they describe themselves:


Goodrec is the easiest way to make, find and remember recommendations among friends.

After years of seeking and making recommendations for everything from brunch spots to beach books via phone calls, emails, and crumpled paper napkins (often only to lose them moments later), we decided there had to be a better way!

Existing online review sites didn’t address our needs...

Reading through wordy online reviews from people we’d never met took too long and didn’t mean much to us anyway. Visiting different sites for different topics was a hassle. And more importantly, our friends weren’t submitting reviews online because it was just too much effort. We were always asking for ideas and tips, then having to keep track of them somehow.

Even more frustrating, there wasn’t a good way to get recommendations when we needed them most: starving on a street corner in a new part of town, standing in the bookstore trying to find a good airplane book, or searching the grocery store for a decent bottle of wine under $20.

...so, we set out to create an innovative, practical service that we’d actually use ourselves.

Our Quick Tip system makes it easy to find and make recommendations from and for your friends, enabling informed decisions when at home or mobile.

No more wading through 52 reviews of Sushi Sam’s, trying to figure out whose tastes most closely match yours.

No more racking your brain trying to remember which Hitchcock movie your fanatic friend says is the very best.

No need to send emails to every friend who’s been to Mexico asking for dinner recommendations in Oaxaca—now you can get it all on Goodrec.





The recommendation engine is simple, and takes some of the daunt out of providing reviews. What I mean is, the IDEA on this site is to get your POV out in a few words. No need to ape the length and pomposity of magazine restaurant reviews. Just state your telegraphic POV and move on with your life.

They also have a nice little thumbs up/thumbs down voting system that I like because all this 3.25 stars crap is just absurdity from people who can't be clear and make an effin decision. Sorry, off my soapbox.

I perused the recommendations and am struck by how much info and nuance people can communicate in 9 words. Absolutely remarkable.

The service allows you to filter through what could easily become hundreds of available reviews based upon personal preferences, location, or desired cuisine/activity/pricepoint.

Yelp and CitySearch and The Onion and the Alternapapers are tough competitors, but the easy to use mobile aspect of this service may give them an important edge in the upcoming recommendation category war.

Thanks for reading, and don't forget to write.

Viral Vid: What If You Were An Unpopular Simpleton And No One Was Willing To Shake Your Hand?

Bushie, you're doing a heckuva job.

Google On The Runway: No Pictures Please

Google dropping picture ads according to iMediaConnection.

Jajah: Hella Big VOIP Provider...For Good Reason

Perhaps you knew how big Jajah was, in which case there is no need to read this post.

But if you are unfamiliar with the company or its impressive growth, definitely read on.

JaJah is a service that lets consumers enjoy the convenience and affordability of VOIP on their handset rather than through a mic and headset on a PC. That was always the one “but” with services like Skype, and why people were still willing to pay for Vonage even when free Skype calling was introduced.

Here are, respectively, a sizzle vid and a local news review:





Rates are very low when compared with long distance charges. Very very low. For example, long distance is just 2.9 cents a minute across the US. A call from the US to to Albania – a call I have actually made and paid something like $3 a minute for, is just 13 cents to a land line.Calls to other Jajah users are entirely free, which is a rather pleasant price, eeh?

Anyway. They apparently have over 10 million users now, and bully for them. This is a phenomenal idea that shows the promise of strong revenue AND profitability because of the low operating costs of providing VOIP service. It also gives small to medium sized businesses a way to participate in VOIP where heretofore they may have been too small.

Thanks for reading, and don’t forget to write.

New Site And Messaging For NebuAd...

There's a pretty new site and some changes to the model at NebuAd. Their new model aggregates data from ISPs, publishers, and emerging media channels to provide behavior clusters. So more data sources.



More data sources is relevant because some ISPs are gonna wanna piece of them for a bit. But they can expand their footprint with publisher and emerging media data, to get scale.

They've done some more explicit naming and graphicing, like the "privacy protection layer."

It's still opt out, so that won't make the super privacy advocates happy. But then so is every other BT offering that I know of, anyway.

Here's their constituency messaging:

Insight for Marketers
- Rich, multi-dimensional insights based on anonymous, online user activity and multiple interest triggers.
- More precise targeting / re-targeting of defined audiences based on demonstrated likelihood of buying a product or service.
- Audience & campaign intelligence reports with insights into who your audience is and what their interests are enabling audience specific messaging.
- Minimized waste through precise and effective matching of qualified audiences to each specific campaign.

Insight for Media Companies
- Most effective solution for boosting RPM and monetizing all of your inventory.
- Comprehensive aggregate reports with industry-leading visitor intelligence based on actual visitor activity.
- Turnkey deployment to get up and running quickly with minimal effort and disruption.
- Flexibility to automatically accommodate changes to your site.

Insight for Communication Providers
- Most effective solution for achieving stronger revenue growth via market-leading advertising system, while preserving and enhancing the interests of advertisers, publishers and consumers.
- Deliver built-in, industry-leading consumer privacy and data protection with Privacy by Design approach.
- Transparent technologies and wire-speed performance ensure an optimal user experience.
- Turnkey deployment to get up and running quickly with minimal effort and disruption to your existing network.

They are outlining the following privacy protections:

As a team of Internet security and online advertising veterans, we hold the highest standards in consumer privacy protection. Our unique Privacy by Design approach ensures that we safeguard consumer privacy and consumer data while empowering consumers with proper control.

- We do not collect or use personally identifiable information.
- We have no knowledge of any web user's identity since we exclusively employ anonymous segmentation processes.
- We do not store the original raw data about a web user's online activities, such as websites visited, in association with anonymous individual segmentation.
- We use the data exclusively to map interests to market segment categories.
- We require our partners to provide consumer notice and offer informed choice in a manner appropriate to the partnership type and channel.
- We make available on-going disclosure and informed choice.

Honestly, I don't see a lot of difference in the privacy message there versus what they said before. But there is a de facto difference in that no one in their right mind would work with them without sending emails in 44 point bold type informing people. And that, my friends, was the bulk of the rub before.

There was another issue, if I understand it correctly, and that is the undisclosed redirection of the browser. I'm guessing that that has been addressed as well, though I dunno for sure. Whether that is addressed through a change in process or will be disclosed in the...disclosure...I would imagine that they have a solution there as well. Without addressing that, I would imagine they would face ISP acceptance problems. That, I understand, is NOT an essential process for ISP targeting.

I didn't see any mention of the issue in the privacy policy, but I ain't no lawya.

Thanks for reading, and don't forget to write.

Mickey Ds Cuts The Cheese...

Mediapost reports that McDonald's has changed the makeup of their dollar menu to replace the double cheeseburger with the McDouble, a burger with one instead of two slices of cheese.

Cheese prices is climbin', people!

The Dollar Menu has also been key in enabling McDonald's to draw in cash-strapped consumers during this trying economic year and continue showing increases in same-store sales in most recent months. QSR magazine reported an increase of 3.4% in U.S. same-store sales for the second quarter and a 5.3% U.S. same-store increase for the month of October (globally, same-store sales rose by 6.1% and 8.2% for those two respective periods).

"McDonald's had to simultaneously accomplish two very important objectives: Make sure that the value proposition continued to be strong enough to compete effectively with all of the other value menu options out there, and ensure that the margin was sufficient for its franchisees to make a fair profit," sums up Dennis Lombardi, EVP, foodservice strategies for WD Partners, a design and development firm for restaurants and retail chains. "Their solution was a compromise that achieves both requirements."


The other silver lining? 100 or so fewer calories! Those waistbands are probably ALREADY feeling a little loose!

Thanks for reading, and don't forget to write.

Massive Inks Deal With Activision

MediaPost has announced an exclusive deal with Activision for 18 of its titles on XBox and PC including the wildly successful Guitar Hero franchise. More details here.

Double Fusion Locks Up Major PS3 Game Producers

AdWeek is reporting that in game advertising network DoubleFusion has cut a bunch of deals giving it exclusive rights to put ads in PS3 titles. The producers?

THQ
Sega
Eidos
Midway

Exclusive deals are key to grabbing revenue and share in a market where MSFT dominates ad sales for XBox titles.

Thanks for reading, and don't forget to write.

Specific Media Study: Display Makes Search Clicks Explode.

From MediaPost:

...in the travel and tourism category, display advertising led to a full 274% lift on both paid and organic searches and clicks. In the health category, display demonstrated a 260% lift on search activity, while in the personal finance category, display was responsible for a 206% on search.

Steve Peace Channels The London Sun For This Piece

As usual Steve overdelivers. But he needs help with headlines to truly be Sun-y. The paper that ran "Gotcha" above a picture of the sinking Argentine fleet during the Falklands War. His suggested headline was:

Twilight Marketing Takes Daring New Direction

whereas The Sun might say something like...

Twilight Snog a Bloodspurt

Anyway...Ivana Be Alone now, so without further adieu:

---

The marketers behind the hit teen vampire flick, “Twilight,” are using a daring new approach to maintaining post-release interest in the film. They seem to be insinuating a romantic link between the leads in the film, Robert Pattison and Kristen Stewart. Far fetched? The raw material is certainly there. All of America got sweaty for Stewart in her Lolita-ish “Into the Wild” role (then felt guilty about it – I mean the dead kid resisted her ‘cause she was only 16...). Pattison? He’s that crazed looking brit with the gravity-defying locks. And he’s a vampire.

A careful campaign designed to appeal to insiders and influencers was launched with highly nuanced placements like the latest Life&Style piece:



Pattison cannily denied the rumors by professing that he got really nervous about the kissing scenes with Stewart in an US Weekly ‘set the record straight’ piece titled “I’m a Really Bad Kisser.” Rage on teen hormones, rage on.

Sexy co-stars dating in real life?! What’ll those Hollywood marketers think up next?

imeem Goes Android! Encore Encore!

Regular readers of this blog know that I like imeem, which is why I am excited to tell you about their new mobile ad platform, which is paired with their Android-based imeem application.. I really like this concept because it combines so many youth-centric things – giving it a great opportunity to attract and hold viewers and advertisers.

Imeem originally launched its Android app about a month ago, and it has already climbed to the top 10 Android apps, and is the number one streaming music app for that fast growing mobile platform.

This is not one of those announcements wherein vaporware is heralded. In fact, imeem already has a major advertiser lined up to market its newest product. Here’s an excerpt from their press release:

Kia Motors America (KMA) is the first brand advertiser to leverage imeem's new platform, using it to promote the Kia Soul, an all-new compact SUV launching next spring in the U.S.

As part of a cross-platform advertising campaign, Kia Soul will have a branded display presence across the imeem for Android user interface, as well as a featured Kia Soul-branded Internet radio station on the application. In addition to its mobile advertising program, Kia Motors will have a presence on the imeem.com service through a profile and display advertising on media streaming pages throughout the site.

“Kia Motors wants to reach its target audience through creative campaigns that complement their style and fast-paced way of life,” said David Schoonover, Customer Relationship Marketing Manager for Kia Motors America. “imeem helps us achieve that goal by connecting our brand with a youthful community and an engaging social music experience that fits the Kia Soul lifestyle.”

“imeem has created a way for advertisers to live at the center of consumers' social music experience,” said Jason Meil, executive vice president and director of Innovations at Initiative, Kia Motors' media, marketing and digital company. “Working with imeem will enable Kia Motors to meaningfully tap into an engaged community where millions of people express themselves with music and media on a daily basis.”

By offering ads in this integrated application, imeem can provide real cross media opps with that highly desirable social media component that more advertisers are seeking out.

Thanks for reading, and don’t forget to write.

Green Dot: How Millions Pay For Things

It’s rare that you hear about a company that makes money by offering services to average to below average income people – without screwing them over. Yes, check cashing services make lots of dough, but their service fees and commissions can be nothing short of extortionate.

But here’s the challenge. Tens of millions of Americans have screwed up credit, or are suspicious of banks, or are compulsive spenders that may not trust themselves with revolving debt. And for people like that there is Green Dot, an outfit that offers reloadable debit cards you can use anywhere that credit cards are accepted.

For as little as $5 a month, GreenDot offers consumers the convenience and safety of debit payments without having to have a bank account. Reloading at a retailer is another $5, or fee through direct deposit.



That’s pretty darned reasonable in comparison to predatory services that charge as much as 10% of their face value of a check as a processing fee, for example. Yes, 10%. An $800 payroll check costs $80 to cash. Or free with direct deposit to Green Dot.

As with all financial instruments, you get money from two sides – from consumer fees and through the sales commissions that retailers must pay when people to choose to pay with plastic. This makes Green Dot a strong business opp, while at the same time a highly ethical one.

I definitely like this model.

Thanks for reading, and don’t forget to write.