Without question the current economic climate is a marketer’s nightmare, with more being expected from less. Much less.
In difficult times, new ideas are often born. And it isn’t long before they challenge the incumbent practices. For example, right now I would guess that there are thousands of marketers dropping some of their online advertisements and exploring the possibilities of a social media campaign, with thousands more already moving ahead full-throttle. The why is obvious—social media offers a low-cost opportunity to try something different with potentially big payoffs. On top of that, according to a new study from Razorfish, four in 10 online consumers have made a purchase based on advertising they saw on a social media site. That being said, the marriage of social media and marketing is still relatively new, and since a proven best-practices model has yet to be formed, the possibility that the effort goes up in a puff of smoke remains. On top of that, with so many marketers already targeting sites like Facebook, the challenges of cutting through the noise have grown considerably more difficult in just a short amount of time.
While I am not here to dissuade your social media aspirations, I do... Read more
Archive for November, 2008
The Mobile Economy
Forget mediasnacking: make a meal of online video
Earlier this week Sony's Crackle.com announced a new season of original-to-online video content, includng a new series called "The Hustler" starring Mark Feuerstein-- one of those "oh yeat THAT guy" actors who you have seen in a million things but can never quite place.
Over at TV Week, Daisy Whitney reports that, "Crackle carries original Web shows and releases them in four 13-week schedules each year, with new episodes debuting on the same day each week to build a regular audience."
But the key sentence -- and the mistake that Crackle, Hulu and every other original video creator keep making -- from the Variety piece is, "Each webisode will run three to five minutes."
Somewhere, somehow, the media industry decided to accept as fact the conventional wisdom that mediasnacking is where it's at. Crazy kids today, such wisdom goes, have the attention span of a guinea pig on crystal meth, and that to these A.D.D. viewers a three minute video is the equivalent of a marathon session of all three extended DVDs of "The Lord of the Rings."
I disagree. We know from gaming, virtual worlds, online community, instant messenger sessions and many other data points that... Read more
The Desktop Is Dead, Long Live the Desktop!
A growing question by brand owners to interactive marketing agencies lately, is "How do I keep my brand intact and survive through today's influx of new media?" For most, the answer is to extend the brand footprint beyond Web sites, by building Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) that live on a PCs and personal devices. The ability to move a brand from the Web to the desk top has become a near instantaneous process. As the line between the Web and the desktop grow close to each other, it’s up to the agency to reinvent itself to offer a brand the most interesting situation every time.
But in doing so, we’ve seen a significant blurring of the lines between what a desktop application is and what a Web application is. It’s hard enough for some developers to distinguish a difference anymore. But for brand owners who look to extend interactivity to the desktop and beyond, the confusion could be crippling. While the idea of a RIA has been around for quite some time, the way users think about them is clearly beginning to change.
With the help of some big players in the technology world, namely Google, Microsoft and Adobe, those distinctions... Read more
