From CBC: Google Wave’s inbox, as seen on the Official Google Blog. In May, Google announced Wave, the company’s attempt to reinvent internet communication. Brothers Lars and Jens Rasmussen, the Australian creators of Google Maps, have been working on the project for the last two years.
On Sept. 30, Google plans …
Ad agency Crispin Porter & Bogusky, known for their award winning creative and strategic work are earning some major PR today with the announcement that they have launched an eBay auction for the services of their 40 interns. These interns, who have been working on client engagements ranging from “Guitar Hero” to Burger King will now be available to other brands and organizations through the auction.
The average iPhone app has an engagement of 9.6 minutes per session and is accessed 19.9 times over its life cycle. This results in an average total use time per user of three hours and 10 minutes, according to Greystripe’s Q109 Consumer Insights Report which released data about iPhone app usage among its users, as well as user response to ads placed within iPhone applications.
So Microsoft bought into Facebook a while back, but has not really been able to realize significant value yet other than access to representing their sales to the agency market. Now, it seems some of Microsoft’s marketing budget is going to help Twitter get itself into the advertising game.
Twitter rolled out a new program titled ExecTweets. The program presents on a page, Tweets collected from various executives.
60,000 videos are uploaded to Youtube everyday, so how does anyone stand out based on content alone. Anyone trying to surface their video content today has to solve a very difficult problem with distribution, and should have a strategy, budget, and partnerships to do so. This means that anyone who is trying to capitalize on their video (not Joe Consumer with family videos), needs a plan, and more important, money.
Working for a media company, or for that matter working in the digital space in general, you are always making sure that any endeavour you take on has to have a revenue model behind it that makes sens. Over the last few months there’s been much speculation regarding the present and future of online advertising. Particularly, that of display ads and their true value to both brand building and conversion. Some people believe that total spend will be up this year, while many feel it will go down. The real question in my opinion, is how to make it last longer and perform better against both brand and acquisition strategies.
Itay Talgam has conducted some of the world’s best ensembles, and studied with and assisted great conductors such as Leonard Bernstein and Claudio Abbado. At the Interactive Exchange, Itay presented an emotional and captivating presentation about music. He showed how music shares so much with the need for collaboration of the interactive industry. To make an orchestra sound like more than a collection of individuals, it takes knowledge and innovation, individual effort and collective achievement. Similarly in the creation of unique and innovative interactive projects, it takes some sort of conducting.
So last week I was with a good friend at Starbucks when a guy sitting behind us got up, walked by, and raised his iPhone to the speaker in the wall which at the time was spouting out some sort of background music that reminded me of the kind of sound you would hear in the waiting room of a swanky physician’s office. What was he doing? Well as a blackberry user, I had no idea that what he was actually doing was using a really cool iPhone app called Shazam. Shazam, I remember Shazam as a second rate super hero that couldn’t really compete with the true heroes like Batman and Superman.
Yet again AdAge has enlightened me to an innovation in online advertising. Today, they released information that major US Web publishers such as NYTimes.com, ESPN.com and CNN.com are preparing to go big, very BIG. In fact the publishers think they know what will attract more brand advertising online. In their quest for brand-advertising dollars, 26 members of the group are adopting a new set of three interactive ad units to get agency minds on better creative and off low-CPM ad networks. The publishers, including Martha Stewart Living, Conde Nast Digital, Discovery and CBS Interactive, have agreed to only direct-sell the new units, and not sell them through ad networks. The new ads will run alone on the page, giving advertisers exclusivity that publishers hope they’ll pay a premium for.
Until recently, Canadians were unable to use Twitter from their mobile phones. Let me clarify, Canadians could send Tweets through their cell phones using SMS, however they could not receive incoming SMS tweets. Bell Canada then picked up the tab on behalf of their own customers giving a part of the Canadian market their SMS enabled Tweets back. Did Bell evaluate the opportunity to make their customers happy, or were they aware that it really wouldn’t cost them that much in exchange for the earned media and positive PR from the move? Well let’s take a look at how users actually use Twitter.
We have all been wondering what Twitter plans to do to monetize their business. Recently receiving $35 Million in funding, they have to be getting close to making some decisions. Where we now know Twitter sees its lucrative opportunity is in search. I doubt it is what Google offers in terms of indexing the entire online world and making it available through a single text box. Rather a Twitter search world would most likely look like the “what’s happening right now” search engine. Giving consumers, companies and the world access to near real time conversations that take place online. It’s because of this potential that Twitter sees in search that the Twitter co-founders walked away from a $500 million offer from Facebook.
The Interactive Advertising Bureau have changed their tune and are now predicting that the whole businesses dependent on online advertising could go belly up, and researcher IDC has completely reversed its growth estimates. No longer will online ads grow 10% in 2009, says the firm. IDC now predicts a 5% drop in revenues in the first quarter that could get worse in the second. I am not sure why anyone should be surprised at this, the recession was bound to impact on all aspects of marketing spend, not just traditional media.
A friend told me about DevHub earlier today as they were about to launch to the public. They offer a solution that enables users to create and publish multiple websites and offers a way to monetize them in the same process. Think of it as a WYSIWYG website editor (much like Website Tonight) mixed with a series of widgets that ease the process of trying to monetize a website. My main concern with this model, regardless of how easily one can build a site, is that in order to monetize it needs traffic. This service, like all quick build solutions can’t help there.
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