TV advertisements may be in a state of flux nowadays, but that does not mean TV ads are getting less interesting:

Bookmark To:

Google, knowing that digital TV will become mandatory within the US removing the ability to use all analog TVs without converters, has introduced a digital video recorder that can report for Google TV ads into Google AdWords.

Through a partnership with Dish Networks, the tool monitors time-shifted data from DVRs to give advertisers insight into how and when viewers see ads during the playback of recorded content. About 25% of television households in the U.S. have digital video recorders or DVRs installed, according to the Mountain View, Calif., company.

Google said it processes DVR viewership data from millions of set-top boxes to provide accurate, detailed time-shifted impression counts. There are several ways to view the number of impressions, from same day to seven days. As with all metrics in Google TV Ads reports, time-shifted impressions reflect the viewership of your specific TV commercial, not just general program viewership. The data is available to Google Adwords TV advertisers for free.

This, of course, leads to it being used within Google Analytics to provide additional information on the ads’ ROIs for free as well.

Would this be television’s savior as companies shift budgeting dollars to the Internet that has the ability to track at a deeper level? Maybe, but the problem still occurs that there is no direct correlation to one watching the advertisement and actually seeing the ad beyond the use of vanity URLs that could potentially come through other marketing channels.

That said, computers and TVs are slowly (in a technological advancement aspect) merging into one whole unit that will likely make the DVR specific device obsolete in ten to twenty years once devices such as HP’s Media Center become the norm and TVs becoming just tertiary (not secondary because one has to have two computer monitors) monitors that connect wireless to a household mainframe computer.

Unsure about how that would work? Look at how Youtube is becoming interactive now and the huge jump in tracking that will provide in the future for television (or online video content) with a simple mouse click away.

Bookmark To:

Get ready for a more “Minority Report” world as new public ads could actually be watching you and changing the ad based on who is looking at the ad:

“Small cameras can now be embedded in the screen or hidden around it, tracking who looks at the screen and for how long. The makers of the tracking systems say the software can determine the viewer’s gender, approximate age range and, in some cases, ethnicity — and can change the ads accordingly. That could mean razor ads for men, cosmetics ads for women and video-game ads for teens.”

Search engines have already numbed people to a heavy amount of data analysis and tracking that goes on around the web in order to provide more and more relevant ads (assuming that advertising agencies and the like are doing the job properly), so it was only a matter of time before offline ads become very in-depth as well.

As a thought process it sounds scary, but these things get rolled out over time in a way that people just get used to seeing them as a part of everyday life. For example, when you sign up to GMail, you give Google (that is, its algorithm) the right to “read” your email in order to serve you relevant ads. I personally find that quite horrific as I consider all my emails to be private and non-negotiable for any kind of reading, but millions of people use the service as they realize that there is no real harm in allowing an algorithm to serve you ads and nothing else.

In the end, public ads that watch you will become an everyday thing–just as long as the ads are not using your name as you walk by.

Bookmark To:

If your first thought of President Barack Obama’s new White House website change is the above title of this post or even a “Wow! That looks nice,” it is time to update the look of your company’s website. Within an hour of Obama’s inauguration, the White House website underwent a whole site redesign to look as the following:

The site redesign is not perfect (I am allowed to have some quibbles) as it could have some stronger call-to-actions, SEO, etc., however, considering this is a government website, the design is very well done.

This only raises the bar for full-service interactive advertising agencies dealing in creative, heurestic analyses, and SEO all around, I will attest to that.

Oh, and the site is using WebTrends:

<script type="text/javascript">
//<![CDATA[
var _tag=new WebTrends();
//]]>>
</script>

I wonder if Web Analytics companies have to go through the same bidding process as contractors do?

Bookmark To:

Lenovo, a Chinese computer brand that bought out IBM, seems to be a big fan of social media campaigns that has been backed up by the recent success of its Lenovo S10 that I mentioned previously.

This time around, Lenovo is embracing the sci-fi fan base of the Trekkies for the newest Star Trek movie that will be coming out in May 2009. I ran across the ads on Facebook about a week or so ago, but for whatever reason when I clicked on the link, the resulting page was blank. I tried again today on an ad that look as the following:

Ironically, I was not interested in purchasing a new laptop as much desktop provides all that I need at this point, but was more interested to see how the “Star Trek” Lenovo laptops looked. Suffice to say, it is a Thinkpad/Ideapad and that means ugly, RECTANGULAR, and no sense of StYlE.

Personally, I would have recommended using the money to build a better laptop with a sci-fi look rather than a viral campaign, but regardless, let me tell you what they did.

As you may have noticed with the Facebook Ad, it talks about the Lenovo Ideapad, but when you hit the page, the first computer they show is a Lenovo Thinkpad. It is minor, but thought I would mention that regardless. In any case, there are some sweet sweepstakes you can sign up for called the Intel Lenovo Seek New Frontiers Sweepstakes where you can win an Ideapad or a really sleek Star Trek messenger bag. There are even greater prizes later on in 2009 with going on the zero gravity flight or showing up for the premier of the Star Trek movie.

If you are not a fan of signing up to sweepstakes, feel free to play the really easy four questionaire (that gives you the answer anyway if you answer incorrectly) to get a nice Star Trek background desktop image.

Once you are done having fun there, head on over to the Intel viral Starfleet Shipyard site to trailers, desktop backgrounds, the USS Kelvin, character snapshots, and much more.

Man, how I wish I could have worked on a Star Trek buzz campaign.

Freebie–here’s a picture of a Beta Quadrant alien called a Monchezkian (I’ll let the canon concept of a Beta Quadrant alien in Star Fleet aside for now):

Bookmark To:

The debate rages on within the online marketing community over the benefits or lack thereof over a social media campaign. I had not planned to delve deep into social media marketing, but due to the growing interest around the net, I thought I would provide a social media marketing analysis after providing you some of the talk around the town.

Aaron Wall jumped into the frayed displaying his general antipathy towards the benefits of social media (with a few exceptions):

A pity, then, that social media traffic is so often worthless.

Worthless?

Let’s look at the market signals. Why is it that you pay dollars per click on Google Adwords for financial keywords, yet the same keywords on social networks are priced at five cents?

This suggests to me one of two things. Either the social networks are seriously underestimating the value of their own traffic, or most of the people on social networks aren’t interested in commercial messages. If they were, then the bid values would closely match those of Google Adwords.

I think the latter is the most likely scenario. Social media traffic isn’t priced higher, because it isn’t translating into revenue for the advertisers. This isn’t happening because the intent of the users when engaged with social media is not conducive to selling stuff.

The pro-social media side believes that social media marketing is still in the infancy of many online marketers and deserves attention for a variety of reasons.

My feelings on the matter are a bit nuanced considering my strong belief in the ability to accurately track, analyze, and optimize any kind of campaign.

Mainly, we have to understand what the goals are going to exactly be for a social media marketing campaign without which any social media marketing campaign will be an instant failure (no game plan = no strategy = no benefits). Let’s look at some examples of the types of strategies that a social media campaign may focus on:

Branding:

Also known as driving ‘awareness’ about your company or client. These are probably the most difficult kinds of campaigns for any analytics and for any marketer to track to determine success. For the most part, there are no easy ways to determine the value generated from the cost inputted by a social media marketing campaign. Many of the desired measures are calculations that are often not looked at deeply enough by online marketers. Honestly, how many of the online marketers are going to look into whether a social media marketing campaign is helping to improve the lifetime value of a customer (much less take the time to track it)? Furthermore, you would have to base an overall base lift in brand conversions as the benefit in the social media branding campaign as an early indicator of success. For major brands, this is likely to be the value they look at in order to keep up the interest and value of ‘fanatic’ customers who are brand loyal and desire to be involved with said brand. Retaining these loyal customers would be a success in my opinion (assuming the cost-benefit ratio is good).

SEO:

As a Search Strategist, I will have a strong bias here that may effect my opinion in this matter, but will comment on this anyway. To me, if there was any reason to do social media marketing, then it would be doing social media SEO marketing. Period. I believe that using social media marketing (in the right way) for SEO will likely get the best bang for the buck. However, one has to be careful as many of the social media sites have a dim view of what SEO does. Nonetheless, a successful social media SEO marketing campaign would include driving high-value backlinks into the clients’ websites all in an effort to drive up visibility for the desire keywords. Admittedly, clients that are more interesting and able to entice customers to link to odd stuff helps make my life as an search strategist far easier.

Revenue:

If you are trying to generate revenue directly from social media, stop. In fact, you have a greater chance selling those products that “protect” you from electromagnetic radiation than generating revenue directly from a social media revenue campaign. People just do not want to be disturbed or marketed directly in their niche social media club. All the analytics data continues to show that anyone coming from these sites have the greatest bounce rate and lowest time on site from any other marketing channel. The time and effort it takes to “infiltrate” a social media networking or build something for social media will rarely, if ever, be made up in revenue directly from these sites. Indirect revenue, is a whole other matter, but will often lack the analytical capacity to track (exception potentially being about my article on Nuconomy and Social Media Analytics).

Traffic:

This section is more for content-based sites that require eyeballs viewing a page to provide revenue generated through advertisements displayed on a page or in a video. These would be the areas where traffic is not a cost, but an asset, particularly if it leads into branding (eg: getting into the top X number of sites by traffic). Nonetheless, the traffic generated will be of poor quality (one page view, short time on site, with a quick bounce) that may not be worth the cost in the end. Unless the niche market targeted for a social media traffic campaign is large enough, then focusing on social media here may turn out to be Pyrrhic gold.

In the end, keep in mind what your strategy will be for a social media marketing campaign, have an analytics package that will be able to back you up (not necessarily something one has to build), and really, best of luck in getting it to work successfully. The belief in not needing to measure will lead to inaccurate assumptions about the success of a campaign or what you can learn from the campaign as well.

As a side note, if you want to understand one of the reasons for the Dot Com Boom and Bust, it truly was the belief in the following concept:

[Traditional] roi is a financial metric but social media is not traditional.

In otherwords, the online world does not follow the same rules as the “traditional” or offline world. It was a flawed concept during the 1990s and it is a flawed concept still today.

Bookmark To:

If you had to narrow the difference down to some key points, what would be a simple difference between a viral campaign and a social media campaign? Actually engaging users.

In China, Lenovo was promoting its new kind of netbook, the Ideapad S10, through a social media campaign using BBS, QQ emotional icons, video, widgets, etc:

A lovely Kuku Bear is the brand image of S10, therefore Lenovo mainly promoted this bear image with some touching love story. [...] Its video on Youku was viewed for over 1.7 million times, its application on Xiaonei.com ranked No. 6 most popular apps on the platform, with about 58,000 daily active users. And its sales on Taobao shop is quite good.

Yes, the marketing campaign succeeded and in fact the viral campaign (the part of it that is) succeeded, but in terms of a social media campaign it was a complete failure (minus any comments on their application page, if any, on Xiaonei).

Hopefully the advertising agency or marketing department was not a functional team calling itself social media marketing as they do not understand the meaning of social media then.

Bookmark To:

A few days ago Google announced a new feature called Google SearchWiki, allowing you the ability to move and comment on search results. Though called a wiki, SearchWiki is really a misnomer considering that you cannot actually fully customize the search results and what each page says. A better name would have been SocialSearch considering that you can see comments made about various pages by other users logged into their own Google Account.

The idea of a social search is nothing new considering the plethora of social media sites around the web that have taken off with many fans of Digg, Reddit, Sphinn, HaoHao, etc (feel free to submit this to any of those of course *winks*), but what is new is a major search engine actually testing and using the concept of social media to affect the results you see. Both Yahoo and Google had actually tested this over a year ago, but required searchers to download an add-on to actually see truly wiki-like results, and as such never caught on.

If you want basic information about the ups and downs of using the new Google Search Wiki, please check SearchEngineLand and check Graywolf for a more… entertaining example of the downsides. I will be covering the SEO and online advertising aspect that could develop from Google’s new SocialSearch (as I will henceforth be referring to it as).

What SocialSearch could do to SEO:

Currently, the new feature rolled out by Google does not play a factor into the search results, but expect that if Google finds the use of it to be beneficial, then it will certainly do so. As a Search Strategist myself, this additional feature would likely force the industry to adopt social media with a stronger embrace as the human equation plays a stronger part beyond the standard on/off-site SEO. As if SEO is not nebulous enough with tracking the value of organic search, the inclusion of having to use social media will only make matters more indirect. Brand reputation will become exponentially cumbersome as comments will continually need to be made to knock out negative commenters.

And that is where things go from useful to spam-ish. Ironically as Google tries to move away from links playing a part in SEO, Google may be choosing the same, if not worse, path in deciding how organic results should rank. I can guarantee that if SocialSearch plays a part into how organic results rank across the board that spam in the comments, spam in emails (”please rank this site” instead of “please link to me”), and spam Google Accounts (with broken Captchas) will inevitably become the norm.

Yet, why do I say it could be worse with social media playing a part? Social media is mob rule at its best and worst. The nice side is you can find unique and strange stuff and share it to large groups of people; the downside is the credit goes to sites that have the largest following. Posted a hilarious picture and Gizmodo found it? Guess which site is going to show up at the top of social media. Minor newspaper outlets that use the AP? Guess which site is going to show up (even though the AP should almost never show up since they do not create their own content). Basically, social search is about those with the largest followings; you have a huge fan base, you win, regardless of what is relevant, correct, or fair.

Heck, I even expect to see a “RankUp” social media button to come about if Google implemented SocialSearch into its algorithm. You could simply post an article, and provide an automatic ability for your fan base to “Rank [it] Up” on their results.

What SocialSearch could do to advertising:

I see the most impact really on the advertising end, along the lines of what Facebook has done. As someone who finds the load times of pages unacceptable when half the load time is of ads that do not interest me, the system that Facebook has set up actually is working rather well. As I mentioned before about Facebook’s feedback advertising, the ability to place feedback on the ads have made them a lot more relevant to me and therefore worthwhile for myself and the advertiser. Theoretically, this could work in the same way for SocialSearch if Google uses the information to help further optimize its search for more relevant sites per keyword (what better way to understand the very general phrases or information only keyword searches) or through Google providing the thumb up/down information to the websites organically ranking.

It is an interesting concept, but the problem really is Google’s foundation of basing sites on popularity algorithms that will always favor those who are popular (whether through links or social media fans).

Bookmark To:

I talked briefly before about how NBC’s coverage of the opening ceremonies was done very badly with cutting to commercials and by trying to limit worldwide Internet coverage before NBC would show it within the US. However, the coverage of the competition during the 2008 Beijing Olympics has been very well laid covered and with a large amount of information for people who know little about China.

With each competition, NBC has been talking with many of the athletes and giving background on who they are and what they need without being too boring, too annoying, or too simplistic–a remarkable achievement when most of the media nowadays tries to appeal to the lowest common denominator.

What has me amazed is how positive the coverage has been for China and the Beijing Olympics in general. This may be the result of being gracious to the country hosting the games or due to the earthquake that China suffered. There have been many stories about China and what you can find there along with the history of China and even the interaction of China and the US. Some of these topics have covered:

• Chinese cuisine (both good and strange)
• Chinese Acupuncture
• Nixon going to China
• Kite flying
• Chinese athlete training programs
• Beijing’s monuments and parks
• Etc

What has made it particularly well-done is that they actually brought in journalists to stay and work within a foreign country and provide on-the-ground reports about the country, something that has been in dire need for those interested in international affairs.

Lastly, even many of the commercials have been geared towards China and the Olympics, providing very relevant ads that I think play very well to the audience watching. These relevant ads do far better when I actually enjoy watching them because they are interesting! Many of these ads have been very memorable including the Beijing Olympics Mummy dual TV commercial.

Budweiser, GE, and some Canadian apparel HBC(?)

Bookmark To:

You know someone has had way too much free time on their hand to create this Barack Obama rick roll video:

Then again, it could be clever political advertising for the Internet generation. At least Obama knows how to use the Internet, much less use a computer compared to McCain.

Bookmark To: