[T]wo companies already are showing me advertising I love: Foursquare, which shows me offers from businesses nearby where I check in, and Yelp, who also shows me offers from businesses nearby. These are HUGE value ads for both consumers and businesses and if Twitter ads this new kind of advertising to a SuperTweet they will make billions of dollars.
It’s “giving season” again and so we’re about to see a huge ramp-up in embedded giving—the practice of embedding a donation into the purchase price of something you buy (e.g. “a portion of the proceeds will go to cancer research/plant a tree/build a space hotel”). Joining Lucy Bernholz, we’ve been critical of embedded giving schemes for a variety of reasons including their ability to obscure what is really going on.
But the genie is out of the bottle. Start managing your reputation in a way that’s authentic and ethical and stay on top of this. And be prepared for what I’m calling the “curatorial economy.” (You heard it here first.)
With Twitter lists, Dave Troy says, collections become the indicators of reputation. Searchable, personal, and indexed by the search engines. Twitter has just hit the social networking ball out of the park.
Search marketers must understand that blasting marketing information through Facebook or Twitter won’t be effective, as search engines will filter out irrelevant messages that nobody listens to. Instead, marketers should allow content on all web properties and email marketing to be easily added to Facebook, Twitter, and other social sites.
Behind the land rush to apps is a belief that they may be some of the cleverest advertising devised. They are, after all, advertisements that people voluntarily choose to watch and share with friends. Some are even consulted in store aisles when customers decide what to buy. “Apps have a huge advantage,” said Carl Howe, a mobile market analyst for the Yankee Group. “You had to take a step to get it; you are already half sold.”
When people open an app, they give it full attention.
On Earth Day, 1971, a nonprofit called Keep America Beautiful launched TV ads to persuade people to stop littering.
If you grew up watching Saturday morning cartoons in the '70s, you'll remember them. Each one featured an American Indian paddling or riding or walking through a trashy landscape and a grave voice over, ending with "People start polution. People can stop it." At the end of each ad, the camera zooms in on the Indian's face, onto a single tear. The crying Indian got America to stop littering. That ad is the one I remember most. Do watch it. Then forgive me a guess about what you're thinking: Powerful TV, but really. Of course, the '70s were top-down times. One example: Elvis Presley, master of media, had three TVs built into the wall of this basement at Graceland. Three televisions were all he needed to watch everything shown on TV in America. There were only three channels, so The King was set. The Indian in the ads was a career actor named Iron Eyes Cody. He became known as The Crying Indian -- better known for those ads than for any other role in in his career, which began when he was 12. While Iron Eyes lived his life as an Indian, Wikipedia says he was born Italian-American, from Louisiana. And there are all sorts of conspiratorial accusations against Keep America Beautiful. The organization purportedly got its funding from corporations and fast-food vendors. Wouldn't it be better, the accusers say, to encourage people to buy less styrofoam than to clean up litter? Yet the ads inspired genuine feeling. And people did (mostly) stop littering. A mark of their power today: their YouTube comments are mostly positive. What's the Crying Indian for our time? And, post-network-TV, what's the medium? The net, surely -- but which net? A thousand blogs? Twitter? Facebook? YouTube? (And do all the brand names in that list creep anybody out, is it just me?) I want to know what kind of campaign it would take to stop pollution -- really stop it.
About two-thirds of Americans object to online tracking by advertisers — and that number rises once they learn the different ways marketers are following their online movements, according to a new survey from professors at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of California, Berkeley.
Great recipes (zillions of them) -- and in-app advertising done right.
Back in the web 1.0 days, Conde Nast put all of the recipes from Gourmet and its other food magazines online at http://epicurious.com. The recipes were searchable and over time Epicurious added ratings and other community features. It's been a fabulous resource for cooks. They are great recipes, and there are lots of them -- including the 1955 recipe for steak au poivre that keeps me from going vegetarian. Epicurious has now come to the iPhone with the free "Epicurious recipies and shopping list" app http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=312101965&mt=8 . That whole recipe database is now searchable from your iPhone. And, yes, it will make a grocery list from the recipes you pick.
search the entire Epicurious recipe database -- from the phone
see how other Epicurious users have rated the recipes
save favorite recipes
generate a shopping list from the recipes you pick
check off items as you buy them
price: free
It's a great app, and the shopping list makes it the best way to use these recipes. But how do they pay for that? The app is ad-supported, but in the least-intrusive way I've seen in an app. Here's how it works -- A search tells you how many results were found (see the second screenshot below). If you click to see the results, the app then splashes an ad while it retrieves the recipes (third screenshot). The experience feels perfectly natural. "Oh," I thought, "I'm waiting anyway, may as well view an ad." Woah! This is completely different than, say, the New York Times approach -- where the splash ad get between you and content you may not want anyway. What's the difference? With Epicurious, I've seen enough to know I want to go on, so an ad is okay with me. Search confirms my intent. The Times, though is a browsing operation. From a headline I don't often know if the story will be what I want -- or worth sitting through an ad. For me, the result of the experience is annoyance or, for Epicurious, gratitiude. Can you afford to annoy your users?
Seth Godin on the investment that new media requires -- it's a platform business now. The technology to build a platform is cheap, what's expensive is getting people to play.
Suddenly the new media comes along and the rules are different. You're not renting an audience, you're building one. You're not exhibiting at a trade show, you're starting your own trade show.
If you still ask, "how much traffic is there," or "what's the CPM?" you're not getting it. Are you buying momentary attention or are you investing in a long term asset?
The push for share of [advertising] voice has created an arms race, where brands spend more and more to hold on their share of a slowly growing market. Like housing prices, this will sustain itself until someone — that is, the buyer — walks away from the table.
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