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Tech Review On Obama's Social Media

MIT Technology Review's cover story explores Obama campaign's use of social media:  "The generational differences between the Obama and McCain campaigns may be best symbolized by the distinctly retro "Pork Invaders," a game on the McCain site (it's also a Facebook application) styled after Space Invaders, the arcade game of the late 1970s. Pork Invaders allows you to fire bullets that say "veto" at slow-moving flying pigs and barrels."

Life-like Projection of Best Buy Salesman

Ah, here's a topic I haven't posted about for a couple of years: "a video display at the Mall of America that looks and sounds like a real Best Buy employee." (YouTube, via AdRants).

Here's a look at the tech behind it by Modernistic: "This digital projection signage system uses a screen to capture all available projected light. The screens can be custom cut into any shape. We also make screens in a self-adhesive film that can be applied to windows, transparent partitions, free standing, countertop and hanging panels. The projected image has a multi-dimensional look."

Earlier:
Advertising Holograms
Stereoscopic Advertising: Part II, Part I

Stormpulse: Great Interface for Tracking Hurricanes

Stormpulse.com. Stunning.

Balihoo Launches Marketer Edition [Ad]

AdLab's sponsor Balihoo launched their Marketer Edition product. In a nutshell, the product provides national brands the ability to consistently implement distributed demand-generation efforts by centralizing the management and execution of all local marketing activities. Functionality highlights:

• Local dealers can customize corporate-approved creative on-the-fly to create personalized but on-brand advertising and marketing materials across all mediums.
  
• Local dealers can plan and buy local advertising with a few simple clicks and leverage the corporate buying power of the national brand.
  
• National brands drive demand generation and brand consistency at the local level.
  

Click for more information on this franchise and coop marketing product.

AdLab Riddle: Says Who?

Below are the four nomination acceptance speeches made by the ticket candidates at DNC and RNC over the past two weeks: Biden, Obama, Palin, and McCain. I ran these speeches through Wordle. Can you match the wordled speeches with the right speaker? Leave your guesses in comments and click letters for the answer.


A:


B:


C:


D:

Sony To Release Ghostbusters on USB Drive

Sony's 25-year-old blockbuster Ghostbusters is the first movie to be released on a USB stick (for something like $50).
- via Slyck

Earlier:
Bible Preloaded on USB
Disposable Audio Books

Google Chrome: That's The Way Ad Cookie Crumbles

This must be the cheesiest headline of all 2,200+ headlines in AdLab's almost four-year history.

So, Google Chrome (download yours). First impressions: fast, stable, bare-bones. Miss all the Firefox extensions. Was hoping for a tighter integration between the browser and the stable of Google web apps, especially with Lively, although that's probably yet to come. Google Reader already comes with an offlline option that doesn't require any additional installations.

What does Chrome mean for the advertising industry?


1. The Incognito mode, much like IE8's InPrivate "porn mode", means that cookieless browsing is now much closer to the regular user who doesn't hunt down esoteric options in the Advanced dialog box or install something like AdBlock Plus. If Chrome and IE8 grow about as fast as Firefox and get, say, 20% of market share each within three or four years, we'll have about half of all users lurking around undetected at least part of the time.

Is display advertising headed the way of the pop-up? Probably not yet, but targeting methodologies that rely on cookies (like some flavors of behavioral targeting) will have to develop new alternatives.

2. PPC search campaigns are likely to become more expensive because of how Chrome integrates the address bar with a search box equipped with the Google Suggest feature. It is a new and tricky game: not only you'll have to SEO your page up to the top of search results, you might need to architect search terms and then push them to the top of the suggestion list.

3. When search results load faster, people search more often (CNet). If anything, Chrome is fast. Naturally, more searches =  more money for GOOG.

4. Less "chrome" (toolbars and navigation buttons) in the browser = more space to display content = more space to display ads. On my PC, it's six AdWords ads in Firefox (bookmarks + Google toolbar on + tabs) and eight in Chrome.

5.  Richer and, one would hope, more useful ad apps in JavaScript.  Also, Chrome comes with a pre-installed Flash plug-in.

6. One more browser to test microsites against.

Sarah Palin: The Book

$12 on Amazon; 157 pages, came out in April 2008. From the first chapter:

"One of her strengths is being able to hold her tongue when she’s been unfairly attacked," said Chuck Jr. "By staying true to her beliefs, things always seem to fall into place for her." Not that Sarah’s journey to the governor’s office was easy. From the moment she began making her mark in the politics, she was criticized for being too young, too inexperienced, and too naïve. Yet, time after time over the years, underestimating Sarah always proved to be a big mistake."

Also, opposition research file on Palin from the 2006 campaign.

Earlier: Prediction Markets Go Nuts Over Rep VP Pick

Fred Davis, McCain's Creative Director

Image: Strategic Perception

Wall Street Journal: "Raised in Tulsa, Okla., Mr. [Fred] Davis at 19 took over his father's small public-relations firm when he died. Early on, he told corporate clients that if their ads weren't seen and remembered, they wasted their ad dollars. For a local bank, he beat out the big agencies by showing how customers would have to travel downtown only once to pre-sign all documents, so the rest of the banking could be handled by phone. He created the slogan: 'Fourth National Bank. You'll Never Come Back.'"

Also:  Strategic Perception, Fred Davis's communications firm; a Politico article on Davis from May 2007.

Earlier:
Stage Design Magic As Propaganda Tool

Coca-Cola Tests High-Capacity Fountain

AJC: Coca-Cola is testing a new fountain that can dispense more than 100 beverages due to highly concentrated ingredients.

Prediction Markets Go Nuts Over Rep VP Pick

I gotta tell you, if prediction markets are any indication, nobody saw Palin coming. I was up till 5am last night watching CNN's political market and as you can see on the graph above, it was all about Pawlenty and Romney (blue and off-white lines) not only over the past week but also for most of the night, with Palin (green) picking up steam only after the first leaks started appearing on CNN around 6-7am.

Which brings up a question of how, you know, predictive prediction markets really are, at least in situations where the outcome is hinged on a private decision of a small group of people. Last night's Rep VP market was very similar to the Dem VP market last week, where bets clearly reflected the somewhat mindless absorption of the news stream. (Bayh and Kaine were leading for most of the week; prices of Clinton, Chet Edwards and Sebelius fluctuated widely on the numerous rumors. Biden emerged as a clear leader the day preceding the announcement).



Me? Last week, I doubled the initial $5000 by buying Biden at $44. This week, I shorted Pawlenty at $80, Romney at $60 (then closed it at $12 and then bought again at $29 last night -- a speculative move that was a mistake, in retrospect). Stocks of all women candidates were dirt-cheap: all but Palin were under $1 last night (I got about a hundred of Whitman, Fiorina and Hutchison); I also bought Palin at $2.57. I thought the latest stream of McCain's commercials praising Clinton could be hinting at the larger Rep VP strategy.

Sex Ads in Denver Up During DNC

Our coverage of the political season continues.

CNet:  "Ads seeking casual sexual encounters through the Denver Craigslist site increased an average of roughly 70 percent to 80 percent over the same days of the week earlier in August."

Media History Through Gartner Hype Cycle Graphs: 1995-2008

Gartner Hype Cycles are good for at least three things: identifying technologies that are still under the radar, taking a look back at stuff that was hyped up in the past but didn't go anywhere, and explaining to your parents what it is that you do as an emerging media strategist.

Besides, they illustrate this wonderful quote from David Brooks's "Lord of the Meme" column in NYTimes: "In order to cement your status in the cultural elite, you want to be already sick of everything no one else has even heard of."

These graphs also provide good fodder for thinking about how media consumption would change if any of the pre-hype technologies reached mass adoption.

After catching the 2008 graph on Techcrunch a few days ago, I hit up Google image search for earlier versions. (You can also buy Gartner's original reports, but at close to $2,000 apiece they are beyond this blog's budget). Below is what I've found. You will see that some of the technologies don't make it into the later versions of the graph; I think it's because these are Garther's charts for different tech sectors. Click on images to zoom in.

If you have graphs for the missing years, please comment or drop me a line.



1995


2000



2003



2004




2005


2006



2007


2008


Sources: Dave Chaffey, this blog, Techcrunch, SAPDesignGuild, Gartner, Guardian

Price and Penetration of Consumer Electronics

Wired: Price and market penetration of consumer electronics over the past 50 years. Infographic: Arno Ghelfi.  Sources: Consumer Electronics Association, US Bureau of Labor Statistics. CD player data not available for 2006 and 2007.

Similar: 
TV Penetration in 1940
NYTimes Graph: Technology Adoption Rates

Search Comments with Backtype

Backtype is a new tool that aggregates comments posted throughout the blogosphere and makes them searchable by keywords or commenters' names.

Other useful tools:
YackTrack -- another tool to search comments
IRSeeK: search conversations on IRC
Boardtracker, Boardreader and Omigli -- search discussion boards and forums
Mail Archive, MarkMail -- search email list archives (mostly older ones)
Copernic -- track changes on sites
A review of image search engines
TalkDigger -- tracks "conversations", not sure how well
Custom Google-based engine for many social bookmarking sites under one roof
Twitter and FriendFeed searches, of course

I also like searching the Raves and Rants section on Craigslist.

I Clicked On a Porn Thumb and All I Got Was...

... a lame political activist slideshow.  But 93 million views? That's the power of a few choice tags (the only nsfw part of the whole thing), an intriguing title and a still frame in just the right spot in the video. Via Ship's Biscuit, who also has a list of 21 genres of viral videos.

Don Draper Tweets: Twitter Fan Fiction

Fake (?) Don Draper tweets, AMC tries to take it down, the account is now back up.

How did people tweet back in the 1960s?  By having their secretaries type it up and then stuffing the message into the pneumatic mail?

"Haggle" Button Boosts Sales

Fascinating: a case study on Marketing Sherpa about an online golf equipment retailer that added a "make an offer" button and saw its sales jump by 685% in a year.

Did you know that "click here" makes people click there?

Is Google More Expensive Than TV?

Denuo's Rishad Tobbacowala compares TV buys with Google search ads: "It has actually become far more expensive to buy advertising on Google than on network television. Google has a product called AdWords, which marketers use to bid on a particular key word [that consumers might type in during an Internet search]. On average, across all categories, it tends to be about 50 cents. Let's say on television you get a $20 cost-per-thousand rate. Fifty cents a click is equal to $500 cost per thousand. You can see how much more expensive it is, but the difference is there's some sort of action."

Media equivalency is a tough problem. If we compare CPM rates, yes, TV's CPMs are cheaper than search CPMs {umm, that was stupid), but Rishad's comparison is not entirely fair or accurate when viewed from at least two angles. First, you cannot call up a TV rep and say, "Hey, I've got 20 bucks here. Can I please have 1000 impressions today?" Second, Google impressions are free, at least to a certain point. It's the action (click) that advertisers are being charged for. A more accurate comparison would be the cost-per-click for an AdWord vs cost-per-call for a TV ad with a 1-800 number.

BarackBook Parody Site; Communists for Kerry

This BarackBook.com by GOP reminds me of the winner of a recent Cracked contest (below).




One of my favorite political parody sites is CommunistsForKerry.com from the 2004 campaign.

Porn Mode in New Internet Explorer Worries Advertisers

image credit

Washington Post says advertisers are becoming worried about the upcoming Internet Explorer 8 and its "porn mode" for cookieless browsing called InPrivate.  Details from Microsoft:

"While InPrivate Browsing is active, the following takes place:

• New cookies are not stored
  
  • All new cookies become “session” cookies
  • Existing cookies can still be read
  • The new DOM storage feature behaves the same way
• New history entries will not be recorded
• New temporary Internet files will be deleted after the Private Browsing window is closed
• Form data is not stored
• Passwords are not stored
• Addresses typed into the address bar are not stored
• Queries entered into the search box are not stored
• Visited links will not be stored."

Obama VP Txt Reaches 2.9 Million

Nielsen Mobile (press release): "Nielsen Mobile, a service of The Nielsen Company, estimates that 2.9 million US mobile subscribers received a text message from the Obama campaign over the course of Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

How does Nielsen know this? Nielsen Mobile monitors shortcode marketing (the use of text-message shortcodes such as the 62262 “O-B-A-M-A”) through the world’s largest telecommunications bill-panel, an opt-in panel that reports on the billing activity for more than 40,000 subscriber lines in the US. It’s just one of the many ways Nielsen reports on wireless and mobile media consumers."

Google Indexes AdSense Copy

I noticed that AdSense ad copy gets indexed and shows up in Google's main search results. Are there any particular implications? If you bought an AdSense ad on a high-ranked site (can you?), would it push this site up in the search results for the keywords in the ad copy? 




Copy in an AdSense ad on DomainTools: "Build Your Site from Scratch, Redesign, or Enhance. No Setup Fee."


Google's search results for the phrase. The DomainTools page with the ad is third result from the top, but other sites featuring the same ad appear in the index as well.

Product Placement and Advertising in Books -- Creative Brief

Russian agency Fabula (rus) makes money by negotiating product mentions in bestselling fiction books. The image above is the cover of a fiction book by Daria Dontsova, a bestselling crime fiction author. The cover features the sponsoring brand's name in the book title (the title is roughly translated as"Gold Cockerel Sirloin"; Gold Cockerel or Zolotoy Petushok makes TV dinners) and its logo -- the chicken outline on the white card above the roullette. The company's site has a creative brief form (.doc, 2 pages) that potential clients are invited to fill out.

Earlier:
Advertising in Books Comes to the US
Advertising Comes to Textbooks
Electrolux Promotes Products with a Book