March 21, 2008

A unique view into marketing

With the NCAA tournament on, everybody is in the game. Personally, I like what Coke Zero did with their site -- they've but a number of interactive games up that are related to both the tournament and the product. See the March Madness section at www.cokezero.com.
Nokia has done some research on entertainment and believes that "up to a quarter of the entertainment consumed by people by 2012 will have been created, edited and shared within their peer circle rather than coming out of traditional media groups." This "Circular Entertainment" is a pass along and add phenomenom where the recipients add or edit content and then pass it along. Sounds like the old telephone game where a phrase is mashed (usually not on purpose) as it travels a series of people.
As mergers and acquisitions continue the role of the ad networks is changing. With graphical, search, and video campaigns all needing to be tracked the uber-server knows all. The piggybacking of tracking pixels across media provides a wealth of information but also poses some risks for marketers. The man in the middle will know more than the folks on the end - consumer or marketer. The easiest place to see where this may happen is search -- MSN owns Atlas, Yahoo! owns Right Media -- now both ad servers can see search bids across the Internet. It used to be people who arbitraged the difference, now it could be the owners.
Tips on naming your product (from marketingprofs): it isn't a linear or even logical process. The best point is to remember that brainstorming always has a purpose and objective. If you're a founder of a company pick one that makes you smile -- there will be tough days and nights and you need something that keeps you going.
What is good for online must be good for TV, right? The ability to target online ads is old news, the ability to target ads to both the Internet and TV based on behavior is new territory. Panache Technology aims to "push any type of ad unit into any video platform" according to CEO Steve Robinson in Behavioral Insider. The silos continue to crumble.
Taking a page out of the emoticons. German car rental company Sixt has used text to put pictures in Google ads. (Found on MindValley Labs blog).
From the center for media research: "eMarketer forecasts that out-of-home video advertising spending in the United States will total $2.3 billion in 2011, up from $1.3 billion in 2007 partially as a result of the falling costs of flat-panel LCDs, combined with the emergence of IP and wireless Internet technologies." So look for ads in all the new places.