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Thursday, June 07, 2007 |
An interesting article in Advertising Age focuses on a debate within the advertising industry about how to approach the new world of user-generated content for marketing purposes. And nobody's seems all that sure about it.
Editor's Note: The release of Google Gears represents another way to shift offline focus to one's online applications. Google Reader is the first to receive this treatment; which web apps, in or out of Google, would you like to have available at 35,000 feet? Discuss it with us at WebProNews.
The debate is no so much do-we-or-don't-we as much as it is how-thick-do-our-kid-gloves-need-to-be? Do we advertise around the content? If so, is the level of control acceptable? If we create our own content for video-sharing sites, how much do we put into production and what is the return?
These are boardroom type questions – queries for suits and bean counters and gamers. But, from a reasonable distance, it makes one wonder if they're over-thinking it.
Ian Schafer, CEO of Deep Focus, is concerned with filtering. Because, really, you don't want your travel guide advertisement popping up next to a guide to New York cocaine bars.
Even then, you wonder how many people notice and how many people (other than the advertisers care.
The rest of the panel, which includes, bigwigs from Avenue A/Razorfish (kings of the surreal), Art Sindlinger of Starcom, and MasterCard, seemed torn on production costs.
Like any creative endeavor, when salesmen and suits get involved, it's ruined. Like any creative pursuit, success is 90% imagination, 5% placement, and 5% timing. Great things don't go anywhere because of bad timing, mediocre things take off for the opposite reason.
The Celestine Prophecy, anyone? Not exactly a triumph of literature, but caught the right wave.
So the 90-5-5 formula I put out there is completely arbitrary (and you should have called me on that already), because it seems to me this type of discussion surrounds arbitrary topics. What catches, catches. What doesn't doesn't. It's almost all intuition.
And suits hate that. Like Schrodinger's Cat, measuring something changes it.
But if we have to have something – something more tangible than "you just gotta feel it" – to go on, we can turn to YouTube for our data, to see what scores and what doesn’t.
Paris Hilton's channel when she launched her (abysmal) pop song was met with some concern as YouTubers complained their beloved space would be invaded by marketers. One commentator complained the music video was too polished, too Madison Avenue.
They like it raw; they like it real; they like something they can connect with. (In Paris's case, watch it catch fire for the opposite reason, as she scoots out of jail for bogus reasons, while the po' folks serve their time.)
Alright, so we know how not to be – salesy and invasive. (Door-to-door may work an acceptable percentage of the time, because it's hard to shut the door in someone's face. If it's just a click that makes the annoyance go away, it's a different story.) But what scores on YouTube?
The all-time most viewed list shows us patterns that we should recognize already. The people like music, sex, and laughter – if all at the same time, so be it. The top 10, which seems to belie a bit the unwashed masses preference for raw reality, are:
1. Evolution of Dance, viewed 49.9 million times.
2. Avril Lavigne's "Girlfriend," viewed 33.3 million times.
3. My Chemical Romance's "Famous Last Words," viewed 29.3 million times.
4. Pokemon Theme Music Video, viewed 24.5 million times.
5. SNL's "A Special Christmas Box," viewed 22.6 million times.
View the complete Top 10 list
So while that shows what type of entertainment YouTubers really value, what about videos that are closer to true advertising? My favorite example is the "Will It Blend?" series, where a seller demonstrates a blender by chopping up an iPod, golf balls, marbles, pens, a rake handle, hockey pucks, you name it.
Simple, transparent, direct, a little violent, with a nice punch from the wow-factor. The "Will It Blend?" series hit its peak with the iPod blending, viewed 3.6 million times – not bad for a blender commercial.
| Article by Jason Lee Miller, a WebProNews editor and writer covering business and technology. |
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Questions For Semel, Schmidt, And Sullivan
 By David Utter
Staff Writer | WebProNews
There are questions we would love to have answered from some of the top figures in the search industry: a pair of CEOs and the search world's most respected pundit.
Eric Jackson provided the inspiration on Seeking Alpha for this piece. Jackson solicited users of LinkedIn and Yahoo Answers for questions for Yahoo's CEO during the company's upcoming shareholder meeting next week.
We're just going to put three simple questions out there and see what our readers think of them; comments are welcome below. Please stay on topic, as the "delete as junk" function can be wielded by our admins with unbridled alacrity.
For the esteemed Terry Semel: Your compensation packages in recent years have rewarded you in a nearly inverse proportion to the results you have created in your job. How would you handle an employee whose highly-compensated position at Yahoo yielded far less productivity than one would expect of a staffer at a high pay scale?
It may seem like we're picking on people here. Bad old negative media, no Coke Zero for you. But we'd actually like to know the answer to that question, as well as others.
Continue Reading
Article by David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. |
Ranking for Two Highly Competitive Keyword-Specific Terms
This one is tough, and I hope that the minds here can help me understand my options.
Our company has been doing SEO since the advent of the Internet, and today we rank extremely well for most of our key phrases and search terms. Which is good.
BUT... (and you knew there was a but...)
One key phrase in particular gives us no end of pain and suffering. It is a variation on a popular phrase used in searching for products of our type.
As an example:
we rank very highly for "chocolate cookies" but are losing ground quickly for "mocha cookies" due to competitors who are optimizing specifically for that phrase and it's keywords.
Historically, we have dominated the results (through good, honest SEO - white paper distribution, PRs, industry articles, quality backlinks, and most of all great relative content) but here's the rub:
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Inc. 2549 Richmond Rd. Lexington KY, 40509
