It’s my first TVC in my brand manager avatar, so be generous with your compliments and gentle with your criticisms. In either case, do e-mail me your feedback both on the TVC and the concept of brand managers talking about their brands on social networks.
As advertising permeates into more parts of our lives, people learn how to block out advertising, develop blind spots, which prompts advertisers to find yet more ways of cutting through the clutter, leading to a self-propagating cycle of more advertising and less ad-free non-commercial space.
Italian agency MTN Company recently used zebra crossing advertising to promote an architecture and design event called “Settimane dell’Architettura e del Design” (via I Believe in Advertising).
See the pictures on Flickr (they are not shared under a Creative Commons license, so do think twice before you put them up at your blogs) —
– or watched the making of the zebra crossing ads on YouTube –
The ads are done really tastefully and add to, rather than take away from, the public space they use as a platform. The Sentieri Urbani project, for instance, uses a similar street art approach to to beautify public space. My experience, however, is that it doesn’t take long for an innovative new medium like this to devolve into lowest common denominator space. It’s one thing to have black and white flowers and hearts on the zebra crossing, it’s another to have loud multi-colored “Buy Now!” price and promotion ads.
Quick Summary: In Mumbai? On Twitter? Register for the first Mumbai Twitter Meetup. Not on Twitter? Find seven reasons why you should sign up for Twitter today.
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If You Are in Mumbai & on Twitter, Attend the Mumbai Twitter Meetup
Yesterday, when I tweeted about wanting to do a Mumbai Twitter Meetup —
Blog meets are so passe. I want to do a Mumbai Twitter meet. Anyone interested? (Twitter)
– I received half a dozen responses within seconds.
Quick Summary: Read about how the long tail doesn’t only apply to culture and commerce, but also to relationships.
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In my earlier post about the Long Tail of Pain, I just drew a diagram of how social media allows us to experience pain anytime, anyplace, in any form, but didn’t elaborate on the idea adequately.
In this post, I’ll explain what a long tail is and how digital media has changed it. I’ll also explain how the long tail doesn’t only apply to culture and commerce, but also to relationships, specifically pain, via the Three Laws of the Long Tail of Pain.
Let me first explain what a long tail is.
A long tail curve is a statistical distribution in which a small number of data points have disproportionately high values compared to a large number of other data points that have progressively low values. If you rank these data points and plot them in the decreasing order of their values, you get a curve that first falls very sharply (forming the almost vertical head) and then falls more slowly (forming the almost horizontal tail). The Pareto Principle (the top 20% contribute 80% of the total) is an example of a long tail curve.
Quick Summary: Facebook serves desi social ad on my News Feed without cluttering it, but still needs to perfect the targeting.
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I wonder what prompted this ‘Love Bollywood’ social ad to show up in my Facebook News Feed, except that I’m part of the India network. Clearly, Facebook is still perfecting the targeting for these ads. What Facebook has perfected already is the ability to serve up to two ads on the same page without compromising on the user interaction.
Facebook Social Ads allow your businesses to become part of people’s daily conversations. Ads can be displayed in the left hand Ad Space — visible to users as they browse Facebook to connect with their friends — as well as in the context of News Feed — attached to relevant social stories. (Facebook Social Ads)
I clicked on the ad out of curiosity — the ad points to a Bollywood focused website and not to a Facebook Page. I even signed up on the website to check if they have enabled Facebook Beacon.
Quick Summary: Find out if Digital Inspiration’s Facebook Flyer experiment worked.
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Digital Inspiration is now advertising on Facebook. Amit’s Facebook flyer just showed up on my Facebook profile page and for a moment, I thought Amit had created a Facebook Page. However, it turned out the the flyer linked directly to Amit’s website.
It will be great to chat with Amit on what kind of traffic he is getting from the flyers. Amit?
Though the above advertising campaigns on Facebook were run for a very short period, they do indicate that the click through rates for ads appearing on Facebook can be extremely low.
TechCrunch revealed today that, instead of launching a new social networking platform, Google will launch OpenSocial, a set of three common APIs that application developers can use to create applications that work on any hosts, social networks, that choose to participate. These APIs give developers access to the data needed to build social applications: access to a user’s profile, their friends, and the ability to let their friends know that activities have taken place. The initial lineup of hosts, or participating social networks, include Orkut, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Ning, Hi5, Plaxo, Friendster, Viadeo and Oracle (update: MySpace, Bebo and SixApart have also joined OpenSocial). The initial lineup of developers include Flixster, iLike, RockYou and Slide.
You can also see a press release on the subject posted on John Battelle’s Searchblog.
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What is my overall impression of OpenSocial?
In my opinion, Google gets three on three for not calling it Maka-Maka, for not falling into the Orkut vs. Facebook trap -
While a lot of bloggers are looking at ‘Maka-Maka’ in a Orkut vs. Facebook context, I think Google will be short-selling itself if it looked at the opportunity in such a limited way.
If you read marketing blogs, you couldn’t have missed the recent buzz on MediaSnackers.
MediaSnackers are (mostly young) people who snack on media, or consume it in small chunks. The 90 sec video on the MediaSnackers website serves as a good introduction to the idea. While the idea itself is not a new one, the packaging - and the catchphrase - is great, and has been rewarded with a meme dedicated to it.
The “Do you respect MediaSnackers?” meme started by Jeremiah Owyang asks bloggers how they are dealing with the low attention spans of their audiences. The meme has spread wide with the participation of many marketing and PR bloggers.
Here are my three quick thoughts on MediaSnackers:
- First, MediaSnacking is about attitude, not about age.
We snack for various reasons: because we don’t have time for a full meal, because snacks are easier to digest, because we simply like snacking. While MediaSnacking may come more naturally to the young, older people who are starved for time and weighed down with information are as likely to turn to it.
