For most bands in the slumping music industry, the day of big budget videos is a luxury of the past.  But last week undisputed kings of the viral music video, OK GO, found a new avenue to make their art a reality: corporate sponsorship.

The band’s clip for “This Too Shall Pass,” which features a mind blowing two story Rube Goldberg contraption, was bank rolled by none other than State Farm Insurance.  In a brilliant move, the band also arranged the deal so that State Farm paid for the right to make the YouTube clip embeddable anywhere on the web.  The band’s singer Damian Kulash recently wrote a piece for The New York Times questioning EMI’s decision not to allow embedding of YouTube videos and State Farm graciously presented a work around solution.

This is the first example of prominent corporate sponsorship of a major music video that we know of and State Farm’s bet has paid off handsomely– the clip received close to a million views a day in the first week of launch.  The video includes a toy car with the State Farm logo as well as a State Farm teddy bear and a closing thank you to the brand for making the video possible. Read More »

After two years managing the social media and healthcare practices at the Lab, Raquel Krouse recently joined the Initiative Media team as SVP, Director for PropheSee media solutions, the agency’s social media unit. We sat down to talk about her new role, and how PropheSee aims to give brands better ways to listen and engage consumers online.

Q: You’ve done exciting work in social media over the past few years; how does PropheSee fit into the social media narrative?

A: When talking about developing a social media strategy, I’ve always stressed listening as an essential first step.  But it’s really about active listening. PropheSee not only provides solutions to monitor online chatter, but also provides the services to help brands understand and effectively act upon online buzz.

Q: What’s different about PropheSee, and why now? Read More »

Ok, I admit it. I love new technology. I love getting new devices, figuring out how they work, learning what they can do for me. But increasingly, I find integrating new technology into my life harder and harder.

I need a new PC for my home office, but I keep putting it off because it will be such a pain to reinstall software, update drivers, connect to my network. I want to switch to a new carrier for my portable phone, but the idea of actually going to the carrier store to switch service irritates me. And my multi that drives my home theater recently died – the thought of buying and reprogramming a new one seems ridiculously complicated, even though I have done it before.

In short, the lure of new technology and the realities of life integration seem increasingly more difficult the older I get. And it seems I am not alone. Read More »

Last week Tracy Swedlow’s  annual “TV of Tomorrow” Conference was held in San Francisco where the “who’s who” of Interactive television gathered to discuss the future of television from broadcast to broadband including tru2way and TV Anywhere.

In past years’ conferences, you would have found the the few, the proud, the clinically-depressed-die-hards of advanced television platforms, geekgirls like myself , who have been trying for years to advance the cause of TV with social features, commerce solutions and true targeting capabilities.  And in the past, the legacy systems of the US cable infrastructure, the limitations of satellite’s two-way capabilities and the lack of scale in broadband hindered advancement in the space.  But this year, the conference came into its own as the industry showed market growth in a number of ongoing initiatives.   There is movement happening, money being spent and real players involved in the marketplace.

To set the stage for what’s happening in the interactive video space, here are some relevant statistics:

57% of Americans use their TV and PC simultaneously at least 1x a month (Nielsen)
20% of all tv viewers are simultaneously on their pc or mobile device (MRG)
78% of Teens and Tweens are online while watching tv and 66% are sending text messages while watching tv (ypulse/Pangea)

Of all the solutions bubbling up, here are a few that marketers can immediately take advantage of to leverage the power of video to accomplish a number of marketing goals:  Read More »

Google built an empire with a simple approach– make innovations to existing ideas and offer the best user-friendly product on the market.  The formula worked with online search as it did with Google’s email service Gmail.  Follow-up launches of Gchat and Gchat video were logical progressions that integrated seamlessly with the Gmail platform and quickly became a part of our day to day interactions.  Google’s latest launch of Google Buzz pushes one step further by trying to enter the social networking space.  And if Google’s Buzz Press Conference is any indication, the company has been quietly planning to enter that space via Gmail all along.

Despite some problems out the starting gate, Google Buzz may be an attempt to jump on the microblogging bandwagon. But GoogleBuzz features several innovations that improve the Twitter platform it appropriates. Users can create custom groups with updates viewable only to family, coworkers, or relevant friends. “Recommended Buzz,” is a smart tool that magically sorts your friends updates by relevance.  The mobile version of Buzz even allows you to post your location based on GPS. Read More »

From Ad Age’s Digital Marketing Guide to Mobile

I haven’t been doing any mobile marketing so far. How hard will it be to catch up?

The mobile landscape is at a tipping point right now, switching from a very old approach to an edgy new one. The difference between newer smartphones vs. feature (or non-smart) phones, or even older smartphones, is dramatic. Consumer behavior is transitioning from mostly using the phone for voice and text communication to using it as a secondary or even primary computing device. For this subset of wireless subscribers, their pocket-size computer is used for browsing the web, watching videos, reading e-mails, listening to personalized radio stations, downloading eBooks — heck, even filing taxes.

Just as the behaviors on the devices are vastly different, the marketing tactics and strategies are night and day between feature phones and newer smartphones. Where promotions and light engagement were the status quo for older phones, the cutting edge is all about features and utility. In most cases, these consumers care most about how useful it will be to engage, rather than just how entertaining. Read More »

Humanity has come to an intriguing crossroads. Our technology is evolving faster than ever, and yet the human experience hasn’t changed much since the golden age of Rome. We stand on the verge of a collision between these two worlds as our technology becomes increasingly integrated with the innate methods humans use to interact with the world. It’s a trend of “engaging the primal.”

Interface technology is an interesting field right now. It takes a long time to move forward, but when it does, the world moves along with it. For a time, we interacted with technology and computers through punch cards that indicated what we wanted done. Eventually, we re-purposed the legacy interface of a typewriter to arrive at the keyboard, expanding the accessibility of computers to most households. Then in 1963, the mouse was invented and with it computers eventually became centered around graphical interactions, no longer requiring arcane command line input.  Today the hot new interface technology revolves around kinetics. Multi-touch screens, image and gesture recognition, internal gyroscopes — as these technologies advance, devices like the Wii and the iPhone are quickly moving from outliers to standards.
Read More »

This morning, Reprise Media released the 6th annual Search Marketing Scorecard on the Super Bowl, which ranks Super Bowl advertisers based on the level of integration between their television commercials and presence in search and social media –measuring how prepared each brand was to capture the demand created by their Super Bowl advertising investment. The Search Marketing Scorecard is the longest-running study of its kind.

The audience for this year’s Super Bowl was primed and ready for integrated campaigns. According to a recent comScore study, 1/3 of the 90 million people planning to watch the Super Bowl expected to log on to their computers during the game. Furthermore, One out of every ten viewers (or nearly 9 million people) were going to use their computers specifically to seek out advertiser websites. That sounds like an audience that’s not only interested in the ads, but interested in having real interactions with brands, which is what our study is all about.

So how did this year’s advertisers do?  Read full article here.

For years, the Super Bowl has become the essence of TV advertising – the one day of the year that we celebrate commercials. Conversations around the ads drive as much interest as the game itself. Increasingly some of the most exciting content is happening in social spaces where interest swells, buzz surges and opinions proliferate. There’s even an opportunity for buzz around network rejected ads. This week, GoDaddy invited consumers to view their banned ad on their site, while the attention and reach for the rejected ad for the gay dating site Mancrunch.com may garner even more attention than if it had aired (without the hefty three million dollar price tag).

Although some large brands such as Pepsi have opted to skip Super Bowl ads in favor on online campaigns this year–a move which has probably earned Pepsi as much or more attention than if they had participated–others have opted to best take advantage of the surge in online consumer interest in their ads. Social media users can share, forward, discuss, critique, rate and review the ads at live chats, twitter games, You Tube’s Ad Blitz, USA Today’s Ad Meter, and many other sites. Read More »

Things are getting downright ugly. Apple and Google, once the best of friends, seem to have devolved into the bitterest of enemies. The tactics have become dirty. The blows are getting dangerously close to the belt. And I couldn’t be happier.

Unlike real wars, when corporations battle it’s often the common person that prospers. We’re seeing honest-to-goodness tooth-and-nail competition take place, and it’s the consumer and marketers that will come out on top regardless of which behemoth wins the fight.

The blows toward the end of 2009 were focused mostly on mobile. Google Voice was blocked from the App Store, and the FCC started poking into the matter – specifically Apple’s Control of the app economy. In short order, Eric Schmidt resigned from Apple’s board. Then the Motorola Droid came, and the marketing that placed Android’s features directly in competition with Apple’s iPhone OS. Apple then acquired Lala, a streaming music service, near immediately after Google started using the streams in their search results. Following this, Google announced they were moving acquire AdMob (still pending FTC approval), an advertising network that served ads into iPhone apps and a company Apple had been trying to acquire prior to Google outbidding them. In turn, Apple bought up ad network Quattro Wireless. As 2009 came to a close, rumors of both an Apple tablet device and a Google built phone competed for headlines. Read More »