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 »

Augmented reality (AR) may sound like something that you get to do in a dark basement with a William Gibson novel and a pair of virtual reality goggles. But the true promise of augmented reality will integrate the digital world into our offline world, and ultimately transform mundane experiences into meaningful, holistic ones. Imagine walking into a supermarket and seeing all of the nutritional and pricing information projected into thin air, or overlaid onto products; touching a logo on a box of cereal would trigger a digital reaction and enable you to use your fingers to scroll through information or content right on the cereal box.

We’re not there yet, but we’re closer than you think.

In the next nine months, mobile applications will make tremendous leaps toward integrating augmented reality into our lives. Today, there are multiple image recognition applications like SnapTell or Barnes & Noble’s Bookstore app that trigger a reaction when you take a picture of an object, logo, or barcode. Instead of pushing you to content on a website, these apps will increasingly pull in information that will be overlaid onto products via the screen’s camera function. Wikitude is an example of an application already doing this — simply hold up your phone and it will tell you what places of interest, restaurants, and shops are in your vicinity, based on the direction you are facing. Overlaying the data onto products (and people!) will be a natural evolution. Pattie Maes of MIT’s Sixth Sense Project describes it as “seamless, easy access to information” using our bodies to navigate the content in intuitive, natural ways. Read More »

This year’s Grammy awards recently demonstrated an exciting concept for a number of other award franchises (Oscars, Tonys, Emmys and on and on); that the “award show” is not dead but can no longer be played out in a pure broadcast silo.

According to Variety, 26.6 million people watched CBS’s 3.5 hour broadcast, marking a 35 percent increase from the 2009 show, it’s highest viewer ship in the last six years. While the trades blasted the overly complex structure and the lackluster MJ tribute, the audience was listening and watching on a number of other platforms that created community and pushed to the broadcast show.

Being with the slogan, “We Are All Fans;” this years Grammy’s sought to connect with the audience on a whole new level. WeAreAllFans.com was the Grammy’s “crowdsourcing” site which featured Twitter comments and videos reflecting the audience’s conversations and reactions to the broadcast in a 3D data visualization, a perfect way to engage the Grammy demographic, on their terms. Read More »

It is amazing how the world can unite during times of tragedy. The outpouring of support for Haiti by individuals, celebrities, governments, and the media has been overwhelming. DOOH Networks are also participating in the fundraising efforts. Matthew Stoudt, CEO of Outcast has pulled together Zoom Media, AdSpace Networks, IndoorDIRECT, Captivate Network, PumpTop TV, Premier Retail Networks, CBS Outernet, and TargetCast Networks for what Stoudt described in the DailyDOOH as,  “A unified message that will run on over 40,000+ screens and reach an estimated 100 million Americans monthly.”

The Preset Group has also created high-resolution video and flash content that any network can broadcast. The video spots encourage $10 donations to redcross.org by texting “Haiti” to a short code.  While historically premium SMS never took off in the US, providing an impulse-friendly way to contribute to an urgent cause has proven to be right on the money, driving the most successful mobile donation program seen so far. Read More »

The IPG Media Lab team weighs in on Apple’s release of the much anticipated iPad device.

Is the iPad a game changer?

Scott Susskind, IPG Lab CTO: I don’t know if I would consider it a “game changer.”  However, I do think it raises the bar.  We saw several tablet devices this year at CES that leveraged the Google Android platform that have some similarities to the iPad.  However, the iPad will quickly leapfrog the competition due to the maturity of the iPhone OS and breadth of the existing application ecosystem. The heavy lifting was already done. It allowed Apple to focus their efforts on smoothing out the user experience for this form-factor as well as developing special ports of business apps that make it an attractive device for the workplace.

That said, I think it will be a short-lived lead.  As the Android App ecosystem matures, the marketplace will swell with a variety of Android-based devices Devices that will either compete directly with the iPad, or fill smaller, niche markets that would be too costly for Apple to support through multiple hardware versions.  And since the content (and app) distribution model will likely be based on an open ecosystem, I would wager that the lion’s share of the market will be non-Apple inside of a few years. Read More »

After weeks, months, and years of speculation, Apple unveiled its long awaited tablet-pad-thing-a-ma-app. It’s as lovely as we’ve come to expect from Apple design. We’ll be convening with our team to get their thoughts on the impact the iPad will have on the various industries who will be touched by its technology; from publishers to media companies, to mobile players and advertisers.  Most of all, the question on everyone’s mind, has Apple created something that consumers want–and as our President, John Ross is fond of asking what problems does the iPad solve for consumers? Another words–is this Apple marketing and hype at its best, or is the iPad a game changer?

Here is a round up of news coverage on the topic.

From the WSJ: Steve Jobs reveals new iPad device, Read here.

From the WSJ: Apple device portends rewrite for publishers, Read here.

WSJ Slideshow: See photos here

From AllthingsD: The iPad is a multi-media device. So where’s the media? Read here.

From AllthingsD: Apple improves its multi-touch and gesture capabilities Read here.

From Wired: Live coverage of iPad unveiling Read here.

See what others are saying; Live Twitter feed, Click here.

From Apple.com, video on the device, Watch here.

Column originally featured on MediaPost

The title of this post is “Will net neutrality kill cloud gaming?” — and no, that’s not the wrong way around. While a handful of game developers just advised the FCC on the importance of net neutrality for the future of online gaming, and to an extent correctly so, there are cause-and-effects in play that also pose significant threats.

Let’s get some definitions out of the way. First off, for the purposes of this post, “cloud gaming” refers to games that are rendered in the cloud (i.e. on servers). In essence, this is the promise of services like OnLive, a gaming offering that portends high-quality gaming on the simplest of devices by centralizing the heavy lifting in the cloud. It’s not there yet, but the intent has many gamers’ hopes up for a day in the future when they can leave the hardware arms race behind. Read more.

Being a veteran attendee of CES, it is inevitable that each year someone asks me what I thought was the most amazing thing I saw at the show. And each year, I can usually point out one interesting piece of tech that fits into that category. Year after year there are invariably a few items that cause we merry geeks to circle around them ooh-ing and ahh-ing with avarice in our eyes.

This year, however was different. What struck me most this year was not to be found in a piece of super-slick technology (though there were a few), but rather something surprising. The industry as a whole seems to have undergone some radical rethink and rallied itself around a few core technologies and concepts. Rather than the chaotic grab-bag of offerings that we are usually presented with, something has galvanized the industry to get their products into some sort of alignment.

Could it be the sudden revelation that what really matters is the content? Read More »