Archive

Archive for August, 2009

Video Platform of Tomorrow? Your Computer

August 31st, 2009

If you look at the statistics just released by the Silicon Alley Insider comparing viewership of video across the major cable networks vs. Hulu you will see that, in the month of July, Hulu beats Time Warner Cable in the viewership deptartment (chart below, ComScore Release).  However, numbers can be deceiving as Fast Company points out

 “The average Hulu viewer watched 12.0 videos, totaling 1 hour and 13 minutes of videos per viewer.  That basically means Hulu viewers weren’t really dialing in repeatedly to watch multiple TV shows–which is the viewing model that pay-TV cable and satellite TV viewers tend to follow.

Hulu clearly has a ways to go before it reaches the profitability level of a major cable network – however what video platforms on the Internet such as Hulu, YouTube, Vimeo and others are showing is that there is an attitudinal shift with viewers in how they consume their video content – the TV doesn’t always win.

 

Online Video ,

Interactive Textnology: YOU as a Sponsor of Tomorrow

August 28th, 2009

I was reminded last night of our Sponsors of Tomorrow launch components by a fellow Intel’r.  Sometimes I forget that there are innovative things we can do outside of executions solely on the Internet (that’s my area of expertise, so pardon me for being a bit biased).  My partner in crime in U.S. Media, Thom Campbell, did a great job with our agency – OMD – to create an experience using out of home media to get users to engage with our new campaign.  Thom and OMD did this by creating ‘interactive storefronts’ where passers by were asked to text in their ‘View on Tomorrow’ and have that text displayed on the 3-D LCD in the storefront window display.  The cool thing?  Their text not only showed up on that display, but also similar displays in Chicago, New York (including all the boards in Times Square), Miami, Boston, San Francisco and L.A, as well as our Sponsors of Tomorrow website.  Hat tip to a brilliant OOH campaign.

Advertising ,

Another year in the books, and one item marked off the Life List

August 25th, 2009

Yesterday was my birthday.  For the safety of others, I will keep my exact age a secret.  Really, I just want to maintain my youthful facade and revealing my age might pigeon hole me with me Internet peers.  🙂  I am usually not one to spend a lot of time talking about birthdays, but yesterday was a pretty cool one.  Not just because it was the one day that is all mine, but because I also got a gift that allows me to look forward to completing one thing on my Life List.

My wife, Danielle, is an amazing gift giver. Every year she spoils me with surprises that I have not anticipated but are always the perfect present.  This year was no exception. Danielle is also very supportive of my career and is always pushing me to be the best that I can be in my field of expertise.  It’s no surprise that as part of that support she keeps tabs on this blog and my Twitter stream. That paid off for her this year when she was coming up with gifts for my birthday. Having read my life list she went through items that were ripe for a great birthday gift.  Slightly too late for France and Le Tour, taking my father to Poland proved a bit pricey right now, and she can’t exactly do the training that is necessary to complete an Iron Man for me.  That left a great opportunity to send both of us to Montana for a fly-fishing expedition next summer.

I mentioned above that she is a great gift giver.  She is also a woman of exquisite taste in holidays.  This gift was no exception.  Drum roll please… Her coup de grace gift for me yesterday was to book us into The Resort at Paws Up in Greenough, Montana for 3 days of adventure next summer.  If you’re not familiar with this place, take a look at their accommodations page to get a flavor of how we’ll be living during this time away.  She has booked us into the newly developed ‘River Camp‘ area for our stay.  That river?  The Big Black Foot, or ‘Big Blackie’, of A River Runs Through It fame.  I’ll be fishing the same waters as Norman Maclean and can’t wait to hook into one of the many species of trout (brown, brook, and cutthroat) native to the Bitterroot Valley.  A fly fisherman’s dream vacation and one item scratched off the ol’ Life List – it doesn’t get much better than that!

Personal ,

Life or Death by the 140 Character Movie Review

August 24th, 2009

It can make you or break you.  Bruno vs Inglorious Basterds – a shared review medium, a vastly different effect. According to AdWeek, Inglorious Basterds ‘rode a crest of tweeting goodwill‘ to pull in more than $37M on it’s opening weekend.  With Tarantino’s new offering we see how the micro-blogging service can change the perception of the ‘mainstream’ audience. Sure – there will always be die hard Quentin Tarantino fans that go see every movie that he makes and give it an unwavering thumbs up, despite the quality.  However, when they amplify that opinion through a service like Twitter they are touching all sorts of people – especially friends in their network that may never have considered going to see the movie in question. AdWeek goes on to say “the movie actually held its ground and even picked up steam as the weekend went on, as even Saturday Twitterers enthusiastically tweeted and re-tweeted their approval.

This is quite the opposite effect Twitter traffic had on Bruno when it first opened.  From Mashable:

According to box office results, Brüno, albeit the number one grossing movie at the box office pulling in $30.4 million, saw almost a 40% drop in ticket sales from Friday to Saturday, and lost even more steam going into Sunday.

Why do we see this effect?  Time sums it up well in this comment:  “Chalk that up to word-of-mouth, viral and virulent. “If you’re tweeting,” marketing consultant Gordon Paddison told Sharon Waxman of the Wrap, “and people are catching that live and they’re out at drinks and were planning on seeing the movie tomorrow — that hurts.

What if Siskel and Ebert had Twitter to compete with when they got started reviewing movies? Their success may not have been what it was…

Social Media, Twitter ,

Tweet, oh Tweet – where are you coming from?

August 21st, 2009

Survey says… The Web.  I must admit, I am surprised by the report released by Rapleaf this week.  They did their due diligence in establishing a large sample size (4M Twitter users) to provide an accurate assessment of how people are using the Twitter service and plethora of tools available to them.  The statistic that surprises me the most is the amount of people (65%) that are still using the Twitter.com Web Site as their means of pushing their 140 character message out to their followers.  With the variety of great tools out there to augment your Twitter experience like Twhirl and TweetDeck, I would think that more people would be leveraging those to streamline their Twitter activities.  Not true.  In fact, the second largest segment of the pie are people sending out their Tweets via text on their mobile phone.  That begs the question – what do you use to Tweet?

Twitter , ,

Check out this MixTape – courtesy of Intel, Pandora, and FM

August 20th, 2009

Outside Lands is becoming an annual event in the Bay Area.  For the second year in a row Intel is playing a role in the three day jam in Golden Gate Park.  Our participation is two-fold. We’ll have a large presence on site at the festival, and we’re also partnering with Pandora (from previous posts, you know I am a fan of this service) and Federated Media to bring you a ‘MixTape‘ of the bands that will be performing in the City by the Bay – streaming right to your computer.

The music lineup is fantastic and features some of my favorite bands. Having missed out on last year’s jam session, I was looking forward to attending this year.  Calendars didn’t work out so I won’t be hanging out in Lindley Meadow, Speedway Meadow, or the Polo Field listening to Band of Horses or The National.  Check out Ranger Dave’s Magic Scheduler to help you see all your favorites!

Pandora , , ,

You say you want a revolution…

August 18th, 2009

Quick ode to the Beatles on that title…but it leads me to embed a great video that was forwarded onto me through a friend on Facebook.  Apropos medium for pass along, considering the subject matter of the video.  I recommend watching the entire video (it’s only 4+ minutes) as there are some staggering stats with respect to the meteoric rise and adoption of social media.  Quickly, here are a couple of interesting factoids that you will see peppered throughout the stream.

  • In 2009 Boston College stopped distributing email addresses to incoming freshman
  • Wikipedia has over 13 million articles, and studies show it’s more accurate than the Encyclopedia Britannica
  • 25% of search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content (Remember what Barry Judge said?)
  • 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations while only 14% trust advertisements

Here was the key statement in the video for me: “Social Media isn’t a fad, it’s a fundamental shift in the way we communicate“.  Consider that for a moment, and reflect back on what your life was like before you got got an email address, started using the Internet for the most mundane tasks (shopping, weather, sports scores), and finally – before you engaged in any form of social media.  It was a different world when we relied on the ‘analog’ technology of yesteryear.  I embrace the present and future, with a fond look over the shoulder at the past (getting a good letter in the mail from time to time is very satisfying and I am a big fan of the Sunday morning newspaper). 

Stats credit goes to Socialnomics.

Social Media ,

Enthusiasm for ‘Causes’ – an update on Vote for a Cause

August 17th, 2009

Wow!  The response to our new Facebook program “Vote for a Cause” has been staggering. You, the community, have really taken to the challenge of nominating and voting for your favorite 501C-3 charitable organization.  We applaud you and encourage you to continue to nominate and vote.  Through the first week more than 10,500 members of the Facebook community have joined this effort and nominated more than 135 causes.  Nominees range from national charitable organizations such as the National Eating Disorders Association to those that are local to individual communities – which is the case for the Big Heart Ranch in Malibu, California.

We are in the first few days of nomination – please continue to do so through the application on Facebook so we can compile a healthy portfolio of deserving causes that will be in the selection set when voting begins on August 28th.  Good luck to those of you that have submitted nominations – I’ll be excited to see how many causes we can pull into the competition for the co-branded advertising winning prize.

Social Media , ,

Hey Mighty Girl, here’s my Life List!

August 12th, 2009

Last month, I blogged about a program that we were doing with Maggie Mason of Mighty Girl.  As you may recall Intel is helping Maggie cross a few items off her Life List of things she’d like to do before, as she says, ‘die – peacefully, in my sleep, of extreme old age’.  I think Maggie is safe from that fate anytime soon and it’s been fun to watch her make progress on whittling that list down.  So far, with our help, she has redesigned MightyGirl.com, taken tap-dancing lessons, and swam with bio-luminescent plankton in Puerto Rico.  Soon, I am going to be taking a quick trip to San Francisco to teach her how to roll in a kayak – which I am very much looking forward to.  My kayaking buddies might be cringing right now because there are times on the river where my roll is not the greatest.  Don’t worry Maggie – I have a bomber roll in the pool!

Maggie’s list has inspired an exercise where many of my co-workers, our agency, and our friends at Federated Media have taken on the task of writing down their ‘mini’ life lists.  We had an amazing response when we polled the list above and we thought it would be fun to share those lists with our friends and families.  I’m not shy, so I’ll be the first to roll mine out for all the world to see….. here goes nothin’!

  • Successful and loving marriage with my wonderful wife
  • Have and raise @ least one healthy child and be blessed to watch them grow up and have a family of their own
  • Ride 3 of the hardest mountain stages of the Tour de France – Mont Ventoux, Alpe d’Huez, and Luz Ardiden
  • Complete an Ironman triathlon (why just run a marathon when you can suffer through 3 disciplines?)
  • Renovate one final house – maybe our ‘life house’ with my wife
  • Fly Fish in Montana
  • Finally learn to play the guitar, and play it well
  • Write a book about something I am passionate about
  • Take my father to Poland before he can’t make the trip
  • Go to at least one Summer Olympics

Blogging, Social Media ,

Twitter makes it to ESPN’s Outside the Lines

August 11th, 2009

As you can tell from my blog, I am a big sports fan and very involved in social media.  I’ve blogged about Twitter and Athletes on several occasions before and continue to enjoy the ‘unfiltered’ access we get to our favorite sports icons.  Today, while doing some research for a Tweetshop I am co-hosting for the Portland Chapter of the AMA, I came across a very interesting video on ESPN.com discussing Twitter and Athletes.  It’s worth the 8 minutes to watch it in it’s entirety – you’ll discover all is not what it appears to be on Twitter with your favorite athlete. 

Twitter ,