A Wider Net

iMedia Connection: Drive Consumers with Online Coupons

Great article about the merits and tactics of online coupons.

Adrants links to a few clever agency christmas cards here. Clever… but while these elaborate e-cards were being made, who was handling their clients?

There’s a ton of video on the web. Among this ton of video, is nearly a ton of video we can all live without. Gotuit Media has an answer - personal video tagging from any video source. This means that you can watch a video on the web, anywhere, and using the Gotuit system, identify the part that’s cool or relevant and share just that part with people. Then, you can add other scenes from the same video, or scenes from other videos, and stitch them together into something entirely new. It could be a highlight reel of football moments, or presidential mispronunciations, or it could be a collection of commercials from all your competitors.
Sharing videos has great viral potential already, and sharing sequenced bits of videos can be all sorts of fun, but it’s going to give the ad-insertion people fits. Gotuit seems to allow you to serve up a piece of a video without any leading or trailing ads, and without any of the source owner’s player page brands or banner ads.
In this example, a user compiled a chain of their favorite Family Guy scenes.

I’m not sure how this is legal, except it’s possibly protected in much the same way deep-linking is protected on web sites.

This tool may have practical applications for marketing and communication people as well, allowing you to easily tag and organize pieces of videos to illustrate examples, provide training on specific subtopics, etc.

I think it also should remind us that putting a video on your website doesn’t mean it’s going to stay on your website. Assume it won’t - and make sure that video carries your brand and message even if it’s lifted out of your page or player. A simple “bug”, like a logo in the lower-right, may be all it takes.

Then, hope and pray that someone cuts up your video and sends it to a ton of friends, and they do the same, and so on, and so on, and so on…

Via Techcrunch.

round tuit

Remember the Million Dollar Homepage? No? Here it is - the most ugly page ever, which netted it’s college-kid creator $1million by selling clickable spaces as small as 1 pixel by 1 pixel at $1/pixel. Brilliant. A lot of cheap nothings in viralspace apparently equals a cheap lot of money.

Well, he’s back again with another way to make a million box. Pixelotto is off and running, offering not-so-premium pixels at the still low price of $2/pixel. This time, however, he’s offered an incentive to everyone who clicks on those adds - a chance to win half of his revenue or $1,000,000. Apparently, the drawing to pick the lucky winner isn’t until after all the pixels are sold. If, after a year, the pixels aren’t all sold, then the winner gets half the lot.

It’s pretty ingenious, because to win, you have to register, and to win, you have to click. He builds a nutty-huge opt-in database, gathers money, and splits it with a winner. Not bad.

Via Adrants.

As you probably know, given the hefty promotion, Burger King is offering XBOX videogames right now for $3.99 with any value meal purchase. The games work on XBOX or XBOX 360. The question is, why XBOX? Part of the reason may be McDonalds existing relationship with Nintendo - sure. But there’s probably a good reason why XBOX and not PC or PlayStation.

So far, Microsoft has sold something like 30 million XBOX’s, including 10 million XBOX 360’s. The number of Playstations sold is just a little higher at around 110 million. The number of PC’s is in the stratosphere. Why, then, did they choose to partner with XBOX for advergaming, when either PC or PS2 provided such a larger pond in which to fish? One major reason is that the XBOX audience is far more likely to respond. They know they’re going to get phenomenal response rate from XBOX users – multiple visits from a huge percentage of that demographic (even though the games are mediocre - $4 is a steal, and XBOX 360 users are starving for budget games to feed their habits).

One of the reasons XBOX 360 owners will flock to Burger King is the wise inclusion of two critical elements to the games: Gamerscore Achievements and XBOX Live Leaderboards. Typically gamers must buy more expensive games and beat them to gradually up their gamerscore - sort of gamer bragging rights. The higher the score, the better the gamer (or at least, the most committed). The quest for gamerscore is addicting and it’s one of the key differentiators XBOX has over its competition. By adding XBOX Live functionality and leaderboards at bkgamer.com, they’ve fueled competition - a key catalyst for viral game sales.

Both brands are the edgy players in their space. This is a good example of fine targeting. Ideally they will achieve phenomenal response rates and, given the higher-end demographics of XBOX 360 users, decent counter sales from those partaking. Also, XBOX gets a boost because people who don’t have them now wish they did, because there are these viral-cool games being offered for cheap and they feel left out.

By the way, if the thrill of playing games featuring the creepy yet all-American Burger King himself appeals to you more than the food, you can always partake in another all-American pastime - overpaying for things on eBay. All three games, retail price: $4 each, can be had for the low shipped-to-your-basement price of $26. I suppose that’s cheaper than three value meals, several hours on a stairmaster, and a few rushed trips to the bathroom.

I’m not sure if the reports of myspace’s demise are greatly exaggerated or not, but the possible collapse of the top-five web juggernaut is mighty interesting. The conversations around this have raised some very interesting questions and reminded us of some valuable lessons about putting all your marketing eggs in one basket.

Myspace feels vulnerable for many reasons, not the least of which is the fact that it’s ugly and clunky. It just screams “give us something better so we can jump ship and quickly end the pain”. The banner ads are obnoxious and the ability to cosmetically tailor the page is limited to those willing to suffer through hours of inconceivably non-intuitive trial and error. It also feels uncomfortably “out-growable”. As Rupert Murdoch tries to leverage the 130 million users he recently purchased, his attempts to restrict music and other file sharing that made the site so appealing may cause a mass correction in the user base.

Puddlegum published a thought-provoking piece about myspace, claiming that myspace is about to collapse as its teenage user base moves on to the next big thing. With 3 million bands using myspace to promote their music, the article points out that many or most of these bands have put too much emphasis on promotion via myspace, and too little effort on their own websites and blogs. There’s also a great comment about the Puddlegum article on Blog Business Summit.
The Puddlegum piece implies that myspace should be prescribed as part of a marketing regimen, but not the whole thing, and not at the expense of ones own website and blog. I agree on all counts - myspace has valuable reach and viral potential. It’s also only one “community” among many. Guerilla and viral marketing in online communities should cover a wide variety of these communities.

Bands may want to check out purevolume, and companies should have a look at secondlife, gather, facebook, and squidoo (at least). All of these allow you to add a free to inexpensive presence that, ideally, directs traffic back to your own site. You will, of course, have to take the time to learn what people are looking for on these sites. Once created and in use, the benefits to search engine optimization are also significant - the links and traffic back to your site make you more appealing to search engines. If you’re interested in the heavy details, consider this paper from eMarketer.com, that indicates that ad spending on social networking, currently at $280 million, will balloon to $1.8 billion by 2010.
Spreading your marketing efforts among multiple communities while focusing on your own information hub should sound a lot like a sound financial investing principle. Keep a balanced portfolio, stay alert to trends, and build a solid foundation.

One thing is for sure - there are a lot of people hoping myspace fails and gets replaced with something better. I, for one, will be watching - popcorn in hand.