„Why Facebook, why now?“ Robert Scoble answers three questions: Why Facebook, why now? Why Facebooks advertising sucks, and how the friends definition and ties could be improved.
In the advertising part, he argues that the ads should somehow be connected to the people’s profiles. But: he says it should be tied to the friends profile, not my own. And I wonder: if my friends are into things that are of no particular interest to me, what is the added value for me? And subsequently you need to ask yourself: why would an advertiser put ads infron of my eyes that are not relevant to me?
Ad agencies are about to trade three-martini lunches, schmooze-fests and fast-talking account executives for programmers, custom software and anthropologists who can navigate MySpace.
One comment was aimed squarely at all those agencies that are desperately trying to acquire people who understand digital and „interactive“ advertising, which invites consumer participation via digital media — for example, voting on products online or sharing text messages as part of a viral marketing campaign.
„Digital anthropologists are going to be the next people you scramble to hire,“ DeCourcy said.
[…] agencies will need people who can use the tools of cultural anthropology to interpret the overwhelming amount of user-generated data, and come up with strategies for using social networks to sell stuff.
But this trend also won’t last much longer says this article. Two more years, and there will be enough young people ready to fill every remaining gap there ever was. So enjoy while it lasts.
They even got some of the typical Simpsons products in these stores, like buzz cola and KrustyO’s. A list of these Simpsons-inspired products is over here.
So here it is. Another „make your own advertising“ by Axe. This time Axe offers a platform for user generated advertising, the briefing for these clips should be fairly clear. At the end of the day, this is a campaign, with a globally comprehensible idea.
However, I am not sure if this campaign really is an international campaign. (This site is in German). But you get the picture, and the videos are, well, boom chicka wah wah. What more need I say?
In this article on Read/Write Web (while I am still at it), there are three points, where Google says, that advertising needs to go:
Advertisers need to get better at creating a 1:1 experience for their users. As an example, she cited the work that Cadillac did with their MyCadillac campaign.
Advertisements need to continue increasing personalization. This was surprising to me, given that I don’t believe Google has publicly announced any plans to incorporate behavioral targeting into their ad delivery system.
Users are demanding the delivery of information to be an experience and advertising must respond to it, just like content needs to.
Not really new points, but it doesn’t hurt to reemphasize them. I also find it interesting that the one thing that made creative ad agencies puzzle (text based search advertising) – because it reduced the need for (admittingly more expensive) creatives – is something Google says, we must move away from. Instead, we should increasingly make it an experience. I have been saying this all along, but now even Google recommends experience-richer content.
One other thing I found in that article: I didn’t even know that Yahoo! actually owns the patent for search advertising! This is interesting.
When Google started doing this type of advertising, Overture (acquired by Yahoo) had been delivering similar ads for years. This is why Yahoo owns patent #6,269,361 – which Google licensed from Yahoo right before the Google IPO.
Another field which Google took from Yahoo! (or Overture, in this case) and made it successful.