OK, I am echoeing others here, but this one I have to mention – let alone for my own records. You might have seen this video:
Joe Jaffe found it in 2006 already and I remember thinking back then: what kind of nonsense of „user generated content“ brands will have to deal with in the future. And I was thinking about how brands could properly respond to this kind of stuff. But I never thought about what they did now: it has apparently been sold to McDonalds by their agency Arnold. It just doesn’t say anywhere for how much. Now it constantly runs on US television, probably costing lots of media money…
Joe now feels a bit stale. For one, because he found it already such a long time ago, but also because of the tagline in the beginning which says: „user generated content“.
… you can see it on the right hand side. Does anyone know the German (or at least European) SMS number for updating twitter?
I am curious to see if this gets me hooked. I have thought about this for some time, but never saw the point. I still don’t, but now I decided to try it nevertheless. And later I shall also try pownce and jaiku, because that’s the next two services people talk about.
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.
Cool idea. At Experience Curve I found something about the site iWait, where you can either offer to wait for someone in a line, or alternatively bid for this someone to wait for you in line. It apparently became very relevant for some people during the iPhone launch last Friday…
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.
Automated translation: According to Mayer, someday in the future Google could automatically search content in all languages and present all the translated results to the user on the same page, regardless of language!
Book search: they are adding metadata about books, so that Google’s algorithms can understand what the book is about, relevant references, and availability of the content.
Images and video: one of their recent changes is to include all web videos into Google search; it is no longer limited to content within Google Video
Voice search: a free phone service that you can call to perform a voice search. As the usage of this system rises, the increasing number of samples of user input will be used to improve voice-to-text technology; users are, in effect, training the system to recognize voice commands
Universal search: the blending of different types of content, such as images and news, into the main search engine
Maps and local search: There are some interesting new advances in this area – for example, Google Maps now supports traffic display, based on data licensed from third parties…
Client software: Google Gears and Gadgets: Google Gadgets enables third-party developers to create tiny applications that live on the desktop and connect to the web in the background to pull in information from the web. Google Gears provides a browser plug-in that, in Mayer’s words, takes Ajax applications and makes them better.
iGoogle: As an example, Mayer said that although she’s a big fan of Netflix, she probably would not make it her home page; with a gadget, however, Netflix could still establish a presence within her home page
One of the most interesting things for me is, however, how people get so excited about Marissa Mayer:
At the end of the session, I had the opportunity to meet her briefly [certainly one of the high points of the conference for me!]
Admittingly, she is pretty. And supposedly, she is also very smart. But the main things is positioning. She is a pretty and clever girl in a world of geeks.
Wo ich sonst so bin...