My weekly update of what’s going on in new media marketing, pulled from social bookmarking site Creativing.com:
Horror Movie Inspired by Twitter?
From the sounds of it, this was a movie written across Twitter. I can’t imagine it was line by line, but probably more general plot developments and so on. All created under the Creative Commons license. The movie site downplays the whole Twitter thing, which is interesting because is would seem to be a marketing angle. They’re probably waiting until release, and then build it up.
Did Shaq Just Find Out He Was Traded On Twitter?
Meanwhile, Shaq seemed to be having his own horror movie play out on Twitter. I find this harder to believe than screenwriting via Twitter. And I realize it’s an employer’s market, but this is a tough way to treat your organization’s top employees. Stunt? Perhaps. But it doesn’t seem in Shaq’s nature to place himself at the butt end of a prank.
The Day Facebook Changed – Messages to Become Public by Default
That article’s headline may sound histrionic, but I’m not sure it’s the case. I’ve had what’s essentially the same conversation with a number of digital marketing people recently regarding online privacy issues. Most agreed that people generally have no idea how much information can be compiled on them. Justice Antonin Scalia certainly didn’t. All publicly available online. Clearly, Facebook is shooting for a tight revenue model, and the potential payout for delivering the level of targeting promised in the data they hold is enormous. But in that pursuit, they’ve gone to a place that’s counter to their past position of users first, marketers second. And when their user’s don’t like something, they let Facebook know.
Facebook Launches New Granular Publisher Controls, Transforms Personal Publishing
To counter the above move to expose more of people’s online actions, Facebook is responding with more personal control over exactly what content is public, and what isn’t. The latest tactic is giving people on-the-spot options for every post, in addition to the global privacy settings. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a scenario in which a privacy scare happens on a wide scale, and mass numbers of users respond by adjusting their privacy settings to block most of what they’re doing.
Google to Target Users by FICO Score
Like Facebook, Google’s gotta make a buck. And if they have a weakspot relative to Facebook’s targeting, it’s that there’s simply not much data available on the gazillions of people using Google every day. The FICO profiling is a move to address that.
YouTube CTA Overlay Lets You Drive Users Elsewhere
If there’s any remaining doubt that Google is pushing YouTube hard to find a strong revenue model, here’s the proof. The rule that you don’t fix what isn’t broke? YouTube traffic hasn’t decreased a bit, so this is all revenue-driven. I’ve noticed the YouTube experience getting more and more cluttered. A lot of video screens are cluttered with overlays, comments, and ads you have to click to remove and even then aren’t gone until you’re well into the clip.
And while this is initially only available for brands and charities, it seems odd not to just level the entire field. So when everyone’s trying to make a few pennies on their lastest post, YouTube could end up feeling a lot different than the site that set out to make video viewing as simple and easy as possible.
And the Winner of the $1 Million Netflix Prize (Probably) Is …
I covered crowdsourcing quite a bit last week. This project’s been out there a while, but looks like the contest has come to a close. This was not a small project, either. The challenge was to find a way to improve Netflix’s recommendation engine by 10%. The winners are a consortium of statisticians, machine learning experts and computer engineers from America, Austria, Canada and Israel. They talked about it as if was a fun challenge. The way you and I might describe a hobby. What I’m curious about is, Would they have taken the job for $1,000,000 in the first place, or would that not have covered the cost of their collective expertise and time?
Most Free iPhone Apps Don’t Bring Bacon Home
I think iPhone apps are great. I have a phone full of them to prove it. But as a marketing tool, I think they have tightly-capped potential. They’ll be wildly successful for a select few brands, but most brands will find it very difficult to embed themselves in people’s lives that deeply. User’s simply can’t accomodate apps on anything close to the level of paid media impressions they can absorb. Here’s a related chart on TechCrunch.
Anecdotally, I have probably 15-20 apps that I use on any kind of a regular basis. More than once a month. Compared to the estimated 3,500 marketing messages I’m exposed to every day, it’s a drop in the bucket. I realize the value is signficantly greater for the apps, but it still makes them a low-odds play. I’d love a good contrarian argument on this.
T-shirt comes with free music downloads
Could this be the new album cover? Since the onset of CDs, then downloads, there’s been a fair complaint that for a lot of music, the album art provided an important visual emellishment to the music. Now there’s The Music Tee. A shirt that gives the buyer the right to free music downloads. The total cost of $40 is actually more than a CD or the download price, but you could argue that a T-shirt has a lot more value than a CD jewel box. And for the band, would I rather my fans have a CD jewel case sitting on a shelf somewhere along with 500 others, or wearing a shirt of my band out in public? No-brainer.
Less, But Better – an interview with design legend Dieter Rams
A brief retrospective of Rams and how influential his work has been, and on no less of a design heavyweight than Apple’s Jonathan Ive. The comparison between Rams’ work, much of it from around 40 years ago, and Ive’s, is striking.