DOUG SCHUMACHER

experience designer + writer

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Creativing :: YouTube educates reporters, more proof of Facebook’s impact, and mobile continues building momentum

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My weekly update of what’s going on in new media marketing, pulled from social bookmarking site Creativing.com:

YouTube – reporterscenter’s Channel

I mentioned YouTube going local with video news reportage last week. This is a support site providing tips for those content producers. Smart way to increase quality of content and build community.

Facebook Search Improved for Everyone

With the attempt at buying Twitter and then acquiring FriendFeed, Facebook has made it clear they’re serious about real-time search. When I think about how often I’ve seen something on Facebook and couldn’t find later to reference, I don’t think there’s any question this is going to be a great improvement. And Facebook’s highly-customizable privacy settings are part of the capabilities: I’m  convinced online privacy issues are going to be major. But most importantly, there’s little doubt at this point about the value of friend and network-based information. With Google search results, it’s a great place to start researching a product or service, but certainly not conclusive or that trustworthy. That gave way to user reviews like Amazon and Yelp. But we’ve seen how easily those can be gamed. The value of being able to rely on people you know and trust is obvious. It’s also interesting to see a marketing tactic come along that’s closer to the purchase decision point than Google Adwords: Assuming marketers have been able to get into those search results. And therein lies the greatest potential of social media.

Facebook’s Click-Through Rates Flourish … for Wall Posts

On the subject of the value of friend referrals: Striking new data out on how people respond to Facebook wall posts. Apparently, quite well. Of course it matters what’s in that wall post, but the online world hasn’t seen 2-40% click-through rates since oh, maybe the first banner in 1994? Of course I have to cringe at seeing the CTR as the metric of evaluation. This is a mixed bag. Social media needs metrics to convince a large number of CMOs, according to a recent survey. Yet the click-through dragged online marketing’s branding potential down to a DR mindset from which it’s never fully recovered. I’d like to think marketers are more sophisticated about the online space at this point, but when the battle is between clearly-defined data like the CTR and more nebulous inferred data, the case is anything but closed.

“Augmented Reality” Is Also A Form Of Search

Search is quickly becoming a lot more than typing a few keywords into a search engine. From voice driven search to location based filters to augmented reality interfaces, it’s good to keep in mind that people are finding out about information in continually-diverse ways. The mobile phone has already driven much of this, and we’re only in Act 1 for that technology. Given that search in whatever form it’s employed is so central to a campaign’s performance, it’s not something creative marketers can ignore.

Chris and Malcolm are both wrong | A continuing discussion about freemium content

Great expansion on the debate between Chris Anderson of Wired and Malcolm Gladwell of Outliers on whether or not the future of content is free or paid. This post, by Brad Burnham, Fred Wilson’s partner at Union Square Ventures, sees truths and flaws in both views. At some point, the whole discussion moves into a debate about the economics of abundance, particularly in terms of content development. It’s ultimately a debate about the scarcity of resources, which has been written about as early as 1971.

From the post:

“In a world where facts are readily available, from multiple sources, basic information will be commoditized. But the explosion of sources will create a real burden for the consumers of information. Raw information will become not just a commodity, it will be a nuisance. In that world, consumers will value scarce, relevant insight over abundant facts.”

An interesting point is that users of a site like Facebook, or even Twitter, are not just using the system. They’re adding value to it. They’re the filters that help people sift through the mass of information being created. So should every user of Facebook or Twitter be paid?

Need to Deposit a Check? Try Your iPhone

I’m all over this. Take a photo of your check and email it in. Get the deposit. Destroy the original check. It seems fraught with fraud opportunities, yet the cashed check always leads back to an account that someone has set up with identifying information that banks have to be vigilant on. There’s no question they’ve thought that part of it through. I hate using cash because it means going to ATMs, and only periodic checks aren’t auto deposited. We’re getting closer and closer to never having to go into a bank. Which has to be a big help to their profitability.

Wells Fargo Labs

Given the previous link, no wonder Well Fargo has a Lab. This is their attempt to create what Seth Godin calls a purple cow. Adding the remarkable to a product or service. Give people something to talk about (presumably on their social network sites). For many companies, this is the new marketing.

LocaModa – Mobile posting to Out-Of-Home displays

The concept of posting to a large public display from a mobile phone has been done before, but now it’s transitioning from a customized experience to something you can buy more like media placements. Wiffiti is another player in this space.

ddɐ ʞooqǝɔɐɟ ʇxǝʇʎɯdılɟ s,ʎɹɹǝɾ & uǝq

Thought this was a fun app, by Ben & Jerry’s. Simple, intriguing, and highly visual. This technique was used on IMs a year or so ago, but with social media now hitting on all cylinders, there are still legs in the idea.

Thinking Space

With so much emphasis on social media, a lot of the attention in marketing has moved away from Flash. And certainly the large Flash sites of the past 5 years. But Flash can create powerful experiences, now more than ever. This is an exceptionally clean site that combines what few sites can: A beautiful, elegant and distinct navigation that’s also intuitive.

Creativing :: Catching crooks with an iPhone, YouTube makes bands money, and a Twitter post leads to a lawsuit

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My weekly update of what’s going on in new media marketing, pulled from social bookmarking site Creativing.com:

I now pronounce you monetized: a YouTube video case study

You’ve seen the JK Wedding Entrance Dance video, now read the case study. This is what YouTube and everyone else who isn’t a record label has been saying for years. That associating your music with emotionally-powerful user-generated content is good for sales, not fleecing the artists. Labels should be thankful they don’t have to a) pay people for developing this content, b) spend the money to drive the traffic to support 10 million views, and c) pay the video streaming bandwidth fees.

New Report Suggests Facebook Has Replaced Email For Sharing Content

I’ve previously reported on how Facebook is driving sharing and traffic, but here’s additional proof. What’s particularly reinforcing is that the two sharing apps have such similar data. Perhaps most telling about the power of Facebook and community in general is that they’re driving all this sharing, and their email app pretty much sucks.

Southern Comfort Pours Entire Media Budget Into Digital

Yep, the whole enchilada. I can’t recall a major brand that’s made that leap yet. And this from a distiller in Kentucky, no less. Their logic is right on. If you want to sell to the people going out to clubs and purchasing spirit-based drinks, the Web is a great place to be.

Tweet Sentiments – Know Who’s Tweeting About What When Where & How

Probably more fun than functional at the moment, but pulling sentiment data out of massive text chunks is going to be huge for both target marketing and market research. So not a bad thing to stay on top of.

Twitter post leads to lawsuit

Perhaps inevitable. Chicago apartment management group Horizon is suing a Twitter user for stating their apartment was moldy, on Twitter. Now, they may have a point, but if they settle this at all in their favor, it’s sure to be a Pyrrhic Victory. The woman Twitterer had 20 followers. Just 20. And Horizon went and turned this into a national spectacle. D-U-M-B. Not to mention there must be a zillion companies in the US named Horizon, so even for those searching for Horizon for whatever reason, this Tweet probably would have been buried. Then, in the middle of the media storm, one of Horizon’s owners explains their lawsuit to the Chicago Sun-Times: “We’re a sue-first, ask-questions-later kind of an organization.” D-U-M-B-E-R.

Winery’s ‘dream job’ idea leaves an aftertaste

A winery in NoCal posted a job opening for a “lifestyle correspondent” to spend their days blogging, tweeting, and singing the praises of their winery from beautiful Healdsburg. $60k for 6 months work. Not bad in a bleak economy. And like a good social marketer, they encouraged participants to promote themselves and the brand by soliciting votes. Several social media experts jumped on board, with one amassing far and away the most votes. But the winery didn’t even include him in their top 50 finalists. A social media community backlash ensued. As Digg founder Kevin Rose said: “You can’t ask the community to help you vet candidates and then just disregard what they said”. This campaign was essentially a knock-off, me-too version of the Australian “Best job in the world” campaign from earlier this year. And I think this demonstrates that you can knock off someone elses idea, but that doesn’t mean that you get the idea. And I think it’s especially true in social media that it really helps to understand the emotional dynamic of the campaign you’re running.

Marketers Get Valedictorian to Plug Movie in Speech

A studio pays a high school valedictorian $1800 to mention one of the catch phrases from the movie in her valedictorian graduation address. They video taped it, and then pushed it for viral success. The results? Not much viral activity, and a pissed off school district and high school administration. Personally, I understand the annoyance, in particular bringing commerce into a graduation ceremony like that. But at the end of the day, it’s seems pretty harmless, and a bright student has some additional money, which she’ll certainly need attending MIT.

New York Nearest Subway augmented Reality App for iPhone 3GS

There have been some similar examples of compass and location-based services popping up, and keep in mind this requires the iPhone to be jailbroken. But a great example of where things are headed.

Busted! Thieves Caught by MobileMe’s Find My iPhone

Great story. A 15 yr old and his dad are on a river trip and get back to find their car broken into, and the kid’s iPhone among the stolen items. He had the MobileMe Find My Phone feature, so he got the location and called the cops. Turns out it was a family they’d been trying to nail for a while. Cops arrived and reclaimed the stolen goods and arrested the culprits. Case closed.

Creativing :: ESPN gets local, iPhone games not for every brand, and more fun with Facebook Connect

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My weekly update of what’s going on in new media marketing, pulled from social bookmarking site Creativing.com:

Operating System Interface Design between 1981-2009

This is like taking a walk through the past 20 years of my digital life. Looking at old interfaces like the first Macintosh OS brings early projects and experiences back to mind. It’s notable how today, even the open source systems have a slick look.

ESPN Aims to Be the Home Team, All Over America

So many questions these days about the future of news organizations. Local is undoubtedly a large, uncharted territory online. ESPN is making an interesting run at the sports vertical. Two points I find noteworthy: They’re going down to the high school sports level, and they’re using citizen journalism in the process. While I don’t know the inner workings of the publishing industry, I can imagine that for the average high school sports star, there’s nothing better than being featured on ESPN, no matter what variation of the network it involves.

iPhone Games: Idea Attracts Coke, Audi, but not Many Others

I know I’ve said this before, but iPhone games are a long shot for brands as a mass market vehicle. If you have a specific way of extending your service, then I can see an app that provides utility making sense. But with so many free, and good games out there, pure entertainment is a tough arena to compete in.

Photoshop in movie posters and ads

A fun look at how movie posters go through the Photoshop wringer.

Facebook Now Lets Advertisers Use Your Picture

I’ve been waiting for something along these lines to happen with Facebook Connect. A man is served an ad for a dating service, with a headline “Hot Singles”. The “hot single” featured in the ad? His wife. Facebook has been adding more and more privacy controls, but the default on FB Connect is pretty wide open. And changing the default settings on an app or platform is probably as common as reading the service aggreement before signing up.

Summer At MoMA – Using Facebook Connect to match your interests

I have to follow the train wreck above with a good example of how Facebook Connect should be used. Facebook, of course, has quite a lot of info about each user. Facebook Connect takes the info and contextualizes is across just about any online experience. In this case, MOMA has used your various interests to try and project what art exhibits you’ll most like. It’s not a flawless example, but certainly moving in the right direction.

Does social media really correlate with the bottom line? Color me skeptical

I’m on board with this contrarian view to a research report posted earlier this week (the link to the original report is in the article). Social media is powerful, but this really stretches the correlation between social media action and business success far too thinly, IMO.

MySpace: A Place for Gaming

So, MySpace is getting killed in the social media space, and their resurrection will come in the form of gaming? My only issue with this logic is that by all industry projections I’m aware of, the big growth opportunity in the gaming industry’s future is social gaming. And what’s the dominant platform in social gaming right now? Facebook.

Top 12 Social Gaming Trends

In case you doubt my previous assessment, here are 12 social gaming trends. Note how many of these trends align with Facebook’s features and strengths. Collections and wish lists, gift invites, donations as revenue, virtual goods, using friends’ data, iphone. What I also find interesting is how the campaign ideas we’re coming up with for clients are involving these same types of features. Just as movies and TV shows were often the driving inspiration behind many TV campaigns of the past, games will likely be the driving force for more and more campaigns of the future.

Online gaming: Has Evony become the most despised game on the web?

Ironic that while so many other industries are exploring ways to integrate gaming into their ads, a game campaign resorts to good old T & A as the foundation for their campaign. I too saw these adds all over the Web. The writer speaks about a general migration from more game play-oriented ads, to little more than women’s breasts. My guess is that this is simply campaign optimization. Finding out which ads are working, and going with those. And at the end of the day, the real probably could be that the game just sucks.

Creativing :: Teens say :( to Twitter, debate over ‘the big idea’, and a new global medium … Postcards

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My weekly update of what’s going on in new media marketing, pulled from social bookmarking site Creativing.com:

Why Teens Are Not Using Twitter: It Doesn’t Feel Safe

Some insightful findings from a recent report on how teens are using media. By ‘safe’, they’re referring to knowing who’s reading your posts. Clearly, Facebook’s latest privacy settings are right on the mark. And while the safety thing is big, and something most adults probably overlook, I thought it was ironic that Twitter is seen as expensive. It’s based on the texting charges, which anyone without a smart phone will be hit by when they post. I’d guess it’s the same for Facebook’s status updates, but the bigger point is, when a significant percentage of a group have a strong preference about a communication platform, it makes other platforms pretty irrelevant for that group. Also noteworthy is this post, on TechCrunch, was written by a 16 year old.

The New Online – Keep It Clear

This article reiterates something social media is reminding us on a daily basis. Keep your communications clear. I think this has been a big reality in online for a long time, and social media is perhaps bearing it out more clearly. Consumer’s are both in charge, and impatient. Site usability studies have shown for years that lack of clarity doesn’t breed further investigation, but rather site abandonment. If you can’t get your message across quickly and clearly today, you probably won’t have a message at all.

PR Blackout Challenges Mom Bloggers to Return to Basics

Pretty interesting approach by community MomDot to serve something of a reality check to the mommy blogger group. Essentially drop all paid posting for a week. Paid posting probably won’t be going away, but reminders like this can help bloggers more conscious of why their readers are there in the first place.

The Difference Between Total Users and Active Users

Most sites and web services have far more total users than active users. Writer Fred Wilson states that companies should focus on the active users, making them even more active, than trying to get the non-active users more involved, because over time, many of the non-active users will become active, as they see their friends who are active users getting more involved. This aligns very well with common social media practices. Brands should be focusing on their best customers first. Once they’re on board, then they’ll carry the message on to their friends.

Howcast, a Video Start-Up, Charges Into the ‘How-to’ Web

At first, it doesn’t seem like there’s be room in the crowded video space for a company developing content internally. But these vids are very well done, and are a good reminder that while YouTube may have a lot of HowTo videos, there’s always room for a better product experience.  The branding and styling of the videos are nice, and the production quality is surprisingly good for miniscule budgets.

The Big Idea: Chronicle of a Death Foretold

Good piece on the life or death of ‘the big idea’ in marketing. This subject is as nuanced and fragmented as the marketing industry it’s written about. The truth, as usual, is probably somewhere between the polarities. I don’t think the big idea is dead, but rather we’re looking at a new version of the big idea. Something that has to have a lot more fluidity and scale than anything we considered the big idea in the past.

Web site recreates Apollo 11 mission in real time

On the 40th anniversary of moon shot v1 comes this piece from the JFK Museum: We Choose The Moon. A nice comprehensive piece that seeks to put the moon mission into a more grandiose perspective by going granular. The site is being rolled out in real time sync with the mission timeline. An interesting tactic, although probably not in line with how people consume media these days. Is that part of the retrospective?

Camera screen overlay info for Google Phone – Kicking Reality Up a Notch

Last week I covered new patents being applied for by Apple in which contextual geolocation information is served through a combination of a phone’s camera, GPS coordinate info, and photo recognition technologies. Now here’s a real world example, from The Netherlands. Pretty impressive, and definitely something I’d use.

Postcrossing – Postcards Traveling The World

This is a cool idea. The site matches people from around the world, and initiates a postcard exchange.  A simple yet effective way to connect people in different cultures. Alternately, it’s a bit random, and I think it would be nice to be able to select a country. But a good idea at the core.

Creativing :: Social media strengths and embarrassments, mobile takes off in a million directions, and a Michael Jackson tribute video worth watching

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My weekly update of what’s going on in new media marketing, pulled from social bookmarking site Creativing.com:

90% of Consumers Trust Opinions of Friends

That shouldn’t shock anyone. But it really gains impact when compared to other information sources, especially paid media. The idea of knowing what our friends are doing, and having that steer our own behaviors, is what social media marketing is all about.

Can You Be Friends With Your Mom … On Facebook?

A funny scenario in which a woman struggles with the pros and cons of bringing mom into her Facebook fold, yet a very real situation for many people. As Facebook continues to push for growth and more and more people file in, many are going to be asking how great of a communication tool it is when they’re seemingly communicating with virtually everyone they know at the same time. Sure you can individualize settings for everyone. How many of you have done that? And how long did it take? These are openings for the next Facebook, or Facebooks, serving niches that were lost in Facebook’s growth.

The Facebook Doctrine: Gaming And The Future

I’d normally never post an article this long for a group of marketing people. But it’s a far-reaching discussion with Facebook’s platform manager — one of the main guys making decisions about what Facebook will and won’t be doing, technologically. Social gaming, considered by many as the most exciting thing on gaming’s horizon, is perfectly suited for Facebook’s friendship network. And Facebook Connect simply extends that to experiences to all 3 screens: Computer, TV, and mobile.

British spy chief’s cover blown on Facebook by Reuters

The wife of the head of the British MI6, their secret service, divulged WAY too much family information on Facebook. Incidents like this make me think that there are a lot of people out there who just don’t don’t get what social media is all about. And per above, with more and more ‘older’ people pouring onto Facebook, it’s a bit like running a media gauntlet. It also seem to set the stage for a backlash based around privacy concerns, although in this case, I think it’s just someone who didn’t get the memo on the social aspect of social media.

The Social Media Underground

One of the least-discussed benefits of a great social media campaign is the SEO rewards. There are 3 pillars to SEO: Content, architecture, and links. The link component is often the weakest. And that’s where great social media creative can knock it out of the park. Because good social media is shared. And often that sharing points back to an experience somewhere on the brand site. Each of those inbound links gives a boost to the brand’s Google rankings. As social media matures, more and more companies are going to be trying to generate this type of content. And that’s where creative agencies that understand the medium are going to have an enormous impact on things way beyond brand awareness, the aspect of social media most focused on at the moment.

Viral customer complaint

I love this. A band is flying to a gig on United, and at a stopover in Chicago, they look out the window and to their horror see their instruments being tossed around like a hacky sack. (Just to have a shot of their faces would have been plenty of entertainment for me.) They complain to the flight attendants. It’s ignored. They get to their destination and the lead guitarist finds his $3,500 guitar destroyed. They complain again, and United ignores them. So what do they do? Sit down with their patched-together instruments and write a little ditty about the whole experience. When it went viral, THAT got United’s attention. Watch the music video of their song.

Mobile Media Usage Soars, Opens New Vistas for Marketers

More evidence that mobile’s day is (finally) here.

SMS Money Transfers with Africa’s M-PESA MobileBehavior

What I love about the mobile revolution is the myriad areas it’s impacting. From entertaining content to gaming to personal communication. This article describes how mobile phones are being used to exchange money via SMS texting in areas of rural Africa that lie well outside the traditional banking world.

First music video shot on iPhone 3GS? Reyna Perez, “Love Love Love.”

This was as inevitable as daybreak, but still worth a view. Add another item to the long list of examples of how production of content is being commoditized by technology.

The Future of the iPhone: Intelligent Object Recognition

I generally don’t like far-flung projections about the future. They’re usually way off. But with iPhone, it’s a different story. The technology at hand is Object Recognition, and its potential is laid out here in two examples. One, say you’re at the Eiffel Tower and point the phone’s camera at it, and up pops all sorts of contextual information. That’s because the Tower was identified as an object, causing related database links to bring up various info about it. The second example is face recognition. Imagine the same thing, but only pointing the phone at someone’s face, and it bringing up info about them. Most remarkable is perhaps that all this is in the latest patent filing by Apple.

Eternal moonwalk – A tribute to Michael Jackson.

Did you hear Michael Jackson died? Despite the overwhelming coverage, this is both an inspiring tribute and a great use of the technology.

Hilarious Family Guy bit about those annoying TV show promos that pop up during shows

Creativing :: Twitter for writing movies, Facebook plays with privacy and fire, and what the new album art looks like

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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.

Creativing :: The death and rebirth of advertising, how real can reality content get, and the Twitterverse once again attempts a shark jump.

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My weekly update of what’s going on in new media marketing, pulled from social bookmarking site Creativing.com:

TV Ratings: Neda Video Truly Shocking, Unlike Jon & Kate

John Rash has a powerful and poigniant piece on recent events in television and video. There’s a profound difference between Reality and Real content. When Reality first hatched, it seemed very ‘real’. By today’s standards, the format is more often than not highly contrived. Of course, the original appeal was the sense that it was real, and people are still looking for content that has a more real feel. The big question is, Where does that end? Or does it end? When you consider the content danger zones of violence and sex, and think about the trend perpetually arcing towards the most extreme examples you can conjure up in your mind, it’s a pretty chilling media horizon up ahead.

Advertising Industry Prospects: A Tough Year Ahead

From Advertising Age: Brace for the worst year in recorded history. About 65% worst than 1991, the previously worst year. We’re headed for a 5% drop this year, which almost feels like a recovery after a 14% drop in Q1. Increasing the challenge is a projected slow recovery. The cause of this is fundamental change in the media-related world. Newspapers are going out of business, and won’t becoming back. Car advertising is way down, and with vast numbers of dealerships going out of business, those media dollars won’t be coming back either.

Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer: Traditional media will not bounce back

Piggybacking on the previous article, Ballmer, speaking at the Cannes Lions Festival, reiterates that media is fundamentally changing, and that to date, only Google has figured out a profitable revenue model around new media formats. He adds that in the near future all content in all media will be digital. It’s only a matter of When.

Need Some 15 and 30 Second Spots? Hire Your User Base.

As if the top-down pressures listed above isn’t depressing enough for the ad industry, there’s also a sword coming in right at the ankles. The user-generated ad phenom is not only sticking around, it’s likely to increase. This year’s Super Bowl was enough of a warning, when the most popular ad (according to USA Today) was done by two brothers in Indiana for practically pocket change. Now here’s another good example of a company crowdsourcing what was once the bread and butter of the industry: 30 second commercials. And getting a nice spot out of it. Contests like this link are proving again that good work can be done for very little money and well outside the traditional agency structure.

John Battelle’s intro to the CM Summit

So with this sense of industry meltdown, what’s an agency to do? John Battelle (author of “Search”), kicked off his CM Summit with his version of the future of the industry and what agencies should be focused on. It’s a video, and you’ll want to skip to the point about 6:00. His prediction? In a nutshell, it’s all about going from ‘creative’, to ‘adding value’, and from ‘buying media’, to ‘creating media’.

Transformers – Revenge of the Fallen :: MMM’s campaign review

When major tent pole films like Transformers start going with minimal production on their websites, you know there’s a sea change going on. What’s most noticeable here is the expansion of brand tie-ins and partnerships. Not necessarily surprising, given the need for both movies and corporations to cut costs while still getting their name out.

Why Facebook Will Fail

I really appreciate a good contrarian viewpoint. I think there’s a lot of validity here, too. The fall in popularity of MySpace should be a warning to everyone. The key distinction to make is the difference between social networking and social networks. The former is here for the long run, I’d say. The latter is perhaps one of the most fickle online businesses yet. It’s not surprising that Facebook is pushing things like Facebook Connect, placing an emphasis on connecting people and having access to their data, versus trying to be the place where everything happens.

June 2009 Trend Briefing covering FOREVERISM

The idea that campaigns in a social media context don’t have an end point the way traditional push advertising does is very real. I’ve seen this  come up in social media campaigns we’ve run, in which a group we’ve engaged actually requests that the relationship continue after the campaign has finished. For an indusry accustomed to viewing media presence as a faucet you can turn on and off, it’s important to remember that the participants in the campaign may not be so ready to turn on a dime.

Furthermore, with any campaigns that take on a utilitarian role, there’s the issue of actually taking something away that you’ve given them and they’re now relying on. Brands are needing to extend their thinking further down the pipeline than ever, and at a time when that future is less and less clear.

Facebook Live Stream Box launched

We saw social viewing play out big with the Obama Innauguration on CNN/Facebook. This will make that type of activity much easier to impliment on a smaller scale. This is great news for brands with something to say and wanting the crowd to help them say it.

LG hosts texting contest, gets 250k entrants, held in Citi Stadium, and videod for a TV show

Fantastic campaign for LG. 250,000 entrants for a speed texting contest? What’s great about this idea is the lowest common denomenator factor (and I mean that in a good way). Texting is universal now. A very high percentage of people do it, so a contest like this is something a lot of people can relate to. The way they played it out live in Citi Stadium and videod it for TV shows good campaign support and viral anticipation/preparation.

Twitterature: 19 Year-Olds Score Twitter Book Deal

Essentially they’re taking a pile of classic books and turning them into the Super Clift Notes. Each boiled down to 20 tweets. That’s what they scored a book deal with. So, this means they’re turning books into tweets, and then back into books. Now on sale. No wonder the media world is screwed up.