Frontiering Talk

Internet access speeds, lower cost of video equipment, and ease of video sharing has lead to an expansion of video content on the web.

3 former Google employees have launched a site that is positioned as a video based “how-to guide” to pretty much anything. In their words, “Imagine an ever-expanding universe of how-to knowledge, created for you and by you. That’s Howcast“.

The site also effectively uses Wiki technology to encourage collaboration / updates from users.  Examples include “How to clean your ipod”, “How to store an unopened bottle of wine”.  The site is well laid out and designed to capture feedback as well as commentary in line with today’s “conversational web”.  The videos follow a similar format where an instructor explains what is needed to complete the task, followed by step-by-step instructions explained in a voiceover. If users want to write their own “how to”, they can use the Howcast template; scripts are then sent to film school students for production.

The “How To” web market has a number of existing players such as Instructables and Expert Village which have been focused on text / image based content.   

Contributors to Howcast also benefit from distribution deals that syndicate content through other channels such as Joost, Verizon’s VCast.  This is a clever business model as it will enable Howcast to grow quickly. 

I couldn’t help thinking of the possibilities this structure has for mainstream education.  Howcast generates the “learning objects” and then effectively uses latest technology tools for teaching.  All you would need to add is a module that tracks what learning objects you have viewed, and testing to measure both the effectiveness of the learning object and to ensure students have grasp the concept being explained.

Super Bowl advertising isn’t cheap, and at nearly $2 million for a 30 second spot it is the most expensive placement you can make.

So if you are going to advertise during the Super Bowl, there are some basic things that you should get right.

1. Create a microsite for the ad and show the URL in your commercial. If you are spending that much on placement, having a microsite is almost mandatory.
This year 84% of ads did this and unlike last year these URL’s led to the right landing pages.

2. Purchase search ads so that consumers can find your site before / during and after the event. 70% of this year’s advertisers did this. 28% purchase Super Bowl related keywords.

3. Call to action. Only 6% of ads had some kind of call to action in their ads. Ads that cost this much to run should link a promotion or competition to the ad to extend the investment. One of the best forms of promotions is one that invites people to interact with your brand.

Proctor & Gamble is doing just that by inviting consumers to submit spoof ads of the Talking Stain ad. The ad features a guy interviewing for a job and a stain on his shirt cleverly translates his comments drawing the interviewers attention. Since the airing of the ad, 5,500 consumer generated spoofs have been uploaded to the spot’s microsite mytalkingstain.com.

These can be viewed on Youtube here. Free ringtones, and related buddy icons are also available. You can also interact with the commercial by “being the stain” which is powered by Oddcast’s lipsyncing tool.

Reprise Media has a full scorecard on this years Super Bowl ads available as a PDF download.

Monkey See is a new site containing a collection of "how to" videos ranging from Parenting, Pets, Auto & Mechanical

There is even a video series on how to carve a pumpkin.

Perspective: I think this site exemplifies the growing demands for videos in online content, as well as the emergence of niche content sites (in this case "How to").

His New York City apartment had to be fumigated. All of his friends have tiny studio apartments. Hotels in New York are insanely expensive. Left with few living options, Mark thought it would be fun and make an interesting video to move into an IKEA store where he’d live and sleep for a week. Never in a million years did he think IKEA would go for it, but miraculously they have a agreed.

Mark moved in early morning Monday January 7th to the IKEA in Paramus, New Jersey and will stay for the week through Saturday January 12th. Every day people can watch a video recap of his day. He will be living in IKEA 24/7 and eating all his meals in the restaurant (he may order Domino’s take out once or twice). Thankfully they have a shower for him in the back offices.

He has a website to record his week in Ikea

http://marklivesinikea.com/

Perspective: This is a great initiative by Mark, but also by Ikea who will gain lots of free publicity from Mark’s live recording of his experience.

NapAds is a pretty cool business that allows advertisers to distribute messages in the form of napkins across it’s network consisting of bars and nightclubs.

The NapAds are provided to the bars for free in exchange for allowing NapAds.com to place NapAds inside their venue. Any print campaign can be  duplicated on to a standard beverage napkin.

Perspective: This is a good medium to reach the often hard to reach demographics.  I think raw drawings would work well,  as many of these places are dark.

Mix your own radio station at Meemix!

Tags: radio

According to Goviral, these are the 5 best ad virals of 2007.

1. Cadbury - Gorilla Drummer, launched online in August; agency: Fallon.
2. Smirnoff - Green Tea Partay, launched online in August; agency: JWT, New York.
3. Ray-Ban - Catch Sunglasses, launched online in May; agency, Cutwater.
4. Blendtec - Will it Blend? launched online in July.
5. Lynx/Axe – Bom chicka wah wah, launched online in May; agency BBH, Copenhagen.

And here’s Jimmy Maymann, Goviral’s chairman recorded at this year’s Cannes Lions delivering a informative talk about the rise of consumer engagement.

Don’t you hate it when you hire a DVD and it’s just not your kind of movie.

Social networks such Criticker and Filmtrust are helping and it’s no surprise that a company who’s very business is about renting movies is trying to improve the “success rate” of hire versus like ratio.

Netflix have announced a contest where the prize is $1 million, to the person or team that can create a better system for improving their movie predictions system.

I love their contest and they describe it here.

Netflix is all about connecting people to the movies they love. To help customers find those movies, we’ve developed our world-class movie recommendation system: Cinematch. Now there are a lot of interesting alternative approaches to how Cinematch works that we haven’t tried. We’re curious whether any of these can beat Cinematch by making better predictions.

So, we thought we’d make a contest out of finding the answer. It’s ‘easy’, really. We provide you with a lot of anonymous rating data, and a prediction accuracy bar that is 10% better than what Cinematch can do on the same training data set. If you develop a system that we judge most beats that bar on the qualifying test set we provide, you get serious money and the bragging rights. But (and you knew there would be a catch, right?) only if you share your method with us and describe to the world how you did it and why it works. To keep things interesting, in addition to the Grand Prize, we’re also offering a USD 50,000 Progress Prize each year the contest runs. It goes to the team whose system we judge shows the most improvement over the previous year’s best accuracy bar on the same qualifying test set. No improvement, no prize.

They even have a leader board to ensure transparency of the competition, and the 2007 winner was recently announced providing a 8.43% improvement on Cinematch.

Perspective: It’s great to see companies outsource innovation in this way, and rewarding the successful innovators. There are many ways to tap into the wisdom of consumers to help with solving challenges like this, it’s just that most brands / companies aren’t prepared to let consumers in.

A new study commissioned by Nokia suggests that as much as 25% of entertainment will be created and consumed within peer communities. Coined “Circular Entertainment” by Nokia, the research interviewed 9000 trend-setting consumers in 17 countries about their digital behaviors. The study entitled ‘A Glimpse of the Next Episode’ was conducted by The Future Laboratory.

Tom Savigar, Trends Director at The Future Laboratory suggests

Consumers are increasingly demanding their entertainment be truly immersive, engaging and collaborative. Whereas once the act of watching, reading and hearing entertainment was passive, consumers now and in the future will be active and unrestrained by the ubiquitous nature of circular entertainment. Key to this evolution is consumers’ basic human desire to compare and contrast, create and communicate. We believe the next episode promises to deliver the democracy politics can only dream of.”

Some of the key results were

Of the 9,000 consumers we surveyed:
- 23% buy movies in digital format
- 35% buy music on MP3 files
- 25% buy music on mobile devices
- 39% watch TV on the internet
- 23% watch TV on mobile devices
- 46% regularly use IM, 37% on a mobile device
- 29% regularly blog
- 28% regularly access social networking sites
- 22% connect using technologies such as Skype
- 17% take part in Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games
- 17% upload to the internet from a mobile device

These results are not surprising, and it does suggest that it will be more difficult for brands to communicate as these trends grow.
Certainly the methods used will have to change, and recommendations from trusted communities will surely play an increased role in driving behaviour.

Listening to consumers is a key prerequisite before brands can be effective in “Joining the Conversations”.

Commuispace has released a study titled Meeting Business Needs by Meeting Social Needs, which examines the 6 social needs that people seek in social networks.

1. Expressing personal identity: online social networks provide people with the ultimate tool for defining and redefining themselves, as evidenced in profile pages on Facebook and MySpace.

2. Status and self-esteem: the need for autonomy, recognition and achievement are essential to our sense of self-worth and are fulfilled in online communities, blogs, and social networks that provide a way to develop and manage a virtual reputation.

3. Giving and getting help: people have a need to both seek and provide help to others. Mutual assistance between strangers is a phenomenon that has been uniquely enabled by the Internet.

4. Affiliation and belonging: online communities are becoming the way people find, create and connect with others “just like me” – people who share similar tastes, sensibilities, orientations or interests.

5. Sense of community: a sense of belonging or affiliation alone is not equivalent to a true sense of community. Achieving a real sense of community requires long-lasting reciprocal relationships and a mutual commitment to the needs of the community as a whole.
6. Reassurance of value and self worth. People want to be reassured of their worth and value, and seek confirmation that what they say and do matters to others and has an impact on the world around them.

These needs are very relevant for any company or brand that seeks to establish a community, and make an excellent benchmark to test the value of a social network. Meeting these needs helps to deliver trust and deeper insight into the community members, says the report.

Perspective: It’s very difficult for a brand to achieve these needs, as most offer limited expression for the community and fail to enlist the power of the social network to give and receive help. This reduces the feeling of affiliation and belonging, and the value of the community. That’s why most of the successful communities such as Shespeaks, Yelp, Minti are run by independant and passionate consumers rather than brands. Brands then try to engage interrupt the consumers with advertising clutter, treating the social network like any other content channel. Consumers want to be heard, and are ready to give help to be reassured of their worth and value. I wonder when brands will recognise this?

Gary Vaynerchuk of Wine Library TV fame, talks with The Trend Junkie about building the Wine Community, transparency and the acqusition of Cork’d.

It’s an insightful video full of excellent advice for people wanting to start a community.

Tags: community, interview, Social Network, wine

We have often mentioned the car segment as one of the best categories suited to “long format” advertising. If you are in the market for a particular make of car, you really want a more detailed engagement than what can be delivered in a 30 second spot.

So it’s no surprise to us that Honda have today launched an Internet TV channel (which will soon be linked to Honda’s UK site) which will deliver on-demand delivery of the company’s films and video content including Honda racing, driving tips and advertisements. Included in the short films section will be a feature on ASIMO (Honda’s humanoid robot), who will also feature as the host of the tv channel.

Currently the site only runs on Internet Explorer, but a Firefox version is in development. It’s also not clear what plans Honda has to allow it’s consumers to comment or discuss this content.

Perspective: Consumer controlled viewing is continuing to grow, and companies should be providing easy options for their existing and potential consumers to engage with their brands. Whilst this site would have quite a large budget, smaller businesses can utilise free social video sites such as Youtube combined with a channel grouping site like Magnify to share content, and allow consumer participation.

Tags: car, honda, Social Network, Video

Alvin and the Chipmunks is a new movie to be released on Dec 14th.  To promote the movie, the Oddcast software has been used to create quite a unique promotional microsite. The site is called Munkyourself and allows consumers to create a mashup of a chipmunk animated character generated combined with your own voice recording which is of course modified to sound like a chipmunk.

Perspective: The technology is very clever, and the site is simple to use, and allows you to send links or embed the result in your site as I have done below. I like this offering as it has strong ties to the movie.

Tags: , Frontiering Campaigns, movies