This is not an ad for Apple

Something interesting to ponder from Adrants: http://www.adrants.com/2008/07/this-is-not-an-ad-for-apple.php

This is not an ad for Apple. Apple doesn't do racy ads. Apple doesn't believe sex sells. Nope. This is not an ad for Apple. Apple prefers hipsteresque silhouettes and white space. Industrial design and witty repartee. Tiny envelopes and bloviated PC guys. This is not an ad for Apple.
We're more likely to see Steve Jobs himself appear in an Apple ad than some cutie in black lingerie lounging on a white couch. No, this is not an ad for Apple. It is, however, an ad for MacUnblogged. Sort of.

You've got to love a brand that motivates people to photograph themselves - or hot models - with the brand's products.

Top 50 US web rankings

These figures are for June 2008 Thanks to comScore: http://www.marketingcharts.com/interactive/top-50-us-web-rankings-issued-for-june-travel-and-leisure-categories-gain-5357/?camp=newsletter&src=mc&type=textlink

Just barely, Google clung to its lead as the top US web property after having wrested away the honor from Yahoo three months ago, according to a comScore Media Metrix monthly analysis of US consumer activity at online properties.Content categories showing traffic gains in June were heavily leisure-oriented, including online gaming, travel, entertainment (movies and lotto/sweepstakes), but gains were modest in a month in which the total number of internet users decreased slightly and time spent online per user declined 4%. Below, the findings issued by comScore.

Top 50 Properties (Unique Visitors)

Google Sites maintained the top position in the Top Properties ranking, reaching 140.2 million Americans in June and narrowly edging out Yahoo Sites’ 140.1 million.
Among other highlights: Microsoft Sites ranked third with 119.7 million visitors. Apple Inc. moved up two positions to #10 with help from the iPhone 3G, which was announced in June.Disney Online and Adobe Sites each gained four spots to numbers 21 and 22, respectively.

Top 50 Ad Focus Ranking (Advertising Reach)

Platform-A led the Ad Focus ranking in June, reaching 90% of the nearly 190 million Americans online, followed by Yahoo Network (83% reach), Google Ad Network (81% reach), and Specific Media (78% reach).

Top-Gaining Sites and Categories

Categories:

Sites:

Summer Travel Season

The online car rental category was the top-gaining one in June, growing 4% to 6.5 million visitors: Enterprise Rent-A-Car Company led the category with 3.4 million visitors, followed by Avis Budget Group with 2.6 million visitors. Significant gainers in the category included Dollar Thrifty Automotive Group Inc. (up 39% to 1.1 million visitors), CarRentals.com (up 42% to 892,000 visitors), and Advantage.com (up 39% to 214,000 visitors).

The travel - ground/cruise category ranked as the third fastest-growing category in June, growing 3% to 11.5 million visitors: Amtrak led the category with 2.7 million visitors (up 11%), followed by VacationsToGo.com with 2.2 million visitors (up 14%), and Greyhound Lines with 1.6 million visitors (up 26%).

The gains in ground travel lines like Amtrak and Greyhound may reflect Americans’ attempts to save on summer travel by avoiding the increasing costs of air travel and long car trips due to rising gas prices, comScore said.

Summer Blockbusters Drive Traffic to Movie Sites

Several summer blockbusters reached theaters in June, driving a 2% gain to the entertainment - movies category: IMDB.com (Internet Movie Data Base) led the category with 20.8 million visitors, followed by Moviefone (15.6 million visitors) and Yahoo Movies (15.2 million visitors).
Interest in Disney’s summer blockbuster Wall-E drove a 24% gain to Disney Movies (4.7 million visitors), while the release of Kung Fu Panda resulted in a 182% gain to DreamWorks SKG (1.4 million visitors).

More Gaming Online When School’s Out

Online gaming typically increases during the summer months with kids out of school, and the category was among the 10 fastest-gaining this month with more than 94 million visitors.

The category was led by Yahoo Games with 17 million visitors, followed by EA Online (13.8 million visitors) and Disney Games (12.8 million).

Every brand is celebrating an anniversary...

As Melissa pointed out at the beginning of the week, it would seem that every brand in the US is celebrating it's anniversary... Have a look-see at these examples she picked out for us:

Maccas:ttp://profile.myspace.com/index.cfmfuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendID=386269716
Nike “Courage” article: http://adage.com/article?article_id=129723
Nike Courage website: http://www.nike.com/nikeos/p/nike/en_US/courage
Chupa Chups: http://www.chupachups.com/en/
Breast cancer awareness: http://comunicadores.info/2008/07/20/caixa-de-cd-duplo-para-prevencao-do-cancer-de-mama/
And one from Simon for Converse:http://www.brandrepublic.com/Discipline/Creative/54818/converse-paper-dolls-anomaly-new-york/

Pot Noodle - the musical

Thanks to Gerry for sharing the musical love, found at The Guardian.co.uk/media/2008/jul/21/advertising

Now it's Pot Noodle: The Musical

The world of Pot Noodle, a brand that made a virtue of the catchphrase "slag of all snacks", is to be turned into a musical comedy at this year's Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

Pot Noodle's ad agency Mother London has been developing a stage production - Pot Noodle: The Musical - based on some of the creative concepts used in advertising the snack in recent years and aims to dish up a "smorgasbord of comedy".

The show is set in the "idyllic all-singing, all-dancing Pot Noodle factory", where workers "pluck Pot Noodles fresh from trees, bottle feed and show them a whole heap of tender loving care".

It follows the story of the hero Steve, who tries to woo Sandie and overthrow the "bloated overlord" of the Pot Noodle factory, Allan Little, who has killed his brother in a bid to siphon off money to "spend on fast cars and loose women of virtue".

Little has a "beastly asthma suffering henchman" called Flick Ferdinando.

The show, which will run at the Assembly in Edinburgh from July 31 to August 25, has drawn creatively on the songs and themes that have run through Mother's recent un-PC Pot Noodle TV campaigns.

In the musical Digger, who has just fled from his wedding, and the hero Steve walk down the street singing the "Pact song" from the Pot Noodle ad about never putting a woman before mates.

"We can stay up late till dawn, watching classic vintage porn," the duo sing. "We can scratch our balls with pride, our man breasts don't need to hide."

The idea of a benevolent Pot Noodle world first appeared with a TV campaign featuring a fictitious Welsh town of noodle miners.

And the irreverent songs that will feature in the Fringe production have come from the recent "Pot Noodle says" ad campaign.

The campaign also featured two crooners spoofing Meatloaf's Bat out of Hell and a 1980s power ballad with lines praying for women to be "easy, simple and hassle-free" like the snack.

Mother is no stranger to extending brands beyond traditional TV advertising. Earlier this year the agency produced a feature film funded by Eurostar with Shane Meadows, the award-winning director of This Is England, which won top prize at the Edinburgh Film Festival.

The film, entitled Somers Town, is named after an area near King's Cross in north London and tells of the friendship between two teenagers, one of whom is the son of an immigrant working on the new Eurostar terminal.

TiVo & Amaon team up

In the words of Simon; a future business model for TV. This article is from the NY Times http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/22/technology/22tivo.html?_r=1&ref=technology&oref=slogin

TiVo and Amazon Team Up

By BRAD STONE

SAN FRANCISCO — TiVo, the Silicon Valley company that introduced millions to the joy of skipping television commercials, is trying to crack a decades-old media dream. It wants to turn the television remote control into a tool for buying the products being advertised and promoted on commercials and talk shows.

The company, based in Alviso, Calif., will introduce a “product purchase” feature on Tuesday in partnership with the Internet retailer Amazon.com. Owners of TiVo video recorders will see, in TiVo’s various onscreen menus, links to buy products like CDs, DVDs and books that guests are promoting on talk shows like “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” “The Late Show With David Letterman” and “The Daily Show.”

In the months ahead, TiVo plans to begin offering this feature to advertisers and programmers, so that the chance to buy products and have them delivered will be presented to viewers during commercials and even alongside product placements during live shows.

The move highlights TiVo’s attempt to shift from being a creator of set-top boxes, competing with copycat devices, to being an advertising innovator that is trying to develop advertising technologies for the television industry.

“Just a few years ago, we were viewed with great paranoia as the disruptor,” said Thomas S. Rogers, chief executive of TiVo. “Our goal now is to work with the media industry to come up with ways to resist the downward pressure of less advertising viewing and create a way for advertising on TV to become more effective, more engaging and closer to the sale.”

“What we are trying to do is to create all the underpinnings of a future business model for television,” he said.

For years, interactive advertising on television has been characterized by risky experiments and high-profile failures. Most famously, Time Warner took a shot at the concept with its pioneering but expensive Qube box trial in Ohio in the late 1970s.

One problem with all previous experiments in this area, Mr. Rogers said, was that buying a product through the television took the viewer out of the experience they had actually settled in for — watching a program.

But on TiVo, if a viewer chooses to buy an advertised item during a broadcast, TiVo records the rest of the program so the viewer can easily return to it after the purchase. TiVo users will also be able to save their intended purchases in their Amazon account and return to the site later to complete the transaction.

TiVo and Amazon, based in Seattle, have an existing relationship. Since last year, owners of broadband-connected TiVos have been able to download movies and televisions shows to their set-top boxes from Amazon’s digital video store, now called Amazon Video on Demand. The two companies have not disclosed the financial details of their newest deal, but in general Amazon’s affiliates get a 15 percent slice of a sale when a customer they referred makes a purchase on the site.

But the media world may not be so quick to jump at TiVo’s new buy-it-now feature. More than a decade after it altered the fundamental experience of watching television, TiVo’s base of users remains relatively small.

TiVo’s purchase feature “is a harbinger of what television ultimately should become,” said Timothy Hanlon, senior vice president for Denuo, the media futures division of the Publicis Groupe. “But TiVo is only in around four million plus homes. From a national advertising perspective, if it doesn’t get beyond that base it remains nothing more than a curiosity.”

TiVo knows that, which is why the company is trying to branch out of the set-top box business and into building software that it can license to much larger media companies. For the last three years, TiVo has been working with the cable operators Comcast and Cox to put its user-friendly software in their set-top boxes. Comcast has introduced its service in Boston, while Cox is still holding trials.

Mr. Rogers also said TiVo’s deal with Comcast includes a provision for TiVo to provide its interactive ad technology for the cable company’s other, non-TiVo digital video recorders. Though Mr. Rogers says “this is not our focus today,” becoming a broker for the next generation of interactive ads may be TiVo’s ultimate goal.

Possible customers for its interactive ad technology include the cable and satellite companies and their consortiums, like Project Canoe, a joint effort by six cable operators to create a technology platform to sell customized and interactive ads.

To publicize TiVo’s efforts at creating this new advertising model for television, Mr. Rogers is not above sowing a little fear about some of the grim trends in the business, which TiVo itself helped to unleash.

As DVRs get more popular, “the majority of commercials in home will be fast-forwarded through,” he said. “It is critical that there be a form of advertising and a transactional solution that underpins the DVR, or the economics of television are going to be substantially undermined.”

How to create a culture of high performance

Thanks to Rob for finding this article from Accenture. Some thoughts include:

1. Maintaining the right balance between market-making and disciplined execution

2. Obsessively identifying and multiplying talent

3. Using a selective scorecard to measure business performance

4. Recognising technology as a strategic asset

5. Emphasizing continuous renewal

For the full article visit:

http://www.accenture.com/NR/rdonlyres/3F0FC8D5-0029-4AA9-A0B3-5F5508F97ECE/0/OutlookPDF_Jan07_Leadership_02.pdf

Introducing Knol

Wikipedia, Meet Knol
By MIGUEL HELFT
Seven months after Google began testing a service called Knol, a Wikipedia competitor, the company on Wednesday finally rolled it out.

The search expert Danny Sullivan aptly describes Knol as “Like Wikipedia, With Moderation.” Articles on various topics are penned by individuals, and in many cases, experts — not collectively by the anonymous masses. Knol authors can choose to benefit from the “wisdom of the crowds” by letting others edit or supplement their articles. But those changes make it into Knol entries only with the author’s permission.

Knol, which, by the way, is short for knowledge, is making some people uneasy because it further transforms Google from a search engine that helps people find content into a site that helps people create and publish content.

Even though it will make money on many Knol pages with its AdSense program, Google promises that the objectivity of its search engine will not be compromised.

“We will treat Knol pages as we treat other Web pages,” said Cedric Dupont, a Google product manager. “If there is a Knol that is the first place in search results, it deserves that place.”

Of course, on many searches, it is Wikipedia’s ad-free pages that show up at the top of search results.

Mr. Dupont dismissed speculation that Knol was designed as a Wikipedia killer: “Google is very happy with Wikipedia being so successful. Anyone who tries to kill them would hurt us.”

There is a striking similarity between one aspect of the two sites. The text of Knol articles uses the same font as Wikipedia. Mr. Dupont said that is simply coincidence, as it is a commonly used font.

For now, Knol has only a few hundred articles, compared to the nearly 2.5 million in Wikipedia’s English language version. And for now, the best place to follow the debate on whether or not Knol is a Wikipedia killer is on the Knol entry on, where else, Wikipedia.

 Thanks to the New York Times for this post also found at:
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/07/23/wikipedia-meet-knol/index.html?ref=technology