The artvertister

Ok, it's the latest tech fad, but i do like this application...

http://theartvertiser.com/

The Artvertiser: Augmented Billboards. from Julian Oliver on Vimeo.

Augmenting a Postcard from Julian Oliver on Vimeo.

Truth in Vodka - cheers to that!

I believe that this article from Marketing Daily is a really interesting example of a premium Vodka brand from Poland, taking on other premium Vodkas by attacking the premium image....hmmm

Sobieski Expands 'Truth In Vodka' Campaign 

by Karlene Lukovitz

Sobieski Vodka is investing $5 million on a new round of creative and expanded consumer media exposure for its successful "Truth in Vodka" campaign, according to Chester Brandes, president/CEO of Imperial Brands, Inc., exclusive importer of the brand.

The top premium vodka in Poland, its country of origin, and the #7 premium brand in the world, Sobieski was launched in the U.S. in August 2007 and sold 255,000 cases in 2008, making it one of the hottest liquor introductions in years. The brand is 52% ahead of its projected sales for 2009 and on track to be the fastest vodka brand to reach 1 million cases in the U.S., reports Brandes.

Excellent timing is certainly responsible for some of that success. According to the Distilled Spirits Council, sales of super-premium vodkas are slipping in this wretched economy, while those at the premium price point continue to climb. Sobieski sells for a relatively modest $10.99 per 750 ml bottle and stresses value for the money.

The "Truth in Vodka" campaign, which urges consumers to focus on what's in the bottle rather than pay inflated prices to subsidize gimmicky marketing claims and showy bottle designs, has made the most of the brand's made-for-these times positioning.

Imperial initially focused on getting the word out to retailers via a $1 million trade campaign, moved into consumer media with a $4 million investment starting in mid-2008, and is now unveiling the creative for a more ambitious, integrated consumer push starting now but running primarily in this year's second half.

The latest round of ads from Meter Industries, the New York agency that created the campaign, continues to leverage the current value-over-status zeitgeist. Taglines include:

* Overspending on Vodka? That's So 2008.

* Flashy and Extravagant Are Out. We'll Drink to That. 

 * Ever Feel Like You're Not Getting Your Money's Worth? We Hate That Feeling.

* Buying a Vodka Because It's Filtered Through Diamonds? We Have a Ponzi Scheme You Might Find Interesting.

* Are You Paying for the Bottle? Or Are You Paying for the Vodka?

* Like Many Vodka Companies, We Used a Focus Group to Vet Our Product. It's Called 'Poland.'

The last tagline homes in on the heritage theme that's being stressed along with the vodka myth debunking. "Sobieski is a real product imported here from Poland," Brandes stressed to Marketing Daily. "Unlike some of our competitors, we didn't create it for the U.S. market."

The graphic approach continues to be minimalist -- nothing but the copy and a photo of the bottle on a solid black or white background.

The media plan, handled by Horizon Media, will include third- and fourth-quarter print ads in consumer magazines such as Entertainment Weekly, Esquire, Rolling Stone, SPIN and US Weekly and outdoor media (bus wrap shown in photo) in key markets nationwide. Online media -- including regionally targeted sites -- will also be tapped.

In addition, Cramer-Krasselt Public Relations has been added to the team for the latest consumer push. 

Tinker is no longer merely the name of my late cat.

Thanks to 3 minute Adage for their video on the launch of Tinker in which they described a service that aggregates and curates real time conversations online using Twitter as their platform. This has great potential for catching positive sentiments surrounding our brands... read more below in an article from Tech Crunch.

Twitter has become one of the most effective ways to catch and track breaking news in real-time. It also has become an invaluable resource for tracking chatter on major events, from conferences to the NCAA Basketball Tournament.
The problem has been that there has been no single place to easily track the chatter on Twitter. Hashtags, Twitter searches, and Twitter apps like monitter all have some functionality, but aren’t comprehensive approaches to event tracking.
However, Glam Media, a popular advertising and publishing network, has launched its solution to the event tracking problem. Dubbed Tinker, it’s both a social media service that makes it easy to track specific trends and news, and also a fully-fledged Twitter Web interface that has a monetization model for brand advertisers.

Building alive with lights and sounds

Just pain beautiful...

lights on from thesystemis on Vimeo.

Via psfk

'Virtual currencies' power social networks, online games

Thanks CNN... jesus, am i really reposting something from CNN?

(CNN) -- When Santiago Martinez wants to give his friends birthday presents, he buys a cake or flowers or sometimes a teddy bear.

'Virtual currencies,' like the hi5 Coin, shown here, are becoming more important on the Internet.

But the 41-year-old, who lives on Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, doesn't spend pesos or dollars. He buys the gifts with an online-only currency called hi5 Coins.

He also doesn't deliver the gifts in the physical world. They appear digitally on his friends' online profiles on a site called hi5, which is a social network like Facebook or MySpace.

"They can't eat the cake. It is an image -- the thing that it represents," said Martinez, an accountant with a wife and two kids. "You can send the feeling of that [cake] that you want to send."

In any given month, he spends the equivalent of $40 in this manner.

But Martinez is hardly alone.

As our identities migrate further onto the Internet, currencies that exist only online are becoming a more significant part of commerce on the Web and in the real world. Some, like the hi5 Coin, operate almost like tokens in an arcade or tickets at a fair: They're a stand-in for real-world currency.

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Other "virtual currencies," like Second Life's Linden Dollars, however, are traded on markets. The currencies also fuel online gaming communities and are becoming an important part of social networks.

Several online currencies are competing to be the economic engines for MySpace and Facebook, which don't have their own unified currencies. Other social networking sites, like hi5 and myYearbook, have created their own units of money for their users to spend.

All of this movement leads some experts to see a future in which virtual currencies enter the same trading space as their real-world counterparts.

The online monies are not robust enough to trade competitively against real-world currencies, but people underestimate the large amount of cash that is transferred from the real world into virtual currencies, said Edward Castronova, a professor of telecommunications at Indiana University.

Castronova says people transfer at least $1 billion into the virtual currencies each year, with most of that money going into online games. The actual amount could be much higher, he said, but the market is hard to quantify.

"The question is really one of scale," he said. "Is this big enough for someone to take their 401(k) [out of real-world currency] and start looking into this? No, absolutely not."

Sometimes, people collect online money simply by purchasing it.

In "World of Warcraft," players earn WoW Gold as they advance through the game. The currency has become so sought-after that it is bought and sold on a black market, experts said.

Low-wage workers in China are known to play the game for a living and then sell the virtual currency they earn to avid "World of Warcraft" players in the West. This despite the fact that the game's maker prohibits such activities.

As the market for online-only currency grows, problems that plague real-world economies start leaking in, said Charles Hudson, who runs the Virtual Goods Summit, an annual conference.

"Once you get a virtual economy that's functioning, you run into all the problems that we have with the real economy: taxation, interest rates, inflation. All of the same problems that cause headaches for the Federal Reserve come up in the virtual economy -- and the stakes are the same," he said.

The solution has been for each social network or game that uses its own currency to appoint a money manager. Hi5, for instance, employs a staff economist for this purpose.

The site soon hopes to make as much money through its virtual currency exchange as it does from advertising, which is the primary revenue source for many social networks.

Mark Methenitis, a Dallas attorney who writes a blog called "Law of the Game," said online currencies are "completely unregulated," which will make trading them against each other dangerous.

"There is huge potential for fraud, for what would be the equivalent of insider trading," he said. "Also, since these economies are completely under the control of the virtual world owner, it's pretty easy to cause massive hyperinflation."

Social networks and virtual worlds are currently trying to find ways to manage or capitalize on their developing economies.

These networks' successes may hinge on how they are able to manage their economies and currencies may, experts said.

Facebook is researching the idea of creating a unified currency but is "very early" in the process and has not committed to it, the site said in a statement to CNN.

Currently, applications on the site -- which allow users to play games with each other and trade gifts -- are powered by currencies made by the application's developers, not by Facebook.

These developers are making good money on the system, and Facebook is missing out on profits in that area, said Hudson, of the Virtual Goods Summit.

Joey Seiler, who writes about virtual worlds, said virtual goods are becoming more popular because people are taking their online identities more seriously.

At first, it may seem ridiculous that someone would pay for virtual currency in order to buy a T-shirt icon to put on a social-network profile. But Seiler said more or his friends see the virtual T-shirts on his Facebook page than see any T-shirt he wears in real life.

Brands tap do-gooder impulse to encourage consumers to pass along marketing messages

Thansk Matt for shiring this from Adweek

May 18, 2009
-By Brian Morrissey

NEW YORK Target is no stranger to cause marketing. The retailer is unusual in that it dedicates 5 percent of its income to charity. It's also no stranger to social marketing, having more than 260,000 fans on Facebook.

Last week, it brought the two together by kicking off "Bullseye Gives," a campaign that invites users to choose from a list of 10 charities to which Target will donate $3 million. The social twist: After voting for a charity, users are invited to broadcast their selection to their Facebook friends via their news feeds, the running summary of updates that is central to the Facebook experience. In less than a week, Target tallied 40,000 votes, which translated into tens of thousands of peer-to-peer impressions.

The effort is one of several undertaken by companies recently that use charities to give people a reason to share brand messages. In the social world, the central front for brands is what's been called "the stream," the real-time feed of updates, links and bits of content that has become the defining characteristic of Facebook and Twitter. Entry to the stream is coveted by brands desperate for the word-of-mouth appeal that comes close to a personal recommendation to friends.

"What we've learned is it's not the cause but it's the idea of a brand truly doing good that has a significant impact through social media," said Joe Marchese, CEO of SocialVibe, a Los Angeles-based startup that runs cause-related social campaigns for brands like Kraft, Sprint and PowerBar. "When you do something good, it used to be that you had to buy a bunch of media and tell people or do PR. Now, the potential is for people to tell each other that you do good."

For brands, particularly those in low-consideration categories like consumer goods, charities can become a cheap way to get access to the megaphones everyone has in social media. Take Colgate. It created a Facebook application called Smiles that languished for months, with just a few hundred people sharing it. Then it hooked up with SocialVibe to recast the tool to tap into the do-good vibe. The brand offered charitable donations each time users shared Smiles. The result: The widget was shared 500,000 times in five weeks.

Kraft is in the midst of a "Share a Little Comfort" campaign that offers to donate 1 million boxes of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese to needy families based on the number of messages people share via Facebook and Twitter. The added bonus of such programs, according to Marchese, is that brands can simply redirect some of their media budgets to cover the donations. It can turn out to be cheaper to offer donations in exchange for people-powered media than buying ad space for promotion. So far, more than 23,000 messages have been posted in response to Kraft's effort.

There is a downside, of course. Efforts can cross the line into social-media spam. Giving people an incentive to pass along messages from brands could come to be seen, reasonably, as an alternative way for brands to buy their way into conversations.

"If it's viewed as a front and that you don't really care, then it can be a setback," said Steve Rubel, svp and director of insights at Edelman. "If it's viewed as a tactic to build buzz, not as a tactic to solve problems or effect change, then you're going to lose all credibility."

This has caused Procter & Gamble, for instance, to shy away from incentivizing sharing with its Tide "Loads of Hope" program, which donates clothing to disaster-stricken areas. It dabbled in the tactic during its "Digital Hack Night," when social-media experts tapped their networks to sell "Loads of Hope" T-shirts. But P&G has not chosen to promote the program the same way with consumers. "There's always a balance of inspiring authentic conversation and being too promotional," said Kash Shaikh, a Tide rep. "We don't want to be too promotional."

To get over that, and to give the marketing programs legs, SocialVibe in some cases sends participants evidence of what their pass-along did. For instance, charity: water, a cause devoted to providing clean drinking water in impoverished areas, takes pictures of the wells dug and sends them to participants a few months later. "People think back to the brands supported over the months and connect it with a specific action," Marchese said. To date, SocialVibe has raised $500,000 for three-dozen charities.

Charities are also a handy way to ensure that "viral" efforts don't completely fail. Sun Products brand All Small & Mighty used the lure of charities to goose distribution of YouTube videos it created last month. It linked up with NBC's Celebrity Apprentice to drive viewers to an All Web site to see videos created by Joan and Melissa Rivers. Each time a video is forwarded, All donates 50 cents to charity. The gambit fits with the Apprentice construct of awarding a winning team with a donation to the charity of its choice.

"We wanted to test how big of a role this would play," said Shiv Singh, social-media lead at Razorfish, the agency that created the program. "You can only create so much passion around a detergent."

The charity game has even gone in an unusual direction. Unemployed copywriter Chris Kahle is trying the approach in the hopes of getting his dream job with Crispin Porter + Bogusky. Last week he posted an offer to donate $1 to charity for the first 200 people who sent Twitter messages to Crispin co-chairman Alex Bogusky and interactive creative director Jeff Benjamin, urging them to hire him. That part of the gambit worked: Dozens of people sent messages to the execs. Bogusky was impressed, calling the idea "really smart," although he didn't commit to interviewing Kahle.

How marketers can leverage the semantic web

Via imediaconnection.

If you think semantic is the same as contextual, think again. Here's what you need to know about harnessing the power of words online.

Online advertising is all about relevance -- being in the right place, at the right time, when consumers are most receptive to your message. But as any marketer who's been around the block can attest, that's easier said than done. Keywords are one thing; piecing them together to infer meaning and context is quite another. In this interview, Lori Xeller, senior director of sales for Kontera, discusses the opportunities offered by in-text advertising, as well as the misconceptions and market climate surrounding the technology.

iMedia: At the summit, you'll be discussing the importance of leveraging the semantic web. Can you give me one or two simple examples of how you help clients do this?

Lori Xeller: Our semantic technology enables us to make the most relevant associations between and among the user, the content he or she is consuming, and our advertisers. The key phrases that we highlight in an article can be thought of as predicting what the user would type into a search engine to get to that page. By associating this phrase with a relevant ad, we deliver a very high level of engagement and an extremely qualified user to the advertiser.

There are a few different companies talking about the semantic web today, with networks, for example, amplifying certain takes on relevance and directing search queries to their clients' products. But delivering the most relevant results that anticipate what a given user's query will be within the in-text segment narrows the purchase funnel in ways that no other segment can.

iMedia: What's the biggest danger in neglecting the semantic web and focusing exclusively on keywords when it comes to searches and ad placement?

Xeller: The danger is that you are missing a valuable opportunity to engage with your audience at the moment when they are most engaged -- within the content. In-text provides an additional opportunity to capture your audience further down the consideration cycle, after they've performed a search query, possibly, and landed on the page of interest. Upon user mouse-over, the ad is delivered in the content that they're reading, or where they're doing research -- wherever the user is engaged. Sometimes that can occur in a nonintuitive or hard-to-reach place, and with in-text, you're not competing with banners that are on the side of the page.

Leveraging the semantic web is smart because it anticipates what the user is thinking and will consider. Our campaign data show how powerful this can be.

iMedia: What's the most common misconception you hear from marketers when it comes to leveraging the semantic web? What do these people need to know?

Xeller: The most common misconception is that semantic is the same as contextual. Semantic does not just target keywords -- semantic infers meaning and context. Semantic technologies can then anticipate what the user is thinking and deliver appropriate ads accordingly.

iMedia: On a more general note, how has the recent downturn affected the marketing needs of your clients? What are the most common questions or issues that clients are coming to you with right now?

Xeller: All marketers are more and more accountable for every dollar they spend. They want to know how they can continue to drive toward their engagement, consideration, and revenue goals with either reduced budgets or higher expectations. We provide them with a great solution because our units are user initiated, which requires the user to engage. At the point they see it; the high level of relevancy of the ad to the page encourages their consideration or brand involvement. The result benefits the advertiser, providing them with an extremely cost effective and engaging solution

Our business is doing well, so perhaps the marketing downturn has driven dollars to more accountable segments. Clients are asking about the brand effects of in-text when they're buying clicks. We know they exist because once a user mouses-over and the unit launches, it's impossible to not have a brand experience with in-text. An advertiser receives the brand engagement for no additional charge -- and we're talking about some of the best engagement rates in all of interactive.

iMedia: Beyond the semantic web, where do you see the greatest untapped opportunity for digital marketers? And what is your high-level advice for breaking into this opportunity?

Xeller: One thing that in-text does is enable publishers to leverage the newest technologies, while being unobtrusive to users and performing extremely well for performance and brand marketers. It's one of the few new marketing technologies that maintains the triangle of benefit for buyers, sellers, and users, and we expect it to continue growing indefinitely.

There are a lot of new great opportunities out there for digital marketers today. These would range from in-text to mobile, content integration, and so on. My advice to the marketers would be this: Don't be afraid to test them and see the results for yourself, but make sure to have a clear understanding of the vendor's history and experience before signing on.

Lori Luechtefeld is editor of iMedia Connection.