Hulu news

Hulu is now big. It's official:
http://www.marketingvox.com/hulu-cracks-top-3-online-video-sites-for-first-time-043940/

And they finally signed that deal with Disney. More excitingly Disney bought 30% of Hulu:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124110275139073305.html

http://www.tvweek.com/news/2009/04/disney_decides_to_dance_the_hu.php

Star Trek ads on your iPhone

An exclusive Star Trek ad has been launched for the iPhone, by MEC Interaction in association with VideoEgg.
As more and more people get on the mobile web I think that mobile ads will become more important in digital marketing. So keep your eyes open for similar things.

http://www.netimperative.com/netimperative/news/2009/april/star-trek-campaign-beams-up-on-iphone

YouTube introduces statistics export

YouTube's Insight tool now lets you export your statistics to CSV, which you can then in turn import quite simply into Excel or Google Docs.

http://mashable.com/2009/04/29/youtube-insight-export/

YouTube's blog post:
http://www.youtube.com/blog?entry=IH_EDPBv7Ng

Wolfram hype builds

The excitement surrounding the new way to search from Stephen Wolfram: Wolframalpha is building as they show special persons in private, and now in public.

He claims the search will be a new "paradigm for the web", by answering your questions more directly. Using various Natural Language Processing algorithms it tries to give you a direct answer to your question, rather than a bunch of sites that happen to mention those words.

I believe that this is another step towards a semantic web, as I've previously blogged about. This being the search end of things, whose job can only be made easier by good mark-up, and well-structured and organised data on web-pages. The future of online is about giving all this data out there on the web some meaning.

Any Question Answered may soon be a thing of the past, if we've all got the web on our phones and Wolframalpha!

BBC article explaining more about Wolframalpha.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8026331.stm

The search engine:
http://www.wolframalpha.com/

The crazy genius that is Stephen Wolfram:
http://www.stephenwolfram.com/

Online video standards updated

IAB have published a set of standards or best-practices for online video.
They recommend the correct size, positioning and length of the following:

• Pre/mid/post-roll adverts
• Interaction in video adverts
• In-stream overlay adverts
• Branded video player skins
• Companion adverts
• Product placement and brand funded content
• Video adverts in social media
• Video sub-sites
• In-text video adverts

IAB standards:
http://www.iabuk.net/en/1/onlinevideomarketing.html


A couple of articles on the subject:
http://www.marketingweek.co.uk/cgi-bin/item.cgi?id=65259

http://www.nma.co.uk/iab-updates-best-practice-guide-for-online-video-advertising/3000364.article

Update your status 2.0

Quub is a great site and app for updating your status across networks. Like hellotxt, but much better.
It's got features for beginners - like status suggestions, and advanced features for those "power users".

Check it out:
https://www.quub.com/welcome

Spotzer

I haven't come across Spotzer before, but they've got some interesting approaches to ad campaigns. You can develop and purchase campaigns on the site for mobile and online.


http://www.marketingvox.com/microsoft-spotzer-launch-multimedia-ad-deployment-platform-043907/

http://www.spotzer.com/microsoft/

http://www.spotzer.com

Disney and Hulu ready to begin relationship

Not much has actually changed here. But Disney and Hulu are closer to closing the deal now, it just seems to be taking a long time to sort out all the details.

http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20090427/disney-gets-ready-finally-to-hold-hands-with-hulu/

Anyone for BANners

There have been Firefox extensions for ages now that block ads, here's a nice new one, TidyRead to help you read more easily.
More than just an banner ad stripper, it does a little bit more and tries to give you a completely clean page to read - useful for reading blogs and longer articles, which on some sites can get lost amongst the banners, google ads and site promotions.

I wonder how much these ad blockers affect the actual number of banners viewed vs. the number of banners served.

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/tidyread_deals_blow_to_display_ads.php

Excellent BBC News Headlines

I've always loved the BBC News website. It's laid out perfectly and you can always get the information you need quickly and concisely. Here's a short article from usability Guru Jakob Nielsen about how good they are at web headlines. I'm afraid I'm guilty of looking for a pun before usability in my headlines!

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/headlines-bbc.html

More and more videos online

I think we all know this already, but here are the stats to back it up. More people are posting and watching videos online than ever. Read the report by Nielsen below.

I think most attempts to monetise online videos will fail. YouTube was so successful because it was free and doesn't force any advertising down your throat.
ITV's idea of prepending every video with an advert, will just drive people to other sites mirroring the content, which don't have ads that are as intrusive.
I think the only way to advertise successfully to people on these sites, is with highly relevant related content on the side, after the video clip, in related videos and in sponsored links.

Article:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/nielsen.php

The Nielsen Report:
http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/nielsen-news/online-global-landscape-0409/


EDIT:
See they can't even make any money from Susan Boyle!
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/23/youtube-and-partners-miss-out-on-boyle-bonanza/

Flash on your TV

Adobe have signed deals to get their Flash player software in many televisions and set-top boxes. The software, which secured its place in the online arena, after it became the de facto standard for streaming videos online, as used by Google Videos, Youtube and more recently iPlayer.

This is a move that makes sense, with the world moving towards everything being online, it is only a matter of time before all televisions are linked up to the internet. To have Flash on your televsion is the next logical step.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8008070.stm


Flash player homepage:
http://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer

Have they finally twigged?

That we want nice unobtrusive ads that if we are interested in them and click on them, then we want decent content. Videoegg seem to understand this.
They have come up with twigs. These "stretchy ads" as marketing-vox calls them, can be used on long pages that scroll. They stay in position at the top or bottom of a page, meaning users don't just scroll past them.

Marketing-vox article on the subject:
http://www.marketingvox.com/videoegg-sports-stretchy-ads-for-social-sites-043812/

Their introduction to twigs:
http://www.videoegg.com/press/videoegg_twig

And here it is in action:
http://clients.videoegg.com/preview/twig/

Keeping the Pirates at Bay

It's the big story. The founders of Pirate Bay have been found guilty and been given a year in jail. Everyone is talking about it - even Stephen Fry twittered about it: "... Poor old Pirates. As an industry insider & (c) holder I'm not supposed to support them, but I do."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8003799.stm

OddCast remove barriers so you can Trek Yourself

I came across this cool little app to promote the upcoming Star Trek film:
http://www.trekyourself.com/

Now it's nothing new - as we've seen silmiar things from OddCast for a while now (Choose Your Surrogate, Commit Your Friend). However, the beauty with this new OddCast app is the integration with Facebook photos.

You can access your Facebook photos in-line in the application and use the images. I think that it is these kind of small additional removal of barriers that make people stick around and interact with applications. If you make it really easy for people, then they will take part.
People's attention span is short and they are turned off if they are asked to do much before a pay-off, or have to leave the site and go back to it. (E.g. Having to load Facebook in another browser and then log-in, go to photos, find one, save it to their desktop, and then upload it ot the app.)
I would compare it to GMail introducing auto-completing email addresses in their To field, and introducing Google Suggest, which are now common-place.

Developers, designers, marketers, competition planners and all should take heed of this and make sure they do similar things to improve usability and remove barriers.

The Boat That Rocked Spotify competition blogged

Just came across this interesting blog:
Digital-Examples - "Good Examples of Digital Creativity and Media Usage including online advertising"
And they mention our The Boat That Rocked / Spotify competition. Reading on, it's got some great digital marketing campaigns, useful for inspiration and ideas. I recommend having a read.

http://digital-examples.blogspot.com/2009/04/boat-that-rocked-playlists-on-spotify.html


Talking of Spotify - they've just opened up to 3rd party developers. Now this is where things get interesting:
http://musically.com/blog/2009/04/08/spotify-opens-up-to-third-party-developers/

Mashable tips for optimizing your brands Facebook presence

Meant to blog this a while ago. Mashable with another great article. Does exactly what it says on the tin:

5 Tips for Optimizing Your Brand’s Facebook Presence
http://mashable.com/2009/04/01/optimize-facebook-page/

Everyone wants to market via social media

The stats here read that marketers are fully into using social media as a way to market their business. Read on for more and all the statistics.

http://www.marketingvox.com/marketers-top-social-media-twitter-blogs-linkedin-facebook-043787/

Amazon makes a stand over bad-Phorm

Amazon has written to Phorm to ask for their site not to be scanned by their system. The controversial banner supplying system that scans every site that users go to and then serves banners depending upon their surfing habits apparently offers an opt out service, by emailing them.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7999635.stm
http://www.marketingvox.com/amazon-uk-says-no-to-phorms-behavioral-ad-probe-043806/

Behavioural Targetting popular

There is much interest in behavioural targeting marketing, with clients willing to pay for it. Seems like there's a lot of buzz around it. Read the stats below:

http://www.marketingvox.com/behavioral-targeting-tops-list-of-exciting-search-trends-043748/

Full length YouTube?

YouTube is in talks with Sony about serving feature films. Is this the way forward for YouTube? Can in compete in the streaming film market?

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10212585-93.html

Flutter: The new Twitter

A regular read of mine, Slate Magazine, has done a great spoof of Twitter called Flutter.

http://slatev.com/player.html?id=18328570001

Tracking Twitter Trends

A nice article from Mashable summarising the sites available to track Twitter trends. The data is all there, being supplied by all those twitterers, it's just a question of what you do with it!

http://mashable.com/2009/04/04/twitter-trends/

Google and Twitter sources wrong

So Techcrunch told us that Google was in talks with Twitter to buy it:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/02/sources-google-in-late-stage-talks-to-buy-twitter/

But it turns out their sources were wrong:
http://kara.allthingsd.com/20090403/sorry-to-get-you-all-a-twitter-but-google-is-not-in-late-stage-talks-to-acquire-the-hot-microblogging-service/

It was nothing as exciting as a purchase, more just that they were in talks about how to work together better. Oh well!

Eager for Iger?

Eager to know what Disney's new CEO, Bob Iger, has to say? Well read all about it below. Indirect mentions of the Hulu deal abound:

http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20090402/live-disney-ceo-bob-iger-at-the-cable-show/

More on the Hulu / Disney deal:
http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20090402/hulu-makes-room-for-a-third-disney-deal-coming-soon/

Big Up Ads

Banner ads are set to get larger. I've been working on some 500x400s - which aren't massive, but seem to becoming more popular. Here 720x300 seems to be the size discussed.

http://mashable.com/2009/03/23/online-banner-ad-sizes/