advertising

CES oddness

You never know what you're going to find at CES. At the Lasonic booth, it's like the 80's never ended! At least they don't seem to be taking themselves too seriously: The Intel booth is bathed in deep blue light and is rather 2001: A Space Odessey looking. But regardless of how funny you might look, these sphere seats are mighty tempting after being on your feet all day... Advertising is on every conceivable surface. Here's a series of postered plastered between the up and down escalators:

RenGen: a generation of cultural consumers?

Isn't it interesting how trends are made? "One of the things I like about trends is that they seem so easy -- Blue is the color of 2008! GenY likes health food!" observes Stacey Gillar. Coupling the disparate ("Chic Trash"), pushing an already extreme concept to the extreme ("Radical Transparency"), or simply announcing the advent of something "new" ("Nouvelle Vague," "Nouveau Niche," etc.) are some of the flourishing categories. Or you simply repackage an old concept.

"RenGen," short for Renaissance Generation and the title of … Read more

What open source can learn from TiVo

No one watches commercials anymore, right? In particular, 18-to-34-year-olds hate ads and will do anything to quash them, right?

It turns out these and other TV myths may be just that: myths. As The Wall Street Journal reports, researchers are discovering that the nature of the show and how soon after it airs publicly has more to do with ad-watching behavior than one's age group:

One evolving theory: that advertisers should pay more attention to people's viewing patterns than to their demographics, such as whether they are a twentysomething or a male. Fans of the NBC Universal show Heroes, for example, whether they are 18-year-old men or 54-year-old women, generally tend to watch the show the same way--often clicking through ads...

So far, commercial ratings show what advertising executives have long suspected--about 3 percent to 15 percent of an audience changes the channel during commercials or fast-forwards through them, while teens and older people tend to skip commercials slightly less than viewers aged 18 to 34. In general, the closer viewers watch a show to its original airtime the more likely they are to watch the ads.… Read more

Anarchist Shopdropping for Christmas

Oooh, look what I got for Christmas, an anarchist doll complete with Molotov cocktail!

No, it's a fake gift, the latest in a funny and subversive series of "shopdropping" by a group of artists. Shopdropping (instead of shoplifting) means placing fake products into real stores to confuse the store management and raise questions about consumerist society. Watch the video as the befuddled Walgreens manager tries to price the anarchist doll, complete with its convincing packaging.

The anarchist doll specifically is the work of Oakland, CA based artist Packard Jennings, who has also produced a line of PEZ … Read more

In between years: Trends and snippets

Soccer and innovation: I blogged about " what Ronaldinho and FC Barcelona can teach you about innovation" before "el cl?sico" on Sunday, and, well, there was a certain risk that my bold claim would backfire. Madrid slammed Barca in its own backyard 1-0, and while I'm flattered that my favorite Fox soccer analyst Bobby McMahon is linking to my post, his comment still stings a little...

Monarchy 2.0: Queen Elizabeth has launched a new channel on YouTube--the Royal Channel--that will broadcast her traditional Christmas address, at 7 a.m. PST Tuesday. According to … Read more

Ad for Microsoft's Sync pretty funny

Microsoft's product marketing tends to be fairly dull. Even inside the company, its methods for naming, marketing, and packaging have been the subject of scorn and derision.

So, that makes this commercial for its Sync in-car entertainment system all the more noteworthy.

The company illustrates the power of the system's voice controls, by showing what happens when you take those commands beyond the car.

It's a good approach to explaining a whole new type of technology--something that is often tough--just ask TiVo.

What do you think? Does it make you want to get the system, or does … Read more

Europeans to hold hearings on Google-DoubleClick and privacy

Update Dec. 18 with exact date of hearing

Update 1:10 p.m. PT with Google comment

European lawmakers plan to hold a hearing next month to scrutinize the privacy implications of the proposed Google acquisition of online-ad firm DoubleClick, according to the Associated Press.

The proposed $3.1 billion deal has provoked complaints that it would give Google an unprecedented amount of information about consumers' online activities, with a view into not only what people search for, but exactly where on the Internet they go and what ads they click on.

The hearing will be held either Jan. 21, … Read more

Ad spending to slow...time for Web 2.0 to get a new revenue model

Internet advertising is set to slow according to research firm eMarketer. This isn't cause for panic, but it is cause for changing the revenue models for aspiring web startups. Consider:

The are some lower figures, for example the two expected white knights in new media advertising won't grow to levels many were hoping for, with advertising on social networking sites only expected to be 6% of the overall online ad spend in 2012, and rich media/ video rising to 13.1%; all in all it sounds like an Internet in 5 years time that isn't that much different to now, only with more money in the pot to go around.… Read more

Attention profiling: How radical do you want radical transparency to be?

Michael Pick of Particls has written the perhaps most comprehensive overview of attention profiling and APML (attention profiling mark-up language) to date. APML is a proposed standard that allows users to share their own personal attention profile and compress all forms of attention data into one portable file format that can be traded between attention seekers and givers:

"We have reached the point of information hyper-saturation. It can become quite a chore to find relevant content online, when there is so much other information competing for your attention. But by implementing attention profiling, it becomes possible to have the … Read more