Someone recently tipped me off to a great banner execution for Burger King courtesy of Crispin Porter. I really respect great banner executions as you have so many more restrictions. It truly proves how far you can take the medium when you want to.

My gut tells me they were not able to run it like this on many sites, but I thought you’d enjoy it anyway. As always BannerBlog had it first…

http://www.bannerblog.com.au/2008/07/bk_banner_of_doom.php

Social media has played a massive role in recent US politics and its influence will continue to increase over time. Although this trend permeates social networking, blogger outreach programs, and even more traditional banner ads across both of these mediums, the use of Twitter is particularly fascinating. For example, the number one position on Twitterholic.com, which tracks the most popular Twitter profiles, has belonged to Barack Obama for the past month and half.

In terms of demographic, social media is no longer something that is skewed towards the younger demographic who have traditionally had lower voter turn-outs. It now extends to the many layers of the voting demographic and even has an influence on mainstream media, which proves that it is targeting people outside of social media’s traditional reach. Indeed, social media has the capability of seeding public sentiment in real time into web properties that people visit on a daily basis, and these are typically sites that people visit more often than news sites. Personally, I believe there will be a growing and consistent trend between successful politicians and those that focus on strong internet and social media strategies.

The UK’s use of social media sites runs in parallel to the US so unique cultural differences will rarely make a difference. Indeed, it would be foolish of UK politicians not to adopt similar strategies or what’s more, create ambitious strategies that could set the trend for future US campaigns.

While most social networks struggle to sell advertising due to lack of proper segmentation and totally irrelevant content for advertisers, LinkedIn has so much demand that they decided to launch their own ad network. LinkedIn claims 27 million registered users, according to comScore, 5.2 million from the U.S. visited the site in July (8.7 million worldwide).

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When I look at some of the most successful marketing campaigns I have been fortunate enough to be involved with I have started to realize that, in most cases, they fit into two categories. One category is projects that have a very high pass-along factor and the second is projects that have a very high pass-along factor and are very press friendly. These press friendly ideas, like Trevor The Mentos Intern or Guinness Hands for example, received exponentially more traffic because of their original content that truly was unlike almost anything on the web at the time of their release. When bloggers received links from us or tips from friends it was easy for them to find a reason to write about it in the hopes that they’d publish before anyone else or felt a sincere need to tell their friends.

These ideas aren’t always the most sane (yet again, reference Trevor The Mentos Intern) and in some cases they’re not particularly politically correct. The fashion company Diesel seems to have a really good grasp of how to make these press friendly viral campaigns. They did it very successfully last year when they had two models “kidnap” a sales person and the company’s primary website while interacting with visitors via a live web cam.

VIDEO AFTER THE JUMP.

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PART V OF THE “TREND WATCHING TO GAIN A COMPETITIVE EDGE IN MARKETING” SERIES:

Let's Hug!

A survey was done at the end of last year that asked people  What their most important source of information was. 80% responded the Internet followed by TV, Radio, and Newspaper at 68%, 63%, and 63% respectively. Simultaneously 73% of people responded personal source as their most important method. When the two highest categories Internet and Personal Source can be so close coordinated in a social network it paves the way for potentially the most important way to communicate with consumers. – USC Annenberg School: Digital Future Report 2007

We can target Age, Connection Type, Day Part, Education Level, Ethnicity, Gender, Geographical, Interest Groups, Marital Status, Parents, Religion, Sexual Orientation, Smoker/Drinker, Enthusiast Targeting.  Unfortunately we’re still just pushing more target ads, when we should be targeting communities and using this knowledge to engage them in a longer conversation.

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