Obama’s digital team is hard at work again. Within 24 hours of winning the historic voite change.gov was launched. The new site transitions the focus away from winning the vote and on to streamlining the transitional period and establishing an ongoing dialog with the citizens of the United States.

The commitment to digital as a communication medium has proven effective for Obama which leads one to ponder what else will be communicated via from the Oval office in the future.

Sites like TechPresident.com which billiantly track the technical ascendancy of our two candidates and how they compare have made predictions that Obama will release his weekly address online and on video sharing sites like YouTube. They predict “town halls” will be facilitated online allowing citizens to make sure their voice is heard. They remind us of the digitally savy nature of his campaign, but most of all they predict he’ll be our first tech president even adding a chief technical officer to his chief advisors.

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Great day at Ad:Tech today, from panels to contacts, new business opportunities, new technologies, new trends, new services… Ad:Tech has it all.

The day started with a keynote from Jonathan Klein, President of CNN/US. John said that CNN embraces innovation, new technologies, new techniques, new trends, and urges all their employees to try new ideas. They have been using user generated content to get faster stories, they have a political blog aggregator that became the largest in the country, they have a program where an expert follows twitter feeds and answers questions and concerns online, in real time, they have a talk show where the host podcasts during commercials, linking the tv air experience with online / web experience. Another twitter fact is that CNN took 4 minutes to cover a recent earthquake in LA, whereas someone tweet it in 30 seconds. They also started providing more data for the next gen during the elections, especially seen during the debates; under the assumption that the younger gen can multitask and consume multiple feeds of information concurrently, they added the analysts’ opinions and scores during debates on side panels, as well as real time undecided voters conversions. Another link between air and web is John King’s touch screen; after the success of the John playing with the screen, they uploaded an interactive version to their site allowing anyone to play with it, just like on tv.  Read More »

Everyone knows that we’re very passionate about Facebook. We’ve been actively building Facebook applications since they first launched and consider them to be one of the fundamental differentiators that helped propel Facebook to such lofty heights.

Facebook embraced what I believe builds the most successful new model businesses successes on the web. They created an open platform and let user innovation drive the direction of their business. Unfortunately, like most open platforms, it got out of control. People abused their rights in an effort to push their application to the top. The constant stream of invitations to join applications became one of the number one gripes of Facebook users as they felt they were being aggressively “spammed” (even if it was by their friends).

Facebook has been re-evaluating it’s infrastructure quite a bit these days. A new Facebook layout, for better or worse, has been released. Additionally they have been making some heavy changes to how applications were handled within the system beyond the presentation layer.

The obvious change that you would have noticed includes shifting all of your applications mini-views to a tab on your profile called “Boxes”. Really? They couldn’t name it “applications” or “apps” so it was even mildly intuitive. It’s bad enough that they’re now treating the application concept they popularized as the ugly step-child, but this is just adding insult to injury. I wish they made the tab name “don’t click here” - it would probably get more people to check it out.

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(at least in my books for his outstanding use of digital marketing…)

The Obama's latest campaign initiative: an iPhone Application

I’m consistently impressed with the Obama campaign’s innovative marketing campaigns. They’re not doing anything particularly revoutionary by the marketing world’s standards, but in the world of politics they might have well been transported here from the ninth dimension.

Let’s compare the campaigns.

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The Android platform is a software stack for mobile devices including an operating system, middleware and key applications. Developers can create applications for the platform using the Android SDK.

Android is Google’s attempt to dominate the mobile advertising market, just as it has dominated the online PC advertising market, said Craig Wigginton, industry leader for Deloitte’s telecommunications practice. “Their number-one driver for pushing this is the advertising model,” he said.

The G1, the first Android phone introduced by T-Mobile, Google, and HTC on Tuesday, comes loaded with Google applications, including Gmail, Gtalk, Maps, and YouTube. The home screen includes just one item: a Google search bar. Each of those applications is an opportunity for Google to deliver advertisements to users.

There are 3.5 billion mobile-phone users worldwide; many more than computers users. Google, with their success at delivering advertising to desktop computers are looking to monetize this enormous opportunity.  Read More »

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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Ah, a fresh new Candystand.com smell...

It was announced yesterday that CandyStand.com, Wrigley’s premier gaming site, would be sold to a new third party. Candystand.com has long been hailed as a trend setter in branded entertainment sites boasting well over 5M unique visitors per month with hundred of high quality Flash games.

The new entity, Funktank, is a sister company to famed boutique digital shop WDDG who has been producing great award winning work in the digital space longer then most of us have been thinking about it.  Although the purchase of Candystand is interesting and apparently a sensible business move it raises a bigger question for boutique digital shops that hang in that gray area that is appealing to companies looking to buy them. They’re not big enough to get the multiples they want and so the deals just don’t make sense, but if you’re producing high quality work, and have been giving away your great ideas for years, why not just focus your talent inward and take over a successful web property?

I think this was a bold and brave move for James Baker (CEO of both companies) and the success of this project might very well change the “exit plan” of many small digital shops around the world.

Great YouTube Ad

I’ve seen two really first class uses of YouTube as a marketing tool recently and I thought you might enjoy seeing them as well. The first ad is for the new “Wario Land: Shake It” title on the Wii. The video which shows game play and the associated Wii hand motions also slowly starts to shake the entire YouTube page to pieces sending text and content flying. I’ve seen concepts like this before, but by being the first on YouTube it came on as totally unexpected which made it memorable and interesting.

http://www.youtube.com/experiencewii

The second ad for Samsung Instinct telephone. It uses some of the new functionality in YouTube to link between multiple videos. The series of videos are presented in a “Choose Your Own Adventure” style with amusing and racy content that is not only entertaining but demonstrates functionality on the phone successfully. Make sure you watch the video to the end to view the additional functionality.

http://br.youtube.com/watch?v=HoOCiaxIZF4

My congrats to the agencies behind both ads. In fact if you see this blog post and you worked on one of these send me an email. I’d love to take you out for a drink in recognition of your original thinking.

The following post is Part 1 in a multi series post that will occur each day for the next two weeks. It’s based on my favorite speaking engagement of this year that I presented to the marketing leadership team at GE. If you haven’t subscribed yet this might be a good reason.

I'll be ranting about the following for the next two weeks....

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Introduction
Imagine a device that scan all internet activity and throttle p2p traffic, reduce spam, protect against hacking attacks, scan against viruses, all done in real time for millions of users. Now imagine the same device can also read all your email, know what sites you visit, see every form post you submit, read every instant message you send, know about every comment you make on social networks, know about your buying habits, know about your searches, know about the videos  you watch, know about the music you listen to, and imagine that this device stores all this information about build a really detailed behavioral profile on you, and partners with advertisers to target the perfect adverb specifically for you.  Read More »