Tuesday, July 24, 2007

What is the worst viral video attempt of all time?

I have seen a lot of terrible attempts of viral videos posted on YouTube by companies with marketing budgets big enough to feed an army. Amongst the painful memories one particular attempt stands out in my mind; The Sony "All I want for Christmas is a PSP" campaign. For some reaon this one has been burned into my mind.

Sony wanted to capture consumer evangelists expressing how all they wanted for Christmas was a PSP through videos on YouTube. Sony essentiall hired a bunch of actors to pretend like they were true consumers that would appeal to an attractive PSP market and man did it blow up in their face! This movie is literally one of the most pathetic things I have ever seen, I got a little sick half way through so I had to take a break.

What is the worst viral video campaign attempt you have ever seen? Can anything get worse than this?

Monday, July 23, 2007

Second Life Losing some Popularity

Second life is no longer the new hotness - LA Times just released an article titled Virtual marketers have second thoughts about Second Life.
Ouch. Sorry SLer's........

Wednesday, July 18, 2007

Nielsen Uses Time Spent on Site as New Number One

In a nod to the success of emerging Web 2.0 technologies like AJAX and streaming media, one of the country's largest Internet benchmarking companies will no longer use page views as its primary metric for comparing sites.

Nielsen/NetRatings will announce Tuesday that it will immediately begin using total time spent by users of a site as its primary measurement metric.

Scott Ross, director of product marketing at Nielsen/NetRatings, said the change was prompted by a continuing increase in the use of AJAX, or Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, which allows a Web site to refresh content without reloading an entire page, and to the growing use of audio and video streaming.

"It is not that page views are irrelevant now, but they are a less accurate gauge of total site traffic and engagement," Ross said. "Total minutes is the most accurate gauge to compare between two sites. If [Web] 1.0 is full page refreshes for content, Web 2.0 is, 'How do I minimize page views and deliver content more seamlessly?'"

For example, he said, MySpace may have 10 to 11 times more page views than YouTube, but myspace.com users spend only three times more minutes on the site, Ross added. Therefore, measuring total time spent on a site will make it easier for advertisers to mold their ads to how users are actually accessing content, he said.

"On YouTube there will be more ads flowing in based on duration (on videos)," he said. "The more time I spend on YouTube ... [advertisers] will figure out a way to monetize that."