Archive of the 'User-Generated Content' Category

In many of the areas of promotion the Internet has given rise to, being around for ten years qualifies you as a pioneer. If that‘s true, then Streetwise Concepts and & Culture is practically the Lewis and Clark of social marketing, mapping out the territory for those who came after.

The Los Angeles-based agency got its start more than 10 years ago when now-CEO David Benveniste hired on to promote and manage a new band, System of a Down. Realizing that their label in 1998, Columbia, wasn’t planning to support the band’s first album with as much marketing or airplay as he thought advisable, Benveniste logged onto that new Internet thing. He began visiting chat rooms where young people got together to talk about music and asking members what bands they listened to. more

Pepsi is one of the world’s most widely recognized global brands. Now it’s linking to one of the world’s favorite sports with a social network that lets members find out which of five major soccer stars most closely fit their personality type.

The site, www.pepsiyouniverse.com, is built on a networking platform from London-based Imagini Holdings, and one of its most interesting features is that it asks registered members to categorize themselves using pictures rather than text descriptions. Visitors answer questions such as “What do you like best about soccer?” by choosing one of 12 photos that show teammates working together, fans rooting in the stands, some tricky ball handling, and so on. more

Let me pull back the curtain and admit that sometimes I get more interviews under my belt than I have print space for. As a result, I sometimes wind up talking to very interesting companies and then having to wait a good while to write about them.

Last July I spoke with Neil Perry, acting CEO of XLNTAds, a start-up that brings together companies that want online ad content and video makers looking for a creative challenge. The company was founded in early 2007, just as the trend in user-generated ads was beginning to build momentum thanks to mass-media exposure such as the Super Bowl Doritos TV spot. more

That chart above is what political disaster looks like as reflected in the blog community. Specifically it tracks the volume and tenor of the posts about Eliot Spitzer, the now-former governor of New York, in the days immediately following his outing at “Client No. 9”, the Emperor’s Club VIP customer who met with a prostitute in Washington’s Mayflower Hotel. more

Common wisdom has it that we’re fragmenting as a media audience, and that the Super Bowl and the Academy Awards are the only major unifying “event” TV left on the annual schedule. After those, it’s believed, we start breaking up into smaller niche interest groups: the NCAA Final Four, the American Idol season finale, the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show, and so on.

The common wisdom may want to head back to school for some adult ad courses, because while the Super Bowl hit its biggest audience numbers ever this year—97.5 million viewers—the Academy Awards show turned in its lowest viewership in history, 32 million.

That’s still one-third of the U.S. population, of course, and the price of $1.8 million for a 30-second spot during the Oscars broadcast reflected the fact that it’s hard to gather that many people in front of the TV anymore. But in contrast to the Super Bowl, where marketers tried harder than ever this year to extend that half minute of audience attention by leading viewers to engage with them on the Internet, Oscar advertisers gave a pretty poor performance when it came to search marketing their TV spots, or simply enabling them to get found. more

Target billboard

Here’s the sequence of events. (1) Last January Target mounted a billboard campaign in Times Square that showed (among other, more innocuous images) a young woman spread-eagled on the retailer’s bull’s-eye logo.

(2) Amy Jussel, the founder of ShapingYouth.org and writer for that group’s blog, placed a call to Target to ask about the female objectification in the image, adding in a blog post that as an ad executive, she couldn’t understand how the image passed through layers of approval without being flagged.

(3) Three days after her call, Jussel received an e-mail from Target saying the company was unable to respond to her request for more information about the ad because “Target does not participate with non-traditional media outlets. This practice is in place to allow us to focus on publications that reach our core guest.” more

Pleo

A two-part study of how some online brands are using social media to build customer loyalty finds that friendship can involve a lot of work—and some companies just aren’t putting in the time.

Online marketing agency OneUpWeb started before the Christmas shopping season by singling out a dozen brands that seemed either to have social communities in place around their products or appeared to be poised to build them in time for the holidays. The study analyzed the potential each brand could maximize by using social media of various kinds, from social networks and virtual reality to blogs, podcasts, consumer reviews, user-generated video and interactive tours. more

Everyone can point to disappointing sequels that failed to re-capture the excitement of the original: “Fantasia 2000”. “The Two Jakes”. “Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo”. When you’re creating a product for popular culture, it’s just hard to put that second bottle of lightning up on the shelf.

Apparently Office Max and the agencies behind the “Elf Yourself” viral campaign haven’t heard about the sophomore slump. The team scored a big holiday 2006 viral success with the campaign, in which users get to download their face to a spindly elfin body and then shake their groove thing for e-mail friends. So when the holiday season rolled around again in 2007, OfficeMax, ad agency Toy New York and digital content company EVB decided to up the ante to four elves per e-mail and add some showier dance moves and voice capability but essentially keep the rest of the campaign the same. more