Internet Marketing Blog

Moby's Movie Music Marketing

  Moby Rocks The Guitar 
  Originally uploaded by wacky doodler

Late last year, the musician Moby started a web site called Moby Gratis that offers some of his instrumental music for free to independent filmmakers to use in their nonprofit movies. If the movie gets purchased, then you'd need to pay a small licensing fee, the proceeds from which would go to pay for a charitable foundation devoted to this free film music site.

Moby Gratis is a source for his music to be used essentially under a Creative Commons copyright license. It provides wider exposure to some of Moby's music that would inherently have a limited audience because it is instrumental and it provides a free resource to independent filmmakers.

Pretty cool. Here's Moby talking about it and about his views on copyright law in general:

Interruption Advertising

ABC announced this week they would offer select television shows like Lost and Desperate Housewives for free through cable television on-demand services with the caveat that viewers will not be able to skip through commercials.

I understand television is struggling to retain advertising dollars that are quickly slipping through their fingers to more effective media, but this isn't the way to do it.

People are increasingly becoming accustomed to either on-demand advertising and marketing or product placement. The more you interrupt them with advertising that is probably not relevant to their needs, the more you annoy them by wasting their time.

People will probably watch ABC's on-demand offerings, but they will no doubt do what they've always done, ignore the commercials by getting up and doing other stuff while they run. A significant percentage of cable viewers will simply DVR their favorite shows rather than use on-demand service for the very reason that they then can skip over the commercials.

The solution to hemorrhaging ad dollars is not more interruptions, but smarter ads through product placement and eventually, if the technology permits, some form of interactive TV, where, if you're interested, you can click on a product within a show for more information.

I don't know that I have the right answer but I do know that traditional television advertising is broken and the networks and cable channels need to figure it out or more and more entertainment will be produced by the advertisers themselves.

And perhaps that's inevitable.

Will Google's Video Ad Network Expand The Embeddable Web?

Steve Rubel argued yesterday that web site traffic metrics are increasingly irrelevant "So debating which sites drive the most traffic is really meaningless."

I think he will eventually be proved right, so I agree with his assertion that we need a new way to measure Internet activity. One primary reason for this is that content is becoming radically decentralized, so it is no longer nearly as important to drive people to a given location on the Web.

Google's recent announcement that they will include YouTube videos in their AdSense advertising network will go a long way toward decentralizing video content. Video content providers will be able to earn money by placing their videos in the network and web sites will be able to earn money from hosting the ads.

If   you want to get me going on a rant, bring up the fact that many organizations prohibit embedding of their video. As I've said before and I'll no doubt say again, prohibiting embedding is nearly always against the content provider's best interests. 

Most local television news sites now host videos of their broadcasts but most also prohibit embedding of that video, offering a simple hyperlink as their concession to "sharing." But the conversation happens elsewhere, primarily at blogs or other online forums. Bloggers would happily embed newscasts when discussing current events. Embedded newscasts provides easy and free product placement that builds brand awareness for the local network affiliate.

Happily, Google has just provided monetary incentive for content producers to allow embedding of their videos and that should help spread the love.

Yahoo Upgrades Search Engine, Blends Search Results

Yahoo! has just unveiled upgrades to their search results after Microsoft had done the same late last month for their search engine, Live.com.

One of the primary upgrades is Yahoo!'s Search Assist function that tries to anticipate what you want as you type your search query by offering related alternative search phrases in a similar but more comprehensive way than Google's preceding service, Google Suggest.

Here's a screencast of Yahoo!'s Search Assist in action:

Search Dominance With Blended Results

Search Engine Land provides a good rundown of Yahoo!'s new search features but for our purposes, the one I'm most interested in is that they've added blended search results. That means they are including within the search results page links to  audio, video and photos as well as web pages. For video, they are actually including an in-line player, so you can watch the video directly on the search results page.

Google, of course, has been doing just that for some time. The following screenshot shows Google's in-line video player for the search results for "joe mauer batting tips." (Click on the graphic for more detail):

That same search, "joe mauer batting tips," is going to help me demonstrate the importance of not just search engine optimizing your own web sites, but also uploading and optimizing your own content to other online centers of gravity where large audiences congregate and share such as YouTube and Flickr.

We uploaded and optimized a 14 minute training video that comes with the Mauer's Quickswing batting training product at many of the popular video sharing sites such as YouTube, Google Video and iFILM. We also opened a Flickr account and uploaded and optimized photos of the Mauer's Quickswing. We did this long before Google rolled out their blended search results feature.

But when they did, the result of that work was that the preponderance of the links on the first page of results for "joe mauer batting tips" lead to content that we provided, either through optimized web sites or optimized content on other sites.

Now that the other two major search engines offer blended search, the same dominance of the search results holds true for both Microsoft's Live.com for "joe mauer batting tips":

...as well as at Yahoo! for "joe mauer batting tips":

The happy end result was that the vast majority of the links went to either the client's site directly, or to essentially product placements, with either photographic or video demonstrations of the Quickswing product.

That's search saturation.

Product Placement In Second Life

William Gibson Reads From His New Book In The Virtual World

  William Gibson live reading in Second Life 
  Originally uploaded by r3db0x

I am fascinated with Second Life. For the uninitiated, Second Life is a popular virtual world.

Wikipedia describes a virtual world as "a computer-based simulated environment intended for its users to inhabit and interact via avatars. This habitation usually is represented in the form of two or three-dimensional graphical representations of humanoids (or other graphical or text-based avatars). Some, but not all, virtual worlds allow for multiple users."

Second Life is populated with actual people and organizations. You can buy and develop real estate and property with the development tools that are provided for you. You can conduct actual transactions in Second Life. From the Second Life web site: "commerce is handled with the in-world unit-of-trade, the Linden dollar, which can be converted to US dollars at several thriving online Linden Dollar exchanges." The company that runs Second Life is Linden Lab, thus the Linden Dollar.

While fascinating, I don't link Second Life is yet ready for prime time. You have to download and install software to use it, there is precious little guidance about what to do when you enter the world, let alone find any interesting destinations, and the graphics are clunky. But when they improve on those things and get the game to run in a browser so you don't have to install software, Second Life has fantastic potential.

The marketing opportunities an easy-to-use and widely popular virtual world presents are limitless. Organizations such as Reuters, BBC Radio 1, and Wired magazine, Microsoft and Dell and Sun Microsystems, and Major League Baseball have set up shop there.

Right now, unless you've got tons of cash to spend on development and real world marketing, Second Life seems good for generating earned media, such as Duran Duran's presence there. The 80s band had been all but forgotten until they generated publicity through Second Life.

  William Gibson Reads From Spook Country 
  Originally uploaded by Head_First_Only

I recently ran across the video below on YouTube that illustrates the public relations dividends of a Second Life presence.

William Gibson is one of my favorite authors. He's been called a cyberpunk novelist because his stories take place largely on "the grid" and visualize a dystopic future in which the distinction between online and off is practically meaningless. (My favorites of his oeuvre are Neuromancer and Mona Lisa Overdrive. ) Gibson coined the term "cyberspace."

A reading by William Gibson from his new book Spook Country, then, is a perfect fit for Second Life and a perfect opportunity for product placement within that virtual world. But the event also, as demonstrated in the video below,  is given a "second life" online, as a viral video that promotes the new book.

Product placement can work in Second Life but it can't be forced; it's gotta feel natural. In this case, with William Gibson, it makes eminent sense.

William Gibson Reads From Spook Country In Second Life

Communications 2.0 - Establishing Expertise With Yahoo! Answers

This is the eleventh part of a presentation Ann Treacy and I gave on Web 2.0 technologies, called Communications 2.0. We presented to a nonprofit communications class at Hamline University.

The eleventh segment discusses establishing your expertise by marketing yourself or your organization by providing answers using services such as Yahoo! Answers:

See also:

• Communications 2.0 - The Theory Of Web 2.0 - Part 1
• Communications 2.0 - Flickr Photo Sharing Marketing - Part 2
• Communications 2.o - Podcasting & Podcast Marketing - Part 3
• Communications 2.0 - Viral Video Marketing - Part 4
• Communications 2.0 - Social Bookmarks Marketing - Part 5
• Communications 2.0 - RSS Marketing - Part 6
• Communications 2.0 - Blog Search Engine Marketing With Technorati - Part 7
• Communications 2.0 - Microblogging & Text & Instant Message Marketing With Twitter - Part 8
• Communications 2.0 - Marketing With Google Docs - Part 9
• Communications 2.0 - Event Marketing With Google Calendar & Upcoming.org - Part 10

Communications 2.0 - Flickr Photo Sharing Marketing

This is the second part of a presentation Ann Treacy and I gave on Web 2.0 technologies, called Communications 2.0. We presented to a nonprofit communications class at Hamline University.

The second part discusses photo sharing marketing through such services as Flickr:

See also:

• Communications 2.0 - The Theory Of Web 2.0

Photo Sharing Marketing

The New York Times ran a review of photo sharing sites this week but focused primarily on the consumer service aspect of such sites, rather than their community features. That wasn't the purpose of the article of course but it is exactly the sharing aspect of these sites that offer marketing opportunities.

The following sites are the most popular photo sharing sites, according to Hitwise:

• Photobucket - Owned by MySpace
• Yahoo! Photos - Slated to be closed
• Flickr - Owned by Yahoo!
• Slide
• Kodak Gallery

Kodak Gallery does not have social networking features and neither does Photobucket but because it was recently bought by the premier pure social networking site, MySpace, it is certainly possible for social networking features to be added to the service.

Hitwise lists Photobucket as the most popular photo sharing site with 41% of the market. As noted above, Yahoo! Photos will be shut down in favor of Flickr.  Assuming most of the Yahoo! Photos users migrate to Flickr, that makes Flickr the second most popular photo sharing site with 10% of the market, but the most popular site with social networking features. The following are a few other photo sites with social networking features:

• Picasa - Owned by Google
• Webshots
• Zooomr
• Smugmug

So how do you use these sites for marketing? Let's use an example. Let's say your company sells model trains. With a digital camera, you can easily photograph your inventory and create a catalog of digital photos.

Search Optimizing Your Photos With Tags

Click to enlarge.
Highlighted areas are editable.

Once you upload your photos to a photo sharing site, you'll be able to create a title, add a caption, and apply keywords--or tags--to your photo. The primary method by which users of photo sharing sites find the photographs that interest them is by using the site's search function. The search function will look for any text that is associated with the photo in order to return relevant results for the person conducting the search. (I've included an example of the edit page on Flickr to the right. Click on the photo to enlarge it. The highlighted areas are editable.)

Therefore, it is important that you use keywords that people will most likely use when searching for your photos. So, someone interested in model trains will probably search for that phrase when they are looking for photographs of model trains. If they are a collector, they might also search for specific brands of models of model trains. Use your keywords in your title, caption, and tags so that people can find your photos.

Conversational Marketing On Photo Sharing Sites

Many of the photo sharing sites give you tools to build communities among their users. You can often create a group. So in the case of our model train business, you could start and host a group about model trains in which you and/or the members of the group could post and discuss photos. 

By doing a search for model trains, you can find other users of the site who have tagged their photos with those keywords; invite them to your group! Post new photos of your inventory and lead a discussion about the product, its features, whatever will capture your group's imagination. All the while, you're reminding people of your business.

Most of the sites also allow users to post comments on individual photos in exactly the same way that blogs allow readers to comment. Find other people talking about model trains and participate; get known as the "model train expert."

Branding, Then Sharing Your Photos

Most photo sites give you control over the degree to which people can use your photos, often using the creative commons copyright alternative. You can let users download photos, post photos to their blogs, etc. Our model train company might want to brand their photos with the company logo and web site address and then give users wide latitude to use the photos. If they download the photos, they might use them as their computer's wallpaper, giving you a great branding tool.

If you allow people to post photos to their blogs (it's usually with attribution and a link back to your photo site profile), you're extending the reach of the photos beyond just the photo sharing site. It's more likely than not that the blogger will be writing something enthusiastic about the photo, casting your brand in a positive light.

Sweat Equity

Sound like a lot of work? It is. But, if you're a Mac user, you can make your life a lot easier by using the very nice (and free) PictureSync utility. It's a little piece of software that lets you simultaneously batch upload your optimized photos to multiple photo sharing sites. A Windows version is currently in development.

The model train company example obviously doesn't apply to everyone but there's no reason you can't figure out how to make these sites work for you.

Be creative!

The End Of Television Advertising

I've been thinking a lot about television advertising because I haven't really been paying that much attention to TV ads lately.

I am a big fan of good TV ads but the problem is now, if I want to watch one, I have to remember to push Play as I'm skipping through them on my DVR. My current media diet is almost entirely time-shifted. About the only things I'm certain to watch live are sporting events and breaking news.

That's the major malfunction television as an advertising medium is increasingly suffering.

TV ads as blocks of content separate and apart and interruptive of non-advertising content is an art that must die or simply find another distribution channel because it is increasingly clear that it no longer works in it's present form.

Perhaps the 15-, 30-, and 60-second ad spot can survive and even thrive as an entertaining marketing vehicle consumed on company web sites or as pasteable blog fodder or video uploads at the YouTubes of the world.

Considering that in such a trackable environment where the audience is most likely watching the ad because they want to, I can only guess that they'd be that much more effective.

Broadband Internet access is quickly becoming ubiquitous. TV-centric, Internet-ready entertainment devices as the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3 video game consoles are poised to become the focal point of the high definition home entertainment future. Microsoft's Media Center software streams music and movies from your computer to your home entertainment system.

And, finally, with devices such as Sony's LocationFree player for the PlaySation Portable, you'll be able to place-shift as well as time-shift by watching the contents of your DVR on your PSP through a wireless Internet connection. Entertainment on demand, whereever you are. 

What all this adds up to the eventual merging of the television, the home PC, and the mobile device and all connected through the Internet.

In that environment, the old fashioned 20th century TV spot is dead but a new form of interactive product placement could well thrive.

The fact that product placement is already becoming much more common is a testament to the fact that Tivo is destroying the traditional TV ad. (Last Sunday, a promo for the new Ice Age movie was written directly into the script of The Family Guy).

There's really no reason that we can't eventually have entirely interactive television so that we could click on or in some way manipulate products that are placed in our entertainment programming, in order to get more information about that product.

Such a marketing vehicle would satisfy consumers because they would decide when or if their show would be interrupted and it would satisfy marketers because there would be an addtional measurement metric by which they could judge effectiveness and they could more easily and effectively find qualified leads.

Technorati tags: television advertising | tv ads | interactive television | interactive tv ads | product placement | interactive product placement | dvr | tivo | time shifting | place shifting | on demand entertainment | microsoft | media center | xbox 360 | playstation 3 | playstation portable | psp | sony | locationfree | ice age | the famliy guy | youtube

Webcam Stars - Product Placement At YouTube

Bowiechick is a silly teenage girl who has become an online video  star of sorts. Last night, in YouTube's Most Viewed section, I found a video of her talking about breaking up with her boyfriend, which was quite amusing because she superimposed a gas mask and other things over her face. In another video she complains about her friends being mad at her because her videos are so popular on YouTube!

And that's the thing--her videos routinely get thousands, to tens and even hundreds of thousands of views. Amazing!

So I found it especially interesting when I saw her video demonstration of her Logitech Quickcam Orbit MP:

Ah, product placement! And another example of citizen marketing. Either Logitech got very lucky or they've got some very savvy people emailing Bowiechick and asking her for a webcam demonstration. Eitherway, Logitech got a great product demonstration/endorsement in front of--as of right now-- 40,260 sets of potential customer's eyeballs.

Technorati tags: bowiechick | webcam | youtube | product placement | online video | citizen marketing | online video | logitech quickcam orbit mp

Citizen Branding Through Fanboy Ads

The practically overnight popularity of YouTube and other video sharing sites has opened up a new channel in citizen marketing and branding. One result is the fanboy ad, a consumer created video advertisement that is either a variation of an already-existing corporate produced TV spot, or an entirely new idea created by a citizen.

One of the most popular videos running on Google Video for a while was a citizen-created advertisement for the Jeep Wrangler. It's a very simple piece with clean production value that looks as if it could've come out of any ad agency in the US. Except for the content: The Jeep fanboy ad consists simply of 15 seconds of a close shot of a young woman's breasts bouncing as she's driving a Wrangler. The fade-out reads: Jeep. Bouncy and Fun. Watch it:

As you can imagine, though the objectifcation aspect of the spot is potentially offensive, the spot is  probably not going to hurt  among the Wrangler's target demographic of young men. Another fanboy Jeep ad at Google Video pits the vehicle against the old arcade video game character Frogger. The clip is mildly amusing and probably works for the Wrangler's Gen X consumers.

The two Jeep fanboy ads are relatively harmless. But the citizen branding phenomenon can cut both ways, as this faux ad highlighting the difference in packaging approaches between Microsoft and Apple demonstrates:

But even this example of citizen branding is relatively benign, because it takes a general shot at Microsoft as a corporation but doesn't really criticize or rebrand any of their products. Burger King, on the other hand, may have their hands full. A search for Burger King at Google Video returns clips of the Burger King mascot strolling the beach with a bikini-clad babe, and the mascot flipping the bird in front of BK competitor stores to the tune of Men Without Hats' Safety Dance.

And there are more that you probably don't want to watch at work. This spoof of a Visa Priceless ad you definitely won't want to watch at work and it will certainly offend some people, so you've been forewarned. But it is perhaps the best example of how citizen branding can completely mess with a company's own branding efforts.

I'm not sure I know what the best response to these ads would be. It appears that for Jeep, Microsoft, Burger King, and Visa, silence is their approach and I don't know that it's not a bad response. I do know that it is a phenomenon that marketers and PR professionals need to think long and hard over, because fanboy ads are fundamentally changing the nature of product branding.

Technorati tags: viral video | viral marketing | viral branding | online video | fanboy ads | youtube | google video | jeep wrangler | frogger | microsoft | apple | burger king | visa | priceless ad | citizen branding | citizen marketing | men without hats | safety dance

Online Videos - Demographics

If you haven't yet noticed, online video has really taken off this year and it has everything to do with the success of Apple's video iPod. Once Apple introduced the product and announced that NBC would offer TV shows for download to the iPod at $1.99 a pop, the floodgates opened.

In January Apple CEO Steve Jobs revealed that more than the company had sold more than 8 million videos through iTunes between October 12 and December 31, 2005. Apple sold 14 million iPods in Q4 of 2005; that's more in one quarter than in all the years before 2005 combined. They ended the calendar year with 32 million iPods sold.

Suddenly, it seems, video is everywhere online. New video sites have popped up and we're looking anew at some online video veterans. The reason for this renassaince is two fold: We crossed the 50% threshold this year of American online broadband adoption and streaming video technology has gotten better. It just works. No more buffering or stuttering video; no more frozen frames; no more waiting; no more overly compressed pictures. By and large, online video  works as you'd expect video to work and it looks good!

At video search engines such as YouTube, Revver and Singingfish, at such longstanding online video sites like IFILM  and AtomFilms, and at Google, Yahoo, and MSN.com, visitors can watch streaming video and in some instances they can download video to their iPods or PSPs or grab code to paste the video into their blogs or web sites. At sites like YouTube and IFILM you can even upload your own video to share and Google and Revver even allows you to charge for downloads.

These sites are opening a distribution channel for a great deal of untapped creative potential and, in Google's case, giving it a marketplace. Though, as this New York Times piece points out, the quality is sometimes spotty. Their sharing features are driving a new form of viral marketing.

Count me as a converted skeptic of the viability of video on the tiny screen. I couldn't fathom that anyone would watch a feature-length film on such a tiny screen. Until I bought a Playstation Portable, that is, and watched one myself. The quality is nothing short of stunning.

If you have video assets in your organization, you should give serious thought to exploiting these new distribution channels.

Online Video Use & Demographics

In December 2005, ComScore released data from a survey of 1.5 million American consumers they conducted in August 2005 on behalf of StreamingMedia.com.

The survey found that the 35 to 54 year old age group accounted for more than 45% of all online videos watched in August 2005.  That age group is 12% more likely than the average Internet user to watch video online.

The survey also found:

• More than 100 million people use online digital media (either streams or downloads) in the United States in a month, representing nearly 60% of the American online population.
• Video use crosses all dayparts and demographics; the primtime and daytime dayparts are particularly strong.
• Nearly two-thirds of all American Internet users in August 2005 streamed audio or video through a portal and nearly 50% did so from an entertainment site.
• More than 17% of Amerrican Internet users streamed digital media from a music site.
• 15% streamed contnent from a retail site.

In October 2005, ComScore released results of their Media Metrix Online Video Ratings which they conducted in June 2005. In June, more than 94 million Americans (56% of the American online population). From April to June 2005, the average online American viewed 73 minutes of streaming video per month.

The June 2005 study also found:

• Male surfers account for 61% of all video streamers
• Men and women spend practically the same amount of time watching online video (72.4 minutes per month for men and 70.6 minutes for women).
• The 18-34 year old male American views 84 minutes of online video per month.
• For June 2005, the daytime daypart (10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.) had the most streaming activity with 18 streams per viewer.
• The Late Night daypart (1 a.m. to 7 a.m.) was the second most active time of the day with 17 streams per viewer.
• The Late Fringe daypart (11 p.m. to 1 a.m. had 15 streams per viewer.

Online Video Sites

• Google Video - Video search engine
• Yahoo! Video - Video search engine
• MSN Video  - Video search engine
• AOL Video  - Video search engine
• Singingfish  - Video search engine
• Truveo - Video search engine
• blinkx.tv - Video search engine
• YouTube -  Video sharing  site
• Revver  -  Video sharing site
• Vimeo - Video sharing site
• Ourmedia - Video sharing site
• Stupidvideos.com - Video sharing site
• Video Bomb - Video sharing site
• IFILM - Indie film site
• AtomFilms - Indie film site

Technorati tags: ipod | video ipod | online video | internet video | streaming video | video search engines | internet video use | online video use | internet video demographics | online video demographics | viral marketing

What Is Social Networking?

Leave it to Comedy Central. This Daily Show with Jon Stewart piece by Demetri Martin is the best explanation I've yet seen on social networking sites like MySpace.com. Not only is it a concise description of social networking sites, it's hilarious. Since they are basically massive online communities of interest, they bear watching.

Technorati tags: comedy central | demetri martin | daily show | jon stewart | myspace | myspace.com | social networking

Super Bowl Commercials

Hundreds of searches have been performed already in the past three months for Super Bowl commercials. That number should spike phenomenally after the Super Bowl as people go online to watch their favorite commericals from the Super Bowl again. Super Bowl ads have become nearly as much a spectator sport as the game itself.

You'd think posting them online would be a no-brainer, but, amazingly, this is the first year that people will be easily able to find all of the Super Bowl commericals online.

The online venues where you'll be able to find all the commercials are Yahoo! Video, which also features banned Super Bowl ads and other related video; AOL Sports will host all the Super Bowl advertisements; SuperBowlAds.us features ads from past Super Bowls as well as banned and cancelled commericals; as does Superbowl-Ads.com; and adland has a nice Super Bowl archive.

iFilm gets its viral groove on by giving visitors code so they can paste specific Super Bowl commericals into their blogs.

Advertisers are begining to uderstand that the Internet can extend both the lifespan and reach of their advertsing.

Super Bowl Ad Spending

Just in case you need a reminder, Super Bowl advertising is big business. TNS Media Intelligence has released the data to prove it. Fox TV earned $160 million in revenue from last year's Super Bowl; compare that to the $147 million from the four games of the World Series last year or the $142 million for the three games of the NCAA Final Four.

The top five Super Bowl advertisers by spending from 1986 to last year were 1) Anheuser Busch, spending $230.5 million, 2) Pepsico, spending $180 million, 3) General Motors, spending $55.8 million, 4) Time Warner, spending $53.4 million, and 5) Fedex Corp, spending $38.9 million.

"Each year, about 60 percent of the network TV ad money invested in the game comes from incumbent marketers who ran commercials the prior year," said Jon Swallen, senior vice president of research at TNS Media Intelligence.

The cost of a Super Bowl ad has more than quadrupled during the past twenty years. In 2005, a thirty second spot would set you back $2.4 million. This year, ABC is reportedly getting $2.5 to $2.6 million for a thirty second ad.

Teen Marketing Strategies

Data from two new surveys will help inform teen marketing strategies. The data from Forrester Reseach and BIGResearch provide insight into online teen marketing strategies.

Forrester's latest survey of Canadian and US teen consumers (21-21 years of age) reveals that more than two-thirds of of them own PCs, DVD players, home stereos, mobile phones or handheld devices and a quarter of them own MP3 players and camera- or Internet-connected or phones. Teens are overwhelmingly gamers, with more than 90% owning a gaming device, and three-quarters playing games (both online and offline) on their computer.

Forester found that teens spent an average of 11 hours per week online, compared to the 8.5 hours their adult counterparts spent online per week. Nearly 80% of teens visit games sites, close to 50% visit movie web sites and more than a third visit music sites.

An effective way of reaching these teens, then, would be through in-game advertising, advergaming, or by advertising on gaming web sites.

Finally, Forrester found that approximately half of 12 to 21 year-olds get purchase advice from their friends and family, and 65% tell others what products they like. That's seconded by a BIGResearch survey of 18 to 24 year-olds that found that Word of Mouth was the most influential media for making electronic purchases, followed by TV, Magazines, and the Internet.

These finding reinforce the point I made in my last post about online fashion marketing that online marketing aimed at teens needs to incorporate the technologies with which they are fluent.

Keyword Research On Xbox 360 Searches

One of the primary things we do for clients is conduct keyword research to determine the exact search phrases people are using to find information about their product or service.

After compiling a list of relevant search phrases, we analyze the list for volume of searches (popularity), intent (search mode: is the searcher an information seeker?, in purchase mode? etc.), and efficacy (how likely is it that we will have success using that phrase for search engine marketing given the competition and other factors?).

Recent data from Hitwise on "xbox 360" searches will give you an idea of searcher's behavior. Hitwise released the following list of "Top 10 Sites receiving traffic from the search term "xbox 360" - based on volume of searches" for the four weeks ending 12/10/2005. The following list indicates which web sites got what share of traffic from the search phrase "xbox 360."

1.	Xbox.com	22.09%
2.	Microsoft.com	6.54%
3.	news.google.com	5.08%
4.	eBay.com	4.77%
5.	Atomicpark.com	4.14%
6.	xbox360.ign.com	2.53%
7.	MSN.com	2.29%
8.	Shoplocal.com	1.98%
9.	Bizrate.com	1.95%
10.	Walmart.com	1.83%

Based on the top 10 sites that people chose to go to after searching for "xbox 360," we determine several things. The top 10 sites can be divided into two general categories: informational and ecommerce. The preponderance of the searches were informational, with most people going to Microsoft-owned sites Xbox.com, Microsoft.com and MSN.com. That's unsurprising, given that the Xbox 360 is a Microsoft product. We also know that a subset of the information seekers looked specifically for news about the Xbox 360 because of the traffic to Google's news search engine and the traffic to the video game web site published by IGN.

The remaining sites are ecommerce-related. Even if we hadn't seen the news about Xbox 360 shortages, we could have gotten a hint that there were shortages because eBay was the top ecommerce site people visited. Why would people buy a product at a site where the price is not fixed unless supplies were scarce?

Atomic Park is primarily a software site but also sells Xbox 360s, so their traffic is probably a combination of people wanting to buy the actual console and people looking for information on Xbox 360 games.

Bizrate is a price comparison search engine, so the traffic to that site consists of people looking for a deal.

Shoplocal, as the name implies, is a site where you can find stores near you and, so, their traffic is fairly self-explanatory: Those people are trying to find a store in their neighborhood where they can buy an Xbox 360. The same might be said for Walmart, one of the official Xbox 360 retailers, because they have a store locator on their site.

Finally, when you look at the Xbox 360 searches in the three major search engines: Google, Yahoo, and MSN.com, you'll notice that the ecommerce sites are not listed in the "natural" search engine results but that they are heavy advertisers in the sponsored sections of the search results page. That tells us that most, if not all, of their traffic is coming from pay-per-click search engine advertising.

Google's Interest In Mobile Computing

Google annouced yesterday that it would raise $4 billion with a new stock offering, the New York Times reports today.

The Times story largely focuses on speculation of just what the tight-lipped search titan would buy with the new money. The article suggests that the company will move into businesses beyond Web search and advertising. The speculation in the article includes buying Web properties in foreign markets, or getting into the telecommunications market, or getting into the content business.  The thinking is that Google will need to expand the breadth of its business in order to compete Yahoo! and MSN.

Since everyone seems to be speculating, let me do a bit of my own.

The article mentions that there was some speculation about Google considering "a 'Google phone'  to allow its search service to be accessible to mobile Internet users" and went on to mention that the company had recently acquired mobile software company Android, Inc., and along with it, Andy Rubin, who founded Android and was a founder of Danger, Inc. 

Glaringly absent from the article, however, was the fact that Danger, Inc. is the company that developed the exceedingly popular cell phone/handheld available through T-Mobile, the Sidekick II.

The Sidekick is a cell phone/PDA with text messaging, Web, instant messaging, and e-mail access. I bought one specifically for what it meant to the future of mobile marketing. The device definitely has a "cool" factor going for it, with it's spin-out screen. But Danger has also done a superb job at product placement. At launch, they wooed young celebrities to use their product. T-Mobile weighed in with commercials featuring Snoop Dogg and other personalities. I've seen the product on Fox's Arrested Development and it's part of the story line of HBO's show, Entourage.

The signficance of the hiring of Andy Rubin, a man with intimate experience with the Sidekick in particular, should not be underestimated. The stunningly well-designed Sidekick is the best example of the current generation of mobile Internet devices that points most clearly to the future. The future is a consolidation of all devices into one Internet-accessible device. The Sidekick II comes closer than anyone to doing that; the only thing it doesn't do is play video/audio files, which, you gotta admit, is a major shortcoming. Yet the point still holds.

A "Google phone" may or may not be in the offing (and, by the way, Google properties work just find on my Sidekick, so they don't necessarily need a "Google phone"). But at the very least, it suggests what direction Google thinks mobile computing will take.

Product Placement In Madden NFL 06

In 1994, the neo-punk band Green Day broke onto the popular music scene with their album Dookie, several songs from which enjoyed quite a bit of airtime on radio stations nationwide. Since then, the band has not enjoyed simliar commecial success until last year's run-away success, American Idiot. That success could very well be due in no small part to their decision to debut the title track on Electronic Arts' franchise video game, Madden NFL 2005.

EA has sold more than 43 million units of the video game worldwide, 6 million of which were the 2005 version. No wonder, then, that the game's popularity, especially among 18-to-34-year-old males, has become a high-profile platform from which to introduce new music and new bands.

Madden NFL 06 is no exception. this year's version includes established acts such as the Foo Fighters and Godsmack as well as serveral songs that are exclusive releases for the game. See the full soundtrack at Madden06.com.

According to an NFL Network show, The Making of Madden (watch part 1 and part 2, Steve Schnur, EA's Vice President of Music, says that approximately 2,500 to 3,000 bands are considered for Electronic Arts titles and that the bands are coming to them from all over the world, lobbying to be included in their games. "At the end of the day, I hear band after band after band from years past say they go to show after show and kids come up to them and say, 'Dude, the first time I heard you was in Madden,'" Schnur continued. David Draiman of the band Distrubed, says "Every band out there needs to start considering what video games and the whole format can do for them."

The fact that video games are played over and over again, make them the ideal substitute for the radio airplay they displace.