Month: December 2003

When I saw this ad, I knew I was watching the future of online video advertising unfold.

THE MESSAGE
Downloading the Future of TV Advertising
With a plink and a plunk and 86 moving parts, Honda reminds the ad world of the value of great content — and teaches it something about the power of interactivity.

By John Battelle, July 2003 Issue

In April 2003, Honda U.K. debuted an extraordinary two-minute television advertisement called “Cog.”Through the simple act of releasing a remarkable television commercial onto the Web, the U.K. wing of automobile giant Honda (HMC) has unleashed something of a typhoon in the advertising business. Though it has yet to fully play out, Honda’s ad proves the value of content and could stand as a turning point in the history of the television spot — proof that interactivity won’t kill television advertising, as many are now predicting, but may instead be instrumental in saving it.

Back in April, Honda U.K. debuted an extraordinary two-minute television advertisement called “Cog.” Aired only in the United Kingdom, the film — and that really is the best term for it — is a Rube Goldbergian ballet, a synchronized dance of 86 distinct parts from a Honda Accord that roll, pirouette, and fly along the floor in a mesmerizing production of meticulously intended consequence. The spot begins with a sequence of three cogs rolling along a plank; one falls to the floor, and a cam shaft rolls, setting an exhaust tube slowly spinning, which knocks three precisely placed grommets down the slope of a hood, and so on. (Download the ad for yourself at Honda UK.)
(more via link below)

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Oh, if only we had this three years ago, at thestandard.com…

THE MESSAGE
Putting Online Ads in Context
Overture and Google have figured out how to sell the Web. Paid search has already saved Yahoo — and your business might be next.

By John Battelle, June 2003 Issue

The long-awaited “30-second spot for the Web” — a way for ads to finally work online – may well be at hand. Overture (OVER), the company some say saved Yahoo’s (YHOO) bacon, will shortly roll out a service that opens up the entire Web to a new form of advertising. “It’s potentially revolutionary,” says Scott Moore, who oversees Slate and MSNBC.com for Microsoft (MSFT). How revolutionary? Moore says using Overture’s new service, or one like it, could well push his sites to sustained profitability.

The breakthrough, which I’ll call “contextual advertising,” involves commercial links that appear adjacent to relevant content on websites. Say you’re at Caranddriver.com, reading a review of the Acura MDX. In place of banners for everything from cell phones to cars you don’t care about, you would see paid text links advertising the Acura website, the Edmunds auto comparison site, and leasing companies vying for your business. These are the same links you’d see if you typed “Acura MDX” into Overture’s client portals, like MSN or Yahoo.

Google also plays in this new market with an offering called “content-targeted advertising.” The beauty of both is their ease of use for publishers: Overture and Google automatically analyze the publishers’ pages and insert relevant links on the fly. All the publishers have to do is collect a check. It’s close to manna from heaven.
(more by clicking on link below)

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For this piece, I daydreamed about how TiVo might be saved by Steve Jobs. I wish this were the case. With cable coming on strong, I am not feeling so cheery about TiVo’s chances.

THE MESSAGE
Is TiVo NeXT?
The beleaguered personal video recorder company is ripe for an Apple takeover.

By John Battelle, May 2003 Issue

Everyone who has TiVo (TIVO) loves TiVo; it is to television what Macintosh was to computing — a revelation. Which is exactly why Apple (AAPL) should buy TiVo and once again redefine the intersection of culture and technology.

Folks love TiVo for the same reason they loved the Mac in 1984 and the iPod in 2001: It gives control back to the end user. TiVo viewers call the shots regarding when, how, and — soon — even where they watch. Once content or access is purchased, the end user is in charge, just like with the iPod.

But unlike the iPod, TiVo and systems like it are in serious trouble. The culprit is the entertainment industry. TiVo has an abeyant Napster-like quality — and the content business is scared silly that it will not only destroy advertising revenues but become the platform for video swapping on the Internet. Case in point: A coalition of entertainment companies recently sued TiVo competitor Sonicblue into bankruptcy.
(more by clicking on link below)

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I wrote this a year ago (there’s a three-month lag from writing to pub date with monthly magazines). I was sick of the press hammering the internet, with the presumption that everything we did over the past four years was a waste. Turns out, it wasn’t.

THE MESSAGE
Alive and Well
From content providers to dog-food retailers, Internet business has moved to a new stage of stable growth. That’s the real story — so why aren’t we hearing it?

By John Battelle, March 2003 Issue

Any avid reader of the business press has seen endless variations on this tired theme: Internet business is dead. It was all a dot-con, and it dot-bombed.
Eager for an easy target and brimming with schadenfreude, many business reporters (and a few opportunistic book authors) continue to tear down the Net with nearly the same enthusiasm they displayed while building it up. But the facts tell a different story.
Let’s start with the flashing VCR clock of all dot-bomb maxims, the Internet pet-food industry. There’s no better proof of dotcom stupidity than the fact that venture capitalists funded not one but at least four pet-food websites at the same time. Thank God for us all, they are dead.
Except … they’re not. In fact, type “buy pet food” into Google and you’ll get scores of active merchants selling pet food online. I put in a call to one of them, Geoffrey Walker, CEO of PetFoodDirect.com. Surprise: His business grew 22 percent last year, and he expects similar growth this year. In fact, he and his three or four biggest competitors — yup, there are still that many players in this category — are all doing well. As for Pets.com, the now-defunct Sock Puppet company, Walker is thrilled about all that exposure, which let consumers know that they no longer had to lug around 40-pound bags of kibble. Pets.com now redirects to Petsmart (PETM), whose stock price has rung up a 44 percent increase since a year ago. Woof! (for more click link below)

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(As long as I’m posting site notes, if you can’t see a picture in the upper left hand corner, make your browser wider by pulling the lower right hand corner to the right till the picture shows up….ahh, that’s better).

So take note, a blizzard of posts (well, about a dozen or so) will follow, and you may want to simply ignore them for the next little while.