Month: February 2010

Updated: Google to Air “Search Stories” Ad During Super Bowl…

Remember when I wrote about the new "Search Stories" ads for Google's core search offerings?In that post, I noted "It's truly a brand campaign: Google is not selling anything here other than its own brand – that ephemeral sensibility that resides between its customers' ears." Well I've got a pretty…

Remember when I wrote about the new “Search Stories” ads for Google’s core search offerings?

In that post, I noted “It’s truly a brand campaign: Google is not selling anything here other than its own brand – that ephemeral sensibility that resides between its customers’ ears.” Well I’ve got a pretty reliable source who is telling me Google plans to hit the branded advertising big leagues this Sunday – the source says Google’s “Parisian Love” ad (below) will air during the third quarter of the Super Bowl.

Now that would be a true turning point for the brand – a brand that, for nearly ten years, dismissed brand advertising as a waste of money (“The last bastion of unaccountable spending in corporate America,” in Eric Schmidt’s words back in 2006), and built its entire fortune on turning the advertising model upside down.

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The Friday Signal: It’s The Platform, Not the Bowl

Friday is all about the biggest event in television marketing – the Super Bowl. This year (as I've noted here before) I'm struck by how many campaigns are integrated with longer term social marketing platforms. That's putting the investment to good use – promoting what I call a media annuity…

Screen shot 2010-02-05 at 8.35.37 AM.pngFriday is all about the biggest event in television marketing – the Super Bowl. This year (as I’ve noted here before) I’m struck by how many campaigns are integrated with longer term social marketing platforms. That’s putting the investment to good use – promoting what I call a media annuity that will pay back all year long. However, much of the press and some of the marketing still gets it backwards – they see the Super Bowl as something that social media “builds buzz for.” Nope. It’s the other way round, folks. Your brand, which after all is what you’re buying the ad for, right? – your brand lives all year long on the platform you create. That platform is social, mobile, real time. The Super Bowl ad should drive that platform, not BE it.

Super Bowl Advertisers Are MIA on Facebook (ClickZ)

Google to Super Bowl Markters – Give Us Your Ads- and Your Dollars (Forbes)

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Thursday Signal: Are You Checked In?

Today is all about checking in. Not so much driven by anything in today's news, but every week or so I'll just go off based on what's on my mind – driven by the news, to be sure, but also by the bricolage of a lot of inputs over…

Screen shot 2010-02-04 at 11.08.18 AM.png Today is all about checking in. Not so much driven by anything in today’s news, but every week or so I’ll just go off based on what’s on my mind – driven by the news, to be sure, but also by the bricolage of a lot of inputs over time.   

And over the past few weeks, I’ve been developing a thesis around the concept of “checking in.” Now for those of you not playing along at home, “checking in” is the terminology for “declaring where I am and what I’m doing through mobile devices and social media platforms.”

As usual, I’m a late bloomer in this new trend. I joined Foursquare, one of several check-in-based services, about a month ago. I’ve started checking in at work, the gym, various restaurants and local businesses. The service has a strong game element, with social capital earned for checking in, or doing more than one thing in a day, or unlocking action-based “badges,” or repeat check ins over time (Foursquare makes you “Mayor” of a location if you check in there the most. Competition amongst Foursquare nerds is pretty intense for those Mayorships.)

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Weds. Signal

Traveling to a marketing conference in Scottsdale today, so here's the roundup from last night's best headlines: Facebook Marketing Goes to the Super Bowl (InsideFacebook) Over and over again, we are reminded that this is the year the Superbowl ad becomes an adjunct to an ongoing social media platform. Good….

201002022222.jpgTraveling to a marketing conference in Scottsdale today, so here’s the roundup from last night’s best headlines:

Facebook Marketing Goes to the Super Bowl (InsideFacebook) Over and over again, we are reminded that this is the year the Superbowl ad becomes an adjunct to an ongoing social media platform. Good.

More Than Half Of Mobile Pageviews Are To Social Networking Sites (BI) This in no way is a surprise but it’s worth reiterating: social drives mobile drives social drives mobile drives location drives mobile drives content consumption drives brands.

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The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Social Search Engine

The folks at Aardvark have posted an ambitious paper over on the 'vark blog. Titled after Brin and Page's original “Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine”, the paper presents the Aardvark engine and, in its authors' words: "describes the fundamental differences between the traditional “Library” paradigm of web…

Screen shot 2010-02-02 at 6.02.56 PM.pngThe folks at Aardvark have posted an ambitious paper over on the ‘vark blog. Titled after Brin and Page’s original “Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine”, the paper presents the Aardvark engine and, in its authors’ words: “describes the fundamental differences between the traditional “Library” paradigm of web search — in which answers are found in existing online content — and the new “Village” paradigm of social search — in which answers arise in conversation with the people in your network.”

I have read most of the paper, which has been accepted at WWW 2010 (it reminded me of all the search papers I read in preparation for writing The Search), and found a lot worthy of interest.

First, the paper’s authors, both of whom have worked at Google, clearly have a sense of potential history here, in that they not only crib Google’s original paper’s title, they also mirror the first line (substituting “Aardvark” for “Google”, of course). Now that’s some b*lls. Of course, when Larry and Sergey first presented Google, they couldn’t even get their paper accepted (it took three tries, if I recall correctly. Someone should write a book about that…).

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Tuesday Signal

A quick set of headlines today, more coming later, after a morning PTA meeting…. Google Is Wrecking DoubleClick, Says Unhappy Client (GOOG) (Business Insider) I'm a DBCLK client and this does not ring true for me, though of course there are always issues with any major business relationship. Forget Common…

A quick set of headlines today, more coming later, after a morning PTA meeting….

Google Is Wrecking DoubleClick, Says Unhappy Client (GOOG) (Business Insider) I’m a DBCLK client and this does not ring true for me, though of course there are always issues with any major business relationship.

Forget Common Sense: Social Media Communicators Must Have Empathy (Shannon Paul) I feel this one.

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Monday Signal

Happy Monday, folks. Today is all about poker. Over the weekend, the buzz was hearsay about Steve Jobs' distaste for Google and its 'don't be evil' mantra, as well as for Adobe and its Flash technology (this is all second hand reporting from Wired and other sources, repeating what…

Screen shot 2010-02-01 at 8.20.53 AM.png

Happy Monday, folks. Today is all about poker. Over the weekend, the buzz was hearsay about Steve Jobs’ distaste for Google and its ‘don’t be evil’ mantra, as well as for Adobe and its Flash technology (this is all second hand reporting from Wired and other sources, repeating what Jobs reputedly said at a Friday town hall for Apple employees. The story became instantly reported “news” all over the blogosphere.)

Whether or not the sources got their quotes right, what’s really interesting is the Texas Hold’em playing out across the computing, media, and Internet industries. Apple, Google, Adobe, and others (including Microsoft) are playing their hands as each market card is revealed. New standards are tested (HTML5), old standards are questioned (Flash), new devices are introduced (Droid, iPad), and old alliances are shattered (Google, Apple – it was less than a year ago that Schmidt was on Jobs’ board, recall?).

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