Weblog Consulting Register Login Subscribe to Free Influx Emails Join our Facebook Group Branding Street Cred Technology Lifestyle Style Entertainment Interviews Art InfluxTV Map Widgets RSS — All Subjects RSS — More Feeds

Search

Advanced Search

Contact Privacy Policy

Whenever a media appears on the horizon, someone comes up with a way to make money out of those eyeballs/viewers and it doesn't always have the brand's or the ad industry's best interests at heart.

Although we are supposedly in a Brand 2.0 world, most of the thinking still seems to come from the C20th industrial age, it doesn't treat consumers with any respect and has no desire to deliver or provide interaction or engagement.

It's basically Spam; a mutation of Viagra emails.

Here's a case.

Some of the most popular applications on Facebook are games.

Since Facebook now has in excess of 100 million users, that's a lot of eyeballs and and a lot of opportunity to make money.

Many of the games are very addictive, some even generate 60 page views per user/day.

These gamers need points, rewards, favors to make it through the game and to the top of the leader board. This is where the ads come in; in return for taking up an offer, getting a free quote or signing on for a trial subscription, you get "the crack" of those favor points.



In the heat of the game, most gamers are willing to do pretty much anything to get an advantage, even if it means getting a free insurance quote.

For the brands, they are are hardly qualified leads and have nothing to do with engagement.

Nothing to do with 2.0.

Here's the disconnect, despite all the talk of engagement, conversations, etc in this Brand 2.0 space, most of the efforts still work on the interruption model.

They either disturb consumers at a moment when they don't want to be disturbed, or they are open to abuse because they offer something of greater value to the user at the moment, than the products or services they provide.




Posted by Ed Cotton Blyk is a UK mobile phone service targeted at the 16-24 year old market. Instead of users paying for the service, they agree to receive 6 ads a day, this seems to fly in the face of conventional thinking.

I have often written about the privacy invasion problems of advertising on cellphones, but this Blyk is looking like a big success in advertising terms and in the build out of an installed base.

The advertising appears to be performing amazingly well, the network has achieved an average 29% response rate for the close to 500 campaigns it's run to date. The advertising success is due to the format, Blyk sends text and picture messages to its user base who see it as part of a conversation and don't have the hassle of browsing around mobile websites.

The company's installed base in the UK currently numbers 100K.

Advertisers seem to find the opportunities of brand conversation and interaction appealing with the likes of Adidas, Ford, L'Oreal, McDonald's all participating.

It appears Blyk is worth looking at for mobile operators and MVNOs in the US who are struggling to find ways of adding advertising revenue.

Blyk has looked at its whole model from the perspective of the user and provides the low-cost service that this demographic requires and thinks about advertising as an on-going information-rich conversation that the user interacts with, rather than simply media placement to grab eyeballs.

Posted by Ed Cotton When a top VC says there is too much video content (See WSJ-Kara Swisher's interview with Roelof Botha of Sequoia- below), there's certainly a problem out there. It seems to be getting worse, which is making it so much harder for virals to break through and ads to be seen. This is clearly the motivation behind the Publicis/Droga initiative to build a "YouTube" for ads. The battle for attention, really sucks.


Posted by Ed Cotton