A little while ago another newspaper group filed for bankruptcy. Freedom Communications, which runs the Orange County Register and a collection of 100 more newspapers across the country, joined Tribune Co. (operators of the other big local paper – The LA Times) and 4 other newspapers in bankruptcy court.

The problem is declining advertising revenue. The auto industry, one of the biggest buyers of newspaper ads, is in the tank. Craigslist et al have devastated the classified monopolies that provided huge profit margins for newspapers in days gone by.

This trend is not restricted to newspapers. TV is seeing the problem as well. According to Jack Myers, an industry consultant:

“2010 advertising spending is heading toward record-setting declines of 13% to 15% in 2009, according to the new Jack Myers Media Business Report forecast due to be released to subscribers September 14.”

And the trend is not just an offline phenomenon, online the price advertisers are willing to pay for impressions is dropping as well. Consider the following from the media focused MultiTasker

Cost-per-thousand ad impressions for online publishers are generally off about 20%, according to several people on both the buying and selling side, and sell-through rates are dropping. And where publishers used to unload 60% of their inventory, some are now able to sell only 30%.

What we are seeing is the law of supply and demand at work. The amount of available advertising space is growing fast and much faster than the demand. When supply goes up faster than demand that means prices will drop. And prices for impressions are dropping fast.

That means that anyone who tries to make a living by selling advertising impressions is going to feel the hurt. Offline, online – it doesn’t matter. Impression based advertising prices will continue to drop fast for just about everyone.

There will be exceptions. Big events will command good prices for impressions and may even do better. There is only one Super Bowl, one Academy Awards, etc. These will be situations where what is being bought is actually getting scarcer. Huge audiences all gather in one place at one time. This is what big TV shows used to be able to do. Now, that is the exception, and therefore will will likely see impression pricing rise for this shrinking segment.

Some will also point to Google as an exception. But in fact Google doesn’t make its money by selling advertising impressions, they make their money from people who pay them for potential leads (people who click on the ads). For the most part, you don’t pay for impressions on Google, you pay for clicks. In fact, Google won’t even let you get huge amounts of impressions without your ad being highly relevant to topic. Just do a search on any celebrity and for the most part you won’t see any ads, with the exception of Bing ads (Microsoft must has given Google a lot of money to promote Bing.) No, Google’s revenues are not driven by the economics of impressions, their revenues are driven by the economics of lead generation.

It is time for every media company to figure out life beyond impression based advertising. If you think you are going to make your living by selling advertising impressions, stop and think of something else.

I believe we are seeing the collapse of an media era driven by the economics of impressions and the emergence of an era that will be based on the economics of community.

Media is a beautiful social object. We love to watch, listen, talk about it, play with it. Media has the power to draw us together, and that can be used to create community.

We can and should recast the discussion from economics of impressions to the economics of communities. And what are the economics of communities? They are micro-economies where trade, commerce and personal interaction are all intermingled with each other.

I’m not talking about clicking on someone’s purse in a web show so you can buy it (although that might work), I’m talking about create real economies where consumers can trade with other consumers and trade with the media creators. Who knows what the audience will buy or sell. We won’t know until we see it. Our job is to find ways to enable it.

Here are 7 steps I think every publisher should be taking.

1. Cherish your audience – Your audience is your most precious asset. It should be cherished as such. Without your audience you are just a tree that falls in the woods with no one to hear it. Your audience is what makes what you do possible.
2. Engage your audience with you and each other – Don’t just talk to your audience, listen, listen and listen some more. Find out what they enjoy. Find out what their problems are. Make it easy for them to talk to each other and listen in on what they have to say. A good engaged audience will give you enormous number of clues as to how you can serve them better.
3. Serve your audience – It is through the gift of service that we show each other how much we care. If you serve effectively, the audience will respond. Some will seek more and more from you which will provide the opportunity to provide them with premium services and products.
4. Think like a marketer – It’s time to realize that marketing and publishing are merging. Brands now publish, publishers now market. Marketing may be new skill for publishers, but it will a major element in there survival. There are lots of ways to make money from publishing that have nothing to do with selling impression based ads. I mapped out ten ideas here that any publisher can pursue. Fundamentally, it’s about taking charge of your own destiny.
5. De-average your pricing – It’s time to stop selling every album at $13.99. Some will pay nothing, some will pay vastly more. Segment your offerings into free samples, low cost bite size morsels and really premium products (eg, personalized, autographed posters included, limited editions etc). Check out what Nine Inch Nails have done to see the power of de-averaging.
6. Give them games – Great games are addictive and bring your audience back even when you have nothing new in the way of content. It also gives you the opportunity to introduce virtual currencies and sell virtual goods, a massive untapped revenue opportunity.
7. Invest in a trading platform – There is a great deal of money to be made enabling trade amongst your audience. Just look at eBay – it’s a huge community that is monetized through a trading platform. I’m sure some members of your audience have things to trade and if you can take a small commission on the trade, or use your virtual currency the cash can add up.

These are my thoughts, what about yours? Is the future hopeless for media? Do you think media companies can make money in the future? What other steps should publishers be taking.

 

 7 Steps for Surviving the Banruptcy of the Impression Economy [10:54m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

I spoke with Susan Bratton, CEO of Personal Life Media, the other day and Susan told me about an exciting new widget that they are launching. Normally, I wouldn’t pay much attention to a new widget, but this one seems really interesting because it introduces a new distribution mechanism for downloadable media that has the potential to make downloadable media much more attractive to advertisers.

By way of background, Susan told me that they were working on ways to connect more effectively with brand advertisers and found real interest from the marketers in putting content from Personal Life Media right on the brand marketers’ web sites.  That led to the development of Personal Life Media’s new brandable player widget which can be loaded with up to five RSS feeds for audio podcasts and customized by color and size to match any web site.  Just like most widgets, the player can be embedded in blogs, Facebook, Myspace and anywhere else you want to use it.  Not only can you customize the player, the widget enables the the brand to be the exclusive sponsor of the podcast content in the customized player.

Imagine the new pitch to advertisers, we give you content you can use on your site, you get your own branded player that your enthusiast supporters can reuse and you get to the be the exclusive advertiser on content played through the branded player.  This gives the marketers some really interesting new ways to engage visitors to the site and gives Personal Life Media the ability to reuse its content on other players with different marketing programs.

At launch, they will have a number of brands using the widget including

• AccuQuote has integrated their “Life Insurance Podcast” along with four shows from Personal Life Media including “Aging Gratefully,” “GreenTalk Radio,” “Living Green” and “Coaching by the Life Coach.”  The player can be found on their multimedia page and their corporate blog.
• CardScan is distributing “Evolutionary Sales,” “Conscious Business,” “Money, Mission and Meaning,” and “Coaching by the Life Coach” in their customized player.
• Oceanus Naturals is providing “Just For Women,” “Tantra & Kama Sutra,” “Sex Love & Intimacy,” “Expanded Lovemaking” and “Fearless Lover” to site http://oceanusnaturals.com site visitors.
• Sinclair Institute is offering a series of five relationship shows on their Sinclair University site at http://www.bettersex.com/t-bsu-university.aspx.
• Zen by Design, makers of meditation chairs, is featuring “Buddhist Geeks,” “The New Man,” “Living Dialogues,” “Living Green” and “GreenTalk Radio” on their site at http://zenbydesign.com along with a group of relationship shows on http://tantrachair.com.
• Music discovery publisher IndieFeed is using two customized players to distribute their 7 weekly music shows on Facebook and MySpace in addition to offering the widget for their fans to get and share for free at http://indiefeed.com.

Even more exciting is that Personal Life Media is making this brandable player available to other podcasters. Here’s a sample of the player I built using their widget builder.

Powered by Personal Life Media

According to the press release:

The widget creator at http://personallifemedia.com/widget is free for any company, podcaster or content fan. Fees may be involved if a marketer wants to offer shows from Personal Life Media that exclusively feature the brand’s messages. Otherwise, the shows will feature existing sponsor’s ads.

Three simple steps customize your player:

1. Select up to five RSS feeds for audio podcasts.
2. Customize the player’s color and background, pick a size and add a logo.
3. Click “Get” and insert it directly on a blog, website and more than 20 social media services.  Any time a visitor to the brand’s site wants to “get” the widget for their own site, blog or social media page, the sponsor’s logo will be displayed along with the podcasts that include the sponsor’s marketing messages.

I look forward to seeing how this changes the way marketers think about downloadable media.

If you follow digital media, you’ve heard a lot about the importance of creating and measuring audience engagement (Forrester’s recent marketing conference centered on engagement – see our posts). After all, the difference between broadcast media and interactive media is the interaction part. But most engagement conversations focus on audience interaction with linear content – viewing, commenting, and sharing.

Imagine instead that as a member of the audience you were part of the action – you enter the video, talk to the characters, and they talk back to you. Or that the story was about you and your family members. Or that the characters in commercials cared about what you have to say instead of just shouting at you.

We’re not as far as you might think from this kind of convergence between media, video gaming, and artificial intelligence. At the most recent Digital Hollywood conference, Andrew interviewed Jonathan Strietzel, Founder of BigStage and Peter Hodge, CEO of Virsona, whose companies offer intriguing components of this future that have the potential to create big value for brands and media companies today.

BigStage’s technology allows users to create and integrate life-like 3-D avatars of themselves into movies, videogames, commercials, and other digital video content, using just three digital face photos. Virsona offers artificial intelligence technology that can recreate and automate any personality after just a couple of weeks of training – allowing characters to personally interact with an unlimited number of audience members.

If you are part of a brand, media, or other company with the vision to imagine what moving from linear to interactive content could do for your business, these interviews with BigStage and Virsona are must-listen conversations.

[tags]Interactive Media, Big Stage, Virsona, Advertising[/tags]

In this panel, the experts are focusing on advertising challenges and opportunities in games. They discuss what works and what doesn’t for in game advertising. They focus on what brands really want and how game companies need to start speaking a language advertisers understand. This is a continuation of our live blogging at the seventh panel from Digital Media Wire’s LA Games Conference 2008.

Panelists
Christian Batist, SVP Marketing, Sulake Inc. (Habbo Hotel)
Barry Schaffer, President, Promotional Currency
Julie Shumaker, SVP, Sales & Marketing, Double Fusion
Keith Kane, Co-Founder, SVP, Sales & Marketing, Giant Realm
Mark Friedler, Internet Advertising, Media, Games Entrepreneur/Founder, GameDaily
Moderator: Chris Lang, SVP, Research Strategies, SmithGeiger, LLC

Chris: Any case studies to start?

Julie: Sponsorship and engagement is really where there is opportunity right now. It’s like major league sports. Sponsorship are a really important part of the marketing mix. This is one way brands can reach fans. The combination of engagement and interactive experiences is allowing brands to participate in long play experiences. TMobile spent $60 million on their NBA sponsorship and mobile was the most important part of the campaign.

Chris: Will gamers put up with advertising?

Christian: It works well if you treat the gamers with respect. Logo slapping isn’t the way to go. You need to make it part of the experience. Have them find the ad and they win something and give them ways to wear your brand in the game.

Barry: We will work with the new release to promote it through specific brands or retail outlets. If you think about it like promotional items, but done digitally. Games, music, video can all be used promotional items.

Mark: Games are compelling as media. There is very high engagement. Attention to the game is very different to information around the game. The way to market to gamers is by working marketing around content about the game. CPM models don’t work in this kind of environment. You’re buying time, not really impressions. If you think of games as media, you start thinking about it differently. Free MMO games can monetize via digital goods. You can get very good revenue per user.

Julie: It’s no different than TV. Brands expect to get product placement to go with their impression buys.

Mark: The web is going micro. Everything is splintering. Players like EA want to spend $50 million. If everyone becomes their own media company, how does EA buy advertising?

Keith: These micro environments can be really scary to brands. There’s lots of things going on that brands don’t want to be part of. The marketing needs to be very relevant to the community. He describes a HP campaign for high performance machines that they ran in Machinima communities.

Q from Andrew via Mozes: How does the need for immersive placement impact scalability of in game advertising.

Julie: Without aggregation across lots of games you can’t scale. It takes a network of games to create audiences big enough.

Keith: Brand advertisers need to start thinking differently. Brands think they need a separate budget for game advertising. They should be thinking about how to reach audiences.

Julie: The game industry creates this problem by talking about PSP, Wii, DS etc. Brands should not have to care. They want to buy advertising and engagement.

Mark: We should be talking about engagement. If people want scale, they should go to Google and buy tonnage. There is going to be downward pressure on advertising because there is unlimited supply. You need to be able to offer media buyers engaging programs that are really simple for them to understand. He describes how this one MMO was able to offer virtual currency to members for signing up for credit card applications. The credit card company called them up and told them to stop after one week. The credit card company had a 12 month backlog after one week running the campaign.

Will there be single measure of engagement

Christian: It would be nice, but I don’t think so. The thing is to agree with your advertisers.

Julie: Advertising nomenclature is reach and frequency and CPM. Engagement is measured by ROI.

Mark: It’s also up to the industry to not take stupid ideas. We should segment it into different segments. Google allows you to buy clicks and measure results. If you’re trying to get a lifestyle product marketed, the product needs to look cool.

Barry: Engagement for us product selling, getting a new customer etc. A lot of the programs we run drive trial.

Christian: If people buy Corn Flakes in Brazil, the customer gets Habbo credits. The same type of program is running in Spain and Finland. It’s too early to tell the results, but the Spanish company pulled all their other advertising to focus on the Habbo program.

[tags]LA Games Conference 2008, gaming, in game advertising[/tags]

The Association for Downloadable Media, an organization whose purpose is to help provide advertising and audience measurement standards for episodic and downloadable media, announced today a proposal for advertising standards at Ad:Tech San Francisco.

A cross section of podcasters, agencies, device manufacturers and others interested in monetizing downloadable media have developed the proposed standards.

Why do we need standards for downloadable media?

• Lots of podcasts, lots of sponsors, lots of options and confusion
• Like IAB display ad unit guidelines for podcasts
• Allow sponsors to create 1 advertisement for multiple podcasts

The panel believed that the standards should be

• Simple
• Inclusive
• Acceptable

The group is proposing three types of ad standards: Insertions, Content Participation, and Collaterals

Insertions (as provided by advertisers)

• Definition: pre-recorded file provided by sponsor
• Time up to :10, ;15, :30, or :60 seconds
• Location: Pre-roll, post roll mid roll
• Frequency: Variable or time period
• Audio: 128k stereo/64k mono mp3, Sample Rate: 44.1 khz
• Video: H.264 MP$, Aspect 4×3 or 16×9 SD and HD

Content participation

• Definition: When an advertiser’s message is included as part of the audio or video podcast content.
• Time: Variable from :1 second to full episode
• Location: Pre-roll; mid-roll; post-roll; or integrated within one or a series of episodes
• Frequency: Variable by number of episodes per month; variable by number of insertions per user per month; or fixed per channel/feed per month.

Collaterals
All the other real estate that a podcaster has that may be included as part of an advertising or sponsorship package, or as separate items a lá carte.
Examples

• Show notes on podcast website
• ID3 tags in podcast episode file
• Album Art Cards
• Link and banner in enhanced audio podcasts
• Overlays, underlays in video podcasts
• Web banners, buttons, text links, hyperlinks (using IAB standards)
• Email sponsorships
• Press Releases
• Product sales (CDs, DVDs, merchandise)
• Signage/Outdoor (for retail)
• Brochures, flyers

The second area that the ADM focused on is developing a set of proposed measurement guidelines for audience traffic.

The Association of Downloadable Media is recommending compliance with one of two proposed methods to determine true download measurement. These two methods are Native Server Measurement or Third Party Measurement.

In order to comply with these guidelines, publishers would clearly state their download measurement methodologies to interested buyers. Buyers seeking to work with ADM-compliant publishers would be entitled to request and receive these download methodologies. The goal is to achieve high levels of confidence around the metrics for both parties.

Third Party Measurement (TPM)
A Third Party server is the intermediary between the Native Server and another Third Party Server. Third Party Measurement refers to the files measuring the initial download requests as received by a third party server to be delivered to the requester. Because the Third Party server is a constant, it may uniformly measure download statistics across multiple hosting services.

Data logged by third party servers include request information about the media being downloaded. Each request contains the following data that may be utilized for analysis.

• IP Address – Unique Internet address of the user consuming the media file.
• Time Stamp – Time at which the request was made for the media file.
• Request – The request specifies the media file requested and provides the method at which the request should be handled.
• HTTP Status Code – A technical code defined by the HTTP protocol that determines the status of the request.
• Referrer – Location where the request came from.
• User Agent – A unique value that identifies the service or application making the request. e.g. web browser such as Internet Explorer, podcatching agent such as iTunes, a web bot such as Google.
• Byte Range – This is the range of start and end bytes requested by the media consumer.

Native Server Measurement (NSM)
The Native Server is the actual end point where the media is hosted. Native Server
Measurement refers to the log files derived from the Native Server. It may include
the amount of data that was transferred in each log entry, and therefore may provide information to derive more than simple download statistics.

Data logged by native servers include request information about the media being downloaded as well as the amount of bytes transferred during the download transaction. All the data listed above (available to third party servers) applies to Native Servers. In addition, the following data may be utilized for analysis.

• Bytes Served - This is the amount of bytes that have been transferred to the media consumer in a given request. Depending on the type of request made, the bytes served may be less than or equal to the size of media file.

The data contained in either native or third party server log files does not necessarily mean that the data is analyzed. The method of analysis used varies.

Analysis Techniques and Factors

Both types of measurement include analysis techniques, in order to calculate download measurement. These analytic techniques are used to determine the validity of actual downloads (versus duplicated or aborted download attempts)

There are a number of factors used in any given technique to analyze log files.

• IP Address – The IP address may be used to determine if the request is unique or a duplicate. It may also be used to determine geographical information of the media consumer.
• Time Stamp – The date and time may be used to determine if the request should be counted.
• HTTP Status Code – The appropriate HTTP status code is examined to determine if the request should be counted.
• Bytes Served – The value may be used to determine if the media was completely downloaded. (Note: This information is only available from native server log files.)
• Referrer – The origin of the download may be used to determine if the request should be counted. e.g. media that is auto played upon loading a web page may be removed or reported.
• User Agent – The identifier of the application or service consuming the media may be analyzed to determine if the request is unique.
• Byte Range – The range of bytes requested in a given request may be used to determine what portion of the media is requested. When analyzed across multiple requests, the information may provide an accurate assessment to determine if the media was completely downloaded.

The ADM does not require a specific combination of factors or techniques, instead requires that you use analysis that’s appropriate to the business at hand in a way that provides high confidence data and you can explain the process used to create the data. It is left to any company following these guidelines to create techniques that fit their situation. However, it is strongly recommended to include the IP Address in analysis.

These types of measurements can be provided by services like Wizzard Media or PodTrac. UPDATE: ADM members RawVoice and Volomedia are also providing this kind of measurement service.

The proposed standards are open for public review and comment through May 16, 2008. Send to comments and feed back to info@downloadablemedia.org.

Once ratified will be reviewed bi-annually by ADM.

[tags]downloadable media, ADM, Association for Downloadable Media, Advertising, Standards[/tags]

Television is changing a lot and television advertising is changing with it. Tivo, DVRs and the internet are changing the way content and advertising is consumed. It changes the way TV ads need to work. This panel explores some of the changes they see on the horizon.

Panelists
Karen Bressner, SVP, Advertising Sales, TiVo
Eric Hadley, Chief Marketing Officer, Heavy Corporation
Rick Mandler, VP, Digital Media Advertising, Disney/ABC Media Networks
Robert Riesenberg, President & CEO, Full Circle Entertainment
Moderator: Joe Adalian, Television Editor, Variety

What’s the future of the 30 second spot?
The 30 second spot is still an important marketing tools and will remain so into the future. As long as television is important spots like 30 second or 15 second ads will be important. Karen from Tivo says they can enhance the 30 second spot by making it interactive. Eric points out that the importance of TV will change for different segments as young males are using the Internet with increasing intensity on sites like Heavy.com. He says the key is to respecting the viewer and make the advertising relevant and engaging.

How important is diverse portfolio in marketing?
In this day and age, when a network has a show doing 7-8 share its a success. It demonstrates the fragmentation of advertising channels and the need for marketers to explore a diverse set of channels to find their audience.

What one thing should change, what would be the new rule?
As the networks have jumped on the bandwagon of integration it has become more commoditized. The integration needs to be more strategic and in harmony with the show as opposed to something that is just a media deal done for an advertiser wanting integration. Rick would like to see more aggregation of agencies to make it easier to coordinate marketing and make it more integrated. Eric suggests that measures need to be tied to the intent of the campaign, not just what can be measured. Just because you can measure impressions or click throughs does not make it a good measure for everything.

What new capabilities will brand marketers need to become publishers of relevant and engaging content?
Need to become masters of what data comes from set top boxes and DVRs to understand what works in different environments. There is also a crying need for different kinds of resources within the marketing infrastructure. Interactive capabilities are still very underdeveloped and need to improved. Brand marketers will need to integrate these new capabilities with their traditional story telling strengths to make interesting content.

Should brands rent or own their content?
Rick suggests that brands should rely on rented content. Content is not what advertisers do so they should leave it to the traditional content producers. Eric suggests that it doesn’t matter whether you rent or own it. What matter is that you need good content wherever the content comes from.

[tags]Future of Television, television, advertising[/tags]

Is brand based advantage eroding as Umair Haque argues in a post entitled The Shrinking Advantage of Brands?

Umair points to Millward Brown’s report about the top 100 most powerful brands in which the number one brand is Google as evidence that there is a shrinking advantage of brands.

I strongly disagree with the point Umair makes in the title to his post. Brands are just as important as ever. Just ask Ask or Yahoo? Would they like to be at the top of that list. You bet.

However, when I read the post I agree with the body of the argument he is making. If you substitute the word advertising for the word brand the argument makes sense. There is a shrinking advantage to advertising and advertising scale.

Because every other player in the top ten has spent decades – if not literally centuries, as for P&G and Coke – investing billions in advertising to build a brand.

But where these players invest on the order of 5-10% of revenues on advertising, Google’s advertising expenditure is almost exactly zero.

Stop and think about that for a second: the top brand in the world belongs to a player that…uhhh…doesn’t advertise.

The social web is way more powerful than traditional advertising based brand building efforts.

Communities have always been central to building brands as positive word of mouth has always been much more powerful than advertising in building brand strength and value. When our friends speak, we listen.

Google’s brand has been built without any paid advertising. It has been built by the world’s biggest community – the social web.

We’ve gone from people telling their physical communities about good stuff to global web based communities where strong positive word of mouth spreads virally across the globe at zero cost.

Brands that don’t understand the power of the social web will shrink in advantage, those that do can build even stronger brands and more value.

[tags]social web, advertising, brand building, competitive advantage[/tags]

In Digital Podcast 38, we interview David Becker, Chief Marketing Officer at ExpoTV.com. ExpoTV is all about consumer generated video product reviews both on line and on TV. ExpoTV covers just about any product you can imagine with about 250,000 reviews.

If you are interested in producing a social media marketing campaign that uses user generated content this podcast is for you. David discusses the concerns advertisers have about marketing around user generated content and some of the steps marketers can take to mitigate the risks. He provides case studies from other companies that show how they have managed to produce successful social marketing campaigns. David has suggestions about how to connect with super fans and turn them into allies that will make social marketing work for you.

 

 Digital Podcast 38 [48:17m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

David Becker is ExpoTV’s Chief Marketing Officer. Prior to Expo, David served as president and COO for Beliefnet.com, a spirituality and self-help web site. David also founded Backslap Entertainment, a user-generated content production and syndication company backed by Fremantle, producers of American Idol. David was also President and COO of Uproar.com.

[tags]social media marketing, user generated content, super fans, advertising, David Becker, ExpoTV[/tags]

Chris MacDonald, Libsyn’s EVP of Business Development and Operations, told me all about the Association for Downloadable Media.

Chris is the newly elected Chairman of the Association. Chris explained that the Association for Downloadable Media is focused on providing standards for advertising and audience measurement for episodic and downloadable media. If you are producing downloadable media the association is working on making it easier for advertisers and publishers to buy and publish ads on this type of content. If you want to get involved you can join the association. Individual memberships are $150 and corporate memberships are $1,000 for now.

 

 Digital Podcast 21 [16:40m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

In today’s announcement, The Association for Downloadable Media (ADM) announced the election results for the 20 inaugural office seat positions including the Executive Board (Chair, Vice Chair, Secretary, Treasurer); eleven (11) Advisory Board seats, Chairs for: Advertising Standards Committee, Education & Outreach Committee, Measurement Committee, Membership Committee and the Terminology Standardization Committee.

Elected individuals for the 4 Executive Committees (Chairman, Vice Chairman, Secretary and Treasurer), 11 Advisory Board seats and 5 Committee Chair positions are:

• Chair
  • Chris MacDonald, Chris MacDonald, Libsyn PRO Enterprise Platform and Indiefeed
• Vice Chair
  • Susan Bratton, Personal Life Media
• Secretary
  • Matthew Snodgrass, Porter Novelli
• Treasurer
  • Duncan Perry, Podcast.com, Treedia.com
• Committee Chair: Advertising Standards
  • Brian McMahon, National Podcasting System
• Committee Chair: Education & Outreach
  • Rob Walch, Wizzard Media
• Committee Chair: Measurement
  • Angelo Mandato, Raw Voice
• Committee Chair: Membership Committee
  • Bryan Moffett, NPR Digital Media
• Committee Chair: Terminology Standardization
  • David Rowley, Kiptronic, Inc.
• Advisory Board
  • CC Chapman, The Advance Guard
  • Jonathan Cobb, Kiptronic Inc.
  • John Furrier, Podtech
  • Rob Greenlee, Microsoft Zune
  • John Havens, BlogTalkRadio
  • Risto Koski, Nokia
  • Jim Louderback, Revision3
  • Mark McCrery, Podtrac
  • Elisabeth McLaury Lewin, PodcastingNews.com
  • Kent Nichols, AskANinja.com
  • Tim Street, French Maid TV

[tags]Association for Downloadable Media, ADM, advertising, new media[/tags]

In a world where competition for attention is growing faster than ever and consumers get to skip the ads if they want, will advertisements as content save the day for advertisers? It’s not clear yet, but there is a growing body of evidence that it can and is being done by advertisers, both big and small.

The Wall Street Journal provided five case studies today of advertising as content, and all done by small companies.

1. Blendtec’s Will It Blend

Blendtec is in the blender business. One day the marketing guy sees the enginneering guy test blenders with chunks of wood. The net result is one of the most successful Ads as Content campaigns, Will It Blend.

The video series is so popular they are now selling it as a DVD for $9.93.

Straight from the success of YouTube.com, Will It Blend has been known as an internet marketing sensation, viewed by more than 30 million people. Now for the first time ever, you can take home the glory, passion and power of Blendtec CEO Tom Dickson with his blending antics on the first 50 Will It Blend videos, including Will It Blend facts and behind the scenes footage.

Not only has it been successful as content they say sales of blenders have shot up 500%.

Here’s the video of one of my favorites Will It Blend: the iPhone edition.

2. MJ Safety Solutions Bullet Resistant Backpack

MJ Safety Solutions MyChildsPack is a bullet resistant back pack. The video is serious with lots of explosions and guns firing. YouTube reports that the video has been viewed just under 25,000 times at the time I write this. The company reports that it has sold over 1,000 of these backpacks at $175 each.

3. All Natural Maine Root’s Free Range Root Beer

In this video campaign, All Natural Main Root is marketing the fight against corporate root beer and of course their alternative: Free Range Root Beer. Sales have gone up from $500,000 to $3,000,000 year over year. Maine Root paid $20,000 for the campaign. Not a bad return from some viral videos.

FreeRangeRootBeer.com is dedicated to stopping corporate root beer “by any means necessary.” Non-violence is our modus operandi. We spread our message mostly through non-violent protests, but also use root beer “breakouts” to free root beer from their bondage in their inhumane storage facilities. We’re on a path of peace, love and organic root-based beverages.

Here’s the SugerCane Shuffle from the SugerCane Gang – fans of Maine Root.

4. Make Magazine’s Weekend Projects

Make Magazine takes a different approach. They not into comedy or even trying to sell you something. They provide How To videos that focus on things you can do over the weekend. Think of what Popular Mechanics or Popular Electronics could have been if they got the web. The other benefit for Make is that the videos have sponsors so they get to advertise their website and re-advertise someone else’s product at the same time. Is that like re-gifting?

5. Moe’s Southwest Grill

Moe’s Southwest Grill decided to get the customers to do the work. They held a contest for a “Burrito in Every Hand” campaign. The winner gets 2,860 vouchers good at Moe’s. They got 40 videos and over 200,000 visitors to the website set up for the campaign. They say sales have gone up, but no details and they expanded their email mailing list by over 200,000.

And here’s a link to the Notorious M.O.E. and Nacho Daddy video, the winner of MOE’s contest.( sorry,I could not get the player to publish -)

So there you have it. Some great, well maybe not great, content that deliver the goods as advertisements. There’s some good lessons for content producers in here and for advertisers as well. It’s time to think differently.

It’s too bad the Wall Street Journal doesn’t understand what it writes about as I would have provided a link to the WSJ story, but it’s behind a walled garden. And I would have provided a link to to the Wall Street Journal video on makes a video go viral, but it had too many ads to make it bearable.

The journal should also get the news that viral is not only about getting a great funny, useful or how to video, its about working the system to get to the top of the most viewed video list. Here’s a link to TechCrunch’s Secrets to Viral Videos. Too bad there’s so much gaming and shady practices involved.

If you know of more case studies, let me know.

[tags]viral video, online video, advertising, ads as content[/tags]