16 10 / 2011
YouTube evolution- helping build brands
Companies still spend 38% of advertising funds on television ads and only 1% for online video, but YouTube wants to change that. “We would love YouTube to be a much larger part of brands’ advertising budget and mix in the next year and the future than it is today,” said Lucas Watson, YouTube’s vice president of online video global sales. YouTube took the step of hiring Mr. Watson from Procter & Gamble, former head of digital business strategy, who in June became YouTube’s first vice president of online video global sales. And now YouTube has acquired expertise in consumer-packaged goods, a sector that has been slow to online video advertising. Video ads for one of Procter & Gamble’s brands, Old Spice, were a viral success online last year.
YouTube is willing to experiment with new types of advertising that could never appear on television, Mr. Palmer said, like a live-streamed ad campaign that he is working on, choose-your-own-adventure videos or user-created ads.
We’re learning more about YouTube in class and have now uploaded our own videos at this point. But it’s these kind of homemade videos that might discourage companies from spending a lot of advertising money on online videos. As Mr.Palmer put it, “It’s hard to justify spending millions of dollars running a Web spot that has helicopter shots and explosions when your ad is sitting next to something shot on a two-year-old cellphone.”
But now with things like Google TV getting more popular too, advertising has the opportunity to make some innovative changes (with Google TV, television will also be able to show personalized ads). Ad agencies are only now hiring people with expertise in online video, so online video and advertising still have yet to really grow and reach it’s full potential. Will YouTube be successful in becoming the home for professional online video ads? We’ll have to wait and see.
(Source: http)
23 9 / 2011
Facebook as Tastemaker
New features are being added to Facebook to help the site become more of a force that shapes what we watch, hear, read and buy. Facebook and its dozens of partner companies hope to influence what users and their friends consume. Its new partners include Netflix and Hulu for video, Spotify for music, The Washington Post and Yahoo for news, Ticketmaster for concert tickets and a host of food, travel and consumer brands.
A new feature called Timeline lets users post information about their past, like weddings and big vacations. On the site you can also be able to more precisely signal what you’re reading, watching, hearing, eating, etc. All this information can be used by Facebook to sell more fine-tuned advertising.
I found the final quote in this article really interesting:
“Facebook wants to be omnipresent in the Web experience by adding commerce, video and mail to their early successes with news feeds and picture tagging,” said Jodee Rich, founder of People Browsr, based in San Francisco, which analyzes data from social networks. “Trying to be all things to all people was the undoing of Microsoft and AOL. If Facebook continues to overreach, they will stumble.”
In class, we’re continually discussing the changes of Facebook and it’s attempts to compete with Google +. All of Facebook’s recent changes seem to be making most users mad and annoyed, but they keep on pushing these changes. So how far can Facebook push the line until it does go too far, as suggested by Rich? Considering the past “undoing of Microsoft and AOL,” Facebook should be careful in it’s efforts to become omnipresent.
