A continued theme in my readings and postings (here and here):
“The amount of video consumed on TV has dropped 5% among consumers who actively stream and download content…Meanwhile, movie theater consumption fell 2% while personal computer viewing grew 8%. One-in-five hours watching video is now done online.”
See Brandweek article for more detail.
Check out a cool experiment by blogger Noah Brier: Brand Tags. This experiment proves that consumers control brands - brands are what consumers say. On this site you can tag brands yourself, or you can see what others are saying about brands. Very cool and fun. Enjoy.
Video continues to be a growing method for consumer consumption of information and entertainment. According to an article in BusinessWeek this week:
“The average American (age 12 and up) with Internet access spends more than 6 hours a day watching videos, shows, news, and sports - or playing games - on screens of one sort or another…Solutions Research Group…predicts a rise to 8 hours a day in 2013.”
“…on average TV accounts for 4 of the current 6 viewing hours. The other 2 hours involve the Web, DVDs, gaming consoles, and mobile devices. (The ratio is roughly reversed for the 12-to-24-year-old set.) By 2013, the group forecasts, Americans will spend an average three hours daily viewing or playing with PCs and mobile devices.”
This is too funny–and true–not to share given our current obsession with social networking sites. From Current TV. Enjoy.
Most moviegoers agree that the best movie-watching experience is on a big screen, but more and more movies are available online for viewing on our much smaller computer screens. Netflix is quickly becoming a leader in this service by offering the ability to stream movies to a Windows PC as part of consumers’ subscriptions. And, now they are offering a device that sends those movies–streaming–to your big screen TVs: the Roku Netflix Player. For our “I want instant gratification” society, this is a great service, but the quality is reportedly still not great:
According to an article in BusinessWeek–”The Roku is a small box that superficially resembles products such as Apple TV or Vudu. But while the setup is similar, the operation is completely different. Other services download the content to a hard drive for playback; Netflix is pure streaming. The quality is not as good as Apple TV or Vudu, but it’s about equal to standard-definition digital TV. Making it work smoothly requires an Internet connection that consistently delivers at least 2 megabits per second.”
The services out there for movies on-demand at home are getting better and less expensive, but you still can’t beat the experience of watching a movie on a big screen. And free is best of all. If you live in Little Rock, be sure to check out Movies in the Park this summer. Free outdoor movies–shown on the big screen–every Wednesday night for eight weeks starting June 4th with E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial. Bring friends along with the beverages and snacks of your choice and hang out under the stars for an evening. It is a fantastic movie experience.
Here is the Movies in the Park schedule for the summer:
June 04, 2008 E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial
June 11, 2008 Rocky
June 18, 2008 Happy Feet
June 25, 2008 Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby
July 02, 2008 Notting Hill
July 09, 2008 Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory
July 16, 2008 Casino Royale
July 23, 2008 The Wizard of Oz
Last week I ordered a “large coffee” from Starbucks. It was an interesting experience for me: usually my order is very complicated. But, just as the new, massive ad campaign promised, I received a venti Pike’s Roast in the brand new Starbucks cup.
The best part about my order however was that my cup came with this little green tab in the sip hole. I actually commented to my co-workers about it: “this is brilliant! I am so tired of spilling coffee on myself and in my car.” As it turns out, this “splash stick” was the result of customer feedback. BusinessWeek this week reports that
“this is corporate democracy in action: At the month-old MyStarbucksIdea.com, customers can make suggestions, other customers can vote on and discuss them and Starbucks can see which ideas gain support. It’s key to Howard Schultz’s plan to reinvigorate his company, to which he returned as chief executive in January.”
Starbucks is not the first company to try this–the company is actually following the lead of Dell. Both companies are using software that acts “like a live focus group that never closes.” Customers want to feel like they are being heard, and this is a great way to do that. Additionally, Starbucks is using “idea partners” to moderate the conversations and tell customers what things have already been tried or why things won’t work. And the ideas that gain traction on the site, actually get implemented–like the splash stick. Fantastic example of engaging in conversations with consumers.
“They shop for casual clothing more than ever before, tend to buy many of the household grocery items and gladly will pick up at least shower gel and cologne grooming products for themselves.” — reported in Ad Age. Some interesting facts:
This is from an article in Advertising Age:
“Research from internet ad network Mindset Media confirms the ad’s personification of Mac users as superior and self-satisfied. Its recent Mac user ‘mind-set profile’–a psychographic ranking system that scores respondents on 20 different elements of personality–found them to be more assured of their superiority, less modest and more open of the general population.”
“Far fewer cohesive personality traits emerged among PC owners, likely because of the breadth of PC ownership. Given that 95% or so of all computer users own a PC, those users essentially are the general population. The one area where PC users did stand out as statistically different was in creativity–low creativity, that is. Mindset Media found they tend to be realists who are emotionally steady and work well with what they’re given.”
This makes total sense. I don’t think research really had to be conducted to learn these things, but it is interesting that now there are statistics to confirm it.
I am trying really hard to like the show Mad Men. Everyone else does, so I should too, right? I hate it. I appreciate the research that has gone into recreating that era. I appreciate the history of specific advertising campaigns told through the stories in the show. I appreciate the style and costumes. But, working in advertising makes me feel dirty after watching that show. I have no appreciation for the business after watching arrogant men push each other around and demean women each week. While that may have been the culture during that period in history, I worry that it will give modern-day viewers the wrong impression of our business today.
I saw Juno three times. It was a great, heart-warming movie–obviously, I loved it. When you see a movie that many times over a two-week period, you start noticing details that could have been missed. My thoughts today turned to Tic Tacs. Paulie Bleeker, the boy who knocks up Juno, had one vice according to Juno: orange Tic Tacs. Throughout the movie he is eating them and at one point Juno stuffs his mailbox full of them. I was craving orange Tic Tacs after the third viewing and I couldn’t tell you the last time I even thought about Tic Tacs.
Did the Tic Tac brand pay for that placement? Are they doing anything to leverage that placement now? I haven’t seen anything, but they should.
Today I read about a Tic Tac sampling event that encourages consumers to mix music tracks using the sound of Tic Tacs clanging around in their iconic box. The target for this promotion is 18-24 year olds. While I get that they are trying to connect music–which is important to this audience–to the Tic Tac brand, it just seems lame after witnessing the connection that Paulie Bleeker and Juno had to Tic Tacs. That is what Tic Tacs should be using to connect to this audience: Juno. Why aren’t they leveraging that product placement?
The Wall Street Journal is going social, as reported by Brandweek:
“Using SeenThis?, built by the social networking technology developer Loomia, members of Facebook, and eventually various other social networks will be able to receive notifications on what Journal content their friends are reading or sharing – while logged into those sites or visiting WSJ.com. Those users will then be able to check out those articles themselves for free (without having to leave their networking site of choice), and share them with others. For example, a user might receive a notice of the top five articles read by members who attend his or her college.”
Tom Green, the comedian who has had a few television talk shows already, has launched an Internet-based talk show. Here is what the site says about it:
“Tom Green Live is a LIVE Internet-based talk show featuring celebrity guests, hosted by comedian Tom Green, from his living room…yes, his actual living room. The show is LIVE at TomGreen.com, The Channel, from 8pm-9pm Monday through Friday. Although technically it’s a talk show, it’s really much more than that. Tom Green Live is non-political, and because The Channel is completely independent, pretty much anything goes! With a combination of A-List celebrity guests, a global audience, and Tom’s signature brand of comedy, Tom Green Live is unlike anything you’ve seen before! Tom takes calls over the phone, along with Skype video calls from viewers from locations as varied as the U.S.A, Canada, Australia, Estonia, and Argentina, not to mention several others! The mission is simple, to make you laugh, and to make you, the viewers, an integral part of the show by harnessing the power of the National Internet, something no other show can offer, sounds cool right? Check it out right here by clicking on the “Tom Green Live” tab on the player, oh, and make sure you tell a friend!”
Think about the growth potential of a channel like this if he were to get paid advertising.
In BusinessWeek: “They may say they hate chick flicks, but men can enjoy stories about sacrifice, love, and empowerment, a new study shows. The key, say three marketing professors in February’s Journal of Consumer Research, is keeping the story unreal. The researchers had undergrads read adaptations of poignant stories by O. Henry and others, presenting them as TV scripts. Males showed more empathy and involvement when told the tales weren’t true. Men ‘need to know beyond a doubt that it’s fiction,’ says Jennifer Argo of the University of Alberta School of Business, one of the study’s authors. Exiting reality, she says, ‘is an excuse to relax gender stereotypes’–and emote. Women preferred true stories. The study’s advice to entertainment marketers: Emphasizing that a weepie is fictional may bring in more males. And get a few real men to cry.”