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.
Continued reporting on the increase in online video viewing, reported by New York Times:
ComScore reported that the average viewer watched 228 minutes of video in April, compared with 158 minutes in May 2007. One reason is that the videos people watch are becoming longer — the average viewer spent about 17 seconds more per video in April than in May 2007 — but most of the rise came from a spike in the number of videos that each person watched.
“‘It’s no longer that people just get sent a link by one of their friends,’ said Andrew Lipsman, a senior analyst at comScore. ‘Now they actively seek things out, ‘I just saw this on TV, and I’m going to find it online.’ I think video is being seen more and more as an extension of search.’”
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.
Women are social and love to share information. They are the gatekeepers for almost all purchase decisions for their families and they advise their friends on their purchase decisions. So it makes sense that women would be attracted to blog-writing as a way to spread “word-of-mouth” experiences and information. According to a recent article in AdAge:
“…more than one-third (35%) of all women in the U.S. aged 18 to 75 participate in the blogosphere at least once a week. And that number increases if less-frequent visits are factored in. Of those women who are online any amount of time, 53% read blogs, 37% post comments to blogs and 28% write or update blogs, according to the study.”
Why do they blog?
“For fun (65%)
To express themselves (60%)
To connect with others (40%)
As a personal diary (34%)
To give advice or educate (26%)”
Why do they read blogs?
“For fun (46%)
To get information (41%)
To stay up to date on family and friends (36%)
To stay up to date on specific topics (34%)
To connect with others (28%)
Entertainment (26%)”
Everything is going digital. As people get more accustomed to using websites to find the information they seek, they are becoming more particular about how they find that information. Reported by BBC News:
“The annual report into web habits by usability guru Jakob Nielsen shows people are becoming much less patient when they go online. Instead of dawdling on websites many users want simply to reach a site quickly, complete a task and leave. Most ignore efforts to make them linger and are suspicious of promotions designed to hold their attention.”
And:
“There has also been a big change in the way that people get to the places where they can complete pressing tasks, he said.
In 2004, about 40% of people visited a homepage and then drilled down to where they wanted to go and 60% use a deep link that took them directly to a page or destination inside a site. In 2008, said Dr Nielsen, only 25% of people travel via a homepage. The rest search and get straight there.
‘Basically search engines rule the web,’ he said.”
Google, always on the cutting edge of innovation, demonstrated its Android mobile phone OS this week. This looks like it could be major competition for the iPhone. Very cool stuff. The phone’s built-in compass allows users to pan around an image by physically moving themselves. Check out some of the coverage and videos:
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
BMW, already known for being on the forefront of new media opportunities–evident by their introduction of BMW Films several years ago–is again proving itself to be a brand that can differentiate itself through digital media, with the launch of a campaign for the new 1-Series. Because the new vehicle is targeted at younger audience, BMW smartly chose to spend almost half their marketing budget online.
Reported in the NY Times:
“Almost half the spending for the campaign, estimated at $15 million to $25 million, is being devoted to online media. By comparison, executives at BMW of North America say, Internet ad spending for other models ranges from 1 percent to 15 percent of the total ad budgets.
“The online elements of the 1-Series campaign include letting members of Facebook…design virtual cars and send them to Facebook friends; buying dominant positions, known as take-overs, on the home pages of msn.com and yahoo.com; posting video clips on YouTube; and developing a microsite devoted to the 1-Series (bmwusa.com/new1).
“The campaign is indicative of efforts by mainstream marketers to alter their media mixes as consumers change their media habits. A recent survey by PQ Media projected that by 2012, advertisers will increase spending by 82 percent from 2008 in areas like search-engine marketing, online video and e-mail messages.”
However, while it seems like I would be in the target market (identified as 20-somethings and 30-somethings) for this new car, I can’t find the Facebook app or the YouTube videos. And, the microsite is hardly a microsite. It looks like any other car website where you can customize and price your vehicle. Am I missing something here? Someone, please tell me.
Well, maybe I will be able to find the traditional ads, which seem pretty cool too:
“There are some unconventional approaches for the traditional media, too. Three magazines — City, Dwell and Paste — are printing pure-white covers that are glued over the actual front covers of the issues; there are ads for the 1-Series on the other sides of the extra covers.
“And magazines like City and AutoWeek are running tiny ads for the 1-Series with numerical themes at the bottom of editorial pages, which double as page-number identifications.
“For example, there is an itsy-bitsy white car on page 26 of the April issue of the magazine City next to this sentence: ‘26: number of bones in right foot you’ll use to crush the gas pedal on the all-new BMW 1-Series.’
“At the bottom of page 60, there is a miniature red car and this sentence: ‘60: m.p.h. you can reach in 5.1 seconds with the all-new BMW 135i coupe.’
A few weeks ago I opened my front door to find a bag with my new phone book in it sitting on my porch. I picked it up and walked the entire bag straight to my recycling bin, dropped it in, and walked away. I have no use for a phone book. My computer is almost always on and if it is not, my cell phones are, and it is easier and faster to look up information online. In fact, most of the time, I can find the information I need online without actually having to make a phone call! It is brilliant - I don’t ever have to have a human interaction or worry about being disappointed by poor customer service and terrible phone etiquette. Which begs the question: why are phone books still printed AND distributed it at all? Why can’t I at least opt out of this waste?
Slate.com is thinking about this to–check it out for a history on phone books. Phone book usage really comes down to generational differences:
“Ask anyone under 30 about phone books, though, and you might as well inquire about Victrola needles. The Yellow Pages Association claims that even young households use them when the occasion—a wedding, for instance—demands reliable listings. But printed phone books are a maturing industry, with only about six in 10 businesses and individuals still regularly relying on them. Yet even as directories hemorrhage content to the Web and to unlisted cell numbers, enough oldsters—those, say, who still recall physically dialing numbers in a rotary motion—continue using them enough to keep profits rolling in. In other words, you remaining four in 10 recipients can expect a lot more doorstops and spider-smashers in your future.”
“The phone book’s most fervent users these days are the cult of young YouTubers who, left with piles of directories that only their parents and professors could want, demonstrate the old parlor trick of ripping a phone book in half. (It’s harder than tearing an apple but probably easier than rolling up frying pans.) A fat Yellow Book is also perfect for punking dorm mates—this video by Tufts students has achieved phone-book infamy—or just for pummeling them. But it’s a throwaway comment in the Tufts prank that deals the most punishing blow of all: ‘They must not have gotten the memo about phone books not being useful anymore.’”
Check out some of the more entertaining phone book uses:
Supposedly, once you start surfing, you can’t stop. We are all information junkies and just can’t seem to get enough of it. Reported in the Wall Street Journal:
“What is it about a Web site that might make it literally irresistible? Clues are offered by research conducted by Irving Biederman, a neuroscientist at the University of Southern California, who is interested in the evolutionary and biological basis of the human need for information.
“Dr. Biederman first showed a collection of photographs to volunteer test subjects, and found they said they preferred certain kinds of pictures (monkeys in a tree or a group of houses along a river) over others (an empty parking lot or a pile of old paint cans).
“The preferred pictures had certain common features, including a good vantage on a landscape and an element of mystery. In one way or another, said Dr. Biederman, they all presented new information that somehow needed to be interpreted.
“When he hooked up volunteers to a brain-scanning machine, the preferred pictures were shown to generate much more brain activity than the unpreferred shots. While researchers don’t yet know what exactly these brain scans signify, a likely possibility involves increased production of the brain’s pleasure-enhancing neurotransmitters called opioids.
“In other words, coming across what Dr. Biederman calls new and richly interpretable information triggers a chemical reaction that makes us feel good, which in turn causes us to seek out even more of it. The reverse is true as well: We want to avoid not getting those hits because, for one, we are so averse to boredom.
“It is something we seem hard-wired to do, says Dr. Biederman. When you find new information, you get an opioid hit, and we are junkies for those. You might call us ‘infovores.’
“For most of human history, there was little chance of overdosing on information, because any one day in the Olduvai Gorge was a lot like any other. Today, though, we can find in the course of a few hours online more information than our ancient ancestors could in their whole lives.
“…technology is playing a trick on us. We are programmed for scarcity and can’t dial back when something is abundant.”
“Text Analytics–a general term for the mining and interpretation of written words–has been used for more than two decades, most notably by the defense industry as far back as the Cold War to read into the word choices and text of, say, a speech written by Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev.” — according to a recent article in Ad Age.
The article goes on to say that marketers are increasingly using text analytics to mine information from customer service surveys, e-mails, online forums, and blogs. “…while the blogosphere and social networks have so far not proved great advertising media, text analytics offers the potential to make them stronger marketing vehicles.”
Dove used the tool to not only understand reactions to their campaign, but to gain an understanding of what motivates people, which issues are most important to women in their target group, and how to create better products and messaging for them. All by using text analytics from content on its own message boards.
What a fantastic way to leverage social media tools with a quantitative analysis!
Check out the hilarious article in The New Yorker this week about technology and the absurdity of it. I think my favorite part was the first paragraph:
“Shortly before Valentine’s Day, a study was released claiming that forty-seven per cent of men in Britain would give up sex in return for a big-screen plasma television…As with all matters relating to technology, numbers are key: precisely how long were those men prepared to go without sex? And how large a screen? (Answers: six months; fifty inches.)”
Other highlights:
“When teen-age girls window-shop these days, they don’t linger longingly outside show boutiques or record stores. They cluster, sighing, noses pressed against the glass, in front of cell-phone stores. But few of these devices will ever be used for talking. The real purpose of a phone, as everyone knows, is texting. Only techno-tards make actual phone calls…”
“Congratulations. You, but especially I, now require the kindness of an eight-year-old…to turn on the television, let alone the living-room lights. This may be the first generation of children who are better qualified to survive in the world than their parents, especially if survival depends on maneuvering loyal droids to fire ranged weapons using a nunchuck.”
Great read. Enjoy.
The CEO of Ask.com announced a shift in the search engine’s strategy yesterday, as reported in the WSJ. He now wants to “focus Ask on its core audience, predominantly women who use the site to ask questions about topics like entertainment and health. To do that, he says, the company will launch new products and enhance its technology through efforts like pulling in more community-generated answers.”
“The new strategy…is a retreat from efforts by former Ask management to broaden the search engine’s audience beyond middle-American, predominantly female consumers, who have long made up its core, to more technologically sophisticated audiences. Just last summer Ask had begun offering search results that combine text, video, maps and other results on one screen.”
The search engine also plans to “refocus the company’s products and marketing on the area where Ask believes it is strongest — searches framed as questions, as opposed to single words or phrases.”
This shift makes so much sense. Rather than competing in an already saturated search market where Google is king, Ask is smart to focus on a niche audience with whom they have already had success. And, by focusing on a niche audience, the search results will be so much more relevant for those users. I love this idea.