Advertising Lab

California Dogs Tune Into Their Own TV Channel

noreply@blogger.com (Ilya Vedrashko) — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 21:50:47 PST

I

Cats can has cheezburger, but dogs are getting their own TV programming.

San Diego dogs subscribed to Cox or Time Warner now have their own 24/7 TV channel called DogTV, soon to roll out nationwide. "DOGTV offers scientifically designed content for dogs of all ages, and all breeds. If your dogs can hear or see, then DOGTV is right for them. DOGTV is working hard to produce fresh content all the time, so your dog will always get new, exciting visual and auditory stimulations."

DogTV will make money through monthly subscriptions, although dogs look like a promising advertising audience. According to the site, "nearly half of those surveyed had dogs that showed some interest in what was happening on the television screen." Which is more that can be said about most people. Besides, dogs are also afraid of remote controls.

For the busy dogs on the go, DOGTV also offers a YouTube channel and a Twitter feed.

How To Hijack Facebook Likes, and Other Social Engineering

noreply@blogger.com (Ilya Vedrashko) — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 17:14:23 PST

The Pinterest Giveaway Scam got pretty big today; at one point about 10% of Pinterest homepage pins were scam pins. In addition to the Starbucks offer, I counted at least three others -- for H&M, iPhone (of course), and GAP.

What fascinates me about the scam is the authors' crafty use of recognizable social media symbols to create an illusion of authenticity, and -- more importantly -- an illusion of endorsement. In other words, exploitation of cognitive biases, also known as social engineering.

Let's take a closer look at the "Starbucks" page (now available at http://giftinterest.com/coffee_4y8l1 but likely not for long). What do we see?

1. Pinterest's favicon, hotlinked directly from Pinterest's servers. Other variations of the scam used Facebook's favicon.

2. A countdown of "packages remaining". The counter resets at a random number lower than 500 (probably between 200 and 500) at the first page load, and then counts down to zero.

3. Fake "Pin It" button with a fake pin count set at 39K. The "counter" is a static gif, shared by the four different scams.

4. Hidden "pinnable" images. If you use the official Pinterest button on the scam page, it will tell you it can't find images or videos that are large enough to be pinned. When you push the fake "Pin it" 39K button on the page, the more advanced variations of the scam would serve a randomly selected image and serve it up together with with a randomly selected page URL to appear in the pin description. Here's one such image from the iPhone/iPad scam site (http://pinterestpromo.info/i/?start).

You'll see how all these images are hotlinks from Pinterest -- they are actual but unrelated pins by the site's users. For example, one of the sources is this pin from a year ago, a picture which in turn was pinned from Apple's site.

5. Friends' endorsements.
At first, I was puzzled by the pictures of my eleven friends who, it seems, all have liked this site. My first guess was they all got somehow tricked into clicking the Like button during one of the later steps of the scam funnel. I asked a couple of them to go through their recent Like history, and none of them could find a record of "liking" anything related or even remember seeing the scam in the first place.

Look closer at the source code:

These pictures are displayed through a Facebook widget called Facepile, and what these pictures show are the faces of my friends who liked Facebook's own page and not the scam site (all four scam sites I saw used the same widget and showed me the pictures of the same eleven friends.) The trick is not immediately obvious because each time you load the page the widget shows a different set of three names and a random sequence of userpics.

Here, let me try to embed the same Facepile widget into this blog post:

If you are logged into Facebook, you should see pictures of your friends who liked this. What "this" means is left to reader's imagination.

In other words, anyone can grab a list of someone's friends who liked facebook.com/cocacola, for example, and use it to fake their endorsement of an unrelated site.

Oh, and the author behind at least one of the scam sites is open to employment offers, with his email address tucked into the source code:

The Illustrated Anatomy of a Viral Pinterest Scam

noreply@blogger.com (Ilya Vedrashko) — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 17:00:12 PST

Update: Part II - Social Media for Social Engineering

It started with a tweet from a friend:

Never one to pass a scam, I dutifully clicked and landed on a page with this URL: http://giftinterest.com/coffee_ob9ve

The ticking "packages remaining" counter communicates the sense of urgency. I am feeling lucky; I am WAY ahead of the Internet crowd. Of 500 available packages, only 74 have been given away and 424 are left. Even if the total number of pins is already in excess of 39K. But who are you going to trust - your lying eyes or an unforgiving counter?

The page beckons: "Pin it". I pin it. Step 1 - check.

This is my pin. The picture of the coffee cups was not on the page I just pinned. Who cares. Five other ~~schmucks~~ users have already liked it.

I am thinking "Hey, that was easy. I am going to get not just one, but TWO cards". I open another browser and type in that giftinterest URL again.

Oh, what a stroke of luck. Look, the number of packages remaining - 442 - now is larger than it was a minute ago. Someone must have returned theirs. I refresh the page. The number is different yet again. Eventually, if you let the page just sit there, it will go down to zero. Refresh the page, and it reset to some random number greater than 0 but smaller than 500.

But whatever. I pin again.

This time, the pinned picture is different.

I figure since I don't drink coffee anyway two cards are enough. I go back to the giftinterest page and click "Final Step".

Yes! Here I learn that the value of the card is $100 (but only if you qualify). The page asks me for my email.

The pop-up window tells me to write "I Love Starbucks" on Facebook. That I can't do. I love Dunkin' Donuts.

The rest of the story is familiar to everyone who has ever taken Free iPad surveys. You get into the funnel...

... and fill out a bunch of surveys and leave your personal info...

... and at some point you are gently prompted to install some spyware...

Needless to say, it is very unlikely that Starbucks has anything to do with this project. Giftinterest.com was registered on February 24, 2012 in private, and both coffee-blends-now.com and yesusrveymedia.com (the two domains that popped up in various fine prints) are registered to a company in India.

Bonus track: An identical scam is promising free H&M cards to the unsuspecting pinners.

Update: Part II - Social Media for Social Engineering

Instead Of Sales, They Seek Applause

noreply@blogger.com (Ilya Vedrashko) — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 23:03:29 PST

From a book about which David Ogilvy is quoted as saying: "Nobody, at any level, should be allowed to have anything to do with advertising until he has read this book seven times":

"Advertising is salesmanship. Its principles are the principles of salesmanship. Successes and failures in both lines are due to like causes. Thus every advertising question should be answered by the salesman's standards.

Let us emphasize that point. The only purpose of advertising is to make sales. It is profitable or unprofitable according to its actual sales. It is not for general effect. It is not to keep your name before the people. It is not primarily to aid your other salesmen. Treat it as a salesman. Force it to justify itself. Compare it with other salesmen. Figure its cost and result. Accept no excuses which good salesmen do not make. Then you will not go far wrong. The difference is only in degree. Advertising is multiplied salesmanship. It may appeal to thousands while the salesman talks to one. It involves a corresponding cost. Some people spend $10 per word on an average advertisement. Therefore every ad should be a super-salesman.

A salesman's mistake may cost little. An advertisers mistake may cost a thousand times that much. Be more cautious, more exacting, therefore. A mediocre salesman may affect a small part of your trade. Mediocre advertising affects all of your trade.

Many think of advertising as ad-writing. Literary qualifications have no more to do with it than oratory has with salesmanship. One must be able to express himself briefly, clearly and convincingly, just as a salesman must. But fine writing is a distinct disadvantage. So is unique literary style. They take attention from the subject. They reveal the hook. Any studies done that attempt to sell, if apparent, creates corresponding resistance.

So with countless questions. Measure them by salesmen's standards, not by amusement standards. Ads are not written to entertain. When they do, those entertainment seekers are little likely to be the people whom you want. That is one of the greatest advertising faults. Ad writers abandon their parts. They forget they are salesmen and try to be performers. Instead of sales, they seek applause.

The reason for most of the non-successes in advertising is trying to sell people what they do not want. But next to that comes lack of true salesmanship. Ads are planned and written with some utterly wrong conception. They are written to please the seller. The interest of the buyer are forgotten. One can never sell goods profitably, in person or in print, when that attitude exists."

Claude C. Hopkins, Scientific Advertising, 1923 (pdf)

Why Facebook Will Do Search And Why Google Needs Social

noreply@blogger.com (Ilya Vedrashko) — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 01:03:09 PST

Mark Zuckerberg posted a picture of himself in front of his computer, and an eagle-eyed blogger noticed that his version of Facebook sports a larger-than-usual search box. An unintended leak or not, Facebook competing in search is only a matter of time just as, in retrospect, it was inevitable that Google would integrate social elements deeper into its main product.

This is why.

It wouldn't be a revelation to say that no large-scale ad delivery system is perfect.

Reason one is that, at any given moment, only a fraction of the exposed audience is actively on the market for the benefit that the advertised product delivers. Yes, I actually might be interested in switching to your cell phone plan, but talk to me in 15 months when my contract is about to expire. This is the efficiency problem of advertising: in order to reach the few people who are interested right now, the delivery systems by necessity overshoot and spam the ~~crap~~ bejesus out of thousands who promptly tune out.

Reason two is that few would admit they believe advertising. People consider the source and recognize the nature of the claims as self-serving and discount them accordingly. This is the effectiveness problem. The advertisers' typical recourse is to bypass rational thought altogether and to beat the claim into the audience's subconscious through incessant repetition.

(Now is a good time to note that we are are talking only about ad delivery here. Effectiveness of creative is a different topic.)

That's what the main media planning principles of "reach" and "frequency" are about -- solving for efficiency and effectiveness. In the picture above, this situation is illustrated by the undesirable lower-left quadrant that says "You Are Here." You are there because most of the existing large ad delivery systems are both inefficient and ineffective.

Except for two.

Google with all its imperfections is the most efficient way to deliver ads -- only people who need something now would actively look for something and see an ad for it.

And even though it took them awhile, Facebook is figuring out that they have this whole effectiveness thing down. According to many studies (the one below, and others, including my own), friends are the most trusted source of product information. Facebook has hundreds of millions of friends, and Facebook also sells advertising, and now Facebook is putting two and two together to make advertising that comes from friends.

But Google and Facebook each solve only half of the efficiency/effectiveness problem. The impeccably timed search ads Google delivers are still self-serving. And the perfectly trustworthy social ads on Facebook still show up at the wrong time. In other words, Facebook and Google each have what the other doesn't, and they are going to fight for it.

On Google's end, this is what the whole Search Plus Your World business is about -- fixing the source problem. That's why the push to get people to +1 stuff, and then connect people into social graphs via Gmail and Google+, and then use +1ers as implicit endorsers. Not, you might notice, unlike Facebook.

And Facebook needs to fix its targeting. "Interests" have an expiry date and "likes" of pop-culture icons are only tangential indicators of predisposition towards, say, vacuum cleaners. Facebook does have several more precise mechanisms for intent targeting useful for certain categories (a recent change of status to "engaged" is a reliable signal for the wedding industry), but by and large nothing as precise of an intent indicator as search.

Hence the picture of Zuck in front of an extra-large search box.

Convert Your RSS Into Email Newsletters With Ads

noreply@blogger.com (Ilya Vedrashko) — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 21:17:03 PST

This is a sponsored post.

RevResponse, a company that helps bloggers make money by selling and giving away white papers and magazine subscriptions, has a new nifty tool that converts a blog's RSS feed into an email with automatically inserted promo offers.

RevResponse's aptly named RSS to Email Tool is a welcome addition to the pretty small group of RSS converters. A field once teeming with start-ups, it is now the domain of a few email newsletter providers, notably MailChimp, and Feedburner, a once innovative product that has become stale after its sale to Google and the departure of Dick Costolo to the greener pastures of Twitter.

Like other similar tools out there, RSS to Email takes your most recent posts and packages them into a template of your choice. The templates come in a range of colors, and while they are not likely to win any beauty pageants the tool does come with a fairly flexible scheduling system that allows you to send digests of your brilliance either once a month, once a week, or on any combination of days of your choice.

Importantly -- and uniquely -- the tool adds rather unobtrusive ads for contextually chosen whitepapers or other publications right into your blogomail: either a set of text links or an ad with a thumbnail of the publication's cover. If you run a marketing blog, advertised publications could range from HubSpot's white papers and something called Chief Social Marketer to the awesomely esoteric niche B2B pubs such as Perishables Buyer and Archery Business.

How To Remove Ads from YouTube Videos

noreply@blogger.com (Ilya Vedrashko) — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 09:07:45 PST

Simple. Except for the pre-roll.

Future: The Pirate Bay Loads Up on Physical Goods

noreply@blogger.com (Ilya Vedrashko) — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 15:25:38 PST

Not science fiction anymore, this: "Once chairs and other things become content, the prospect of rampant chair piracy turns from unimaginable into very real." The Pirate Bay is opening a new category for the new kind of piratable stuff: "We believe that the next step in copying will be made from digital form into physical form. It will be physical objects. Or as we decided to call them: Physibles. Data objects that are able (and feasible) to become physical. We believe that things like three dimensional printers, scanners and such are just the first step. We believe that in the nearby future you will print your spare sparts for your vehicles. You will download your sneakers within 20 years."

In the world where all merchandise is either basic materials or data about how to arrange them, what is the role of brands?

In Memoriam: Kodak Scenic Spots

noreply@blogger.com (Ilya Vedrashko) — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 10:50:03 PST

I took my first Kodak Photo Spot (wiki) pictures at my spring break trip to the Disney World in the mid-1990s, and through all these years I've never stopped admiring their genius. It's a marketing idea whose elegance has rarely been emulated. I love how organically spreadable the signs were, how they subtly nudged you to spend another scarce frame of film, and how they made people's lives a little bit better by giving their memories just the right composition.

Of course today the Kodak Picture Spot is something that could probably be built straight into the digital camera wired to recognize the subject and to statistically analyze thousands of photos taken from the same spot to recommend the optimal composition and camera settings.

A Kodak photo spot, (K. Mikey M on Flickr / group)

Eastmanhouse.org:

"As photography became more engrossed in American culture in the early 20th century, The Eastman Kodak Company began to look for new ways to advertise photography and its cameras. With the rise of the automobile industry and the development of American highways, the company began a campaign called “Kodak Scenic Spots.” Starting in 1920, Kodak began to place signs throughout American highways that advertised both their name and the practice of photography by marking interesting and beautiful scenery. Initially, these signs appeared on the roads outside of Kodak’s hometown of Rochester, NY in order to test the effectiveness of the idea. Within a year, they began sending members of their advertising department across the country to select the most scenic views to be awarded signs. By 1939, Kodak had placed 6,000 scenic spot signs across the country.

The exact phrases used in these signs changed over time. When the company began the campaign, the signs read: “Picture Ahead! Kodak as you go.” Eventually, the use of the work “Kodak” as a verb was stopped and the signs were changed to read: “Kodak Scenic Spot.” After the initial campaign ended in 1939, Kodak continued to place these signs sporadically in theme parks and tourist locations until the late 1980s. These signs also carried a new label, which read: “Kodak Picture Moment.”

Map of Kodak Picture Spots at Magic Kingdom (source)

Spy Plane As Propaganda Tchotchke

noreply@blogger.com (Ilya Vedrashko) — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 15:06:06 PST

An Iranian company Aaye Art Group ("designer and manufacturer of artistic and cultural goods") is making replicas of the American RQ-170 drone aircraft downed in Iran last month: "Most of the toys, which come in several colors and are made of Iranian plastic, have already been snapped up by Iranian government organizations. [...] The firm is now making 2,000 of them a day. " (Washington Post)

If you want to buy one but are affected by the embargo, you could pick up a similar one on eBay.

Augmented Reality Glasses from Lumus

noreply@blogger.com (Ilya Vedrashko) — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 00:46:29 PST

Ever dreamed of watching a video or a favorite TV show on the go? Well, aren't you lucky:

Daily Mail: "Translucent TV: Lumus' PD-18-2 is a set of spectacles that can beam high-quality images directly into your eyes but allows the user to see through the images too." (This is Lumus.)

Memorable Metal Plaques From Impact Signs

noreply@blogger.com (Ilya Vedrashko) — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 21:04:37 PST

This is a sponsored post.

The many uses for fine metal plaques are as varied as those who commission them. Whether they're intended for individual recognition, as a treasured memorial, or to identify a landmark or location, customized plaques make noteworthy markers.

Impact Signs creates metal plaques with distinction. Shapes of any style are available, and in most cases, turnaround is complete within eight business days; no extra fees apply. With exacting standards and superior services, Impact Signs is a leading source for metal plaques.

Abundant choices make it easy to create a unique and unforgettable plaque. After selecting the shape, material choices continue the design. Cast metals, such as aluminum or bronze, may be plain or textured in leatherette, pebble, smooth sand or stipple. Etched finishes offer a different, glossier look in brass, bronze, copper or stainless steel.

Several background color choices add to the appearance of metal casts, and specialty finishes lend an impressive air. Specialty finishes for cast bronze include oxidized options as well as colorful patinas, while both aluminum and bronze casts are available with a polished finish.

There are also numerous border and edge choices for cast plaques. Beveled edges, no borders, and single or double-line borders are available for both aluminum and bronze casts. Etched finishes come with either beveled edges or no border.

The finishing touches on a metal plaque are no less important than the plaque shape, materials and finishes. A variety of installation methods suit different materials and can create unique appearances, especially with the addition of rosette details to conceal or enhance the mounts. Additionally, both etched and cast plaques offer photo options that are truly exceptional.

In business since 1989, Impact Signs uses ecologically friendly practices, including recycled signage materials, solar technology and recycling of waste products. All work comes with a lifetime guarantee.

Clotaire Rapaille Patents "Before And After" Ads

noreply@blogger.com (Ilya Vedrashko) — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 23:30:35 PST

Clotaire Rapaille, the author of The Culture Code who was featured in the PBS documentary The Persuaders, is the inventor behind the patent for "Advertisement for Leather Clothing" granted in 2005. The patent references Rapaille's "imprinting sessions", "archetype discoveries" and the reptilian brain to conclude that "by emphasizing the transformative nature of leather clothing, it is possible to produce a useful, concrete and tangible result, namely, an effective advertisement for leather clothing. In particular it has been determined that such an advertisement can be made yet more effective when the transformations involved is from a person who is less sexual to a person who is more sexual."

In other words, show "before" and "after", with the "after" being the sexier of the two.

Future Schlock

noreply@blogger.com (Ilya Vedrashko) — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 13:34:01 PST

This Minority Report scene with personalized billboards that recognize your retina get a lot of people excited and pointing towards the future, but it doesn't look like people in 2054 are paying any more attention to the smart billboards than they notice the dumb ones of today.

A Nice Automated Letter from Netflix

noreply@blogger.com (Ilya Vedrashko) — Sun, 18 Sep 2011 22:19:35 PDT

It is so infrequent that automated communications are nice that I enjoy celebrating every instance. I had put my Netflix account on hold last month, but mailed back what turned out to be an empty envelope. I assumed they had already charged me the $14 for the missing DVD -- how many companies would've done just that? -- but instead I get this reminder from a friendly robot.

Y Combinator Ad Innovation Conference: What Stuck

noreply@blogger.com (Ilya Vedrashko) — Sun, 18 Sep 2011 22:20:31 PDT

As part of Hill's Beacon initiative, I traveled to the Y Combinator's Ad Innovation Conference earlier this week to watch some 20 YC-funded start-ups present their technologies to a roomful of ad people. AdExchanger already has a nice write-up that explains what each company does, so that's not what I am going to do here. Instead, I will go through my notes trying to answer the question Paul Graham, the YC co-founder (pictured above with the glass), asked after the event: "So, what stuck?"

Here's what stuck.

Ginzametrics offers SEO software which they position as a content optimization offering, an angle I liked a lot. Their slides had a lot of graphs outlining the business opportunity and the advantages of their solution, which made the deck feel like it was designed for investors and not the end users. The site has plenty of screenshots; I would just show those instead.

Tagstand develops technologies that have to do with near field communication technologies, the meaning of which they took time to explain,showing how an NFC device (usually a smartphone) can replace just about everything you are now carrying in your wallet.

One of possible advertising applications Tagstand suggests for its technology is people downloading stuff off billboards by swiping their phones near a designated spot. As you'll see a few pictures down, Paperlink shows the same use-case for its own QR code tech. This kind of interaction was also what made people excited about Bluetooth, back in 2005. It must be working for someone, but I've never seen it myself. Moving information from a billboard into the phone isn't usually the problem; the problem is overcoming people's indifference.

I do like the analytics possibilities Tagstand offers, though.

That was funny: Vidyard, a company that offers a "YouTube for business", showed what businesses have to deal with when posting stuff on YouTube -- a promo video for BlackBerry PlayBook followed by a user-submitted top-rated comment about how shitty the PlayBooks are. The company's YouTube reference is understandable but confusing -- in advertisers' minds, YouTube is more about distribution, and Vidyard is in the video hosting business.

Crowdbooster showed the kind of interfaces that social media managers have to deal with.

The company offers what they call "the first intelligent social media dashboard". I would love to see how fully they can replace Radian6 and Tweedeck, the incumbents Crowdbooster contrasts itself against.

Optimizely was one of the few companies I had known about before the conference -- they help create landing pages for testing. Their technology speaks for itself, and all they had to do was demo it. It's stuff like this that makes you feel like you live in 2011 and not 10 years ago.

These guys presented off the record. The teams behind each company wore different t-shirts; the ladybugs stuck.

This is a slide from the presentation by Paperlinks, the QR codes guys. I'm not crazy about the data, likely from a third-party study. Up 4,549% in Q1 from what base? How often do you need to scan QR codes in order to be counted? The 18-34 is too much of an age spread for the HHI number to be meaningful here -- is it their income or their parents'?

Paperlinks helps design cool-looking -- and apparently more effective -- custom QR codes.

The idea here is that you scan the code for the ice-cream you want and then walk up to the store to pick it up and avoid the line. As I wrote above, it has to be working for someone, although maybe selling ice cream is not the best application -- could Amazon be selling books this way?

But generally, I can't shake off the feeling that QR codes are like pagers, a bridge technology that might have been useful for a brief period of time but is already on its way out, being displaced by more advanced things such as full image recognition. To quote Paul Graham, I worry.

Pagelever offers analytics tools for Facebook fan pages. They shared some of their findings, such as the fact that the best time to update your page is when the previous post is losing traction, which is something they can tell you.

Three photos in one update attract more engagement (likes, shares and comments) than single-photo updates. Attracting engagement is important because that's one of the signals into Facebook's Edge Rank, the algorithm that decides which updates to show to what people.

GazeHawk is another company I had known about before the event. They offer remote eye-tracking services using nothing but webcams. I'm looking for an excuse to try them.

JustinTV talked about how gaming has become a spectator sport. They have recently launched TwitchTV, a streaming portal of gaming footage.

Two companies' versions of the same graph.

DoubleRecall offers a novel spin on CAPTCHA ads -- it asks users to type in words that are highlighted in a sentence. I thought it was interesting, but I also think CAPTCHA ads in general offer the wrong kind of incentives to publishers.

Journalism's Primary Duty Is To Its Readers, Not Advertisers

noreply@blogger.com (Ilya Vedrashko) — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 15:42:57 PDT

"Henry Luce, a co-founder of TIME, disdained the notion of giveaway publications that relied solely on ad revenue. He called that formula "morally abhorrent" and also "economically self-defeating." That was because he believed that good journalism required that a publication's primary duty be to its readers, not to its advertisers. In an advertising-only revenue model, the incentive is perverse. It is also self-defeating, because eventually you will weaken your bond with your readers if you do not feel directly dependent on them for your revenue."

Time, "How To Save Your Newspaper", 2009

I keep thinking about this quote but forgetting where I first saw it, so I'm parking it here. It's a good thought; probably applies to a lot of web and mobile apps, too.

Will Daily Deals Turn Newspapers Around?

noreply@blogger.com (Ilya Vedrashko) — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 16:42:20 PDT

"Groupon is Hastening the Demise of the Newspaper Industry," wrote a daily deals trade pub in April.

It could be the other way around.

The technological barriers to the deals space are pretty low; Shoutback and Nimble Commerce and many other companies are offering consulting and white-label systems to power deal mechanisms. And newspapers have other things many other Groupon clones don't -- large local audiences that are still used to turning to newspapers for coupons, and a sales force with established local relationships.

The Boston Globe is offering its own Boston Deals (promoted on the home page, no less) after trying a partnership with BuyWithMe last year (and SCVNGR, also last year) as it moves to separate its online content from a potentially more lucrative e-commerce business. Boston Phoenix offers deals, Star Tribune in the Twin Cities offers STeals.

It's interesting how newspapers today struggle to make money on content -- putting up paywalls, repackaging it into single-device apps -- instead of going for an easier buck. It seems like the newspapers should be able do a lot with the two things they already have -- local audiences and local sales relationships. They could do daily deals, for example, like The Globe, Phoenix and Star Tribune. Or they could aggregate local deals from Groupon and its numerous clones, Yipit-style. (Maybe they could also print some of these deals in Sunday circulars, for fun.) Or maybe they could try getting some of the classifieds back from Craigslist -- has any newspaper really tried?

But even content -- what if they took their massive and rich content they have accumulated and repackaged it for a different, non-news market? For almost everything a large newspaper touches there's a start-up that is likely doing for more money. School ratings in the Globe? There's School Digger and Great Schools. "Hyper-local news"? Neighborhood Scout.

A lot of tech start-ups are going to great lengths to produce content to attract people to sell their services to. With newspapers, it almost feels like they half-heartedly bolt on random third-party services (job search by Monster, auto listings by cars.com) to attract people to read content off which the newspapers then struggle to make money.

It's easy to be an armchair strategist so I'll shut up, but I like newspapers and hope that maybe the Globe's and other publications' experiments with daily deals will mark the beginning of things turning around for them.

Movie Spectrograms

noreply@blogger.com (Ilya Vedrashko) — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 01:22:16 PDT

Every frame of Kill Bill vol.1 compressed into a spectrogram-like "barcode". This and a lot of other movies on MovieBarcode Tumblr.

Kinect To Power TV Ads, Billboards

noreply@blogger.com (Ilya Vedrashko) — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 01:16:25 PDT

A Microsoft guy explains how Kinect and Nuads will add gestural and voice goodness to TV ads served through Xbox.

Would one have to be standing up for this? Are people's living spaces spacious enough to accomodate Kinect? And would anyone care?

Kinect, though, would be a nice cheap addition for digital signage in public spaces, illustrated by this hack and this. Some ad shops are already experimenting. Wouldn't be fun to customize a billboard's message based on the onlooker's body type and gender?

One other thing Kinect would be awesome for is monitoring people's general usage of TV and other media in the device's vicinity by combining sound detection and recognition with body position identification, answering the "what's on?" and "is anyone watching it?" questions. It's such an awesome idea that I'm actually keeping my Kinect behind the TV and facing the wall when it's not in use, in case the idea has already occurred to someone else.

Looks like Microsoft has tested a Nuads-like execution with Chevy Volt last fall with the car placed into the Kinect-enabled Joy Ride.

SoftKinetic has developed and been using its own hardware to power up signage way before Kinect.

AdShip Adds Ads to eBay Purchases

noreply@blogger.com (Ilya Vedrashko) — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 23:10:05 PDT

Here's a way for eBay sellers to earn an extra buck by adding ads to their shipment paperwork and email confirmations: AdShip "dynamically inserts complementary advertisements on shippers' post-sale, customer-facing print and digital order fulfillment touch points." Like this.

Did you know that eBay has its own app store?

YouTube Identifies Soundtracks, Creates Auto Playlists?

noreply@blogger.com (Ilya Vedrashko) — Tue, 24 May 2011 10:50:22 PDT

I was watching this mega-awesome video and noticed that YouTube identified the artist on the soundtrack (Hybrid) and linked the artist's name to a separate page containing more artist details including other tracks, a playlist button, upcoming events, and an info blurb.There's also an affiliate "Buy" link placeholder under the artist's name, but it was left empty. This seems to be a part of YouTube's Content ID program, but I haven't it in this type of action before.

Bonus track: one hacker explores how Content ID works.

CreditLoan.com Cashes In On Rapture

noreply@blogger.com (Ilya Vedrashko) — Sat, 21 May 2011 18:21:26 PDT

Love how CreditLoan.com jumped on the Twitter rapture train by paying to for the sponsored tweet in the #endoftheworldconfessions top trending topic. 150 retweets as of this post.

Casual Mobile Advergames - For Cats!

noreply@blogger.com (Ilya Vedrashko) — Fri, 20 May 2011 16:42:11 PDT

Puss In Boots, boot up your tablet - Friskies has released not one but three Games for Cats advergames playable in any tablet browser thanks to the magic of HTML5/CSS3. The games don't scale down to the phone screen size, though, so smaller cats are out of luck. The games are Cat Fishing, Tasty Treasures Hunt, and Party Mix-Up. Cats like.

Now waiting for a study on the advergames's effect on feline brand recognition.

There Are No Insights, There Is No Research

noreply@blogger.com (Ilya Vedrashko) — Fri, 20 May 2011 15:35:53 PDT

Farrah Bostic points out that you can't have "insights" the same you can't have "intelligences":

"You can not uncover, seek, find, or land on "insights". Insight isn’t a noun in the sense that a car or a nickel or a pen are nouns. It’s a noun that names a quality or capacity, like beauty, intelligence, compassion. We tend not to pluralize and objectify these nouns, because they are not about objects.

Insight is a capacity to gain accurate and deep understanding of a person or thing. Insight, in other words, is what a good planner or creative – or hell, in a perfect world a good client or account manager – should have. The depth of this understanding should go so far as to seem intuitive. There are many ways one might obtain insight – through study, immersion, experience, interrogation, observation. And these are the standard tools of the planner or market researcher or strategist."

Ben McAllister warns about the dangers of "scientism":

"As an undergraduate physics major, I had grown to understand scientific research as a slow process that took place over years or even decades. Research, as I understood it then, was an attempt to deliberately advance knowledge by eliminating false theories. It was a difficult undertaking bolstered by rigorous debate.

In the business world, I later learned, “the research” is quite a different phenomenon. As my interview so nicely illustrated, “the research” is not debatable. Apparently it’s capable of predicting people’s reactions to decisions that haven’t even been made yet. In fact, “the research,” seems to be capable of making decisions all on its own."