According to an article on AdAge, a “source familiar with the product” claims there are new features Facebook wants to release concurrently with video ads, requiring more software development.

Meanwhile, Mashable claims that the delay stems from slow uptake by advertisers. Facebook is allegedly trying to convince brands of the merits of the ad units, which will go for around $1m per advert reaching a specific demographic swath, and as much as $2.4m for an advert seen by all US-based Facebook users.

Clearly, this delay will prove expensive for the site, but its advertising revenue remains strong, growing 43% to $1.25bn in the first quarter of 2013.

It’s an area that Facebook needs to get right – eMarketer projects that advertisers will spend $4.09bn on video ads this year, and $5.68bn in 2014.

More than maths, though, the company needs to ensure the new ads don’t completely deter Facebook users already growing weary of its advertising. As Debra Aho Williamson, principal analyst at eMarketer tells AdAge: “From a business perspective, Facebook would want to roll out this type of advertising more quickly, but they have to weigh that against how their users feel. Facebook has to be really careful about not overweighting the news feed with advertising.”

According to online sports media company Perform, 28% of fans who use social media are more likely to be interested in a brand that sponsors or advertises around a sport, and 25% are more likely to buy a product or service, compared to 20% and 17% of all sports fans respectively.

Fans are also spending more time with sports content, at an average of 8.1 hours per week in 2013, up from 6.2 hours in 2012.

These findings reveal a potentially lucrative advertising space for brands, although it’s not clear whether fans show extra interest because of social channels directly, or because of the already global nature of the brands advertising.

Nonetheless, the report does indicate that the fragmentation of ‘traditional’ media is providing new opportunities for those within the sports industry, and brands should be ready to take advantage of them. Oliver Slipper, joint chief executive of Perform, said: “Judging by this report, the importance of a device- and platform-neutral strategy to engage with fans is becoming more important.”

That’s the question every crowdfunding project asks itself as it seeks to create the essential “elevator pitch” video.

All crowdfunding sites – whether it be Indiegogo, Kickstarter or any of the more niche sites now springing up – recommend you create a short, snappy video to be the centrepiece of each campaign. After all, in the social media landscape, video is a far more compelling and shareable medium than even the funniest, well-written blog post. A good video message can become the digital calling card for your campaign that can also live on YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook, Pinterest, your own blog and many other social media sites. If tagged correctly and accompanied by a link back to your crowdfunding page, the video can help drive traffic to your project.

We chose to make a video that introduced the main characters of our brand – four kids called Dill, Olive, Sprout and Pickle – and also tried to highlight that what some people think of as gross, others consider a cultural treasure and often a delicacy.

Working with Atticus Digital, an agency that specialises in animation, we created a video lasting just over 2.5 mins. We had the each of the kids introduce a gross food from a different part of the world as a “taster” of what the App would deliver. Dill’s gross food, for example, is burgers made from flies in West Africa. Not only does Dill think fly burgers are yummy, but they also are really healthy and give provide the local people with a much needed source of protein.

I wrote the script for the animated video and storyboarded how I wanted the video to look. Then I asked a friend, David Charles, a talented actor, to provide the narration. Next we got our kids to provide the voices of the characters – we recorded them using an iPhone – and the team at Atticus did the rest. Here’s how it turned out.

By creating this calling card video we also generated a lot of other visual assets that we can employ throughout the campaign to keep people interested and hopefully keep contributing.

We also decided to create a mock up of one of the elements of the Gross Food Guide App. We chose to focus on one of the funniest gross foods out there – the famous Argan Oil from Morocco that was traditionally “refined” from goats’ poo.

Atticus created this mock up of how the game might look.

All told creating the two videos has cost us about £4,000 in “donated” time and labour. That’s a lot of favours to ask on a speculative venture but without a compelling video a crowdfunding project has no chance. Next week we’ll look at how well or badly the video has performed and how it has driven engagement.

Finally (and you knew this was coming) if you want to help us create the Gross Food Guide, please contribute to our Indiegogo campaign.

The Social Food Brand Study 2013 looked at activity across a wide spectrum of social and digital media, including the use of main networking platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, as well as forum, blogs, video and photo sharing, and the degree to which social is integrated into websites.

The research found that online conversations are being dominated by only a few:

Burger King – 32.8%
KFC – 19.7%
Starbucks – 15.5%
Pizza Hut – 7.7%
Subway – 6.1%
Greggs – 2.8%
Nando’s – 1.5%
Ben & Jerry’s – 1.5%
Dominos – 1.2%

It also found that 40% of websites are not optimised for social media, that only 4% of brands use smaller platforms such as Flickr and Foursquare, and that only 60% of food brands use LinkedIn, highlighting an opportunity for food brands to better engage with franchisees and B2B supplier networks.

Encouragingly, social media links on brand websites have increased by 72% this year, but according to the findings adoption still lags behind FMCG, entertainment and housing industries.

Catriona Oldershaw, managing director UK of synthesio, which partnered on the report, added that 77% of people discussing these social food brands on the web are talking about the experience of eating, “but many brands aren’t engaged in that conversation”.

“The emphasis on mainly transactional activities and broadcasted promotional communication means that many brands aren’t engaging in the best ways that can help their businesses,” she said.

“There also seems to be a general reticence in the sector about people coming out from behind the brand as part of the development of corporate reputation.”

The internet giant says that marketers could bid against one another to have their adverts presented to those perceived to have a high degree of social authority among their circles.

According to the patent, users could be assigned a score based on their number of followers, connections or mentions – not unlike Klout or Kred, then, which are already being used to identify user traits and social desirability.

The patent says that this score could be further tweaked by considering:

• The number of posts, reports and retweets a user makes
• The type of pages they ‘like’
• Lists they subscribe to
• The degree to which others write about them
• How influential their own followers are

“In this manner, an advertiser may be billed a higher amount for advertisements provided to users having a higher social authority score than for advertisements provided to users having a lower social authority score,” the patent states.

How Yahoo plans to move forward with this plan is not yet clear. The patent for ‘social reputation ads’ was filed in December 2011, but has only just been published, and according to a spokeswoman for the company, hasn’t yet been approved.

Try catching the goat’s poo to make Argan oil!

If you asked me just a few months ago if I would ever consider running my own crowdfunding campaign I probably would have dismissed the thought out of hand. Sure I’d seen the monster success of such high profile ventures like the Pebble Watch on Kickstarter and the “Let’s Build a Goddamn Tesla Museum” on Indiegogo but still, the idea of asking complete strangers to help fund my own creative idea seemed, well, a little uncomfortable to be quite honest.

That said, I was facing a major dilemma. For the past two years I’ve been devoting a great deal of my spare time to developing a new kids brand around food and adventure. Together with a very talented animator and illustrator called Phil Hayes, whose credits include The Simpsons, King of the Hill and Bob’s Burgers, I’d created four characters, Dill, Olive, Sprout and Pickle and written five short stories detailing their amazing adventures all over the world discovering and learning about food.

It was a great project to invest my time in and the stories scored highly with their target demographic….. my kids, aged 10 and seven, that is. Surprisingly though, those results didn’t seem enough of an incentive for book publishers and major motion studios to write me a multimillion dollar development cheque and greenlight the project. Indeed, the more people in the kids entertainment business that I talked to – and I’ve chatted with the lot (including top producers, Hollywood agents, major toy brands and media lawyers) – the more I got the same advice: you’ve got to demonstrate your brand can establish and command a community before anyone will take a risk on yet another kid’s entertainment venture.

Now, as anybody involved in social media can tell you, building a loyal community around an already established business or product is hard enough. Creating community and loyalty for a brand of fictional characters that no one has ever heard of is really hard work! And so, even as I’d started blogging about the foodie adventures of Dill, Olive, Pickle and Sprout I kept searching for a way to, um, kickstart my project.

I’d been writing about crowdsourcing and crowdfunding platforms for a while but it was only when I was listening to a presentation at SXSW by Indiegogo co-founder and CEO, Slava Rubin, that I realised crowdfunding actually could help my project. But only if I had a tangible product to rally around. That’s when I decided to create The Gross Food Guide, a kids entertainment and educational App that explores the most interesting, bizarre and, yes, gross foods that people like to eat all around the world.

The reason for creating an App was straightforward: kids, aged 6 – 10 love interactive Apple and Android Apps and games. They also love gross stuff and are fascinated by food. Admittedly the children’s App market is a competitive field to say the least but if I didn’t believe in my project I shouldn’t be trying to raise money to fund it right? And so The Gross Food Guide was born. We launched the Indiegogo campaign six days ago and so far we’ve raised 23 percent of the £15,000 we need to build the App – a good start according to most research on crowdfunding.

The other reason for undertaking this crowdfunding campaign was to learn firsthand about this fast growing social sector. With this in mind I’ll be writing a regular diary through the course of the campaign detailing the highs and lows (of which there are many) of running a crowdfunding campaign. At the end of the campaign I’ll write a special SMI guide to crowdfunding, drawing on my experiences.

So stay tuned for the next update And, of course, if you’d like to support the Gross Food Guide, I’d be very appreciative and it will make for a better story. Everyone loves a happy ending after all.

Tomorrow: I’ll document all the planning that went into the campaign before we launched and tell you about a special offer for SMI readers.

The ‘Jigglevision’ initiative, built around a dedicated Facebook app, invites fans to create secret messages that can only be decoded after the recipient has purchased a Jell-O snack pot.

Messages are concealed with a pattern and can only be viewed – thanks to optical jiggery pokery – through a Jell-O snack lid. The campaign is also supported by a series of interactive print ads featuring jokes requiring a lid to view the punch lines.

It’s a kid-friendly campaign that adds a really fun element to the usual challenges inherent in bridging the online/offline divide, and marks another marketing triumph for the brand, which recently stirred controversy by ‘reinventing’ popular (and sweary) acronym and hashtag ‘FML’ as the far more family-friendly ‘Fun My Life’.

The first time a consumer makes a purchase with Chirpify they’ll be asked to sign up and enter their card or bank routing information. After this, they’ll only have to type the words ‘buy’, ‘donate’ or ‘gimme’ on a Facebook or Instagram post, or reply to a tweet, in order to seal the deal.

“Our brands and members want optionality when it comes to paying and payment acceptance,” said Chirpify CEO Chris Teso. “With direct payment processing we are making the transaction as frictionless as possible for consumers, eliminating the need to connect with another payment platform outside of Chirpify. For brands, the direct payment acceptance lowers fees by eliminating the need for a third party, and enables wider acceptance beyond just PayPal.”