MTV has clearly elevated the concept of socializing while watching television to an artfully modern parlor game. It’s called Backchannel.
Here’s the nutshell. Micro-blog funny or snarky comments in real time with others online while watching The Hills on MTV (you probably already do that). To play, log into a specialized MTV Backchannel game “chat room” while you are tuned into the tv show. Viewers make comments (called tags) about what is happening in the show to the 100 other people or so in that room. Other people click on the comments floating around that they like - a la an arcade game. Players get points as both a clicker and tagger with the goal of becoming a Backchannel superstar. It is all timed and limited pretty ingeniously so the tagging and clicking isn’t overwhelming. It’s way more compelling than it might sound, trust me.
The commenting goes on right through the commercials – yes, I hear the ad-people gears turning on the potential advertising metrics on that one…. Advertisers, are you ready to hear what people think of you?
Social media concepts personified. MTV connects the audience to each other (one of our well-worn mantras here), and makes their TV shows interactive, more fun and socially powered. But just think about the insight MTV is gathering from the audience on the content of the show – not to mention a new value they can offer their advertisers.
MTV has mashed up TV with Twitter with gaming with social networking – they’ve done equally interesting things with virtual worlds, but that's another story.
I tell you. MTV are ones to follow (even if their programming may not always be).
W00t! I got one!! That 100,000-of-a-kind 75th anniversary October Esquire Magazine issue with the very modern e-ink cover. It’s blinking at me now - 2 ½ x 4 1/4 inches of pure modern media.
Esquire teamed up with E-Ink (of Amazon Kindle fame) to create the first ever e-paper magazine cover as a forward look into the future of print (no backward glances in this birthday suit).
The cover has been rumored for a while, and Hearst Corp. (Esquire’s parent) has been working with E-Ink for over two years to make it a reality.
The goal here is making advertising sing – well, at least bling.
Ford Motors defrayed much of the R&D cost, paying a nice premium to have its first-of-a-kind animated E-Ink ad placed on the inside cover. Esquire’s publishers believe this tiny animated billboard on every page is the future (and salvation) for print media advertising. It’s inevitable that as the technology sophisticates e-ink ads – and print content in general - will too. We happen to think the potential – and Esquire’s experiment - is pretty modernly cool.
The cover and Ford’s ad are made up of microchips, batteries and microcapsules thinner than a human hair and covered with a flexible plastic. The microcapsules contain black and white pigments that, when charged, work together to create the images. The batteries should keep the cover blinging for at least three months, but the juice could last as long as six.
We’ll definitely see more of this from Hearst since they have a one-year exclusive from E-Ink – not to mention that Hearst Interactive Media also owns a stake in E-Ink (modern move there, Hearst!).
Once it stops blinging for us, we’ll be putting it into our modern media archives.
And to the 99,999 other lucky Oct. Esquire owners, file this one away. You never know, it might be worth something on eBay someday. If you must toss it, Esquire suggests how to recycle it.
To see what the cover looks like see this video.
To get inside the cover, see Popular Science article, Hacking the Esquire E-ink Cover.
Photo credit – Folio Magazine
Sign me up!!
Advertising really gets a bad rap in today’s “social” mediasphere. Fact is, we consumers need it, and we want it – especially those ads from our very own in-town local merchants who generally offer us unique products or better yet, a shopping experience that is person-person social while keeping us close to home and eco-friendly.
Problem is those ads are generally dead trees in our mailbox or on our doorstep – and we wind up sending it back into the recycling loop, which inevitably increases our carbon footprint anyway which doesn’t help the planet….
Pubeco has a model I’m totally up for. Members of the Pubeco service can get all their full-color, personality-included local ads and promotional flyers online – plus they can manage personalized RSS feeds for their local businesses, selecting and searching by categories of interest.
Social networking features allow customers to add merchants as favorites or trusted connections, which serve to build the merchants’ business relationships as well as their “socially networked” reputation within the community. Pubeco has a Facebook page as well.
Pubeco users put a sticker on their mailbox that refuses advertising: “ No advertising, I look on the Internet. I protect my planet.”
But there’s more! Members earn points for visiting the site and the points are converted into grants to eco-friendly causes.
Pubeco is a project launched last February throughout France by Sustainable Development Multimedia. Their mission: “More promotions, less pollution.” We say: Modern media well executed and very “socially” responsible.
Now, anyone know of such a service in the U.S.?
Cozi’s getting some big press these days.
Cozi is an oh-so-simple, but oh-so-happy-making family calendar done Web 2.0 style. It offers a family journal, lists, and reminder service and is a general keeper-and-organizer-of-family-details. Its user interface is a thing of pure beauty – and its ability to sync automatically with your calendar at work is simply brilliant. But, being able to call or text message to get my shopping list sent to my mobile phone – that’s music to our modern media ears!
Newspaper publisher, Gannett is feeling warm and cozi too. After launching a strategic partnership with Cozi in April to offer locally co-branded Cozies on three of its newspaper sites, Gannett has just announced a full-on investment as a minority stakeholder in Cozi.
Speculation is that Gannett will go modern by integrating Cozi into their newspapers’ Calendar listings. Since they also have a seat on the Cozi board in the deal, we’ll be seeing the Gannett Cozi modernness being promoted across Gannett’s print and online newspaper sites. Well, like this:
Those aren’t call letters, it’s yet another take on moving radio from broadcast to a modern media. And with more than a billion java-enabled handsets sold last year, I’d say it’s a pretty smart move.
PM1 SMS, a service aimed at radio stations, turns handsets into marketing ma-chines.
Actually, I like it. It’s total modern media. It gives listeners new kinds of access to their music and moves advertising just a touch closer to where more of it should be - on-demand. But, more importantly, the revenue and purchasing models signal the move toward true mobile commerce and that advertising models are thinking modern while gaining mainstream traction.
 Listeners text a five-digit code to the radio station which triggers a plethora of expected choices - everything from artist information, wallpaper and alerts to downloading the ringtone, buying music on iTunes or grabbing concert tickets on the go. Of course there are the necessary polls, contest entry and feedback. But, listeners can also request certain radio content on-demand and use “text tags” to get advertiser information and special promotions (that would be Frame of Mind marketing) – and of course buy non-music products, all with their everywhere-I-go handset.
A key and unique feature is listeners set up an M-Wallet account with the radio station and purchases are charged against the credit card on file. Currently, almost all purchasing done via mobile phone (for U.S. audiences at least) is through mobile service provider. Let true m-commerce begin!
PM1 SMS differs from Nokia’s Visual Radio in that Visual Radio is primarily a “push” model which then allows some limited user response opportunities. PM1 SMS is listener-initiated, two-way, get-it-when—where-I-want-it radio.
Virgin Radio launch an SMS response service last year – so we’re not too surprised that Virgin Mobile is just one major customer signing on with PM1 SMS.
Good call!
 Remember when you were asking yourself
“who wants a camera in a phone?” Mobit is connecting the real world with the digital
world via the mobile phone camera. They’re teaming their
visual search technology with instant gratification (and media
and marketers).
A picture can launch a thousand possibilities. Take a picture
of an ad – get the nearest location to purchase. Click a quick photo of a movie poster,
buy tickets or download a ringtone. Shoot a smile and respond to a poll. Snap a shot of a label and get product information. Immediate reponse on your mobile phone. Anything becomes “animated” without any modifications to it (no bar codes, tags etc.)
And, of course Mobit supplies
response metrics.
Elle, Vibe, Jane magazines are
using Mobit to offer promotions to advertisers, and a host of them are signing up –
Saturn, Target, Absolut Vodka, DKNY, Old Spice, VW, Ford – and on and on.
We like where this is going (with caution) – customer pull – “what I want, when I want it.” What can you animate?
 Dutch SMSeenHuis (“text a house”) lets you, well, text a house. The company makes “for sale” or “for rent” signs smart by enriching them with a unique text code. As you pass by your dream home, dial the code on your mobile phone and information about the property is instantly sent to your phone, such as price, square footage, number of rooms.
The mobile phone is the quintessential liquid media device – information when we want it, where we want it.
What information can you deliver
at that right “frame of mind” moment?
 Well, here’s one idea. The UK’s largest media companies,namely Virgin Radio, Channel 4 and Capital FM, are now offering SMS response to their standard radio or television ads. Listeners and viewers are encouraged to SMS a shortcode in response to ads to receive free product,special pricing or an exclusive offering. The bigger news is
that this is a formalized sign that mainstream media is embracing
mobile’s ability to turn static into interactive. Now, watch WAP content explode as advertisers accept SMS as a response mechanism and use WAP sites to offer compelling content in exchange for starting or expanding that all important relationship with a customer.Levi’s is among the first
to launch a WAP site as an integral part of their latest 501 jeans campaign.
 You
must know about the worldwide 8-billion dollar (and growing) mobile phone ringtone
market. The United States currently only accounts for about $160 million of that.
But, thanks to Billboard,
we have a Top Ten chart for ringtones.
Did you know in Europe and Asia
you can buy them in vending machines? - just point your mobile phone to pay for
it.
Ringtones - and ringback tones are somewhat old news - the latest in
Japan are ring videos (with audio, of course). DoCoMo has trademarked Chaku-Motion
for their ring video service.
 One
of our mantras is "all media is multimedia." Here's an example of what
we mean. Zinio gives you a digital subscription to all your favorite magazines.
With the Zinio reader you can browse the magazine pages exactly as they are in
the print version. Except they also include animations, audio interviews, music,
movie clips and TV commercials. And, the Zinio reader downloads your magazines
automatically for you, just as they hit newsstands, so you can "read"
(or experience) them offline. They are keyword searchable and you can forward
an entire digital issue to a friend.
How might this impact your advertising,
editorial or publication?
www.zinio.com
MTV has clearly elevated the concept of socializing while watching television to an artfully modern parlor game. It’s called Backchannel.
Here’s the nutshell. Micro-blog funny or snarky comments in real time with others online while watching The Hills on MTV (you probably already do that). To play, log into a specialized MTV Backchannel game “chat room” while you are tuned into the tv show. Viewers make comments (called tags) about what is happening in the show to the 100 other people or so in that room. Other people click on the comments floating around that they like - a la an arcade game. Players get points as both a clicker and tagger with the goal of becoming a Backchannel superstar. It is all timed and limited pretty ingeniously so the tagging and clicking isn’t overwhelming. It’s way more compelling than it might sound, trust me.
The commenting goes on right through the commercials – yes, I hear the ad-people gears turning on the potential advertising metrics on that one…. Advertisers, are you ready to hear what people think of you?
Social media concepts personified. MTV connects the audience to each other (one of our well-worn mantras here), and makes their TV shows interactive, more fun and socially powered. But just think about the insight MTV is gathering from the audience on the content of the show – not to mention a new value they can offer their advertisers.
MTV has mashed up TV with Twitter with gaming with social networking – they’ve done equally interesting things with virtual worlds, but that's another story.
I tell you. MTV are ones to follow (even if their programming may not always be).
W00t! I got one!! That 100,000-of-a-kind 75th anniversary October Esquire Magazine issue with the very modern e-ink cover. It’s blinking at me now - 2 ½ x 4 1/4 inches of pure modern media.
Esquire teamed up with E-Ink (of Amazon Kindle fame) to create the first ever e-paper magazine cover as a forward look into the future of print (no backward glances in this birthday suit).
The cover has been rumored for a while, and Hearst Corp. (Esquire’s parent) has been working with E-Ink for over two years to make it a reality.
The goal here is making advertising sing – well, at least bling.
Ford Motors defrayed much of the R&D cost, paying a nice premium to have its first-of-a-kind animated E-Ink ad placed on the inside cover. Esquire’s publishers believe this tiny animated billboard on every page is the future (and salvation) for print media advertising. It’s inevitable that as the technology sophisticates e-ink ads – and print content in general - will too. We happen to think the potential – and Esquire’s experiment - is pretty modernly cool.
The cover and Ford’s ad are made up of microchips, batteries and microcapsules thinner than a human hair and covered with a flexible plastic. The microcapsules contain black and white pigments that, when charged, work together to create the images. The batteries should keep the cover blinging for at least three months, but the juice could last as long as six.
We’ll definitely see more of this from Hearst since they have a one-year exclusive from E-Ink – not to mention that Hearst Interactive Media also owns a stake in E-Ink (modern move there, Hearst!).
Once it stops blinging for us, we’ll be putting it into our modern media archives.
And to the 99,999 other lucky Oct. Esquire owners, file this one away. You never know, it might be worth something on eBay someday. If you must toss it, Esquire suggests how to recycle it.
To see what the cover looks like see this video.
To get inside the cover, see Popular Science article, Hacking the Esquire E-ink Cover.
Photo credit – Folio Magazine
Sign me up!!
Advertising really gets a bad rap in today’s “social” mediasphere. Fact is, we consumers need it, and we want it – especially those ads from our very own in-town local merchants who generally offer us unique products or better yet, a shopping experience that is person-person social while keeping us close to home and eco-friendly.
Problem is those ads are generally dead trees in our mailbox or on our doorstep – and we wind up sending it back into the recycling loop, which inevitably increases our carbon footprint anyway which doesn’t help the planet….
Pubeco has a model I’m totally up for. Members of the Pubeco service can get all their full-color, personality-included local ads and promotional flyers online – plus they can manage personalized RSS feeds for their local businesses, selecting and searching by categories of interest.
Social networking features allow customers to add merchants as favorites or trusted connections, which serve to build the merchants’ business relationships as well as their “socially networked” reputation within the community. Pubeco has a Facebook page as well.
Pubeco users put a sticker on their mailbox that refuses advertising: “ No advertising, I look on the Internet. I protect my planet.”
But there’s more! Members earn points for visiting the site and the points are converted into grants to eco-friendly causes.
Pubeco is a project launched last February throughout France by Sustainable Development Multimedia. Their mission: “More promotions, less pollution.” We say: Modern media well executed and very “socially” responsible.
Now, anyone know of such a service in the U.S.?
Cozi’s getting some big press these days.
Cozi is an oh-so-simple, but oh-so-happy-making family calendar done Web 2.0 style. It offers a family journal, lists, and reminder service and is a general keeper-and-organizer-of-family-details. Its user interface is a thing of pure beauty – and its ability to sync automatically with your calendar at work is simply brilliant. But, being able to call or text message to get my shopping list sent to my mobile phone – that’s music to our modern media ears!
Newspaper publisher, Gannett is feeling warm and cozi too. After launching a strategic partnership with Cozi in April to offer locally co-branded Cozies on three of its newspaper sites, Gannett has just announced a full-on investment as a minority stakeholder in Cozi.
Speculation is that Gannett will go modern by integrating Cozi into their newspapers’ Calendar listings. Since they also have a seat on the Cozi board in the deal, we’ll be seeing the Gannett Cozi modernness being promoted across Gannett’s print and online newspaper sites. Well, like this:
Those aren’t call letters, it’s yet another take on moving radio from broadcast to a modern media. And with more than a billion java-enabled handsets sold last year, I’d say it’s a pretty smart move.
PM1 SMS, a service aimed at radio stations, turns handsets into marketing ma-chines.
Actually, I like it. It’s total modern media. It gives listeners new kinds of access to their music and moves advertising just a touch closer to where more of it should be - on-demand. But, more importantly, the revenue and purchasing models signal the move toward true mobile commerce and that advertising models are thinking modern while gaining mainstream traction.
Listeners text a five-digit code to the radio station which triggers a plethora of expected choices - everything from artist information, wallpaper and alerts to downloading the ringtone, buying music on iTunes or grabbing concert tickets on the go. Of course there are the necessary polls, contest entry and feedback. But, listeners can also request certain radio content on-demand and use “text tags” to get advertiser information and special promotions (that would be Frame of Mind marketing) – and of course buy non-music products, all with their everywhere-I-go handset.
A key and unique feature is listeners set up an M-Wallet account with the radio station and purchases are charged against the credit card on file. Currently, almost all purchasing done via mobile phone (for U.S. audiences at least) is through mobile service provider. Let true m-commerce begin!
PM1 SMS differs from Nokia’s Visual Radio in that Visual Radio is primarily a “push” model which then allows some limited user response opportunities. PM1 SMS is listener-initiated, two-way, get-it-when—where-I-want-it radio.
Virgin Radio launch an SMS response service last year – so we’re not too surprised that Virgin Mobile is just one major customer signing on with PM1 SMS.
Good call!
Remember when you were asking yourself
“who wants a camera in a phone?” Mobit is connecting the real world with the digital
world via the mobile phone camera. They’re teaming their
visual search technology with instant gratification (and media
and marketers).
A picture can launch a thousand possibilities. Take a picture
of an ad – get the nearest location to purchase. Click a quick photo of a movie poster,
buy tickets or download a ringtone. Shoot a smile and respond to a poll. Snap a shot of a label and get product information. Immediate reponse on your mobile phone. Anything becomes “animated” without any modifications to it (no bar codes, tags etc.)
And, of course Mobit supplies
response metrics.
Elle, Vibe, Jane magazines are
using Mobit to offer promotions to advertisers, and a host of them are signing up –
Saturn, Target, Absolut Vodka, DKNY, Old Spice, VW, Ford – and on and on.
We like where this is going (with caution) – customer pull – “what I want, when I want it.” What can you animate?
Dutch SMSeenHuis (“text a house”) lets you, well, text a house. The company makes “for sale” or “for rent” signs smart by enriching them with a unique text code. As you pass by your dream home, dial the code on your mobile phone and information about the property is instantly sent to your phone, such as price, square footage, number of rooms.
The mobile phone is the quintessential liquid media device – information when we want it, where we want it.
What information can you deliver
at that right “frame of mind” moment?
Well, here’s one idea. The UK’s largest media companies,namely Virgin Radio, Channel 4 and Capital FM, are now offering SMS response to their standard radio or television ads. Listeners and viewers are encouraged to SMS a shortcode in response to ads to receive free product,special pricing or an exclusive offering. The bigger news is
that this is a formalized sign that mainstream media is embracing
mobile’s ability to turn static into interactive. Now, watch WAP content explode as advertisers accept SMS as a response mechanism and use WAP sites to offer compelling content in exchange for starting or expanding that all important relationship with a customer.Levi’s is among the first
to launch a WAP site as an integral part of their latest 501 jeans campaign.
You
must know about the worldwide 8-billion dollar (and growing) mobile phone ringtone
market. The United States currently only accounts for about $160 million of that.
But, thanks to Billboard,
we have a Top Ten chart for ringtones.
Did you know in Europe and Asia
you can buy them in vending machines? - just point your mobile phone to pay for
it.
Ringtones - and ringback tones are somewhat old news - the latest in
Japan are ring videos (with audio, of course). DoCoMo has trademarked Chaku-Motion
for their ring video service.
One
of our mantras is "all media is multimedia." Here's an example of what
we mean. Zinio gives you a digital subscription to all your favorite magazines.
With the Zinio reader you can browse the magazine pages exactly as they are in
the print version. Except they also include animations, audio interviews, music,
movie clips and TV commercials. And, the Zinio reader downloads your magazines
automatically for you, just as they hit newsstands, so you can "read"
(or experience) them offline. They are keyword searchable and you can forward
an entire digital issue to a friend.
How might this impact your advertising,
editorial or publication?
www.zinio.com
-->
|
|
Here’s the nutshell. Micro-blog funny or snarky comments in real time with others online while watching The Hills on MTV (you probably already do that). To play, log into a specialized MTV Backchannel game “chat room” while you are tuned into the tv show. Viewers make comments (called tags) about what is happening in the show to the 100 other people or so in that room. Other people click on the comments floating around that they like - a la an arcade game. Players get points as both a clicker and tagger with the goal of becoming a Backchannel superstar. It is all timed and limited pretty ingeniously so the tagging and clicking isn’t overwhelming. It’s way more compelling than it might sound, trust me. 
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