8 March, 2010

In Outsell’s annual advertising and marketing study released today Outsell Vice President Chuck Richard reveals that U.S. advertisers will be spending more on digital media than on print in 2010. Digital advertising is expected to grow by 9.6% in 2010. The calculated increase is based on data from 1,008 U.S. advertisers, in the consumer as well as B2B segment, gathered in December 2009.
Digital surpassing print.
U.S. marketers plan to spend $368 billion this year, of which 32.5% will go toward digital. Only 30.3% of their budgets is to go to print. In this piece of research, digital includes e-mail, online video ads, banner ads and search engine marketing. So, in 2010, for the first time ever, advertisers will Read on…
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21 February, 2010

New Media Age reports that brands and agencies commit more and more to Facebook as a viable direct response advertising channel, threatening Google’s share of ad spend. In the UK, brands like O2, Virgin Media and Vodafone are ramping up spend on Facebook as it proves to be a valuable channel for direct response advertising, while agencies say spend is shifting away from other channels like… paid search.
Opening up to media agencies
Last year, Facebook opened its site to creative agencies, giving them Read on…
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17 February, 2010
I’ve been discussing this with a couple of people before, but only today did I find hard data to prove it: Twitter is now officially no longer a reservation for the middle aged.
Youngsters catching up.
According to comScore Twitter showed growth Read on…
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28 January, 2010
Today, Steve Jobs announced the iPad. A new device from Apple that tries to invent it’s own category. It’s basically a Netbook/E-reader device with a 27 cm. diagonal screen. Some people refer to it as a a juiced-up iPhone. The prices start at $499 for the 16 GB version, but an internet connection other than Wifi will cost you another $130 per year (!).
Design, Screen, Graphics.
The overall look is slick, and it’s wafer thin at about 1,5 cm, but I’m somewhat disappointed it has such a thick border around the screen. Also the screen is Read on…
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22 January, 2010
Today YouTube launched YouTube Music Discovery, basically a music video suggestion tool, although they call it a “Music Discovery Project and Playlist Creation Tool”.
There is a lot of ambition in a name like that, which I will get back to later, but it can best be described as a way to quickly turn YouTube into a video jukebox with an automatically generated, relevant playlist based on one artist. You select, say, Eminem and boom, there is a page with a playlist of 40 music video’s, 10 of which are Eminem clips and 30 of which are by “related” artists.
Taylor Swift, anyone?
On the YouTube disco page you can click one of the suggested artists, or you can enter an artists’ name yourself. Strange enough, the latter feature doesn’t work in a recent Read on…
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18 January, 2010
According to a Dutch study published last month, news users think that within 20 years internet will be the dominant source for news content. Younger respondents think that this will happen faster. TV will be in second place as a source. Newspapers and radio are thought to have faded to mostly insignificant roles in news distribution by 2029.
Losing faith in newspapers.
Of the 13- to 65-year olds 87% claims to use TV as their main source for news today. With significant overlap, 65% mentions internet as a primary source as well. But, according to the study, within 20 years these two should have traded places. By 2029 about 80% of the respondents expects to look for news content on the internet first. 72% expects to still use TV. Newspapers are only mentioned by 37%, down from 59% today. The large majority of respondents does not expect forms of distribution like Twitter and SMS to be still relevant in that timeframe.
Willingness to pay
Younger respondents answer differently to questions about the Read on…
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22 December, 2009
This week, at iHollywood’s Digital Living Room conference a Sony US marketing manager stated that company plans to build out an area on the PlayStation with it’s own, original TV programming. Meaning that with a connected Playstation 3, you don’t need a TV subscription to see the TV shows.
MTV your PS3
Sony already released the Vidzone Music Video application for PS3 this month, offering “your own personalized version of MTV” on the Playstation 3. This free app offers unlimited access to high quality music video streams, and the ability to build custom music video playlists, turning the PS3 into an MTV type station - but one that actually shows Music Videos ;)
From MTV to HBO
The ultimate goal is to transition from a Read on…
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12 December, 2009
Google News was the first step, here is the next; real, solid-bodied content on Google. The just-launched “Living Stories” service from Google Labs shows a new way of integrating newspaper content into a Google page.
Gimme more
This time, instead of taking a snippet and sharing none of the generated revenue with the owner of the content, there is a different model. With consent of the publisher, Google takes more Read on…
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26 November, 2009

Nielsen’s VideoCensus reports indicate that the battle for the leading positions in online video is on, and the category is still growing fast: Year-over-year, unique viewers, total streams, streams per viewer and time per viewer are all up significantly, led by a 41 percent growth in total streams (US data).
Winners and losers
The loser of the last months: Read on…
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13 November, 2009

This week, UK gaming industry publisher MCV has broken the news that in November 2010 the Xbox add-on known as “Natal” (the black thing lower in the picture) will be released. According to MCW 5 million Natal units wil ship globally and there will be at least 14 games supported by the hardware.
Why you should care
Simply put, Natal enables you to talk to your TV, and it will recognize what you say. Also, you will be able to have it interpret motions you make. Don’t think Wii, think Minority Report. It can even see you smile or frown, and react accordingly. Natal is actually a set of very sensitive depth-vision cameras that do facial recognition and voice recognition as well. This is some extremely complicated technology in a low-cost device. What that means is demonstrated in this must-see video.
14 games ready for launch.
After the unveiling of Natal, Activision Read on…
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6 November, 2009

This fall, Sunday is the most expensive night of the week on American network television for advertisers, according to data collected by Ad Age.
Top 3
The top 3 shows that brought in the most money on average for a 30 second TV advertisement are, in order, NBC’s Sunday Night Football, Grey’s Anatomy, and Desperate Housewives.
Making less
Unsurprisingly, with the increasing Read on…
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30 October, 2009
I was always hoping that the Internet would kill off low-brow TV forever, but no such luck, apparently. During last week’s launch, the “Internet TV” feature in Windows 7 suddenly became something serious for users in the U.S.. Internet TV was already present in pre-release versions of Windows 7, but back then it only had short clips and promos. With the final release, Internet TV includes full episodes of a surprising number of classic and current TV series. With this, Microsoft is entering competition for TV content distribution with Hulu and Apple in a much more direct sense than ever before.
Content
The content is Read on…
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26 October, 2009

Last night Youtube streamed a live U2 concert from the Rosebowl in California. You can still see the recorded HD stream, which has great quality. The playist can be found here. During the live show, an integrated Twitter widget displayed comments from Twitter that were marked #U2, adding an extra layer of interactivity, which was, though hardly innovative, still nice.
PR machine
So, why is YouTube’s PR machine all over this event? We’ve seen enough live webcasts before, right? The truth is, Youtube is far Read on…
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20 October, 2009
Jay Leno recently congratulated the New York Times for being in business for 158 years. The punch line, of course, was that he had read about the milestone on the Internet. According to US September 2009 studies by ARAnet and the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press television remains Americans’ primary source of news. However, online gained 20% in the last year, while the traditional channels lost between 10% and 18% versus last year.
Next year
While fewer respondents selected TV as their biggest news source compared with last year, TV is Read on…
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13 October, 2009

Traditional UK newspaper the Guardian will launch “Guardian Local” a digital local news service under the Guardian brand. This will be done by hiring local bloggers to create content, meaning text, photographs, audio and video. The local news service will start in 3 medium-sized UK cities early 2010, with the bloggers reporting on meetings and events within their area.
Experimental
Emily Bell, director of digital development at Guardian News & Media, said, “Guardian Local is our small-scale experimental approach to local newsgathering.” Sarah Hartley of Guardian Local; “This experimental project reflects both the shifting nature of journalism and the reality on the ground.”
Grass roots
I really wonder if this is Read on…
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7 October, 2009

The Association of Online Publishers in the UK hosted its’ Content, Convergence and Creativity Summit today. Being creative content persons, they lovingly call it the AOP 3C Summit 2009.
Of course, there was a session about paid content. Now it is important to realize that most of the large online publishers are really traditional media companies that make severe losses on their activities. They have a huge cost base and they are either getting less public funding or less money from advertisers. Going online seemed to be the solution to make up for those losses a couple of years back, but now they find that their losses can’t be compensated by the proceeds from online advertising alone.
Financial Times
Therefore the Financial Times’s Rob Grimshaw and BBC’s Luke Bradley-Jones stated with infallible logic that Read on…
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3 October, 2009
By now the first happy few have had the chance to begin testing Google Wave, the service presented by Google as “the email of the future.”
Mediapost gathered some early reactions from infulencers that were the first to test the service:
Blogger Robert Scoble has already deleted his account: “This service is way overhyped and as people start to use it they will realize it brings the worst of email and IM together: unproductivity. The first thing you notice is that you can see Read on…
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26 September, 2009
According to Sir Martin Sorrell, CEO of WPP (the worlds largest communications company by revenue) 20% of marketing budgets will be spent in digital advertising within the next five years.
In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Sorrell said digital budgets would increase significantly in the next few years - but would not fully make up for the difference between share of time spent online and share of marketing spend.
Time spend online to be 30% within five years
“Companies are spending up to 13% on digital. We know we spend up to 20% of our Read on…
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30 August, 2009

I Twitter a lot more than I blog these days, and when I blog, it often is related to Twitter. I guess it’s a trend.
Kids
And I swear, if I read any more posts about how Twitter is a failure because “only white middle aged men that work in media” use Twitter, and no teenagers do, I will scream. Where exactly was it written that a product needs to be supported by kids to be deemed “a success”? But I digress.
Middle aged men
For all those white middle aged men that also Read on…
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