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…
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.
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.
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.
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…
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…
Here’s a quick copypaste: Hulu Desktop sure looks a whole lot like the future of TV.It’s a media center type of application—like Front Row or Boxee or Netflix or Windows Media Center—that gives you full access to Hulu with an Apple Remote or Windows Media remote or just your keyboard and mouse. In other words, freed from the constraints of the browser, it’s like real TV. The app is beautiful, fast, easy to navigate and simply amazing—everything you’d expect from Hulu, honestly.
There are thumbnail previews that pop up as you move alongside the scrubber, like Netflix’s streaming app. You can queue episodes too—you need a Hulu account for this. There are bunch of different ways to find content: via search, Hulu channels, by studio alphabetically or just through suggestions.
Belgian IPTV provider BelgacomTV, who delivers IPTV over ADSL created this commercial to promote their Video On Demand movies offering. It’s best if you understand Flemish, but appearances of Nicole Kidman, Robert de Niro and Dustin Hoffman make it worthwhile for any viewer…
Hulu - the American site for complete movies and TV episodes - continues its explosive growth trajectory, increasing a whopping 490% in total streams year-over-year, according to new data from Nielsen VideoCensus.
That translates to 373.3 million streams in April — up from 63.2 million last April — which solidifies Hulu’s status as the fastest -growing premium video brand online.
According to Nielsen Online, the success of Hulu — originally a joint venture between NBC Universal and News Corp.– proves that in the future, the Web will not be as dominated by short video clips as it is today.
Hulu, along with pure-play providers like Veoh and the TV networks, have spent the Read on…
A quick copypaste of an interesting news item from the UK: Volvo has restructured its marketing budget to focus more on natural search and social media in a bid to reinforce its ‘Life is better lived together’ brand positioning.
The Swedish car brand has appointed Mindshare to manage its search optimisation, social media and online PR accounts full-time, having previously worked with the media agency on a project-by-project basis, including its Volvo C30 campaign.
Last year Volvo spent £19.75m on advertising, excluding paid search. Of this, internet accounted for just 3%, or £695,500
Anita Fox, Volvo UK’s head of marketing communications, said that now, while the company has Read on…
With MSN, Hotmail, Messenger, Facebook and a huge network of other affiliated sites, we have access to a whole lot of internet usage data in Microsoft, where I work.
Research
A study called “Europe Logs On” was just released that looks at a European set of this data (both internal and external) that we had available, and we did get some very interesting findings as a result of it.
Conclusion
The most important conclusion that we can draw would probably be that we see the Read on…
Last week many blogs broke the news that YouTube is about to lose approximately $470 million in 2009. The reason for this was the “Deep Dive into YouTube” report released on Friday that Credit Suisse analysts Spencer Wang and Kenneth Sena wrote.
The blogosphere echo chamber robbed the news of most of it’s detail and even respectable blogs merrily copied away, tumbling over each other to have the news first. Heck, some even dressed up the story with another $30 virtual millions in cost just to be able to use a $500 million number in the headline.
Surprisingly today, after years of hostility & police raids, the Pirate Bay has announced they have settled their differences with US media conglomerate Warner Bros. The largest BitTorrent tracker has sold out to Hollywood and the two have agreed a deal.
The deal, worth over $13 billion (10 billion euros) came about after the recent performance at the Pirate Bay trial gave strong indications that the judgment would go against Warner Bros. For the Hollywood movie studio, it seems that acquiring The Pirate Bay was the only option left.
“Video snacking” is an accurate description of the current viewing habits around quick & consistent consumption of video.
ComScore recently published highlights of its U.S. video reporting that support this trend. Mind you, the data is US only and was gathered in late 2008. Still, some interesting results:
146 million people, or 77% of the U.S. Internet audience, have now viewed online video. Those viewers watched 34% more online videos than they did last year. The average online viewer watched 273 minutes of video, up over 40% vs. the previous year. The average duration of online video is fairly short, at 3.1 minutes per video. And, the audience viewed 87 videos per month on average, 18 more videos per month than last year.
Do you like Reggaeton music? Or Gospel? Or Beyonce? Chances are, you’re not the sharpest tool in the shed :) The “Music that makes you dumb” project shows that there is a clear relation between your musical taste and your intelligence. Or at least a relation to your chances to succeed in college, as defined by the average score in the SAT test, a standardized test for U.S. college admissions..
The x-axis represents the SAT score, while the colored boxes indicate either music genre or artist/composer. The chart maps the 133 most popular (out of 1,455) favorites from 1,352 different schools. This image shows the central piece of the chart. Click to enlarge.
Country beats Classical
Overall, fans of Lil Wayne’s music scored the lowest in SAT while the highest scorers were listeners of Read on…
Proof for the point that internet video distribution through consoles is growing fast. Netflix, an American video rental service that started out renting out DVD’s through the post, is successfully crossing over into internet distribution by using the Xbox 360 game console to get movies on subscribers’ TV screens.
In the last few months, one million Netflix subscribers have downloaded and activated the Netflix app that enables Microsoft’s Xbox 360 videogame console to play normal and HD movies - streaming. And it’s not just that the application was installed often, it’s actually being Read on…
I really love companies that profile themselves with some flair. And the Hulu Superbowl Commercial is one of the best commercials I have seen in a while :)
Hulu is a joint venture between NBC Universal and News Corp that offers free TV shows from major studios to online viewers. In its recent Super Bowl TV ad, Hulu admitted that it is evil–and proud of it.
The Crispin Porter & Borgusky ad, called “Alec in Huluwood,” stars “TV star” Alec Baldwin narrating a 60-second spot that takes place in what appears to be an underground laboratory facility beneath the famed Hollywood sign.
According to Baldwin, because there’s loads and loads of TV content available on the Web now, you can’t possibly escape it anymore (”I mean, what’re you going to do? Turn off your TV and your computer?”) And Hulu, he says, was created with an ulterior motive: “Once your brains are reduced to a cottage cheese-like mush, we’ll scoop them out with a melon baller and gobble them right on up.”
I have to hand it to the good people at Emakina - they just had me spend about 10 minutes of my time on an ad for an ING bank account that I am completely uninterested in. What’s more, I had fun and I even remember the name of the account on offer AND the interest rate. ING Lion Deposit account. 4%. There.
Apparently Emakina has used a breakthrough in-house invention called Read on…
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.
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.
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.”
Here’s a quick copypaste: 
Hulu
A quick copypaste of an interesting news item from the UK: Volvo has restructured its marketing budget to focus more on natural search and social media in a bid to reinforce its ‘Life is better lived together’ brand positioning.
![youtubeLOGO_thumb[1]](http://www.copypaste.nl/uploads/2009/04/youtubeLOGO_thumb1_thumb.jpg "youtubeLOGO_thumb[1]")
Last week many blogs broke the news that YouTube is about to lose approximately $470 million in 2009. The reason for this was the “Deep Dive into YouTube” report released on Friday that Credit Suisse analysts Spencer Wang and Kenneth Sena wrote.
Proof for the point that internet video distribution through consoles is growing fast. 
I have to hand it to the good people at Emakina - they just had me spend about 10 minutes of my time on an ad for an ING bank account that I am completely uninterested in. What’s more, I had fun and I even remember the name of the account on offer AND the interest rate. ING Lion Deposit account. 4%. There.