So in the process of finding cool new websites, I also run across great advertsing.

Juicy Fruit created an online personality called the ’Serenading Unicorn’ on Playlist.com, which is a great site dedicated to music (similar to YouTube set up where people/companies can have profiles dedicated to the info they post on the site). The Unicorn personality originally creeped me out, but when I clicked over to their official page, it surprised be how interesting and creative it is.

http://www.playlist.com/juicyfruit

The playlist on the side is ‘Juicy Fruits Top 15 Favorites’ and all the songs are popular and current. The playlist keeps you on the page for a long time, because all the songs are great and it’s an easy, pre-made playslist.

Just another example of how companies can create advertising that allows users to interact with the brand.

Now, I’m fully aware of how pathetic this sounds. But once you start, you just can’t stop. Everyone morning I get to work, I answer my emails, then I feed my Fishville fish. The girls around me ask for aquarium gifts, and I send them and promptly receive gifts in return. It’s like internet-crack.

This game is a an invention of Zynga, a social-game development company that was formed in 2007 out of SF. And yes, this is the same company that has inflicted Farmville and Mafia Wars on the world. But the social game space is fantastically addicting, and one of the greatest guilty pleasures in the digital space. This social-gaming phenomenon isn’t the next big thing in online advertising, it is THE thing. The cost might be high, but when you have a placement in a game that reaches 70 unique people a DAY, who are all logging at least 30 minutes, the price almost seems worth it.

So go chekc it out. And if you seem me on Fishville, friend me, and I’ll be sure to send you a welcome antique.

And they’ve just decided to make another with the original cast! I’m super excited!:

“Barry Sonnenfeld has confirmed to Roger Friedman that Will Smith and, after months of speculation, Tommy Lee Jones will star in Men In Black III.

Smith has been on board Sony’s threequel for some time, but Jones’ involvement was less clear, with Josh Brolin mooted as a replacement, while the likes of Sacha Baron Cohen had also been in the casting frame. However, Jones has been concentrating on smaller dramas, like In The Electric Mist and The Company Men, for some time, so the chance to exercise those blockbuster muscles (and pay for a new conservatory) was probably too good to pass up.

At the moment, little is known about the plot of the movie, which Sony will be aiming to get into cinemas by Memorial Day 2011 (that’s May 30, 2011 to the rest of us), but we imagine it’ll involve Agent Jay (Smith) and Kay (Jones) getting in way over their heads with some angry alien beasties. But Sonnenfeld did drop one more bombshell – MIB III will, like every single film in this or any other post-Avatar universe, will be in glorious 3D.

Actually, 3D should suit Sonnenfeld’s manic camerawork pretty well and, with the Smith/Jones deadpan dream team reunited, we’re now quietly optimistic about this one. Especially if they bring back Rip Torn – in full drunken bank-robbing mode – as Chief Zed.”

Source: Empire Online

I’m super excited about this movie, so check out the trailer!! It looks awesome!!

Oceans!!

http://disney.go.com/disneynature/oceans/?cmp=dmov_dpic_oceans_psg_title_oceans%2Btrailer

 This survey from Mashable.com of “1,000 U.S. consumers showed that more of us than ever before are choosing to watch TV shows on websites such as Hulu rather than on a TV. For younger folks, a full 83% said they watched some, most or all of their TV programming online.

This study, which was conducted by consumer electronics shopping site Retrevo, shows that the majority of Americans — 64%, according to the survey results — get at least some of their TV content online. Eight percent of the total said they watched most of their TV shows online, and 5% said they only watched television programs on the Internet.

For people under 25, almost a quarter of respondents said they watched most of their TV shows online, and 6% said they only watched TV online. 

Another interesting demographic breakdown shows that men are more likely than women to forsake the television set in favor of the computer monitor. Seventeen percent of male respondents, as opposed to 9% of female respondents, said they watch most or all of their TV shows online.

When asked what would prompt a switch from cable or satellite TV to online-only programming, folks talked about their current cable and satellite providers and about the kinds of programming currently available online.

Around 43% of respondents said they had considered canceling their service or had actually canceled; those in that group who chose not to cancel did so because they couldn’t get their favorite shows online. As far as shows go, respondents said that premium channel programming, live sports and HD options were important factors in deciding whether to switch from cable/satellite to online-only TV.

The survey concludes that “online TV viewership is on the rise, and people are tired of high-priced programming[...] With the advent of Internet-capable TVs (starting to appear on the market) and the dissatisfaction with satellite and cable service (at least with the hefty monthly bills), we will likely see increasing attraction toward online offerings in the years to come.” “

Source: Mashable.com, Jolie O’Dell

I’ve always hated the bad rap science fiction and fantasy gets. It’s not all aliens on rocket ships. The characters act and react like real people, just like in any genre, and there’s no better way to escape a day then with a good dose of the unbelievable.

I ESPECIALLY hate that people think these genres are just for boys. Hello!! Girls would love to have magic powers, or super fast means of transportation, or a weapon that could silence creepy guys.  If the popularity of Twilight is any indication, girls crave a little fantasy too.

Of all the fantasy & sci-fi books I’ve read, the ones below are my favorite, in no particular order, from the mainstream to the slightly obscure.

If you’re a girl that wants an escape with a bit of the unbelievable, you should definitely give them all of them a try:

1. Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrel – Susanna Clarke (Jane Austen meets Lord of the Rings)

2. The Sword of Truth Series – Terry Goodkind (the books are super long, but def. worth it)

3. Lathe of Heaven – Ursula Le Guin (Perfect chick sci-fi;  you’ll finish it in one sitting. Then rush back to the store for Le Guin’s Earthsea and Hainish Cycle series)

4. The Book of Lost Things – John Connolly

5. Twilight Series - Stephanie Meyer (step off boys, this is a list for girls. A great guilty pleasure. Great alternatives written strictly for adults – True Blood by Charlaine Harris or The Host by Stephanie Meyer)

6. Good Omens – Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett (two of my favorite authors)

7. Harry Potter Series – JK Rowling (can you have a fantasy list without it?)

8. A Dirty Job – Christopher Moore (Moore is a addicting author)

9. Jurassic Park - Michael Crichton (The Lost World – Crichton is also a must)

10. Diogenes Trilogy – Douglas Preson and Lincoln Child (Brimstone, Dance of Death, Book of the Dead)

Try them out, and see that sci-fi / fantasy isn’t just for the weird guy that walks around the bars wearing a cape

 source: http://community.livejournal.com/ohnotheydidnt/45648168.html

Seriously though, I can remember being in 4th grade and pouring over encyclopedia’s (complete with color pictures , of course) in the creepily quiet library while a really mean (stereotypically so) librarian scowled at me from behind half-moon glasses and hissed BE QUIET to a silent little me. Now, don’t get me wrong, I LOVE books and they’re great research tools. But when you’re ONLY choice for research is a dusty cave inhabited by a fire-breathing, silence-loving dragon, it doesn’t make writing a paper on the history of the State Bird all that fun.

And then there came Google. Suddenly, all I had to do was type in ‘Florida State Bird’ and pages upon pages of information appeared on my screen. Easy, simple, clear, and dust-free. And I can find the most relevant information, get an overview, and save myself hours of hopeless searching and go straight to the books I need in the aforementioned book cave.

Google revolutionized the way we get information. I don’t need Webster’s dictionary to find the meaning of the word ‘Anatidaephobia.’ I just type it into Google. And presto, I FINALLY know what to call my fear that some time, somewhere, some how, a duck is watching me.

What would we do without Google? But look at the search engine itself. It’s actually kind of…boring. All it is is a list of websites. Few pictures or videos, simple black texts. It’s basically an electronic encyclopedia without the dust.

And our Google looks like child’s play next to http://www.naver.com/, the Korean search engine. And our search engines aren’t the only things that we’re behind the times in.

Korea and Japan have a 70% mobile penetration. 70%! More people use their phones to use the internet than their desktops and laptops.

Ad Age had a great article today by Dean Donaldson about how the technology of the East is going to create the technology of the future.

Want to See the Future of Search? Better Look East

Remember the day you first discovered Google search. Now, think back to what search was like before, using Altavista and Lycos. It was pretty painful stuff. Google, with its plain-vanilla HTML interface, simple black text, blue links and one sole graphic did nothing but revolutionize my search experience, and judging by the brand it has built since, I don’t suspect I’m the only one.

In fact, many of us can’t imagine life without Google, despite the valiant contender efforts of Bing and the old faves of Yahoo and AOL. That is until you head East. When we first adopted Google we were all on dial-up and time waiting for graphic-rich content was secondary to getting data results — fast! Yet, in a culture where consumers have always had high-speed broadband from day one, such as South Korea, who has the world’s deepest penetration of internet users, those rules just never applied. In fact, for them, search has always been an entirely different affair.

When you take a look at Naver or Daum, the Google and Bing of Korea, respectively, you realize that to the majority of Korean’s search-engine sites are more like portal websites where search results are fully integrated with images, video, music and user Q&A’s, which boasts 50,000 questions a day posted by users to share information with fellow locals. It reminds me of a more sophisticated Yahoo search portal. The concept of a simple text search is pretty alien to Koreans and is quickly becoming alien to us to when you consider the time we are now image- and video-searching ourselves. This is only part of the reason Google has had a hard time way out East.

Both Korea and Japan, the second-largest advertising economy behind the U.S., are also the leaders in 3G adoption across mobile devices, with over 70% of mobile penetration. As a result, more people use mobile devices than PCs to access the internet, a trend we are beginning to see in the West led by social-media access.

As consumers find natural, more convenient and faster ways to interact with information and content databases, we are about to see those little text input boxes finding themselves being used less and less. It’s not just that searching on mobile is increasing, but it’s also the way users are conducting searches that’s shifted. When you consider the fact most mobile phones already have an inbuilt camera and are seeing handset manufacturers poised to adopt Quick Response (QR) code and Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) readers throughout 2010, it is not just contact-less payments via your cellphone that will become commonplace, but comparing prices in real-time that will make a radical change to our purchasing habits.

Quick Response (QR) codes are appearing on everything from print to outdoor billboards as seen in Universal Pictures’s “Repo Men” and Volvo. It has caused movie studios or car manufacturers to enable the auto-opening of mobile pages by pointing mobile phones at such posters, all tracked through ad-serving systems. Applications like Red Laser on an iPhone allow bar code reading of products to automatically search for price comparisons, while on the move. We are also seeing the use of cameras to find information through augmented reality overlaying the natural world with interactive information. And now, RFID will take this even a stage further, when proximity to items can auto-trigger further information, a trend already firmly rooted in Eastern cultures.

Though still in its infancy in the West, it is these concepts that will move quickly towards critical-mass adoption, and challenge everything we thought we knew about search and optimization, or the relationship between display and search across channels. In fact, it’s these forms of mobile technology that’s facilitating a level of location-based advertising which will move consumers beyond a video search on YouTube and bring a new simplicity to search and consumer activity that will give the classic search a run for its money.

And though the website is widely popular with consumers, its’ not making any money, which is, of course, the main goal of any business. The following article by Michael Learmonth on Ad Age discusses the pivotal crossroads Hulu has reached, and how the decision (whether or not they  will start charging for their service) will affect online TV viewing as we know it.

Hulu’s a Towering Success — Just Not Financially:

Web-Video Future Hinges on It Working Out Pay Model

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — Hulu is everyone’s favorite provider of TV on the web, but it’s facing an ideological battle over its future. On one side are its network backers, which would like Hulu to become a paid service. On the other is the advertising community, which would like to keep Hulu free as a test-bed for new targeted-ad formats that can’t be skipped.

Hulu is feeling pressure from its partners to erect a pay wall which would allow the web video provider to get some of the cable programming it covets, such as ‘The Daily Show’ which Viacom pulled off the service last month. It’s an important issue, because any debate about Hulu is a debate about the future of purely ad-supported TV, which is increasingly becoming an endangered species. Hulu is the No. 2 video site on sheer volume of video views behind YouTube, yet no one is yet making much money from its model: not its network backers, other content partners and least of all Hulu itself, which has a hard time paying for its bandwidth bills.

“[Hulu] does have to move to a premium model,” said one network exec. “If you look at the business, it’s just not economically feasible to give away programming at low rates.”

Hulu won’t comment on its economics, but if you consider that it’s selling video ads and companion banners together in the $40 CPM range, and it appears to be about 50% sold out, when 70% is paid back to networks, Hulu is netting pennies per viewer per hour, about what it costs to deliver video of that quality.

One caveat, however, is that a significant amount of Hulu inventory is sold by the networks, which can buy back inventory to sell to advertisers. Hulu gets 30% of that CPM without any of the costs. Also, Hulu has ad deals with many TV networks on different terms.

Complex web
“There’s room for an ad-supported model for TV online,” said Curt Hecht, president of Publicis innovations unit Vivaki. “Hulu is a great environment with great programming; the onus is on us to help figure out the business model.”

Hulu is navigating an increasingly complex web of agendas, not least of which is what will happen when it is partly owned by a cable company after Comcast takes control of NBC Universal. “Ultimately, as a content company, you have to be paid on multiple platforms for multiple eyeballs in multiple ways,” said Quincy Smith, partner in Code Advisors and adviser to CBS and web video service Vevo.

When Hulu launched, it was set up as the perfect online distributor for network TV, which was completely ad-supported. But since then, broadcast networks have fought for and won retransmission fees from cable operators, making their model a lot more like cable. The TV business is only 50% ad supported, with $68 billion coming from advertising. When you tally up TV subscriber fees collected by cable, satellite and telcos, it comes to, well, about $68 billion. And the reality is, between cable, satellite and telecom TV offerings, 90% of Americans pay for their TV.

And then there’s Hulu.

Increasingly, networks want paid models for their content online, such as Fox’s mobile service introduced last week, which will charge users $9.99 for mobile access to programming. Hulu has promised a mobile app for months, which may also be a paid service.

Pay wall
As the networks rely more on subscription fees, pressure is growing on Hulu from its partners — and from cable providers themselves — for Hulu to erect a pay wall, which would not only help pay the bills but allow Hulu to get some of the cable programming it covets, such as “The Daily Show” and “Colbert Report,” which Viacom pulled off the service last month.

An easy answer would be to increase the ad load, which an array of studies has suggested it could do. Hulu has steadfastly remained at six ads per hour, fewer than CBS is showing online (as many as nine) and far fewer than the more than 20 that the networks show in a typical hour-long drama on TV.

From the agency perspective, it would be better to keep Hulu free but invent new ad formats with precise targeting to demographics and stated interests. The pre-roll “selector” was invented at Hulu. This gives the consumer the chance to choose the ads he wants to watch before a show starts, which also means the viewer is interacting with the ad even before watching it. The format was chosen by Vivaki as a format of choice across Publicis agencies. Those are sold at a much-higher CPM than $40; so too would targeted ads to certain demographics. But would it be enough to support Hulu and pay for the production of content?

“It definitely gets you closer to the answer than just throwing up more ads with no targeting involved,” said Tracey Sheppach, innovations director at Vivaki, who worked closely with the company as it tested a variety of digital video ad formats over the past year.

by Michael Learmonth