Pre roll ads - when ads and content need caution applied

I just read the news of a gastly accident during the "California 200" an off-road truck race event that occured this Saturday night.

A racing truck, travelling through at dusk through the Mojave desert flipped when taking on a 'rock pile' and crashed into a group of spectators. The resulting carnage left 8 dead and many more badly injured.

Naturally in the digital age, people were filming the event on phones and cameras - some of this footage found its way very quickly to the traditional news outlets and then to You Tube.

Unfortunately, it seems no one at Google/You Tube pre-checked the pre-roll ad that CBS had running in the lead into this horrific news item. The result - an ad (at least when I viewed twice) for All-State insurance featuring a car getting rear-ended.

Clearly this is a hugely unfortunate error - probably due to lack of proper tagging, but also due perhaps to a lack of supervision by the agency/CBS/You Tube/and maybe even the client Allstate. Either way, lessons need to be learnt form this as more and more digital display money goes into pre-roll ads and more viewers use You Tube as a primary source of news footage.

Sky and the HBO content coup

Today came news that BSkyB (owner of pay-TV platform Sky TV in the UK) had signed a whopping content deal with HBO - the hugely successful cable TV operator and producer.

The deal will give Sky access to HBO's first class library of productions - including The Wire, The Sopranos, True Blood and Martin Scorsese's eagerly-awaited crime drama Boardwalk Empire. It is believed to be worth around £150m over five years.

I think this illustrates a couple of interesting developments at Sky.

Clearly as Sky have recently been forced to relinquish their monopoly on Sky Sports channels, by allowing BT Vision to carry live Premiership games for example, Sky are looking to diversify their consumer offer. Whilst Sky claim that only 5% of their viewing is football related, it doesn't take a genius to understand that a far higher proportion of their subscriber revenue is directly football related. If this revenue comes under any kind of threat (not sure how much impact the BT deal will have in the short term), then clearly Sky must find other reasons to encourage subscribers to choose Sky, stay with Sky and ideally become a high value customer through taking Sky + and HD options too - which seems to be going very well right now.

So there is diversification going on to shore up subscribers, but also I feel this is part of a confident Sky move to strike for audience growth also as rivals ITV and Channel 4 go through a period of upheaval and re-gearing - with new management teams and profit short-falls.

Sky is reported to have a content development/acquisition pot of 1.7 bn GBP - versus BBC 2 (who originally screened The Wire to great acclaim) having c. 500 mill GBP. It is certain that Channel 4's programming budget will be under increased public scrutiny - indeed this HBO deal really feels like the sort of deal Channel 4 would have been 1st in line for 4-5 years ago. And ITV seem to struggle for consistency in either produced or bought in formats.

That said, Sky also have had their own troubles with self-made programming. Davina McCall's big budget Got to Dance failed to pull in big audiences earlier this year.

It also means that The Wire will soon be on the broadcast sponsorship market - who will be first in the queue? The Baltimore Tourist Authority perhaps?

Famecount - keeping tabs on social media efforts

As we enter the end of the group stage of the World Cup finals in South Afirca. It's not just teams like England. Germany and Portugal who nervously await their fate, the lack of progress into the knockout stages will have serious financial and status implications. The financial gold-mine that is the World Cup is also a vital time for many of the world's biggest brands. Will there huge investments to become FIFA partners pay off? Brands such as McDonald's and Hyundai have spent 100s of millions of US$ to be part of the world's biggest sporting event over the last 10-12 years.

Another brand looking nervously at its investment is Adidas. As official sportswear partner of the World Cup finals, Adidas gets a huge boost at every finals - from player and team endorsement through to pitch-side perimeter boards and sponsored TV coverage in certain territories. However there is a dark spectre making Adidas very nervous, and that is its old rival Nike. Nike have continued their policy of become official partner of the FIFA event, but they stick to their 'ambush marketing' strategy plus massive sums paid to individual players and football federations to supply kits.

Nike have already claimed to be the winner in this mammoth head to head of the sports giants. This seems a little premature but Nike feel they are winning the battle of the buzz. According to Nielsen Buzzmetrics, Nike have achieved a 30.2% of the brand buzz around South Africa 2010, while Adidas trail with 14%. Time will tell but it does throw up interesting questions about how brands track and quantify their social media efforts.

One interesting tool that came to are attention a little while ago is Famecount http://http//www.famecount.com/all-platforms/Worldwide/all/Brand a free service which creates a % Famecount or index for brands by aggregating their performance across Facebook, Twitter and You Tube. Topping the Famecount brand charts right now is Starbucks, mostly due to its 8 million Facebook friends and near 1 million Twitter followers. Starbucks embraced social media some time ago, so they have been adding friends and followers in a gradual organic manner, hence their Famecount of 68.8%. In second place sits uber-brand Coca-Cola with 52% and Pepsi nowhere to be seen. Coke's closest category rival in the social space appears to be Red Bull, thanks in part to more You Tube channel subscribers. Clearly a reflection of the original content Red Bull as a brand prides itself on and which indeed its brand DNA is built on.

What is interesting is that few of the top 20 brands in the survey are doing particularly well with their You Tube strategy. While Famecount assigns the lowest value to You Tube (25% vs 45% for Facebook and 30% for Twitter), a well executed You Tube channel can be incredibly powerful for brands. Hence the virtually unknown outside of social media, Blendtec, achieving a position of 39th, just behind Pizza Hut and ahead of Blackberry. All on a spend in the region of a few $100,000 versus $100,000,000. The Blendtec channel, "Will it Blend" is a cult success, with brand owner Tom Dickson blending everything from golf balls to an I Pad. As of mid June 2010, the brand has received over 117 million views on You Tube.

Famecount certainly does illustrate how smaller brands can and are outwitting their bigger spending rivals with smart social media strategies. Both Jet Blue and South West Airlines are 2 smaller US airlines with Famecounts in the top 20. In part this is due to their long-held customer service principles but also their novel use of the this newer media space. Southwest have games imbedded into their Fan-page that encourage the user to share with their Facebook friends. Easy, simple tactics that more brands should try to emulate.

And so back to Adidas and Nike. Well according to this slice of social media life, it is Adidas who are trumping their Amercian rival. Adidas Orginals has a score of 37.8% driven by its 3 million Facebook friends. As a follower of this myself, I know its good rich and engaging content, not just ads. This week for instance, we had the chance for a live chat with Adidas-star Snopp Dogg. I'm sure he'd love to know his famecount before he re-negotiates his next contract, well now he can use this great tool to find out.

Zoogle Day Poland 2010

Chewy Trewhella Google UK speaking at Zoogle Poland

A few months in the planning, 4 hours of content, 3 excellent Google speakers, 163 happy delegates.

Zoogle Day Poland has launched, here's to next year.

Steve Paler, Tango Zebra/You Tube @ Zoogle Poland

Artur Waliszewski Google PL @ Zoogle Poland

Jakub Potrzebowski ZO PL CEO @ Zoogle Poland

Puma - saving the world, one showbox at a time...

Media in Mourning

Tragic, unprecented events in Poland this weekend have led to an unprecented response from Polish media owners. As the nation tries to come to terms with an unimaginable level of loss, a period of national mourning has been declared for 7 days (starting last Sunday and leading up to the funerals on Saturday). During this time, there will be very little commerical media activity in Poland. Indeed most clients have pulled all campaigns and will start again in May.





All networks clearly completed cleared their programming schedules to allow for 24hrs news. All commercials have been stripped from TV, radio, press and main internet portals until Wednesday at the earliest. All newspapers (paper and online) have changed their mastheads - such as market leading Gazeta Wyborcza below - as a mark of respect.

Same goes for TV station idents - they have all added the black ribbon of mourning.

On radio there has been a more subtle change. Perhaps I expected classic funeral march music on all stations. Actually the response has been more thoughful - music stations are still playing music, just more understated tunes, more reflective music. This is acutally much more emotive and a very appropriate response.

I guess this reflects the mood and actions of the nation. Everyone is in shock and very sad. But the overwelming belief in this country that has suffered more than its fair share of tradegy is one of 'it won't kill us, we will emerge stronger'.

Very strange and challenging times indeed....

Social Network monopoly - the death of Bebo

It appears that the 'winner takes all' predictions about the social networking market are becoming truer by the day.


Yesterday the news that AOL would sell or close the social site, Bebo, effectively signaled the end of another once-successful social network which simply cannot compete with Facebook.


A couple of years ago Bebo was the only website that mattered in the playgrounds of the UK and Ireland when it hit the peak of coolness in 2007. Among 13- to 16-year-olds, Bebo was the place to be seen online, where members could blog, email each other, upload videos and design quizzes – while many adults just didn't quite get it.


AOL saw the potential in the site launched from a San Francisco living room by a husband and wife team and gobbled it up for an eye-watering $850m. Which even then analysts saw as a triumph of ego over due-dilgence.


It was the sites positioning and content that orginally set it apart from other sites and drove traffic to a peak of 40 million unique users in early 2008. An example of such content was the online drama serial Kate Modern.



However, it looks like AOL uninvested and misunderstood the brand Bebo. Compared to Facebooks 2,000 engineers; Bebo employed 40 - leading to technical issues which todays social networker has little patience for.

AOL aim to broaden appeal failed also. Moving away from a small but loyal audience was clearly an error. Figures from comScore show the dramatic shift – Bebo's monthly users in the UK fell by 60% from February 2009 to February 2010 to 3.8 million, while Facebook's grew 24% over the same period to 28.1 million.

So the still privately owned Facebook can count the passing of another social rival backed by big-spending corporates. ITV recently sold Friends Reunited for a mere $42m (just 14% of the purchase price). NewsCorps' My Space, a $580mill Murdoch punt, is struggling to re-position and losing share. And now Bebo goes.

Which all goes to show, people want to hang out where there friends are. So is there any hope for a non-monopolistic market in social networking?