Three Minds On Digital Marketing @ Organic

This video mashup is a collaboration between will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas, director Jesse Dylan, and numerous celebrities, set to the words of Barack Obama's inspiring New Hamsphire concession speech.

Since Superbowl weeked, the video has had more than 7 million views on YouTube and another 3.6 million on DipDive, will.i.am's personal site.  I found it incredibly moving and well worth sharing.

If there's a bias on ThreeMinds towards the Obama campaign, it's a function of how effectively he has leveraged new media compared to the other major candidates.  He has clearly inspired the younger demographic that create content online, starting with Hillary 1984 and running through Obama Girl and Obey's Sheperd Fairey.  If Obama is a Mac, Clinton is a PC. 

Read more on the making of the video from The Washington Post.

Misha Cornes

I never thought that contributing money to a political campaign could be an exceptional experience, but I was delighted by how the Obama website made a connection with me and then facilitated a connection between me and another supporter. During each step of the process, a video played of Barack Obama talking to me about why it was important for me to make a contribution. He told me that every dollar I gave would be matched by another grassroots donor.

When I completed the form, instead of a standard thank you page, I was presented with a message from the person who matched my contribution, in my case Sarah, K., from Westerly, Rhode Island. I then sent her a message back. In a small way, we connected. This was a simple, surprising and effective way for me to feel a part of something larger, and to make an unexpected connection with a stranger over a shared action. Both of these effects are basic promises of the internet and used to great effect by the Obama campaign. No wonder he raised $28 million online last month.

www.barackobama.com

Whitney Browne

I have always been a big fan of Conde Nast’s men’s magazines GQ and Details.  However, the men.style.com site which houses both GQ and Details online in my opinion has always been sub-par.  There is very little or sometimes no search functionality, the pages are hard to navigate, and the online content generally doesn’t build too much on what I read in the magazines.  I understand their goal is to protect the magazine but please can you help me a little.  I always thought it would be great to be able to search “wine” so I can remember which Long Island Vineyard they recommended.

With that said, the section Upgrader has been a great way to combine editorial content with user generated content.  I can seek guidance on products in Style, Gear, or Living categories.  The editors give the product a little description and can even stamp the product with an editor’s pick.  The users then get to rate the product moving it up or down to form a ranking list as well as an option to write their own testimonials.  If I find a brand I love I will gladly go out of my way to tell others and this gives me an outlet to do so.  I already found my new favorite jeans from A.P.C (rank #1) using Upgrader.  Hopefully the rest of the site will be soon as useful.

A new study released by Starcom MediaVest Group shows that heavy clickers are distorting click-thru metrics on online advertising. Apparently, 6% of people online account for 50% of display ad clicks.

The study goes on to say:

"Heavy clickers skew towards Internet users between the ages of 25-44 and households with an income under $40,000. Heavy clickers behave very differently online than the typical Internet user, and while they spend four times more time online than non-clickers, their spending does not proportionately reflect this very heavy Internet usage. Heavy clickers are also relatively more likely to visit auctions, gambling, and career services sites – a markedly different surfing pattern than non-clickers.”

While the theory of “heavy clickers” has been floating around for many months, the results of the study cement the idea that the “click” is not the end-all-be-all it used to be. Measurements such as view-throughs, user path, engagement, and sales are beginning to take on ultimate importance in campaign analysis.

I guess reality show betting and fantasy leagues are nothing new (http://www.tvvoting.com). But, it was only recently that I stumbled upon one of the few that I really could have gotten into, a fantasy league site for Bravo's Project Runway. The show is heading into its final episode, so no luck for me this season, but it didn't stop me from gaining an appreciation for what Bravo was doing.

The idea is simple, guess the winner of Project Runway each week and compete against your friends to win pride, points, or a sweepstake prize.

As much as I find some of Bravo’s intense promotion antics annoying, or perhaps I am just thinking just their overt product placement… make an outfit this week the embodies the happiness of Hershey’s candies, create a dish only using Barilla products, watch how our past season winners gain inspiration in their Saturn Vue, and don’t forget to use an accessory from our L’Oreal Paris TRESemme BlueFly.com product placement wall.

Anyway, as much as I find THAT annoying, I am actually very impressed at the way Bravo infuses interactivity into their reality shows. There is real-time cell phone voting, extensive additional web content including blogs from contestants and industry experts, online games, polls, tools, galleries, videos, and numerous other ways to waste time.

But the most fun part of the show is watching week to week and see “who’s in and who’s out”. This (TRESemme) Fantasy Runway game is a perfect way to make that a social and competitive experience. And with numerous extensions of the mini-site into banner ads and social network widgets advertising your success, Bravo proves they truly understand that appeal, as much as those product placement monetization opportunities.

Does anyone out there want to join my Top Chef league?

Marta Strickland

For those of you who missed yesterday’s Engagement Debate, please find below a link to the conference in its entirely.
 
http://www.ianschafer.com/2008/02/20/watch-the-engagement-debate-08-right-here/

Engagement Debate '08 brought together some of the most innovative media executives (including a number of Organic alumni), digital marketers, and thought leaders in our industry to debate: "The right way and wrong way to create, measure and price engagement in a digital world. Bold insights from people that are leading the industry. A fresh departure from the snorefest conferences we've all come to know and loathe."
 
Marie Sabatini

A lot of online retailers struggle with balancing a controlled brand identity with the ways consumers purchase in the real world.  A clerk might give advice on what clothing or accessories go together closely following employee training from a prescribed "season" of goods--and this plays out online as "others who bought this also liked" features.  For the Vogue set, it may work fine to be decked out head to toe in a single brand--but that's not usually how real people dress. 
 
Walk up to anyone who is fashionably put-together and ask them to list the retailers that comprise their look.  Assembling an outfit is a personal and usually multi-branded effort--one of self-expression, imitation of friends and random people they see on the street, magazines, and TV.  It is a mental model of shopping that individual retailers are not inclined to support because it can advantageously position competing lines of goods.  
 
Enter Polyvore.  This year-old company blends a variety of familiar social media tools from Flickr, YouTube, and blogs to help people create, share and shop.  What makes it really clever is that it often links out to far-flung product pages from a variety of ecommerce sites.  Users can put together a blouse from Abercrombie, a watch from Kenneth Cole, and a handbag from some little boutique in London, give the outfit a name like "cocktails in the afternoon", and share it with their friends.  Even if the creator of the look never buys the entire outfit, 200 of her friends just might, either in whole or in pieces.  If you like a blue dress in one assembly but want to see what others are doing with that same blue dress, fresh looks are just a click away.  Suddenly you've got a new reason to hide your credit card from your teenage daughter.  
 
I just got off the phone with Sarah Cooper, who heads up product, marketing, and community, and she described the site aptly.  It is all about "people making art out of advertising, which essentially turns it into better advertising, because it's user-generated, viral, and initiates purchases".  For now the site is focusing on apparel and home décor, but could automobiles, cell phones, books, and DVDs be far behind?  Aren't these things that people use to express themselves?
 
Michael Beavers

The site for Swedish street wear brand WESC (We Are the Superlative Conspiracy) rethinks the online catalog experience with an Ajax Flash interface that enables users to explore the clothing collection in a fun and engaging way, using the arrow keys to jump around the huge one page layout. The site effectively breaks the boundaries imposed by the browser window and presents information as a series of layers as opposed to pages. Many sites utilize this technology these days, but it’s nice to see a clean, simple and fresh implementation.

The homepage campaign photo treatments are pretty entertaining too.

http://www.wesc.com/#clothes_overview/sex/mens/category/campaign

Whitney Browne

There was an interesting article today on Last100 about Apple and a new patent they have on a podcasting mash-up service.

It is a little embarrassing, but the idea of podcasts has never really appealed to me. I mean, I understand why they are great and I could honestly see a use for them in my daily life, but I have been intimidated to get involved. I felt kinda the same way when RSS first came out. I was excited, but the idea of searching for places that had feeds and incorporating them into this extra tool known as an RSS reader that I would have to remember to visit… it just seemed like too much of a bother. It wasn’t until RSS readers started to become integrated into anything and everything I was already using (browsers, start pages, mobile phones, etc), that I began utilizing RSS with a passion

Last100 suggests that the patent recently filed by Apple might mean that they are building a took that allows users to easily “look inside” podcasts for certain keywords, aggregate snippets together, and then publish that to a service that can be accessed by iPods, iPhones, and AppleTV. This finally perked my interest. Sure it will be a while before this service becomes more automated and available outside of the realm of Apple. But, the thought of being able to assemble my own daily “best of” on a topic that gets automatically pumped into my phone or car stereo (even better for commuters like me) is a tantalizing daydream that has finally got me seriously considering latching onto this whole “podcast” thing.

Marta Strickland

Behold the amazing power of Sprout, a quick and easy way to build all those widgets, jukeboxes, and mini-sites you've been dreaming of, both for clients and personal projects. My first endeavor into using the service, aka my first Sprout, was a widget of passion.

Even before going on my big fall eurotrip, I decided that upon returning I was going to chuck out the idea of the traditional scrapbook and latch onto more web 2.0 ways of recording my experiences. By using Sprout, I was able to develop a "mini-site" of most of my digital vacation artifacts (music, photos, videos, maps, research) within a few hours, and to their credit, most of that time was spent in designing, collecting, and uploading.

The actual interface within Sprout Builder made the entire process intuitive and quick, and when I was finished, I was able to instantly bring my Sprout into my Myspace page, Facebook page, Netvibes account, and now here on ThreeMinds. Although it has a few bugs and limitations, I was more surprised at how much it COULD do and how much it did well. Any users of Photoshop or Flash will be able to dive right in, but I think it would be easy to pick up for most anyone.

Marta Strickland

BricaBox is a new offering that promises users the ability to build there own platform for social content. What is "social content"? In essence, you can create your own specialized version of a Flickr or a Yelp dedicated to whatever niche you fancy. Users can choose short list of content templates (restaurant reviews, photos + maps, discussion board, video collection) or create their own from scratch. My embarrassingly bare version of a photos and maps mash-up invites users to upload their favorite photos of food.

"Think about what Blogger was before people knew about blogs," says co-founder and CEO Nate Westheimer. "The Web has progressed since then. Now we have a more connected Internet -- both in terms of data and socializing. The time has come for a publishing platform with both elements. BricaBox is a simple way to mix and mash the tools needed to create unique, social content websites."