People Call Us Goo Goo

Friday 14th December
Hello, and welcome to the newsletter.

Buried deep within the next four pages is the neatest fact you’ll learn this week – the content of the first ever text message sent. But to find that – in the spirit of a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down - you’ll have to wade through the other stuff, including the new OFCOM international communications report, the top 5 virals for 2007 (a relatively unscientific list), 10,000 Facebook applications, how to monetise your Facebook page, correlations between search position and awareness measures, why Google won’t crack China, Glue’s cycle ride to Lapland, and a Netflix for books.

Enjoy!


Market stats

Hooray – the new OFCOM International communications marketplace report is out
“This report considers levels of availability and adoption of communications services and how they are used by consumers in seven major countries (the UK, France, Germany, Italy, the US, Canada and Japan). Where data are available, we have also included Poland, Spain, the Netherlands, Sweden and Ireland in our analysis. Last year’s report showed the increasing significance of China in the global communications market. This year, we have expanded our research to include three other huge and fast-developing countries: Brazil, Russia and India.”
Follow the link to download the 250 page pdf for free


Virals

Top 5 virals of 2007
“Cadbury’s gorilla drummer ad, with more than 5 million views for the original video on YouTube, was the top viral-video ad, followed by Smirnoff’s Green Tea Partay, with 3.4mm views, according to agency GoViral, reports the Financial Times.
The top 5 viral-video ads:
Cadbury - Gorilla Drummer
Smirnoff - Green Tea Partay
Ray-Ban - Catch Sunglasses
Blendtec - Will it Blend?
Lynx/Axe – Bom chicka wah wah.”


Social Networks

There are now 10,000 apps on Facebook (reports Facereviews, a site dedicated to - um – reviewing Facebook Applications)
This is indicitaive of the engagement from the developer community and companies that look at facebook as a distribution, branding and engagement ecosystem. The velocity of new facebok applications does not appear to be slowing at all. This is for many reasons… not the least of which it is one of the most efficient ways to gain users online. Brands are increasingly realizing this huge benefit of facebook.
This means more options for users of facebook. The range of types of applications is mind boggling. This means that the competition to gain new users of an aplication is much more intense. Applications need to become much more creative and useful to keep users attention and keep their attrition rates down.

Making money with your Facebook profile
“It is probably against Facebook's TOS*, but slapping an affiliate banner on your profile page is fairly easy - get an account with a service such as LinkShare, register with a merchant program, grab an ad unit (a linked image), get MyHTML application (I think SuperWall would work, too, but I haven't tried), copy-paste the code, and you are in business. Similarly, you can embed a simple pixel-based traffic counter from a service like StatCounter.”

Bebo opens up it’s platform
The Open Media Platform makes it easy for you to create rich and engaging profiles within Bebo (we call these Channel Profiles) for each of your show or channel brands, and program them as you like. Bebo users who visit your Channel Profile can become a 'Fan', and thereafter receive notifications whenever you make available any new piece of content.
Thanks to Michael Badmin for the link!


Mobile

The SMS celebrates it’s 15th birthday in London
“Kevin Wood, CEO, Airwide said that he felt honoured to have in the room, the first sender and recipient of the first sms message “Merry Christmas” From those humble beginnings no-one could have know the impact it would have. Applications of SMS have exploded and fundamentally changed the way that the world communicates. 15 years seems like a long time - but if you put it in the context of the PC and Internet which had their births in the 1970s, we can see it’s still quite young. It is amazing how quickly this tech has become ingrained in what we do. Messaging volumes break records every day - currently 2 trillion worldwide. Britons send more than 1m per week.”


Search

Correlation between search and brand measures
“Using Honda as a test brand and "fuel-efficiency" as a brand attribute, the study focused on consumers early in the purchase process who had not yet selected a car model.
Among the key findings of the study:
Lift in brand affinity: Online consumers who saw Honda in the top ad placement and the top organic search result were 16 percent more likely to think of Honda as a fuel efficient car than when the automaker's brand didn't appear on the page at all.
Lift in brand recall: Online consumers were 42 percent more likely to recall Honda if the company appeared in both the top ad placement and the top organic search result, rather than just the top organic listing.”

Google ‘will never crack China because the Chinese can’t pronounce it’
“``G-O-O-G-L-E is not a normal Chinese spelling and people don't pronounce it right,'' Kai-fu Lee, Google's president for Greater China, said in a Nov. 30 interview in Beijing. ``Most people call us `go go.''' “

Great website for the Danish agency Wibro Duckert & Partners
“This site has only few frames with simple content linking to google and letting others tell the story through the links higgest ranked by google. Perhaps some of the competitors buys some ad words on this soon?”
Thanks to Pernille Fruensgaard for the link from her blog – check out the full post:


MSN

MSN starts serving mobile ads in the US
“This week display and text ads from companies like Jaguar and Paramount Pictures began appearing on the MSN Mobile portal.
The ads were launched via Microsoft's Advertiser and Publisher Solutions Group, the fruit of its ScreenTonic SA acquisition.
ScreenTonic provides Microsoft with "a platform specifically designed for managing and providing ads on mobile phones," according to InformationWeek.”

MSN buys Multimap
“Multimap was used extensively between 2000 and 2005 to map out trips in the UK and Europe, but has since seen competition from Google Maps.
Microsoft plans to use Multimap to compete with Google's search services and collect more online and mobile advertising, reports the International Herald Tribune.”


The New, New Thing

Demographic overlays for Google Maps
Including
“A really cool mash-up (pictured above) of Google Maps and US Census (2000) data.
Analygis's tool that works a bit differently but uses the same information
Retail marketplace data package from ESRI.”


Christmas Shopping

Everything cool is now sold out…


Creatives
More at my blog:
http://digital-examples.blogspot.com

Let’s go to Lapland
Watch the Glue people do a sponsored bike ride online

Very nice new Mercedes site

Elf Yourself for OfficeMax
Thanks to Benoit Radenne for the link!

PensionBook
Ho ho!

Funny Korean Broadband ads
Thanks to Christina Buck for the link!

Fiendish but addictive travel game


& finally

Paperspine – like Netflix, but for books – is this a very good or a very bad idea..?
“For a monthly cost of $9.95 and up + postage, you can get two or more books out at a time.”



Help write this newsletter (please!) – If you see anything interesting send it to me at:
dan.calladine@isobar.net & I promise that I do look at them.

Subscribe or unsubscribe – if you don’t want to get this email, or if you want to add colleagues to the subscriber list send me an email at the above address.

All stories archived at:
http://del.icio.us/DigitalNews

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
DISCLAIMER: The ideas and views contained herein are my own and not the views of Isobar Global. You are free to agree or disagree, all feedback is welcome.

I typed it on my mobile phone

Friday 7th December 2007
Hello, and welcome to the newsletter.

This week we have more on eCommerce, the economics of being an online video star, prices paid for mobile domain names, Russia’s $1bn internet site, plus iProspect’s expansion into Asia, and a great new game fro Reebok, playable either through the PC or the Wii.

Enjoy!


eCommerce

US online Christmas Shopping stats
“The fastest-growing retail sites since Cyber Monday compared with the corresponding days last year (within the top 20 most frequently visited retail sites) were Yahoo Shopping, Target, Apple, Circuit City and Toys "R" Us.
Some traditionally popular product categories for holiday gifts had strong growth in dollar sales versus last year: video games, consoles and accessories (+170 percent), toys (+36 percent), computer hardware (+21 percent), sports and fitness (+19 percent).”

Wii was the most searched for product in the UK in November
“The Nintendo Wii was the most searched for product by UK Internet shoppers during November. There were thirteen times as many UK Internet searches for ‘nintendo wii’ sending traffic to the Hitwise Shopping and Classifieds category as there were for ‘apple ipod’, and over twice as many searches for ‘wii’ as for both ‘ipod’ and ‘iphone’. Despite shortages of the popular console in the UK, the volume of searches for ‘nintendo wii’ has increased 158% since November 2006, while searches for ‘wii’ have increased by 278%.”

Study shows that online reviews affect offline sales
"The study examined the offline sales impact of online reviews for restaurants, hotels, travel, legal, medical, automotive and home services. Nearly one out of every four Internet users (24 percent) reported using online reviews prior to paying for a service delivered offline. Of those who consulted an online review, 41 percent of restaurant reviewers subsequently visited a restaurant, while 40 percent of hotel reviewers subsequently stayed at a hotel."


Online video

The economics of being an online video star
“Near the top of the pile sit Kent Nichols and Douglas Sarine, who have parlayed their "Ask a Ninja" Web program into about $100,000 a month in ad revenue and income from merchandising and licensing.
Mr. Plesser said he is pulling in about $15,000 a month with his Beet.TV blog, which includes video interviews with top technology executives.
And iJustine, whose video sendup of her gargantuan iPhone bill drew about 8 million views, by comparison pulls in about $1,000 a month, she said.
The winners are testing a variety of Web-video business models, and they’re learning that they need to lure one hell of a lot of eyeballs before they quit their day jobs. Creators usually need at least 50,000 to 100,000 views per month before advertisers will take them seriously, said Dina Kaplan, chief operating officer and co-founder at video-sharing site Blip.tv.”

Sarah Fay’s article on online video
“If you want to tap into the vast majority of online video watching, you should be developing video creative that is meant to be viewer-initiated. For this kind of creative to be successful, it needs to be as interesting to the viewer as the content he/she would otherwise be watching.
Imagine your brand’s creative lined up with pure unbranded content: Your video message needs to compete with that to be chosen by the viewer. It has to be THAT interesting, THAT entertaining, THAT relevant or THAT useful to the viewer. If we can deliver this kind of positive experience, we may actually condition consumers to like advertising!
Because this means brands are moving from producing advertising to producing content, there are a plethora of branded content-production houses emerging.”


Mobile

The prices paid at auction for 3 .mobi mobile domain names
“Results in from the latest domain auction at Sedo:
1. music.mobi - $616,000
2. games.mobi - $401,500
3. sports.mobi - $101,000
Very exciting. This proves that there’s significant economic heat building up in the mobile web. A medium starting grow up.”

In Japan half of the top 10 most popular books are written for mobile phones
“I typed it all on my mobile phone," Rin explains matter-of-factly over the same device. "I started writing novels on my mobile when I was in junior high school and I got really quick with my thumbs, so after a while it didn't take so long. I never planned to be a novelist, if that's what you'd call me, so I'm still quite shocked at how successful it's turned out."
Remarkably, half of Japan's top-10 selling works of fiction in the first six months of the year were composed the same way - on the tiny handset of a mobile phone. They sold an average of 400,000 copies. By August, the president of Goma Books, Masayoshi Yoshino, was declaring in a manifesto that he was determined "to establish this not simply as a fad, but as a new kind of culture".”
Thanks to Oliver Hughes for the link!

Case Study – Landrover ad for iPhone
“For high net worth customers, Land Rover partnered with AdMob.
Its resulting campaign targeted smartphone users and took advantage of AdMob's new ad unit, exclusive to the iPhone (see video), which has a store-locator in the banner itself.
Of those who clicked on the Land Rover mobile ad, 23 percent of customers responded to at least one call-to-action on the landing page: 88 percent watched the video, 9 percent entered zip codes, and 3 percent used the click-2-call action.”


Search

Google experimental search – rate your search results
“This experiment lets you influence your search experience by adding, moving, and removing search results. When you search for the same keywords again, you'll continue to see those changes. If you later want to revert your changes, you can undo any modifications you've made. Note that this is an experimental feature and may be available for only a few weeks.”
Thanks to Sebastien Larre for the link!


Eastern Europe

Mail.ru (Portal, not just an email site) is Russia’s first $1bn internet company
“The latest financial results released by Naspers, a South Africa-headquartered media and Internet group, reveal that it has acquired a further 2.6% stake in Mail.ru for $26 million, thus valuing the company at $1,000 million.
Naspers first bought a 30% stake in Mail.ru for $165 million from private equity investors Digital Sky Technologies and Tiger Global Management in January 2007.
Mail.ru says its monthly audience was 35.3 million in September 2007, up 20% from March 2007 . Mail.ru operates the largest free web mail service in Russia as well as blog, photo, video, dating, and other online portal services. The Mail.ru service was first released in 1998.”


Isobar Companies

iProspect launches in Asia
“iProspect, the Original® Search Engine Marketing Firm, today announced the launch of iProspect Hong Kong, iProspect Malaysia, and iProspect Singapore. The new offices are part of iProspect's continued worldwide expansion designed to offer marketers a seamless global search engine marketing solution.
With its worldwide expansion that began in 2005, iProspect continues to bring its experience and expertise to major international markets. The launch of offices in Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Singapore — along with the recently launched iProspect Australia — positions the firm to dominate the Asia-Pacific region as the premiere search engine marketing (SEM) offering.”
Thanks to Colleen Reed for the link!


The New, New Thing

Virtual shopping interface
Thanks to Stefan Moritz for the link!

E-Ink – how E-ink could revolutionise outdoor advertising
Thanks to Sasha Grujicic for the link!

JustStolen.net
“Juststolen.net was created by police officers to provide the best possible asset tracking and property recovery services in the world.
JustStolen.net is an innovative tool designed to easily register assets in order to facilitate their recovery if they are lost or stolen.”


Christmas Shopping

Star Wars USB cards
Use the memory card, Luke…

Napkin Notebook
Perfect for creative types

The Internet – in a handy book form
Might be funny…

(Fake) French USB wine tap


Creatives
More at my blog:
http://digital-examples.blogspot.com

Reebok El Duelo
El clásico (English: The Classic) is the name given to football matches between Real Madrid and FC Barcelona. The rivalry comes about as Madrid and Barcelona are the two largest cities in Spain, as well as the two most successful and influential football clubs in the country. Featured in the game are two of Reebok’s key football assets, Thierry Henry, the lead striker for FC Barcelona, and Iker Cassillas, the starting goal keeper for Real Madrid. To celebrate the rivalry Isobar Global has created a bespoke shootout game for Reebok featuring the two assets where entrants into the game have the opportunity to participate in a live event taking place a week prior to the shootout.
You can have a play on your PC or Nintendo Wii on www.rbkelduelo.com.
Thanks to Sasha Grujicic for the information!

Cadbury Magic Elves

German interactive urinal game
"The P***-Screen (the site's dead) is a pressure-sensitive inlay for urinals. The game is displayed on a screen above the urinal. We designed a driving game in the style of Need for Speed." The game would end with a crash and display a message to the effect that the player should take a cab home.”


& finally

Here Comes Another Bubble
Brilliant, topical music video. See how many of the references you get.



Help write this newsletter (please!) – If you see anything interesting send it to me at:
dan.calladine@isobar.net & I promise that I do look at them.

Subscribe or unsubscribe – if you don’t want to get this email, or if you want to add colleagues to the subscriber list send me an email at the above address.

All stories archived at:
http://del.icio.us/DigitalNews

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
DISCLAIMER: The ideas and views contained herein are my own and not the views of Isobar Global. You are free to agree or disagree, all feedback is welcome.

MySpace Overtakes Yahoo

Hi and welcome to this week’s newsletter.

Full of news and information, including:

MySpace is now the most popular site in the US
User reviews are the most useful part of ecommerce web sites
Japanese alarm clocks
Star Trek – by fans for fans
A brilliantly targeted ad
& Freestyle rock out for Rolling Rock

& the company of the week is Webanalys, search specialists from Sweden.

Enjoy!

Dan

Industry Stats

MySpace is now the most popular site in the US“For the first time, www.myspace.com has surpassed Yahoo! Mail as the most visited domain on the Internet for US Internet users. To put MySpace's growth in perspective, if we look back to July 2004 myspace.com represented only .1% of all Internet visits. This time last year myspace.com represented 1.9% of all Internet visits. With the week ending July 8, 2006 market share figure of 4.5% of all the US Internet visits, myspace.com has achieved a 4300% increase in visits over two years and 132% increase in visits since the same time last year.”

Lowest weekly ratings ever in the US for broadcast TV“CBS, ABC, NBC and Fox averaged 20.8 million viewers during the average prime-time minute last week, according to Nielsen Media Research. That sunk below the previous record, set during the last week of July in 2005. It wasn't entirely unexpected. By tradition, the week that includes Independence Day has the fewest viewers of the year, or close to it, because rerun season is in full swing and the public is consumed with outdoor activities.”

Young people in the UK now spend more time online than watching TVBritain's young people are for the first time spending more time looking at internet sites than watching TV, a new survey has revealed.
The lives of youngsters aged between 16 and 25 are dominated by their computers. The average youth spends 23 hours a week online and 67 per cent of youngsters say they would be "lost" without their PC.
Thanks to Brandi Stevens for the link!


Future of Media

The CEO of Tacoda on why the growth of digital media is far more fundamental than the launch of TV“We're now in a consumer-centric world. To consumers, it's "all about me." This world makes traditional advertising and media very uncomfortable as they are used to talking to, or shouting at, consumers. Now, it's about having a conversation, in some cases with one consumer at a time. This is foreign to almost every editor and programmer and creative in the business, and is fundamentally different from how they operate today.”
Thanks to GianPaolo Faprisco for the link!


Site Design

43% of Japanese use their mobiles as an alarm clock

User Generated Media

Star Trek intrepid – by fans for fans“Nick and his friends share a passion for Star Trek in all its incarnations, and in trying to recreate their heroes they are not alone. Across the world it's been estimated that there are more than 20 fan-made Star Trek projects on the go, with their efforts attracting increased interest since the TV series ended in May last year. The final incarnation of the Star Trek saga, Enterprise, was cancelled after ratings fell in the US to just under 3 million viewers.”
http://www.ussintrepid.net/
Thanks again to GianPaolo Faprisco for the link!

Lynette’s slides are now being syndicated by Futurelab“Who says a blogposts should consist mainly of words? Lynette Webb, has turned around conventional wisdom and uses photography to make her point (supported by a limited amount of words). Focusing on media, marketing, digital life and the occasional other thing that takes her fancy her work is usually informative, occasionally provocative and almost always makes you stop and think.”


Isobar Company of the Week – Webanalys

Webanalys is a leading player within Swedish search engine marketing. Clients constitute of market leading companies and organisations, and the client portfolio is one of the strongest and most renowned in the business sector. It consists of public companies, international corporations and smaller specialised companies from all business areas.

Webanalys offer search engine marketing solutions tailored to the specific needs of clients.

Through their services they help companies and organisations attract targeted traffic and achieve qualitative searchability in Internet search engines.

The solutions comprise optimizing clients’ websites and administrating sponsored links. As a result, Webanalys' clients obtain top rankings in the search engines results lists, reach the right target
groups, obtain more visitors and achieve a higher profitability on their Internet investments.

Webanalys was established in 1997 as the first Swedish company to offer search engine marketing services. In July 2005 Webanalys was acquisitioned and is now part of Aegis Group Plc, a global media and communications company based in London.

Current clients include:

Vattenfall, Trygg-Hansa, SIF, BOSCH

Recent projects include Q-Med´s upcoming websites www.Restylane.com, www.Deflux.com and www.Zuidex.com.

For more information about Webanalys and our search engine marketing services, please contact:
Mikael Rytterstam, Sales & Marketing Manager
Tel: 08 566 155 95
mikael.rytterstam@Webanalys.com


The New, New Thing

Desktop Robot“Billed as a desktop hobby bot, PLEN can roller skate for about 25 minutes on a single charge of his battery, kick balls by himself and knock your coffee all over your keyboard”


Creative
More at my blog:
http://digital-examples.blogspot.com/

A very well targeted ad for VW

The 9 – a Yahoo site sponsored by Pepsi providing a pick of the internet

Gaddafi – The Opera live in London this autumn
‘google’ is now officially a verb
“The latest edition of Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary includes "google" as a verb, among some 100 other new words that have officially made it into the American and English lexicon, reports the Associated Press. Merriam-Webster lower-cases the new dictionary entry”


Help write this newsletter – If you see anything interesting send it to me at:
dan.calladine@isobar.net & I promise that I do look at them.

Subscribe or unsubscribe – if you don’t want to get this email, or if you want to add colleagues to the subscriber list send me an email at the above address.

All stories archived at:
http://del.icio.us/DigitalNews


* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
DISCLAIMER: The ideas and views contained herein are my own and not the views of Isobar International. You are free to agree or disagree, all feedback is welcome.