Hasta La Creative!

Someone at Channel 9 is running around stressed. Meetings are happening to discuss how to handle this and the social media monitoring companies, the social media commentators (me included) are already gearing up for another “How to handle a social crisis” Slideshare deck.

Australia’s biggest TV channel and Olympics broadcaster channel 9 is being “smashed” on their Facebook page over their coverage. Mostly around the coverage, or over coverage, of swimming. In heir defence, swimming is usually the area where Australia does the best in the medals so 9 probably over invested in their prep around swimming.

The page is getting around 10 angry posts a minute and I found a lot of them funny. There’s even some memes (both good and bad) popping up.

The example below sums up Australia’s youth well.

But it’s not all young kids there’s also some people that will pick out any fault whether it be the pronunciation of a country or even when the channel accidentally broadcasts old footage. Whoops.

What surprised me was this “Dear Channel 9” post by Matthew Taylor which has since reached 94,000 likes and 4,000 comments. It’s as if it was posted by Lil Wayne himself.

Foxtel, Australia’s only pay TV provider, must be loving it. If they don’t have a reactive ad coming out soon to capitalise on this I would be surprised. Foxtel’s games profile, Follow The Games* is dedicated to the games in this period.

It’ll be an interesting few days to see how Channel 9 respond to this and how the other networks cover it. Oh and more importantly how the “social media experts” say they should have handled it.

It also begs the quest does Australia’s largest television network have anything to gain by running a Facebook profile for the channel itself? Sure their shows desrve a place for fans to chat but people don’t like a channel, they like the content on it. Their 54,000 fans are nothing compared to their viewership and unlike brands they already have a channel to reach and engage people with, it’s their own network.

Someone at Channel 9 is running around stressed. Meetings are happening to discuss how to handle this and the social media monitoring companies, the social media commentators (me included) are already gearing up for another “How to handle a social crisis” Slideshare deck.

Australia’s biggest TV channel and Olympics broadcaster channel 9 is being “smashed” on their Facebook page over their coverage. Mostly around the coverage, or over coverage, of swimming. In heir defence, swimming is usually the area where Australia does the best in the medals so 9 probably over invested in their prep around swimming.

The page is getting around 10 angry posts a minute and I found a lot of them funny. There’s even some memes (both good and bad) popping up.

The example below sums up Australia’s youth well.

But it’s not all young kids there’s also some people that will pick out any fault whether it be the pronunciation of a country or even when the channel accidentally broadcasts old footage. Whoops.

What surprised me was this “Dear Channel 9” post by Matthew Taylor which has since reached 94,000 likes and 4,000 comments. It’s as if it was posted by Lil Wayne himself.

Foxtel, Australia’s only pay TV provider, must be loving it. If they don’t have a reactive ad coming out soon to capitalise on this I would be surprised. Foxtel’s games profile, Follow The Games* is dedicated to the games in this period.

It’ll be an interesting few days to see how Channel 9 respond to this and how the other networks cover it. Oh and more importantly how the “social media experts” say they should have handled it.

It also begs the quest does Australia’s largest television network have anything to gain by running a Facebook profile for the channel itself? Sure their shows desrve a place for fans to chat but people don’t like a channel, they like the content on it. Their 54,000 fans are nothing compared to their viewership and unlike brands they already have a channel to reach and engage people with, it’s their own network.

Winning the battle against boring banners by easing content integration.

New York, New York (April 16, 2008) – Eyeblaster, the global leader in integrated digital marketing solutions, and Dapper, a leader in the emerging content mashup space, announce a strategic partnership to create the next generation of online ads. MashupAds will enable campaigns with dynamic content from external sites. Providing a platform for the delivery, management and analysis of the new MashupAds, Eyeblaster once again shows its commitment to deliver a complete range of ad campaign management services to its clients.

Until now, the only way advertisers could integrate content into online ads was using XML feeds. XML, however, requires coding on both ends – content provider and ad designer. Because of this limitation, most of the Web’s content was not readily available and integration was often costly, lengthy and risky.

With MashupAds, designers will be able to make advertising dynamic in ways never thought possible using powerful, user-friendly mashup tools. Ad creators can move text, images and even interactive forms from existing websites into online ads and:

– Integrate advertiser’s content into the ad.

– Include third party content into ad.

– Contextualize the mashup by analyzing the data to target the ad.

MashupAds are an extension of Dapper’s proven core feed-creation engine at dapper.net. Through a simple, point-and-click online interface, advertisers and publishers can “unlock” their content to create live feeds that are used to create relevant, compelling ads with no programming. The end result is an ad that behaves like a site feature, combining the advertiser’s site functionality with a publisher’s context. MashupAds make the difference for advertisers because they:

– Increase relevance through live, updated content beamed directly into the ad.

– Increase interaction, conversion, CTR and ROI.

– Build higher brand awareness.

“Content plays a big role in brand advertising. But content alone cannot connect a brand to its audience,” said Gal Trifon, co-founder and chief executive officer at Eyeblaster. “MashupAds will deliver relevant, engaging content closer to the consumer by taking it from the website to an interactive ad campaign.”

“We are very excited at this opportunity to work together with a global leader such as Eyeblaster. MashupAds will transform display ads into becoming more engaging, interactive and relevant, and most importantly, enhancing the end-user’s browsing experience” said Eran Shir, co-founder and chief executive officer at Dapper.

About Dapper:

Dapper is a U.S. company with offices in Tel Aviv, Israel. Founded by Eran Shir and Jon Aizen in late 2005, Dapper aims to make it easy and possible for anyone to extract and reuse content from any website. By doing so, Dapper hopes to allow others to realize their creativity and implement new and exciting services and applications. For more information, please visit http://www.dapper.net.

About Eyeblaster

In 1999, Eyeblaster was among the pioneers in rich media communication. Today, Eyeblaster extends its inventive heritage in digital advertising through Ad Campaign Manager (ACM). ACM enables interactive agencies, advertisers and publishers to manage campaigns across digital media channels, including online, mobile and in-game, and a variety of formats, including rich media, in-stream video, display and search. ACM is a robust, integrated and easy-to-use platform that allows customers to focus on campaign strategy, creativity and media efficiency without having to worry about the technical complexities associated with managing global advertising campaigns online.

In 2007, Eyeblaster delivered campaigns for nearly 7,000 brand advertisers serving approximately 2,500 ad agencies across over 2,500 global web publishers in over 40 countries worldwide throughout North America, South America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Africa and the Middle East.

Learn more at http://www.eyeblaster.com.

In Internet time, this is now probably old news:

“Video! Video! Video! The rumours are true and “soon” is now. We’re thrilled to introduce video on Flickr. If you’re a pro member, you can now share videos up to 90 glorious seconds in your photostream.

90 seconds? While this might seem like an arbitrary limit, we thought long and hard about how video would complement the flickrverse. If you’ve memorized the Community Guidelines, you know that Flickr is all about sharing photos that you yourself have taken. Video will be no different and so what quickly bubbled up was the idea of “long photos,” of capturing slices of life to share. […] ”

The 90 seconds limit sounds wierd initially, but they have a fair point. We don’t need more video sharing sites, we need more cool content.

The video interface looks nice. Interesting to see how it goes.

Hi welcome to my Mypace page. But I’m not here! I’m at thisis50.com! That’s what users are greeted to when they visit 50 Cent’s Myspace page.

While Thisis50.com would be renamed thisisshitty.com as it looks even worse than his Myspace page it’s sending out a big message to other bands and artists. Why are the big players leaving Myspace? What does this mean to his 1 million friends. How many will follow to the new site, how many even noticed. Is a friend just a badge like a sticker on your school book or is it something more meaningful like having them on speed dial. I know personally I only added friends as a way to say “yeah I like The Simpsons” I never actually returned to their profile.

I can see labels now asking their marketing teams why their band doesn’t have their own social network?!? Do smaller bands without a huge fan base like 50, Pussy Cat Dolls or Kylie will still need the large social network audience? Or does it make it more special that you become part of a small niche “fan club” that reall means something.

More on fiddy’s move here

Contrary to what Adnews is reporting, we think Macquarie Communications Group is a potential suitor for Blue Freeway. Just a guess, but at last look in January, Macquarie Group Limited had acquired 10.39% of BLU Read ASX Announcement

MCG could indeed be Mitchell Communications Group, but we think otherwise.

In a stunning piece of acquisition action, Photon Group Limited (ASX: PGA )has acquired independent planning shop, Naked Communications. There is currently no announcement of the acquisition lodged with the ASX, but according to sources, the deal includes an initial upfront cash payment of £16.5 million.

Photon entered a trading halt last night, and are expected to resume this morning according to an ASX filing.

The DVD wars are coming to a close. Here’s a great spoof that explains everything that’s happened recently.

At least it seems Sony might win this format war.

Wired have reported on the top downloads on P2P networks for 2007. See the full article here.

Now I’ve never heard of Akon or half the rappers in the top 10 of music I do know a little bit more about the film side of things. And looking at the report it makes me wonder.

The top then movies downloaded in 2007 according to Wired are:

1. Resident Evil: Extinction
2. Pirates of The Caribbean: At World’s End
3. I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry
4. Ratatouille
5. Superbad
6. Beowulf
7. Transformers
8. American Gangster
9. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
10. Stardust

I’m not 100% sure the data is accurate though (these networks don’t exactly provide logs) as “I now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry” being the #3 movie. C’mon. The Simpson’s movie was everywhere on the networks and had a greater global appeal than some B grade comedy. And Stardust? That’s certainly not the film for the “P2P crowd, which is made up largely of younger males.”

This also shows that while music seems to be suffering because of P2P, all the films in the top download list did pretty good in the box office. Yep even Chuck and Larry pulled in $120 million.

So film distributors needn’t be worried about P2P downloads, Box Office earnings were the biggest yet $9.68 billion with ticket sales staying steady from 2006.

29 sequels in 2007 brought in 22% of the earnings, or $2 Billion dollars. Compared to the 346 original screen plats that brought in $3.3 Billion.

I look forward to “I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry 2” coming to theaters soon.

Anyone else interested in Box Office earnings on films should check out The Number’s 2007 Summery or read Open Wide.

**** Update : Thursday 6th December. As expected, the Federal Communications Minister has today ordered an investigation by ACMA into the sale of adult content ****

Australia’s #1 Telcommunications carrier, Telstra is this morning embroiled in a scandal involving it’s YouTube styled user generated content site WotNext, which was found to have a number of soft-porn clips.

WotNext is unique in that it has a revenue sharing model whereby contributors earn money each time a user of Telstra’s NextG mobile service downloads a clip. Each clip is charged at $1 and Telstra takes 50%, with the other 50% being credited to the user.

The key issue is that no age verfication takes place either on the site, or the mobile handset, therefore minors can access adult content.

News.com.au and the Sydney Morning Herald are both reporting the story, with News.com.au having captured and censored one of the clips for publication.

It will be interesting to see whether Telstra will undertake an audit of its userbase to ascertain whether any minors have indeed accessed adult content and whether Telstra is prepared to refund any money it earned through minors having access. No doubt the incoming Communications Minister, Senator Stephen Conroy, will be asking Telstra to ‘Please Explain’.

Furthermore, Telstra may have potentially committed a criminal act by selling porn to minors. The Australian Media and Communication Authority’s (ACMA) “Internet Content Guidelines” and “Adult Verification Scheme” has specific guidelines relating to the access of adult content online.

Earlier this year, the site was lauded for its effort by the Australian Direct Marketing Association (ADMA) when it won Best of Show at the 2007 Mobile Marketing Awards. The agencies credited include, George Patterson Y&R and Tiger Spike.

Unlike YouTube, Telstra claim the site is moderated. However this Google cache snapshot, clearly shows at least one of the controversial videos was posted back in July 2007, casting doubt over Telstra’s assertion that the site is moderated.

Beware the pitfalls of user generated content!