Author: leahstern

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Twitter Shapes Advertising

Forbes has an article, Twitter Moms Sink Motrin Ad, covering the recent events in which general outrage among mothers on Twitter caused Johnson & Johnson to pull its advertising campaign about using Motrin to treat pains from carrying babies.

Twitter Bird Image from Twitter.comWould the backlash have gained such momentum so quickly without Twitter? The speed with which news and opinions travel is astonishing to marketers who are unfamiliar with the micro-blogging space. What are people saying about your brand on twitter? Try out search.twitter.com and subscribe to an RSS feed that updates whenever a new tweet matches your search query.

Keeping tabs on your brand on twitter and responding, especially when people have a complaint, is a great, inexpensive way to interact directly with your audience and manage their perception of you.

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Obama Considers Options for FCC Chairman

Ethernet Switches Image from twenty_questionsBusinessWeek reports that President-Elect Obama’s transition team is hard at work considering options for FCC Chairman.

“The new Administration is expected to give greater prominence to emerging providers of communications products and services, such as Google (GOOG)—a departure from the Bush Administration, which has tended to favor traditional providers such as AT&T (T).”

This is not unexpected, as Barack Obama has gone on record before supporting net neutrality, but it is certainly good news for internet companies and the new media producers who rely on them.

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Stop Prop 8 Ads from being served in Adsense

Vote No on Prop 8 Image from HBC4511Several websites have reported unwanted advertising from Google Adsense from the “Yes On 8” campaign supporting the banning of gay marriage in CA.

Here is the quick fix to make sure this doesn’t happen on your site:

  1. Log into Adsense
  2. Click “AdSense Setup”, then “Competitive Ad Filter”
  3. In the appropriate text box, add “protectmarriage.com” to the list of disallowed domains.

That’s it. Your account should not serve any more ads from the “Yes On 8” campaign. There are however, other campaigns that could still place advertising on Prop 8. You can add more domains to the competitive ad filter in the same way. If you know of more pro Prop 8 domains using AdSense, lets us know in the comments.

Now go vote!

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Radiohead’s Pick-Your-Price a Success?

In Rainbows Album Cover Image from WikipediaThe Chicago Tribune has a good set of numbers from the Radiohead “In Rainbows” release. As you may recall, Radiohead offered the album as a download in advance of the physical release and allowed fans to choose what price to pay for the album (if at all).

A few highlights:

  • $8 million from 100,000 box sets sold
  • 1.75 million CDs sold (on top of box set sales)
  • 1.2 million fans on the concert tour
  • 3 million copies sold overall (including digital)
  • Web sales alone exceeded the total sales from their previous album
  • Upon physical release, “In Rainbows” debuted atop both the U.S. and U.K. pop charts

What do you make of this? Do you think the experiment was a success? Are theses numbers indicative of a good business model despite the number of users who downloaded the album for free, or is this the effect of a quality album coupled with Radiohead’s previous popularity?

Is this evidence compelling enough to make you consider a similar model for your own work?

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Dr. Horrible MP3s available from Amazon

Felicia Day of Dr. Horrible Image from BobbyPromFor those of you who prefer your internet-musical-extravaganza soundtracks sans DRM, the Amazon MP3 store is now offering Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog soundtrack. We’ve talked before about Dr. Horrible before, and I am a fan, but I do think it’s a little strange that the soundtrack costs $8.99 when the entire show could be had for $4.99 on iTunes.

I guess that’s the price you pay for convenience. Honestly though, who would pay $0.99 cents for the opening 9-second track? Joss, I think you missed the mark here. Amazon lets you set variable pricing (one of their major distinctions over iTunes, as far as labels are concerned). Take advantage of that and pick some reasonable prices rather than just going with the default. Your fans will thank you.

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Musical Road

Ok, now this is cool. A road in Lancaster, CA has had grooves cut into it that cause car’s tires to play the William Tell Overture as they drive over it. CNET has the full story.

This is apparently part of a marketing campaign for the Honda Civic, and the road is tuned to play best for a Civic’s tires. The best part is that this isn’t even unique. There are other “singing roads” in Japan and South Korea. The one in Lancaster is being paved over due to complaints from neighbors. You would complain too if you had to listen, over and over, to a section of the William Tell Overture that sounded like this:

Encoding music into a road is a clever idea, despite the low fidelity. It certainly gets my attention. What other creative outlets for music have you seen?

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Canon 5D Mark II Video Footage

Canon EOS 5D Mark II Image from Steve KeysCanon lent a prototype of the new 5D Mark II to New-York-based commercial and editorial photographer Vincent Laforet for 72 hours, and this short film is what he put together: beautifully shot, put to music (no sync sound), using only footage from the 5D Mark II. The footage is 1/4 size (from the original 1080P) and shot with mostly L-series glass. The 5D Mark II retails for about $2700 (body only) from B&H. The combination of excellent lenses with the full frame sensor yields some gorgeous low-light shots.

I’m certainly interested to see some of this tech make it over to the prosumer video side of Canon. After seeing this kind of result, would you consider shooting your next project on a DSLR?

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Ask Ken Burns

Ken Burns Image from dbkingPBS Engage is offering an opportunity for viewers to ask documentary filmmaker Ken Burns five questions as part of the ongoing “Five Good Questions” series. This is a chance for all you budding documentarians to get your burning questions answered by one of the best known documentary directors in America.

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Virtual World Creation Gets Democritized

In an interview with Information Week, Raph Koster talks about the Metaplace project.

“As [game] technology has risen, it has been harder and harder and harder for ordinary people to contribute,” said Raph Koster, the founder and president of Areae. This has driven budgets up “and the result is less creativity, less innovation, and fewer worlds,” he said.

“So we want to democratize this by doing what the Web has managed to do, which is push content creation tools to a much lower threshold,” said Koster.

The vision of bringing the technology behind virtual worlds to a level that allows non-technical users to easily create new content is akin to the dropping prices and lower thresholds in video equipment that fuel YouTube and other UGC video sites.

Virtual Building Blocks Image from fdecomiteThe difference, of course, is that democritizing virtual world creation is a matter of software design and usability, not governed by Moore’s law. Most modern computers are already powerful enough (rendering time aside) to create and run a virtual world. The difficulty is in designing the tools. Given Raph Koster’s previous successes, we’re optimistic that the future holds a signifigantly lower barrier to entry in the virtual world department.