Snapple shows the way to do viral

Not only do we love this new viral by those clever people at Snapple, but the fact that there is over 100 hidden embedded in the video drives continued views and further engagement.

Interesting use of AR technology

Lynx brought angels down to earth last week in an augmented reality campaign for the Unilever owned brand.

Signs in Victoria railway station told travellers to look up to a giant video screen. On the screen, they saw an image of themselves plus the angels, who featured the online and TV commercials the brand was running. As this video shows, the reactions ranged from surprised to the, ahem, interesting.

US Trends – More people getting news from the Internet than newspapers

According to a study published by The Poynter Institute, in 2010 more people got their news from the Internet than from newspapers — and more advertising spend went to online media owners than to newspapers.

34% of respondents said they read news online within the past 24 hours (as opposed to 31% who favoured newspapers); and 41% said they get most of their news online, 10% more than those who said they got most of their news from a newspaper.

This trend was more pronounced within the younger 18-30 year old group 65% of whom said the Internet was their main news source.

The report showed that the web was the second most popular source of news - television news is still the number one source for the majority of people.

This is especially interesting given News International’s move to start charging for online content – a move that has been criticised by many for attempting to put the genie of free content back in the bottle.

Quora taps into the 'wisdom of crowds'

Quora is a recently launched social Q&A website that has been receiving more than its fair share of press lately.

It works on a straightforward idea; the user asks a question (either to the community or an individual) and you then wait for the answers. You can also follow questions, topics, or people and read all the updates related to them on your home page. It’s simple enough, but beyond that, some of Quora’s features are proving contentious.

One point of concern for example is the ability of users to edit others queries, potentially changing meanings and putting the whole notion of the ‘open source’ nature of the website into question.

In order to implement quality control on the answers people give, Quora employs a system of “upvoting” and “downvoting.” Upvoting a response displays it higher up in the queue of responses. With enough upvotes, an answer will appear first in the queue, implying that its content is of the highest quality because the community approved it.

We suggest that anyone interested in Quora signs up and give it a try. If you don’t like it, you’ll know right away. If you do like it, you can find yourself getting sucked into the site and jumping from question to question, checking out topics that you never even knew existed.

Catherine Becker, COO of AdConnection, attends the Westminster Media Parliamentary Forum at the House of Commons – Feb 2011

Catherine Becker, our COO, attended the Westminster Media Parliamentary Forum yesterday at the House of Commons, bringing together MPs with leaders in broadcast, media and regulatory bodies such as BARB and Clearcast to discuss and debate the up-coming changes in the Communication Bill. Nigel Evans, MP, spoke of the need to evolve the communications legislation based on changes in technology and the growth in TV channels. Darren Childs, CEO of UKTV spoke about the need to have flexibility and protect the smaller broadcasters against the growth in power of the terrestrial channels and the pressure to maintain the status quo. He also discussed the challenge of migration of TV onto other formats such as online and even viewing on Xbox and Playstation 3 and the need for the industry to understand the implications of these changes and the need to legislate for them.

Catherine Becker, COO of AdConnection, representing the needs of advertisers, challenged the need to look at potential for advertising on BBC to widen commercial impacts and create a fairer playing field. Nigel Evans replied that this would be unpopular with the large TV stations but there was a need to look at this as part of the on-going debate. Catherine has now been invited to take part in quarterly select committees to advise on changes and how they will affect advertisers to help shape the next bill.

Catherine, seen above with Darren Childs, CEO of UKTV and Ray Blaney, Head of Regulatory Affairs at UKTV, discussed the challenges of fragmentation, the impact of TV consolidation and the need to protect advertisers from unnecessary inflation. Catherine also raised the challenges of cross-media advertising results, discussing how advertising in online TV formats (pre- and post-roll ads, banners and other online formats during the programming) were still to prove their effectiveness, and the need to push product placement in online formats (ability to click on products within programming taking the viewer straight to the websites to purchase). This has been recently tested by Tesco, who as well as having their barcode app, are now looking at the ability to use the red-button during programming to download a product onto the app, providing true cross-media response.

Finally, Catherine discussed with Bjarne Thelin, CEO of BARB, the challenges of recording viewing data as these cross-platform technologies evolved. Bjarne cited the challenges of even +1 channels which were broadcast at different times to slightly different audiences as making measurement more complex as broadcasting evolved.

Facebook's No3 advertiser is Microsoft search hjacker

Adage has detailed Facebook's growing advertising pool. Here's a chart of social networking's biggest ad sources..

Something that has caught the eye of many is Make-my-Baby.com, and well it might. Make-My-Baby.com is a spyware company that has gone from selling cell phone owners auto-recurring fees of $10-$20 each month, to peddling software that sets homepage and default search on browsers to Microsoft's Bing.

It is a site that allows you to put eyeglasses and mustaches on top of a funny looking baby's face. Hilarious. Well, that is what it seems to be….before you can do anything the site says you have to install "a browser plug-in to present an enhanced experience." If you do so, according to the fine print, your browser's default search and home page will be switched to Bing. Once you do so, the affiliate company behind the toolbar, called Zugo, will capture a slice of the revenue whenever you click on a search ad.

At best, Facebook is showing billions (literally) of spyware ads that trick users into installing browser-hijacking software.

Spooky Spokeo

We're not entirely sure how you are meant to pronounce ‘spokeo’, but for many it will read as ‘spooky-o’ because it certainly is spooky to say the least. Not in a hiding under the sheets, ghost and goblin way, but in a frightening data-protection type of way….

Type in some personal information into spokeo.com, for example, an e-mail address, and it will return *everything* to do with that e-mail that can be found in the public domain all in one neat package – your social networks, photo’s, images uploaded onto forums, comments, pretty much everything that is linked to that e-mail on the web. Worried yet? Well this is nothing compared to if you live in America. Type in any American resident name that you may know of, and up pops their home location, value of their house, a Google street map view of the home, their family tree, relationship status and more.

Frightening, but don’t hide under the sheets just yet…because this is your own 'fault'. All of this information has not been gained by illegal methods, it is simply acting as an API hub, roaming the web for anything that has been made public by yourself. Parts of forums are public, social networks (that are not secured by you) are for public viewing, photos you have uploaded via flickr are public…you get the idea… its more the fact that all of this information is in one place, and some revealing details that you may of thought as ‘private’ have been made public, such as your house value.

Thankfully, if you want this ghost story to end, you can ‘opt-out’ of your data being available to spokeo.com, although if you make another ‘public’ entry online afterwards the data will reset itself and you will be found once more.