How this year’s Super Bowl ads will offer social media perks
Super Bowl ads this year are unlike anything you will witness: on Sunday, expect these million-dollar spots to feature Twitter hashtags, viral videos and music apps such as Shazam. Brands are embracing social media to get more out of their spots.
You’ve seen Super Bowl ads – or any ad, for that matter – plug their website at the end of some celeb-endorsed spot. But come Sunday, when the New York Giants face off against the New England Patriots, you won’t see any URLs; instead, some brands will tell you to use the mobile app Shazam, which recognizes tunes and identifies the name of the song. With ad spots, you can open the app, Shazam would recognize the ad, then a URL or other perk will be unlocked.
For example, Super Bowl viewers who catch Pepsi’s commercial with “X Factor USA” winner Melanie Amaro performing the Otis Redding song “Respect” can download a free video of the performance by using the Shazam app after they capture audio from the commercial, FirstPostreports.
This is one way these 30-second ads – costing $3.5 million each – will be tapping into social media to keep NFL fans “sticky” to their marketing messages.Coca-Cola wants to hook the Twitterati with some bait. Their Super Bowl spot will feature Arctic polar bears watching the game. As Reuters writes, “The bears will then be brought to life on Twitter, Facebook and on a dedicated website doing such things as responding to fans and commenting on the game.” So if the Giants are winning, the animated bears will talk about the lead, their actions manipulated on the fly by ad agency Wieden + Kennedy.
Also, let’s say there’s a naughty ad or a Janet Jackson moment. At that moment, a bear will cover a cub’s eyes, Mashable writes.
As any Twitter user would recognize, hashtags have fast become a popular way to track trends. Of course, brands want to create their own buzz via their Bowl ads, leading Volkswagen’s Audi to start a campaign. Its 60-second spot, on during the first break in the game, will promote the new 2013 Audi S7 and its LED headlight technology, which does some damage to a party of young vampires.
Reuters writes “Audi hopes to continue the conversation about the ad via the Twitter hashtag #SoLongVampires.”
Viral videos have quickly become a hot trend, especially before the Super Bowl lands in Indianapolis. Recently, Honda revealed a two-minute version of a Super Bowl ad they’ll be running, starring Matthew Broderick in a reprise role as Ferris Bueller. A spoof of the 1986 Matthew Broderick film, it’s a long spot for the 2012 CR-V compact SUV.
The vid quickly spread from YouTube to Twitter to Facebook feeds. Hits have already surpassed 433,000. Kia Motors is taking early release a step further, MySanAntonio found, showing its Super Bowl ad called “Drive the Dream” on 18,000 movie screens beginning Wednesday. The 15-second teaser is already playing in some U.S. movies.
“Nobody has ever released their Super Bowl spot in theaters prior to game day,” said Michael Sprague, vice president of marketing for Kia Motors. “We’re trying to break through the clutter.”
A marketing professor comments on the trend: “We saw last year a lot of Super Bowl ads tried to push people to their websites via social media, and now we’re seeing social media push people toward the ads,” University of Texas-Austin advertising professor Gary Wilcox said, according toNew Jersey Online. “Until now it’s always been our feeling that watching Super Bowl ads is a surprise. Perhaps social media is enhancing that even if it spoils the surprise, but we don’t know yet.”
On game day, NFL fans are not too far from their favourite gadgets. Mashable reports research has shown about 60 percent of people watching the game plan to have a second screen running — whether it’s a PC, tablet or a smartphone.
This article originally appeared on Digital Journal [Link]
Canada: Tablet ownership tripled in 2011
by Elizabeth Cunningham Perkins (Guest contributor/Digital Journalist)
A Media Technology Monitor report indicated tablet computer use by Canadians almost tripled during 2011 and promises to keep rising through 2012, 680 News reported.
According to 680 News, ownership of tablet computers by English-speaking Canadians had reached about 11 percent by last fall, compared to four percent in 2010, based upon Media Technology Monitor surveys of 4,000 English-speaking and 4,000 French-speaking Canadians.
Among French-speaking Canadians, tablet use reached six percent last fall, up from two percent in 2010, and MTM predicted 17 percent of all Canadians will own tablets by the end of 2012 — mostly Apple iPads if the current trend continues — compared to 10 percent in 2011, but few Canadians watch TV on their tablet computers, or watch TV online at all, 680 News reported.
Tablet ownership has increased in the United States also: A study of several Pew surveys conducted late 2011 through early 2012 found tablet purchases, including e-readers such asNooks and Kindles, surged throughout the United States during the 2011-2012 holiday shopping season, Reuters reported.In the United Kingdom, research by comScore in 2011 suggested higher morning and evening use of tablet computers and smartphones, before and after personal computer use (perhaps over breakfast and before bedtime), was growing steadily into a significant share of the browsing market, The Guardian reported.
The article originally was published in Digital Journal [Link]
Photo courtesy of Robman170
Gizmodo bans own editor from commenting on site
Watch what you comment, journalists. Tech news site Gizmodo has banned one of their own editors from commenting on the site.
Jesus Diaz, an editor at Gizmodo, can no longer comment on the site’s stories, due to breaking a cardinal rule laid out in Gizmodo’s commenting policy: attacking other commenters.
In article about Google, written by another Gizmodo writer, a commenter called the post “sensationalist.” Then Diaz went overboard, writing: “It’s amazing how moronic people can be and how hard they can suck on corporate cock.”
Diaz didn’t stop there. He later commented: “Google fandroids like you are as bad as Apple fanboys like Gruber. All of you sucking on corporate cock and lying off your tits.”
Gizmodo’s editor-in-chief Joe Brown said about the decision to ban Diaz: “I hate to do this, but we have to hold ourselves to the same standards as we hold our readers; these lines have to exist for us as well.”
Brown added, “Sometimes his passions get the better of him, and that’s often what gets him in trouble.”
Diaz continues to be busy writing posts for Gizmodo. Since the banning announcement, Diaz has written five articles for the site.
60 hours of video uploaded a minute, 4 billion daily views on YouTube
by Andrew Moran (Guest contributor/Digital Journalist)
Google’s YouTube announced in a blog post that 60 hours of video is uploaded per minute, which is one hour for each second. Also, the video-sharing website receives more than four billion daily views.
According to the latest studies, Canadian Internet users are hooked on YouTube. Data from comScore Inc. suggested that 88 percent of Canadians who use the Internet viewed a video online in one month. In that one month, Canadians viewed 3.1 billion videos.
The numbers from Media Metrix are similar in other Western countries, such as the United Kingdom (81 percent), Germany (79 percent), France (78 percent) and the United States (77 percent).
The company announced in a blog post recently that in 2011, one hour of video is uploaded every second. This amount is equalled to 60 hours of uploaded video each minute.
Furthermore, the website receives four billion global daily views, which is up 25 percent in the last eight months. “For all the hours of video you’re uploading—you’re watching more as well; we’ve now exceeded four billion video views globally every day,” wrote the YouTube team in the blog post. “That’s up 25 percent in the last eight months and the equivalent of more than half the world’s population watching a video every day, the same number as there are US $1 bills in circulation, the same as number of years since there was water on Mars…it’s a big number, and you’re making it bigger every day.”
In celebration of this achievement, YouTube has launched onehourpersecond.com. This latest endeavour visualizes the volume of content uploaded over certain periods of time. For example, “in 48 seconds of uploads to YouTube, a bamboo plant grows six feet (2 days of video).”
TG Daily notes that YouTube generates more than $5 billion in revenue from “display” ads. Also, of the four billion daily views, Google makes money on approximately 428 million. Remember, Google purchased YouTube for $1.65 billion just a few years ago in 2006.
Photo courtesy of Flickr user Chung Chu
This article originally appeared on Digital Journal [Link]
Video: Clay Shirky on why SOPA is a bad idea
By Chris Hogg
As someone who runs a user-generated website, I think SOPA is a very bad idea. But I think it’s bad not just because it would inhibit my business, but because it would stifle innovation across the Internet as a whole.
For those of you who may not be familiar with SOPA, I’m providing a definition here (courtesy of the user-generated site Wikipedia):
The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is a law (bill) of the United States proposed in 2011 to fight online trafficking in copyrighted intellectual property and counterfeit goods. Proposals include barring advertising networks and payment facilities from conducting business with allegedly infringing websites, barring search engines from linking to the sites, and requiring Internet service providers (ISP) to block access to the sites. The bill would criminalize the streaming of such content, with a maximum penalty of five years in prison.
User-content websites such as YouTube would be greatly affected, and concern has been expressed that they may be shut down if the bill becomes law. Opponents state the legislation would enable law enforcement to remove an entire domain due to something posted on a single blog, arguing that an entire online community could be punished for the actions of a tiny minority. In a 1998 law, copyright owners are required to request the site to remove the infringing material within a certain amount of time. SOPA would bypass this “safe harbor” provision by placing the responsibility for detecting and policing infringement onto the site itself.
Lobbyists for companies that rely heavily on revenue from intellectual property copyright state it protects the market and corresponding industry, jobs, and revenue. The US president and legislators suggest it may kill innovation. Representatives of the American Library Association state the changes could encourage criminal prosecution of libraries. Other opponents state that requiring search engines to delete a domain name begins a worldwide arms race of unprecedented censorship of the Web and violates the First Amendment.
On January 18, 2012, several high-profile sites including Wikipedia went “dark” in protest of SOPA, and prominent Canadians like Michael Geist illustrated how an American legal issue would also affect those living outside of Uncle Sam’s reach.
I am against SOPA for many of the same reasons that others have spoken about publicly. It’s ill-conceived, destructive and it would stifle the innovation, open discussion and progress we have come to love of the Internet.
One particular voice in this discussion caught my attention and I wanted to share that with you here today. Clay Shirky gave a TED talk on SOPA and it says everything I would and provides great context on a complicated yet important issue. If you have 15 minutes to spare, I strongly encourage you to take the time to watch this talk: