Remember when CBS ran two Super Bowl commercials in a row that featured guys running around in their underwear? I mentioned it in my picks for the worst Super Bowl ads, and now CBS is actually apologizing for it (and that's not all).
Filed under: Commercials, Reality-Free
Permalink | Email this | | Comments
Yes, this is a Hyundai Equus luxury sedan with manufacturer plates and a wing ripped straight off a B16 Civic. It's not a joke. Hyundai'll do anything for performance cred.
This photo was sent into AutoBlog and they've made a joke about Rhys Millen replacing his Pikes Peak-racing Genesis coupe with this luxobarge. Probably not, but there's more here than ugly aftermarket aesthetics.
In addition to buying a million Super Bowl ads and a billion Oscar commercials the company has long sought out tuners for their vehicles including numerous SEMA, Genesis show cars.
In fact, back in 2007 Hyundai execs apparently approached RENNtech's Hartmut Feyhl with an eye towards establishing an AMG-like relationship with the tuner (Feyhl was former AMG Tech Director). So even if this particular car+spoiler photo is a joke there's nothing funny about the way Hyundai wants to buy its way into the forefront of everything. And yes, that includes performance cars.
Last month, Pepsi made the bold move of forgoing Super Bowl ads in favor of a $20 million social media campaign centered around the Pepsi Refresh Project.
Today we’re excited to announce that we have an opportunity to get of our reader’s ideas funded to the tune of $50,000, and it will all happen within the next couple weeks in conjunction with SXSW. We’ll also be keeping you updated about the project and letting you know how you can help here on Mashable.
Here’s how it works:
We’re asking our readers to submit their best pro-social digital ideas to us by Sunday, March 7th, at 11:59pm ET. For an idea of what we mean by “pro-social,” check out some of the submissions already on the Refresh Project site.
We’ll select our favorite, and work with the winning team to formalize an application to Pepsi. Because this is Mashable, our criteria will focus both on the idea and its proposed social media strategy.
We’ll be competing against other “digital influencers” to win the $50,000 in funding. I’ll personally be presenting our choice at SXSW along with the winning team (meaning you’ll have to be at SXSW to present) when the voting portion kicks off on March 13th. We’ll also be using Mashable’s online reach to promote our idea make sure we bring home the funding for it!
Voting will take place publicly via Twitter with a unique hashtag for our chosen team and the #PepsiRefresh hashtag. Voting will end at 11:59pm CT on March 15th.
Interested? Be sure to read Pepsi’s guidelines and eligibility requirements (a key one being this is US-only) and then submit your idea to Mashable by going here. We’ll be in touch with the winning team early on March 9th to discuss next steps. We look forward to your ideas and working with our selected team!
Disclosure: Pepsi is a previous sponsor of Mashable events.
Tags: Pepsi, pepsi refresh, social media, sxsw
Again this week, the intersection of sports and politics made headlines when the National Collegiate Athletic Association pulled website advertising by the advocacy group Focus on the Family. Several weeks ago, this organization's same ad campaign garnered national attention for spots during the Super Bowl featuring Pam Tebow's story of her choice not to abort her Heisman trophy-winning, national championship-quarterbacking son, Tim.
Ironically, the NCAA website ads were part of the deal that paid for the Super Bowl ads, since CBS Sports maintains the NCAA Website and apparently sold the advertising as part of the same $2.5 million contract with Focus on the Family. The NCAA stepped forward to take a stand against advertising that does not meet its standards of being "generally supportive of NCAA values and attributes and/or not be in conflict with the NCAA's mission and fundamental principles."
While the ads themselves cleverly couch their message in the neutral tagline "Celebrate Family. Celebrate Life," Focus on the Family's mission is dedicated to right-wing Christian values, among them advocating against abortion and gay marriage. Around the Super Bowl, women's groups and free speech advocates clamored to debate whether CBS should have accepted the advertisement, but the individual with the most power and responsibility to take a stand -- NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell -- sat squirrelishly on the sidelines of the issue, skirting the controversy.
As the NCAA's actions this week have shown, the responsibility for sending a message about the appropriate advertising standards for any sport falls squarely on the shoulders of its governing body. The NCAA recognized what the NFL did not: that controversial and divisive political messages have no place in the fan experience of sporting events, whatever the agenda.
Now is the time for the NFL and other major professional sports leagues to follow suit. Empowered to act in the "best interests of the game," the NFL Commissioner should establish rules about what advertising should be aired during the Super Bowl, or any other NFL game for that matter -- and take away the opportunity for the highest bidder to determine what the fan experience should be.
Like the other major commissioners in major professional sports, Goodell wields nearly unfettered power with broad authority to set the policies and agenda for everything from on-field conduct of the players to the types of business relationships teams and their owners can have. The leagues uniformly require that contracts for the rights to show games on-air contain league-mandated language subjecting the agreement to rules established by the commissioner -- in his sole discretion.
The leagues often use these rules to prohibit teams and/or their media rightsholders from accepting certain advertising -- as the NBA did for nearly 20 years by prohibiting hard liquor on courtside signage or as most leagues now do with rules that restrict ads related to organizations that accept bets on sporting events. And in January, the NFL argued to the Supreme Court that the league should be free from most antitrust scrutiny in the landmark American Needle, Inc. v. NFL case, which would further expand the Commissioner's power over all aspects of the league's business.
But if the commissioner wants this power, he should take the responsibility: Commissioner Goodell should follow the NCAA's lead and set policies that ensure that NFL games are an experience that exemplifies a unifying force for all fans, prohibiting the Super Bowl and any other NFL game from serving as a platform for public debate on divisive social and political issues regardless of the position.
History has shown that sports have a remarkable ability to influence social norms -- and the commissioners of these sports often are the key to that influence. When Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in Major League Baseball, it was only because Commissioner Happy Chandler paved the way with his support when he succeeded Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis, who had steadfastly refused to allow African American players in the league.
And many commissioners have demonstrated the savvy to determine precisely where wield that influence -- even if there is no simple bright line to be drawn. NFL commissioners have decided, in years past, to put the NFL's support whole-heartedly behind the United Way and to oppose domestic violence. In turn, these Commissioners have steered clear of controversial issues such as gay marriage, abortion, and who should be the next president of the United States. These commissioners have consistently demonstrated a keen understanding of where the line should be drawn based on what unites, rather than divides, their core fan base. Commissioner Goodell is no different. He launched the NFL Play 60 campaign promoting physical fitness for America's children because he knew that all NFL fans would rally behind it.
Though some may be troubled by a Viagra ad and others may be opposed to liquor advertising featuring scantily-clad women, there is an obvious difference between ads selling a product and those seeking an audience to influence public debate. It is easy to make a distinction between the marketing of those products and advocating for issues -- be it anti-abortion, pro-gay marriage or otherwise -- that are recurrent subjects of rhetoric in campaigns on which people on either side of the issue are alternately impassioned or outraged.
Moreover, avoiding that rhetoric may just be good for business. In a year where the media has focused on the abominable behavior of certain sports figures -- like Steve Phillips and Tiger Woods -- have shown toward women, many forget the significance of women as sports fans and the spending power they represent for the professional sports teams and their advertisers. In fact, women represent a growing audience for the NFL. According to published Neilsen reports, approximately 38% of viewers of the 2008 Super Bowl were women, a number that reflected an 8% increase over the prior ten years. Even if those women are equally divided on the issue of abortion (as polls often show), no league wants to alienate nearly 20% of their viewership.
Anyone watching the Olympics over the past two weeks has seen again that, at their best, sports serve as a powerful unifying force among all people. The NCAA recognized just that power by pulling the Focus on the Family ad -- noting in its standards that it may pull advertisements that "that do not appear to be in the best interests of higher education and student athletes." It is time -- and in the "best interests of the game" -- for Commissioner Goodell and his colleagues to follow the NCAA's lead and set standards that prevent their games from becoming a platform for advocating someone else's cause. Fractious political messages belong on the soapbox not on the playing field.
Lucinda Kinau Treat has spent more than a decade as a lawyer and senior executive in professional sports, including as the former Executive Vice President and General Counsel of Madison Square Garden and the former Chief Legal Officer of New England Sports Ventures, owner of the Boston Red Sox and NESN.
The results are in from the Wired Biometric Super Bowl Party, and 25 of our readers’ autonomic nervous systems have selected their top 10 advertisements.
The Google ad that had everyone talking after the game got the attention of our party goers as well, but the real winner was a surprise. It turns out our readers are even geekier than we thought.
The study, conducted by Boston-based research firm Innerscope, was held at Wired HQ in San Francisco with participants from across the state and as far away as Sweden. These guinea pigs had their skin conductance, heart rate, and movements measured to see how they responded physiologically to the motley assortment of Super Bowl ads.
The company’s algorithms translate those measurements into a single metric they call “engagement.” While the researchers are obviously looking for spikes in people’s excitement — heart rate increases, etc — the best ads also generate consistent body movements and attention to the ad. (Read more about the science in “How Your Biometrics Can Make Super Bowl Ads Better.”)
What’s fun about this technology is that you can see people’s reactions in real time, which you couldn’t with traditional advertising scoring techniques. The downside is it takes some time to crunch the data, which is why you’re reading this now instead of the day after the game. But as the old aphorism goes, slow and data-rich wins the race.
In the videos below, engagement is charted on the graphs, so you can see it moving up and down as the ads roll. On the Innerscope scale, getting up near 90 is impressive. The peak moment they measured was (of course) Tracy Porter’s fourth-quarter interception of Peyton Manning and the long return for a touchdown that followed. It hit over 122 on the engagement scale.
“It may be the highest ever score for Innerscope and there are some obvious reasons why that might be,” said Carl Marci, a social psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital and Innerscope co-founder.
One funny quirk about this year’s Super Bowl ads: none of them beat the two NBC promotional spots for The Late Show with David Letterman and How I Met Your Mother. If we included them on the commercial list, they would ahve ranked one and two. Go figure. Maybe all that Conan O’Brien/Jay Leno controversy was good for the late night talk show host business.
In a surprise, the Electronic Arts ad for the upcoming game Dante’s Inferno topped the list. If you needed more evidence that Wired readers are geeky, take the fact that they liked an ad for a videogame better than any of the beer commercials.
There aren’t a lot of noticeable peaks and valleys for this ad, unlike some of the others. People most just stayed tuned in and watched the whole thing.
“Like a movie trailer, the ad is the product,” Marci explained.
But why this ad and why this game, which at least to this writer, seem kind of mediocre?
“With the Dante’s Inferno ad, people probably weren’t thinking ‘This is going to be the greatest game of all time,’ but it would have been very hard for them to ignore,” said Innerscope senior scientist, Caleb Siefert. “Definitely people in that audience are going to have an opinion of the game.”
Coming in at number five, we see Google’s first Super Bowl ad. When it came on, a hush fell over the room as people watched to see how their search engine would make a commercial.
“We didn’t rate Google as the number one ad, but when you look at the trace, it’s absolutely amazing,” Siefert said.
Throughout the commercial, we stay at one time scale quickly progressing through a cute love story between some American dude and a Parisian lady. Then, right at the end, the ad’s time scale speeds up and soon the searcher is looking for information on how to assemble a crib.
“What I loved about the Google ad, it was one of the best stories told,” Marci said. “It’s so tight and hangs together so well and then reminds you of the product that delivered this story so effectively.”
Then, Google’s “branding moment” hits as the words “Search on” come on the screen. People loved it.
“I’m blown away by the slope of the line in the branding moment, how sharply it goes up,” Siefert said.
And finally we get to the ad in which a Doritos samurai with Doritos num-chuks attacks some unsuspecting faux-hipsters who are for some reason eating Doritos in the gym. What you see in the numbers here is a classic joke that works. It starts off kind of fun, lulls you for a minute as the action plays out, and then bam — the punchline.
See Also:
WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal’s Twitter, Tumblr, and green tech history research site; Wired Science on Twitter and Facebook.
One of the hopes of anyone who paid the money to advertise on this year’s Super Bowl (or any year for that matter) is to generate sales and web traffic. In addition, it would be nice result if the number of searches for your brand went up as well. Based on some research by Hitwise, I suspect that the retention rate for Bud Light commercials run during the game goes down as the consumption rate of Bud Light during the game goes up but that’s my informal theory.
It appears that in the week following a Super Bowl people seem to need a little reminder (or some kind of aggregation) of what ads were run during the big game. Hitwise ran some numbers on searches for Super Bowl ads for the week ending February 13 to see what the search landscape looked like and it was not exactly brand specific.
Some other numbers regarding how brands fared in searches show that it pays to have either a pre-game controversy about your ad (Focus on the Family and Tim Tebow) or have a kid smack down his mom’s date (Doritos) to get a little love in the area of search.
In the end who was the real big winner? Google. Why? Well, approximately 70% whatever searches that were done for anything were done on Google and they didn’t need their ad to make that a reality. That would have happened regardless. Also YouTube was the biggest winner by seeing almost 13 percent of the overall clicks from terms in Hitwise’s portfolio of ads for Super Bowl 2010.
Maybe next year Google should run a YouTube ad to remind everyone that when they are clear of their party they can see the ads there the next day. Heck, they might even make a little money.
What you missed on Sunday Kos ....
As a follow up to my blog post about the lift in traffic to websites advertised during the Super Bowl, I thought it would be interesting to see which advertisers were searched most often. Among the search queries that were related to Super Bowl ads during the week ending February 13, 2010, the top ten were mostly generic searches for ads & commercials. Two specific ads were mentioned in the top ten search terms - Doritos and Tim Tebow for ‘Focus on the Family’. Overall 7.5% of the traffic to the portfolio was from paid listings and 'super bowl commercials 2010' was the top paid term.
The top advertisers included among the search queries were Doritos, Focus on the Family and Snickers. For advertisers that used a celebrity in their advertisements, their names were also commonly being searched, with Tim Tebow and Betty White appearing most often.
YouTube received the highest share of traffic from the search terms in the portfolio ‘Super Bowl Ads 2010’ for the week ending February 13, 2010. The section for Super Bowl ads on the NFL Fanhouse website and SuperBowl Commercials followed, with the top 3 websites all offering the opportunity to view the commercials online.
As a follow up to my blog post about the lift in traffic to websites advertised during the Super Bowl, I thought it would be interesting to see which advertisers were searched most often. Among the search queries that were related to Super Bowl ads during the week ending February 13, 2010, the top ten were mostly generic searches for ads & commercials. Two specific ads were mentioned in the top ten search terms - Doritos and Tim Tebow for ‘Focus on the Family’. Overall 7.5% of the traffic to the portfolio was from paid listings and 'super bowl commercials 2010' was the top paid term.
The top advertisers included among the search queries were Doritos, Focus on the Family and Snickers. For advertisers that used a celebrity in their advertisements, their names were also commonly being searched, with Tim Tebow and Betty White appearing most often.
YouTube received the highest share of traffic from the search terms in the portfolio ‘Super Bowl Ads 2010’ for the week ending February 13, 2010. The section for Super Bowl ads on the NFL Fanhouse website and SuperBowl Commercials followed, with the top 3 websites all offering the opportunity to view the commercials online.
Snickers and Google ads were the most positively perceived ads among Twitterers had during this year’s Super Bowl, according to a newly published analysis by social search engine PeopleBrowsr.com.
Snickers ads were referred to positively in over 98% of the tweets on the micro-blogging site while Google ads had slightly over 91% favorable mentions, according to the study. Commercials touting Focus on the Family and GoDaddy received the least positive tweets while CocaCola and Budweiser ads generated more neutral sentiment among Twitterers than any other ads.
People tweeted about carmaker Kia ads more than about Hyundai’s even though Kia ran fewer ads during the game. The highest-tweeted ad was from Doritos , which generated 41, 748 tweets. It was followed by Bud Light ads (15,555) and Google ads (12,120).
The total number of Super Bowl tweets of the ten top brands was 103,158, according to the study. For the analysis, PeopleBrowsr sampled 10,000 tweets from every brand and found that 50% of the ads were positively perceived on Twitter.
PeopleBrowser, a start-up with offices in San Francisco and Sydney, Australia, functions like TweetDeck, enabling users to open and moniter multiple Twitter streams at once.
Snickers and Google ads were the most positively perceived ads among Twitterers during this year’s Super Bowl, according to a newly published analysis by social search engine PeopleBrowsr.com.
Snickers ads were referred to positively in over 98% of the tweets on the micro-blogging site while Google ads had slightly over 91% favorable mentions, according to the study. Commercials touting Focus on the Family and GoDaddy received the least positive tweets while CocaCola and Budweiser ads generated more neutral sentiment among Twitterers than any other ads.
People tweeted about carmaker Kia ads more than about Hyundai’s even though Kia ran fewer ads during the game. The highest-tweeted ad was from Doritos , which generated 41, 748 tweets. It was followed by Bud Light ads (15,555) and Google ads (12,120).
The total number of Super Bowl tweets of the ten top brands was 103,158, according to the study. For the analysis, PeopleBrowsr sampled 10,000 tweets from every brand and found that 50% of the ads were positively perceived on Twitter.
PeopleBrowser, a start-up with offices in San Francisco and Sydney, Australia, functions like TweetDeck, enabling users to open and moniter multiple Twitter streams at once.
Internet hosting company Go Daddy is making headlines and generates huge traffic with their riskey Super Bowl ads since 2005. The times are maybe over. Go Daddy announced today a commercial contest with serious money to be won by creative people out there....
What's coming up on Sunday Kos ....
What's coming up on Sunday Kos ....
We're back! After a month of technical issues and other starts and stops, we're geared up and ready to talk about TV again. This week, Jason Hughes, Kona Gallagher and Danny Gallagher join me to talk about what's going on in the TV world:Continue reading The TV Squad Podcast: Winter Olympics, Lost, 24, Idol, Product Placement, and More
Filed under: 24, American Idol, Lost, Podcasts, Reality-Free, TV Squad Podcast
Permalink | Email this | | Comments
As an antidote to weeks of corporate sheen, our clips roundup goes back to its more rough-and-ready roots
In the past weeks we had shiny, glossy Super Bowl ads and corporate films all over the Viral Video Chart. And while some of them were inspiring, this week is a return to alternative culture – which is much closer to our heart if we're honest. We face an attack of the teenagers as two under-20s storm to the first two positions of this week's chart armed with talent and a rather raw version of digital technology. And some blue hippies.
In a charming machinima, 15-year-old Calle from Sweden makes the World of Warcraft monsters sing using the game's characters, and the dark meets the bright side. Warcraft or not, these monsters can teach you why their world is just awesome.
Visualising the history of man, the other teenage talent went to the other extreme and rather than going digital used about 50 jotter books and a biro for a stop-motion movie. The truly funny Brief History of Pretty Much Everything was produced in only three weeks during which 17-year-old Jamie Bell created a stop motion history lesson for an art class. He covered pretty much everything – apart from women. Oops.
Another home-made stop-motion video, the T-shirt war was a big climber last week and nearly made it into the chart. To visualise a funny fight between two guys it uses 222 custom t-shirts and one fire extinguisher. Try it at home – it will only take you two days. And last but not least, we have some Live Avatar Role Playing from Wisconsin in our charts, for the real hippies among us. So don't be afraid if during your walk on the weekend you come across some weird blue looking people. Borrow some paint. And feel free. Life can be fun, and if not you have to force it to be!
1 A Brief History of Pretty Much Everything
This charming stop-motion tells the earth's history in a rather funny way with the appearance of, eh, no women at all.
2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOZBU257ERE
Lovely submission for the Alienware WoW Rise to Power Movie Contest and the answer to DiscoveryNetworks' The World is just awesome
During halftime a red round monster raptor dances along with the cheerleaders, attacks one and eats it. And the commentator's verdict: "That's, eh, wrong."
4 Lady Gaga Brit Awards 2010 Performance
The US chanteuse dedicated her live performance on the Brit Awards to Alexander McQueen, and took home a fair few awards while she was at it
5 ROCK SUGAR-Don't Stop The Sandman
You had enough of this weeks all-about-the-nineties Brit Awards? Then try the eighties with this unbelievable Journey- Metallica-mashup.
6 L.A.R.P. Live Avatar Role Playing
Tired of the human race? Don't know what to do on weekends? There is an app for it: blue face paint. Simply get together with some friends and paint yourself Avatar-blue, and you will learn: in the end humans are lovely people.
Young kid is looking for trouble in a bus. With this old man however, the kid picks the wrong victim. He freaks out. Be careful, this video contains explicit language, explicit violence and a stopped bus.
Wes Anderson movies are the alternative side of Hollywood, but there is no reason why a blockbuster can't be interpreted in an alternative way, too. So Jason Schwartzman becomes Spider-Man, and Gwyneth Paltrow is the girl while Anderson is the director..
9 Shoplifting Seagull steals Doritos
This seagull has lifted more than 20 bags of Doritos from Aberdeen in the past few weeks. It prefers the Original Hot flavour, apparently
10 T-Shirt War
This charming stop-motion video uses 222 T-Shirts to express a dialogue between two guys fighting. Yes, custom T-Shirts, they say. Exactly. Whew.
Source: Mostly from Unruly Media. Compiled from data gathered at 17:00 on February 18 2010. The Viral Video Chart measures the viral dissemination of both brand-driven and user-uploaded videos across social media environments. Videos are ranked by the velocity of citations, based on a real-time analysis of over 50 million blogs and microblogging profiles. View and comment counts are cumulative and are aggregated across all known instances of the video. For more detailed metrics contact Unruly Media.
It’s been nearly two weeks since the Super Bowl, but the stats behind one of the world’s biggest media spectacles keep pouring in. YouTube has just written about the impact some of the Super Bowl ads have had on its site, offering rare insight into just how much attention those million-dollar advertising spots will get you.
During the days following the Super Bowl, YouTube reported an 18,000% spike in queries for “Snickers” (no doubt spurred by their ad featuring Betty White and Abe Vigoda). YouTube also says that mobile queries for Doritos rose by 5,000% (note that the Snickers stat that was for YouTube’s entire property but Doritios was for mobile only — it’s a bit strange that they aren’t giving an apples to apples comparison).
YouTube ran a week-long contest beginning on Super Bowl Sunday that invited users to choose their favorite ad using a special site called YouTube Ad Blitz, during which 2.9 million votes were cast (Doritos took the top spot).
YouTube mentions one other interesting stat: clicks on the site’s Promoted Videos, which allow users and brands to advertise their videos on the site, doubled over Super Bowl weekend.
Everyone’s always down for a good tech commercial parody, and now the politicos are getting in on the fun as well. Today, to mark the one-year anniversary of the Recovery Act, the Democrats on the House Labor and Education Committee as well as the National Republican Senatorial Committee released dueling ad spots that crib from the iPhone and Google respectively.
Both these are ads are rather well done and borderline funny, but I think my favorite part is that the political parties chose rival smartphone carriers as their medium for the message. The only thing that would make this pair of vids better would be if the Republicans had chosen the Droid rather than the over-played “Parisian Love” Super Bowl spot.
Personally, we think it’s fascinating that burgeoning technology has become so ingrained in our society that political parties are riffing on it. What do you think of this culture clash?
[via Time]
Tags: Google, iphone, Political, Super Bowl ads, video
Turner Broadcasting Selects Brightcove to Expand Online Video Business; Turner taps Brightcove to support online video content in the UK, Spain, France, Italy, Germany and other countries throughout Europe. (press release)
Adap.tv Launches a Video Ad Exchange; the video ad-serving company has opened the doors on the first-ever online video ad exchange, working with Gannet, Demand Media and dozens of local TV stations, as well as Publicis Groupe’s Vivaki and Omnicom Group’s OMG Digital. (AdAge)
New Trends Application From Visible Measures Is Invaluable; the new product offers access to videos in three different data sets: social video, film trailers and all the recent 2010 Super Bowl ads. (VideoNuze)
Court Denies DirecTV Temporary Restraining Order Against Dish; a federal court denied DirecTV’s request for a temporary restraining order against Dish Network seeking to block Dish’s “Why Pay More” ad campaign. (Multichannel News)
Video Ad Networks Embrace Retargeting; video ad retargeting is emerging as a new way for direct response advertisers to leverage in-stream video advertising. (ClickZ)
MTV Networks Joins Quantcast Media Program; MTV will partner with Quantcast to offer advertisers capabilities to better reach their audiences on sites in its domestic portfolio. (Quantcast blog)
PubMatic Introduces PubMatic Premier; the new offering enables publishers to increase revenue from existing ad strategies and find new ad revenue opportunities, while allowing them to maintain total control of their brand and data. (PubMatic blog)
Intel and Cineform Create 3-D Video; Intel and Cineform have come together to make it possible to make your own 3-D video by putting two cameras on a single tripod. (WebProNews)
Viral video tracking and measurement firm Visible Measures is launching a new product today to show the weekly trending online videos on the web. Visible Measures will provide brand advertisers, agencies, and movie studios with a benchmark to understand the effectiveness of online video campaigns.
Visible Measures lets both ad agencies and big video publishing sites on the Web track viewership and engagement with videos across the Web. Ad agencies can measure the effectiveness of specific video ad campaigns, and publishers can see which of their videos are being played and passed around the most. With the new trends application, Visible Measures will include a variety of metrics, including total online viewership, comments, placements, and demographics. Users can even watch videos within the application. The company has launched three different data sets for the applications. The Social Video Campaigns covers brand-driven online video ad campaigns and is designed to help ad professionals measure campaign effectiveness. Social Video Campaigns deploys ad-specific filters to help users identify campaigns by various categories and features.
Online Film Trailers measures engagement for movie trailers online. The trend feature covers more than one hundred movie trailer campaigns and similar to the Social Video feature, allows for information to be sorted and filtered by by release time, genre, and even film studio. And the Super Bowl Ads collection covers online performance for the year’s Super Bowl ads.
Visible Measures has raised $29 million to date, and faces competition from Viralheat, Omniture, Radian6 and others.
What was Twitter talking about this week?
While Haiti relief and Apple’s iPad were still top conversation topics, we also saw young singer Justin Bieber in the top 10.
Topping the charts, however, was Sunday’s Super Bowl, with users still discussing the game early this week — not to mention the Super Bowl ads. Second place went to Google Buzz, the new social service from the search giant.
Without further ado: the top 10 Twitter topics from the past week, courtesy of WhatTheTrend.
(You can view the Top 20 trends, including hashtags, at WTT’s Week in Review page.)
Rank | Topic | Top Index This Week | Change | Description |
#1 | Super Bowl | 1 | The New Orleans Saints defeated the Indianapolis Colts in Super Bowl XLIV. It received 106.5 million viewers, the most in American TV history. (Trends: Super Bowl, SuperBowl, #SB44, Super Bowl Sunday, Colts, Go COLTS, Drew Brees, Saints, NEW ORLEANS, Touchdown Saints, New Orleans Saints, Count on Losing The Superbowl, Miami, Peyton Manning, NFL, MVP, Go Saints, Interception) | |
#2 | Google Buzz | 1 | Social networking is now built into Gmail and called "Google Buzz." Following its release, there is some concern about privacy. (Trends: Google Buzz, Gmail, #googlebuzz, Google Buzz Has A, Google Goes Social, Buzz, Google, What It Means, Stop Google Buzz) | |
#3 | Follow Friday | 1 | Follow Friday is a tradition where people tweet people they believe are fun/interesting to follow (on Fridays) (Trends, #FF, #followfriday, Follow Friday) | |
#4 | Valentine’s Day | 1 | Valentine’s Day is fast approaching, and people are tweeting plans. Celebrated on Feb 14th, it is a traditional day on which lovers express their love for one another. (Trends: V-Day, Valentine’s Day, #V-DaySong, VDAY, Valentine’s) | |
#5 | Justin Bieber | 3 | The young Canadian R&B/pop singer has a lot of fans who like to tweet about him! People are now tweeting about what they will do if Justin Bieber becomes a trending topic again. (Trends: Justin Bieber, #ifbiebertrendsagain) | |
#6 | Apple iPad | 3 | -2 | Apple announced their newest product, the Apple iPad (a tablet computer.) (Trends: iPad, Apple iPad, Real iPad) |
#7 | Haiti | 4 | -1 | On January 12, 2010 an earthquake measured at 7.3 devastated the country’s capital. A week later, on the 20th, an aftershock of magnitude 6.1 struck. Haiti continues to trend throughout fundraising & relief efforts for the recovery of the country. |
#8 | Dear John | 2 | Dear John is the name of the much anticipated movie featuring Channing Tatum & Amanda Seyfried which is out in movie theatres across the US. (Trends: Dear John, #DearJohn) | |
#9 | MNIK | 3 | One of the year’s most awaited Bollywood film "My Name Is Khan" distributed by FOX Searchlight is being released this week. It is a triumphant story of an unconventional hero overcoming obstacles to regain the love of his life. It premiered in Abu Dhabi on Feb 10 with rave reviews and will be showcased at the Berlin Film Festival. | |
#10 | Alexander McQueen | 1 | Fashion Icon Alexander McQueen was found dead on 2/11/10 after apparently committing suicide. (Trends: RIP Alexander, Alexander McQueen, P Alexander McQueen, British) |
Tags: top trends, trends, twitter
