Sisomonitor 46
SISOMO SIZZLES
The waning days of 2006 and the first half of 2007 saw sisomo continue its takeover of the mainstream in terms of media, marketing and consumer preferences. A number of trends and events occurred that showed signs of culture-bending stickiness. Here’s a look at some that caught our attention.
That Gobbling Sound You Hear Is Google
Continuing the conquest of the Internet, in late 2006 Google snapped up video-sharing service YouTube for US$1.65 billion. Fittingly, YouTube founders Chad Hurly and Steve Chen used their own creation to announce the sale: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCVxQ_3Ejkg
Year Of The Widget
Widgets are mini-applications that you can easily drag onto your desktop or paste into a personal page to constantly update information you want. If 2006 was all about social networks, user-generated content and viral video, Newsweek magazine declares it’s a fair bet that 2007 will be all about further personalizing life online. They’re great for consumers and are a goldmine for marketers. JC Penney, for example, launched a desktop widget in June 2007 - jcptoday - that brings deals and content directly to consumers: http://www.jcptoday.com/jcptoday_demo.html
Swap Meet
News Corporation head Rupert Murdoch offered in June 2007 to swap his wildly popular social networking site MySpace for a stake in Yahoo. Murdoch has been looking for ways to expand his media company’s online exposure while Yahoo has been eager to find the right social networking play. Here’s a look at the scope of Murdoch’s far-flung media monolith: http://www.newscorp.com/
The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly: Happy Birthday, PowerPoint!
For better or worse, the business world was dragged kicking and screaming into the age of sisomo with the launch 20 years ago of PowerPoint 1.0, a presentation program that makes it possible to replace the mind-numbing overhead transparencies of yore with slideshow extravaganzas enlivened by the use of sight, sound and motion. The fault with PowerPoint, dear Brutus, is not in the program, but in ourselves. http://youtube.com/watch?v=HLpjrHzgSRM
Plays Well With Others
This year, social networking site Facebook opened its 24-million-member site to external programmers. The company’s new f8 program allows them to integrate their features with Facebook’s messaging infrastructure and other services. “This is basically a move by Facebook to become the next major operating system,” says Max Levchin, a co-founder of PayPal. The following month the site’s much-larger rival, MySpace, followed suit. The move marks a new step in the evolution of social networks into full-fledged Internet platforms and opens a new front in the battle for audience share. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s 23-year-old founder, announced the new program at a developer’s conference in May 2007: http://developers.facebook.com/videos.php
Reality Check
Marketers have flocked to Second Life’s virtual Web world ever since it went live in 2003. Coca-Cola, H&R Block and Toyota are among the 80 companies that have set up a virtual presence there to capture eyeballs - Second Life boasts a population of 7.1 million registered users who spend more than US$220 million each year - and experiment with online branding. Once reason is that it’s cheap: Linden Lab, the site’s creator, charges as little as US$1,675 plus US$295 a month to occupy an island. Toyota is using Second Life to market its edge Scion line of vehicles. Watch video here.
Hangover
It’s the morning after for Anheuser-Bush and Bud.TV, its $30 million online marketing effort aimed at the young male crowd. The beer maker’s new digital entertainment network quickly lost its fizz after its Super Bowl kickoff in February 2007, averaging just 250,000 visitors a month, well shy of the projected 2-3 million. Budweiser executives are now going back into the studio in the hopes of making major changes to revitalize their struggling Web channel: http://youtube.com/watch?v=G57Do6ZlZpI&mode=related&search=
Content Wants To Be Free
Digital Rights Management (DRM) software has been a major bone of contention for music lovers. EMI made a stand for musical freedom in April 2007 when the world’s third-largest music label began selling its music without copyright protections through Apple’s iTunes Store. Sales have been good, and EMI is now unlocking DRM-free music for other retailers. Amazon.com is also reported to be gearing up for DRM-free music sales.
Kingmaker
Burger King and Microsoft partnered in a first-of-its-kind deal to build three video games around the restaurant chain’s ubiquitous King mascot. The deal marked the first time any major consumer marketer has had a video game built from the ground up around its advertising icon. The games were created by Microsoft for its popular Xbox systems and were distributed through Burger King restaurants during a five-week promotion in December 2006. They sold for US$3.99 with the purchase of a value meal. The company sold over 2 million games and is gearing up plans for another series. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mnh-6d2oi1k
The Second Coming
Anticipation - and expectations for the Apple iPhone introduction on June 29, 2007, ran so high that even the normally even-measured Wall Street Journal referred to its as the “Jesus phone.” But early evaluations by critics such as the New York Times’s David Pogue and the Journal’s Walter Mossberg indicated that the device would live up to its advance billing. A Piper Jaffray analyst estimated that 500,000 iPhones were sold over the opening weekend.
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