Here is the full review of the product:

Here is the much more popular (1.2 million views on YouTube) parody from SarcasticGamer.com.

Could this be the next Tablet PC? What is a Tablet PC I hear you ask….exactly.

Liz Gannes on GigaOM has a very good summary of what happened in this case and also points out that it is not the first time that MySpace has decided to “censor” content.

When I heard Shawn Gold, CMO of MySpace, speak at ad:tech earlier in the year, he attributed much of their massive growth and success in overtaking embedded rival Friendster.com by allowing users to do whatever they wanted, whereas Friendster was very restrictive. However, since they launched the company obviously Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Interactive has acquired MySpace and he is pegging the shining star of his consumer generated media portfolio to achieve $1 billion USD in revenue by 2008.

At the end of Liz Ganne’s post she quotes Friendster’s new pitch:

?"A friendlier Friendster, widgets, new tools and all, has re-emerged in 2006 and 2007 as a global leader in online social networking. While MySpace is looking less and less like the free-to-be-me place it was circa 2005 and 2006.?"

They could be dreaming but is it possible that the influence of MySpace’s new owners will cause enough dissatisfaction to cause a widespread move of users back to Friendster? Probably not, but the decidedly unfriendly attitude MySpace is displaying does not fit well with the web 2.0/mash up world.

• Our industry is hot. Everyone is talking about interactive/digital being the future of marketing and advertising. This includes big media/publishers, agencies, and the big brands. I’m particularly encouraged by the very bold campaigns being done by major Australian brands such as Qantas, Telstra, and Tourism Australia. These guys are committing big money to the segment and are really interested in doing interesting, integrated campaigns. There is a real appetite for taking risks and pushing the boundaries and this is very encouraging. To hear that banks are spending 10% of their marketing budgets online, is fantastic.
• MySpace is going to be huge in Australiasia as a marketing channel, especially for consumer brands. I haven’t yet worked out the business to business angle, but I think there might be something there for some brands.
  Search marketing is gaining almost mainstream acceptance of being part of the media mix. Unfortunately, this applies to Australia, not New Zealand, where uptake is still way too slow for my liking.
• I think there is a place for rich media video and interactive banners. I have seen some amazing examples of what you can do now and am very inspired. Research shows a mixture of visual ads backed by search marketing makes for a more effective campaign. With easy access to YouTube, MySpace and other major networks, this is easy to implement and the technology for tracking interaction and effectiveness of visual ads is getting better and better.
• 2007 will be the year for branded video content. Start thinking about how you will get consumers to watch a 3 minute branded video online or via Podcast, rather than a 30 second TVC.
• Mobile, which should really be renamed mobility (e.g. not just mobile phones but iPods, PlayStation Portable devices, WiFi) has a place, and the challenge we have is pulling all of this together into a truely integrated experience for consumers where they can interact with the campaign using the device that suits them.
• The talent shortage will continue to be an issue for everyone.
• In game advertising and online virtual world communities like Second Life, will continue to be popular and will create really interesting opportunities for brands to interact with consumers in an entirely different way.
• TV, magazines and newspapers are going to continually get their budgets cannibalised by interactive, especially if you are targeting a young demographic. These guys don’t watch broadcast TV! They download shows from the US a year before network television airs the series. They’re on YouTube, watching videos on their PSP or iPod and spending time in Second Life or online games.

I’m going to put together a presentation with a summary of everything I’ve blogged about this week, if you’re interested in getting this, please let me know.

Tourism Australia – “Where the bloody hell are you?”
http://www.wherethebloodyhellareyou.com/

Promoted through banner campaigns, some search marketing, but also a whole lot of word of mouth/viral/media coverage based on the controversy of the UK banning the TV commercials from airing. They didn’t say if this was deliberate or not, but it definitely worked for them?

They got 12 million visits to the campaign site and a load of blog posts when the story broke.

I personally think the site is a little bland, basically just allows you to view the TVC’s and download some stuff. They didn’t say how many people actually bothered to download the screensavers etc.

The lady from M&C Saatchi who gave the presentation was going on about BlogPulse as a way of charting blog posts on a topic. Not sure why anyone would use this over Technorati.

Qantas – Top 10/Mercedes Promotion

(URL no longer live)

Purpose of the campaign was to:

• Generate awareness of all the features of Qantas.com
  Convert Frequent Flyers to online statements instead of paper based
  Generate more opt-ins for their Red E-Mail Newsletter.
  Create value for the marketing partner, Mercedes.

Promoted via:

• 1.2 million emails (wow, would you like that database to market to?)
  In lounge posters
  On boarding passes
  On Qantas.com
  On paper statements
  Inflight magazine

Results:

• 660,000 entries to the competition
  75,000 moved to online statements
  24% increase in opt-ins to their Red E-mail special offers email newsletter.
  Over 70,000 people viewed the Mercedes vehicle product information.

Telsta Street Idol

(URL no longer live but checkout http://www.wotnext.com.au)

This was part of Telstra’s sponsorship of Australia Idol. Street Idol allowed consumers to great a lip-synch music video on their mobile and send it in to the Street Idol site. Many entrants would later submit better quality video recorded using digital video cameras, but the entry via mobile made it really easy.

I think this is a fantastic idea, but only because we pitched it to a prospect client 2 weeks before this campaign went live. Unfortunately we didn’t get to do our version. Seems we were right though based on these results:

• 3,083 registered profiles on the site
  1,575 entries
  774,522 visits to the site
  642,269 videos viewed
  The average pages viewed per visit was between 17 and 54.

You might say that the entries were a bit low, but this is more than enough to create a compelling consumer generated brand experience for the hundreds of thousands of people who came just to view the videos. This was Telstra’s main aim. They wanted to position the brand with the youth demographic in a very genuine way. That’s why the Street Idol branding is not even based on the Telstra brand. Their brand was not doing well with that target audience and it took something big and bold to solve that.

wotnext.com.au is an extension of the Street Idol concept that Telstra has just launched, and I think this will be really interesting to watch. Consumers submit videos and if you want to download content to your phone you pay $1 but 50% of this goes to the person who created the video.

Citibank and NAB both spend about 10% of their marketing budget online.

Virgin Money spend over 50%! (if only all our clients were like that!)

Their focus is both on customer acquisition but also improving online services, such as Internet banking, to ensure the customers get a good online experience once they do join.

Chips in credit and debit cards will happen soon, and this will lend itself to chips going into phones for mobile payments. Neither bank would disclose specific plans or timeframes.

Phishing is a continual issue. NAB have introduced a new service whereby they will text a code to your cell phone which then have enter into the website to confirm any online payment. This is very clever I think.

Because of phishing they are highly restricted in the email communication they can do. For example, they won’t send out emails with embedded hyperlinks. This lends itself to moving towards RSS marketing as an alternative way of getting messages out to the consumers.

Both companies felt online should really be a division on its own with marketing and technology people in one team, rather than in operations or marketing departments, however, they didn’t feel this was a major issue.

Firstly, in Australia and New Zealand, SMS/TXT is here to stay. Using the capabilities of video and photo phones in a campaign is still very difficult partly due to low penetration of 3G handsets (about 12% in Australia) and partly because the mobile phone companies still make it very difficult to provide a consistent experience across different networks and handsets. I worked on a project last year in the US where this problem was magnified by the number of different networks and handsets. Even more complicated is that the mobile phone companies pre-install different firmware on the same handset which turn on or off functionality. So you could get everything working fine on a Motorola RAVR on the Vodafone network, and then find that it is different on the same device that came from Optus or another network. So to ensure the most people possible can enter, you should still use SMS, but then it can be used as a gateway to richer content. For example, they txt in initially and then are sent back a link to a mobile web site with photo, music or video content.

Video and photo phones have been used effectively as devices for getting content from consumers for campaigns. Perhaps the biggest campaign in Australasia is the Street Idol campaign run by Telsta in Australia. Entrants could send in their video from their phone and then supplement the entry with a description etc online. There would have been some technical issues doing this, but it it is pretty cool. YouTube supports content being uploaded via a phone, but as mentioned above, only certain networks will let this happen. Vodafone doesn’t support it for example as it will only send a link, not the actual video file itself. Once this becomes widely available, it will make it very easy to do a campaign like this by leveraging YouTube’s platform and avoid a complicated negotiation with the telcos.

Mobile commerce and mobile payments are going to emerge this year, but I don’t believe we’ll see widespread adoption. Banks are already starting to trial this and once one or two jump in, the rest will follow quickly but it is going to be a slow start I think.

The concept of “brand subsidy” is probably going to be a reality this year. That is a brand paying for or subsidising handsets or services in return for branding and advertising. Google has already indicated that they believe people would accept a Google branded device with advertising if it were very cheap or free. Another example, would be a brand providing a branded application or service that is given away to consumers.

Mobile TV will probably not be widely adopted as the networks are busy recouping their investment on expensive 3G networks so are charging for data and the content. I don’t believe that many people will want to watch long videos on their phones. I do believe that consumer generated video content which is generally much shorter in length and free will be much more popular. Although Telstra has just launched wotnext.com.au where consumers can submit video content via their phones and if you want to download it, you pay $1. The interesting part of this is that the person who created the content gets $0.50. This will be one of the first regional examples of monetisation of consumer generated video and so will be very interesting to watch.

There is “Mobile Phone Lifestyle Index Third Edition” due out in Australia on 6th March which has deep qualitative research as well as hard numbers on how consumers are using their phones and mobile devices and what they are wanting to do in the future. We’ll be keeping an eye out for this as it will be probably the most detailed research done regionally in recent times. You can register for the launch event if you’re in Sydney. Thanks to Oliver Weidlich for pointing me in the right direction.

- Nintendogs campaign which has a game integrated into a Flash banner. Very cool. (sorry, I can’t find an example of this online, I’ll keep looking and also contact the guy who had it in his presentation).

- Virgin Casino campaign using interactive video.

- Castlemaine XXX Beach Cricket Game.

- EA are continually developing teaser versions of their console and PC games for use in advertising.

Other interesting advances in this field are:
A technology developed by a company called Massive (founded by 3 Aussies, recently acquired by Microsoft for gazzillions) that allows for real time delivery of ads into online games, both PC and consoles (XBox, PlayStation). For example, see the screenshot below from popular game Splinter Cell:

The concept of advertising supported online games. Research suggests 70% of games would accept ads in games if it were free or very cheap.
Some terms:
Advergaming – the game is effectively the ad
In Game Advertising – You insert ads into the game.

• 0 – 150 million registered users in less than 3 years.
  Number One in the US in terms of page impressions, downloads and average time spent (an indicator of how “sticky” the content is). Other sites have more unique visitors (those with much wider appeal such as CNN.com etc) but no one can match them in terms of actual content delivered.
  Number 5 in Australia of all websites, Number 1 based on the same metrics as in the US.
  400 billion page views per month, over 100 billion ads served.
  Currently in 7 countries, with internationalised sites, and will be in 20 countries by year end 2007, including China.

What advertising options do they offer now to advertisers beyond just standard online ads?

• The movie industry were really the first to adopt MySpace seriously as an advertising option by setting up dedicated MySpace pages with video trailers and allow other users to comment on and become friends of the movie. A movie studio can spend between US$1 – 3 million in a period of a couple of weeks to promote a new release through targeted advertising on the network. They can get instant market feedback and research on a movie as soon as it is released via comments on their MySpace page.
• Bands and comedians have used MySpace to build and maintain a loyal fan base. It is becoming common for them to offer exclusive access to events to just their MySpace friends. The Beastie Boys recently did a show recently where only their MySpace friends could gain entry.
• MySpace creates originally branded video content that can then be promoted through the network.
• MySpace can promote original video content. Dove Skincare in Canada created a 1 minute video, did a very small TVC campaign and then pushed it entirely online, using MySpace and other tools. They got 20-30 million unique views for a fraction of the dollars it would have cost to get via traditional air time.
• They can offer highly targeted campaigns e.g. if you wanted to advertise to all hip hop DJ’s in the US market or just California, they can do this.
• If you have a MySpace page and have built up a significant number of friends, then MySpace can run demographic profiles on your friends, given you deep metrics on who is interested in your product/brand.

What’s next? Well like everyone, they are trying to figure out how to monetise consumer generated video content. I was interested to discover that MySpace delivers more video content than YouTube or Google Video. Videos with “hotspots” with hyperlinks, branded/”wrapped” video players and pre and post rolls are all being experimented with.

What are the key areas of focus for MySpace?

1. Self Expression Platform – Growing their toolkit of widgets and tools to allow more consumer generated content to be put up on MySpace. They really believe that this idea of self-expressionion, 21st century cyber-hippies if you will, are the key to their success. Other previous social networks, such as Friendster, which was the basis for their business model, failed because they were very restrictive on the content you could publish and in what format. For example they wouldn’t allow you to customise the look of your Friendster page.
2. Communications Platform – Various tools such as instant message, text, Voice over IP, video calling, to enable their users to communicate easily with one another.
3. Content Aggregation – They already have massive communities for movies, music and comedians, they intend to pool more content in specific communities such as fashion.
4. Marketer Platform – Tools for marketers and agencies to more easily advertise and run/analyse campaigns on their site. Importantly, all advertising and the type of advertising will always be elective to the user to avoid the impact being diluted over time.
5. Safety & Education – MySpace gets a bad rap from people about the dangers of meeting people online. Confidence in the site is critical to the site and they have a big team working on this area. Every photo (about 5 million per day!) and video(about 40,000 per day) posted to the site is looked at by a human being to screen out pornographic or hateful material.
6. Internationalization – Continuing to roll out MySpace to different countries in different languages with regional specialisations.

Here are some final soundbites:

Andy Worhol said “Everyone is famous for 15 minutes” well today “Everyone is famous for 15 people”

The arty kid in a small time who used to feel isolated because he coudn’t relate to the friends in his local school can now connect with thousands of like-minded people around the world. It’s a great time to be lonely on the Internet.