Twitter has always been a hard thing for me to get a handle on. For one, it always seems to skew a little young and it didn’t have a great infrastructure for targeted ads until very recently. In the last year Twitter has made huge strides in being friendly to advertisers and they’ve also done a great job of doing it without alienating their fanbase. Clearly they learned a huge lesson from the failures of Myspace. They didn’t dilute their core product and alienate their fanbase. They managed to integrate more advertising pretty seamlessly. By doing things like putting a promoted topic in with the trending ones and not changing the user experience, twitter has become a great place for advertisers without sacrificing the simplicity that made them unique and interesting in the first place.
Read MoreArchive for the ‘Findings’ Category
The State of Streaming Video in 2012
The internet is an ever evolving constantly growing creature that is just beginning to take over every aspect of communications and entertainment. Streaming video will soon replace traditional cable as the number one source for home entertainment. It’s already starting with things like X-Box and PlayStation carrying NFL and ESPN networks on streaming devices. In the next few years major networks and stations like HBO will follow (they’ve already gotten the ball rolling with partnerships on Hulu and services like HBO Go which allows subscribers to use HBO similar to a paid I-pad app.) This represents a fundamental shift in the way you spend your advertising dollars and can open the door for many small business to advertise in ways they never thought possible. At least it should if some of the old guards allow for change that could cost them in the short term but pay off huge just a few years down the road.
Read MoreDon’t Call It A Comeback: 5 Brands That Found a Second Life Using Social Media
Advertising is full of great comeback stories from brands that were on their way out but came back with a vengeance. Radio Shack has clawed its way back from near extinction in recent years. Some brands have done it using social media to rebuild their audience. If you can find something that catches on virally via the web, it doesn’t matter what your past reputation was as a brand and here are a few brands that will show you how to do it.
Read MoreBehind The Curve On Streaming Video: Netflix and The Streaming Video Debacle
Remember TiVo? When it first came out in 1999 TiVo was the biggest thing going. TiVo was going to be the next Microsoft or Apple. Judging from those first few years TiVo has got to be in every home in the country right? Well a funny thing happened, when TiVo got popular companies took their business model and applied to a much larger infrastructure and improved upon the technology. In the end TiVo was left with nothing but a mostly forgotten brand name. Because, as social media has shown, being the first one in on new media means the moment you’re successful everyone is going to take your model and run with it in directions you can’t control.
Read MoreInterest-based digital advertising: It’s the right thing to do
This is a brief abstract of an important article appearing in AdAge this week that we felt was worth sharing with our readers. At Billups Design we’re engineering solutions that enable advertisers to focus on interest-based advertising that delivers the right message at the right time and place in every consumer’s consideration process. We agree with AdAge that current (outmoded) methods of retargeted advertising result in massive media spend waste and actually create negative brand-association with consumers. It past time to do it a better way – and we have the media strategies, technology and creative insights to help retailers…
Read MoreKickstarter: Everything You Need To Dive Right into The Deep End of Digital Marketing
It’s really hard to predict exactly what great new social media sites are going to take the internet by storm. Even companies like Google need three tries to break in and even now it’s still not a guaranteed shot. Every site has a social media expert who has said it’s the next big thing. I was a big fan of Formspring for a long time and it hasn’t taken off like I thought it would, the same goes for Justin.TV. Although with original sponsored programming coming it could be in for a boost but that’s not this article. This time I want to highlight a site that is already starting to pop in a big way, Kickstarter.
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