Add-Art is a free application for Firefox browsers that replaces Web ads with contemporary art. The art shows are updated every two weeks and feature contemporary artists and curators. For many, replacing ads with blank space would be enough. Add-Art attempts to do something more interesting than just blocking ads - it turns your browser into an art gallery. Every time you visit the New York Times online or check the weather you’ll also see a spattering of images by a young contemporary artist.
To have it, you need to install ad-art and use Firefox. I tried to download it, but it did not work with Firefox 3.
One more thing, even this is an anti-advertising project, I think it will increase the efficiency of banner advertisements. Normally, many people find them disturbing, however, this time people might think that they will see an artwork and give their attention to it. However, instead of it, they will come across with with a real banner ad which will be tricky for them.
Last semester, I was interning at a well known Hispanic-targeted advertising agency. Why I was there?
- First, I got my acceptance from this agency without knowing any Spanish word:)
-Second, I was in Texas and the Hispanic population is really high in Texas (second after California).
At the agency, I was working on a new culturally relevant strategy for an automotive brand that targets national Hispanic market in the United States. While working on this campaign, one more time I noticed that, Mexicans and Turks are very similar to each other culturally and physically. ( When I was in Mexico, everybody was thinking I’m a Latino, even the police holding my passport).
Hispanics are early adopters of mobile data services, especially text messaging and more involved to use social networking sites than any American. Because of immigration, they want to keep in touch with family back in Latin America. Also, family and friends are very important for them, like in Turkey. As I know, text messaging is the most expensive way of using cell-phones in the U.S. Therefore, I don’t know why they’re using text messaging so often. Maybe, like us, they’re thinking it’s cheaper. Anyway, at the end of all these studies, I found a couple of good websites for mobile marketing strategies.
Not all of these links below are directly related to interactive advertising. Some of them are for the insight that every advertising people need to track on the innovation.
Digital Hive; a blog from the account planning group at Digitas; one of the top interactive advertising agencies in the United States.
The Long Tail; a blog from to understand today’s economy.
TechCrunch; a blog about the Internet products and companies that are making an impact (commercial and/or cultural) on the new web space.
What’s Next In Marketing; a blog from Mitchell Caplan who is the Chief Marketing Officer for Young & Rubicam.
I’m using FriendFeed for a while. I might be obsessed with it after all my Facebook friends register for it. Right now, I have only three friends using FriendFeed. Normally, my curiosity is not that high for now.
The Ad Age article says that, FriendFeed has the potential to become as big as Google. There are three mega trends make FriendFeed a huge success: The rising influence of peers, online searching and generation Y. And, the combination of these three trends generate social contextual search advertising.
As we all know, the most trustful information comes from the people we know. Therefore, if you can just search what your friends think and prioritize it over everything else, you have a very powerful recommendation engine. So, the best advertising model for now, will work at FriendFeed; the combination of all top social websites.
I have recently seen Michel Gondry’s new movie, Be Kind Rewind.
I did not find the movie interesting except its visual perfection. However, at the end of the movie, I understood what Gondry made different about this movie. At the end of the movie, you’re being directed to the website of Be Kind Rewind. I have to write about the topic of the movie here. The two characters of the film effort to recreate their erased videos is called sweding in the film. The tapes are described as having come from Sweden as an excuse for higher rental fees and longer wait times. In light of the theme of sweding, director Michel Gondry swedes a version of the trailer of the film, starring Gondry himself. On the official website, users can engage in sweding, which puts their faces on the VHS cover of a movie. The Be Kind RewindYouTube minisite also encourages filmmakers to swede their own versions of popular movies. Also, in the website, Internet is accidentally erased. So, users are using a rebuilt Internet.
Gondry developed a wonderful consumer generated marketing way for his movie. Maybe, he thought on the after process before taking the movie.
A tumblelog (or tlog) is a variation of a blog that favors short-form, mixed-media posts over the longer editorial posts frequently associated with blogging. Common post formats found on tumblelogs include links, photos, quotes, dialogues, and video. Unlike blogs, tumblelogs are frequently used to share the author’s creations, discoveries, or experiences while providing little or no commentary.
Yesterday, I had an account from tumblr. It’s very easy to use, there is not any complicated navigation, and it’s not desiged like a newspaper column. I think, what makes Tumblelog important is, its convenience to use with mobile devices, such as with Blackberry and Iphone. You can easily post interesting stuff that you find.
A simple analogy is like that: If blogs are journals, tumblelogs are scrapbooks.
One more Facebook article, which is not surprising.
Facebook is planning a new advertising system that will target ad delivery based on profile information added by Facebook users.
According to a TechCrunch article, the new system will “let marketers target users with ads based on the massive amounts of information people reveal on the site about themselves and predict what products and services users might be interested in even before they have specifically mentioned an area.”
Google is already delivering contextual advertising with Google Adsense. However, Facebook is not only going to use user data and networking activities to deliver targeted advertising, they are going past that and trying to produce preemptive targeted advertising based on what they think you might want in the future.
I really wonder how Facebook will achieve this new advertising system technically. If they just look at the keywords, it is not that different from the Google Adsense. There should be another way of targeting.
Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired magazine, plans to crystallize the implications of doing business when the cost of products, services and storage is falling rapidly toward zero.
He said to Advertising Age that there are 3 kinds of free. In the first one, the product is free because it’s subsidized by the advertiser. That’s called a three-party market — the publisher, the advertiser and the consumer who gets everything for free.
In the second kind of free, the price gets closer and closer to zero, you can eventually just treat it as free. For instance Gmail’s one gigabyte mail account for free and Yahoo’s infinite storage.
The third one is the gift economy. This is the basis for Wikipedia, the blogosphere, Craigslist. All the social incentives that are turning out to be incredibly effective in getting people to do things for free.
Now, Wired is charging $10 a year for a subscription. This fee is a nominal fee simply as a psychological fee that shows that readers want it — which allows us to charge advertisers more. A single penny does it. They charge $10 because they don’t want to devalue the product, because that would be sending the wrong message.So, Wired is almost free to, less than $1 per month.
This is the new economy that companies like Wired, Craigslist, Ebay and Netflix ushered. Product types are changing, consumers are changing and the economy, too.
This semester, I am taking Invisible Global Marketing course from MBA program. This course is about developing markets and the global commerce opportunities that emerging markets have. These opportunities are ranging from luxury products to entry-level automobiles.MTV is one of the companies that is successful in global business. In the class, I saw their MTV Asia advertising, which was wonderful. I guess these egg packages are referring the higher amount of egg consumption in Asian countries.
MYPOCKET is my brother Burak Arikan’s new project. MYPOCKET discloses Burak’s personal financial records to the world by exploring and revealing essential patterns in the daily transactions of his bank account. These are the records that we usually keep secret, whereas financial institutions intensively analyze them to score our credibility. Archived on the site, the artist’s two years of spending history is analyzed by the custom software to predict future spending; these predictions sometimes determine his future choices, creating a system in which both the software and the artist adapt to one another. Influenced by today’s techno-cultural milieu, MYPOCKET presents a hybrid interface to a living physical/digital process.
As everybody knows, there’s no escape from being tracked by banks, online shopping sites, telephone companies and the others. I saw Burak’s art work as a reflection of today’s Big Brother society. Also, for advertising people, MYPOCKET is a new source beside customer researches and observations. In addition, it’s more valuable than customer researches because, it’s not based on the responses, it’s based on the real facts daily happened.
