Here is the latest installment of the Fan Cam - See it Live! campaign for the Los Angeles Clippers.

Enjoy!

This week we headed to Harlem, New York City to record a new radio spot for A&P Supermarkets featuring the Harlem Gospel Choir. As a part of the Holisaleabration campaign we sent our great production team to capture the amazing energy of this nationally known singing group. We are so happy with the partnership that has developed between a great company and a great community charity like Mama Foundation for the Arts.

Here is our latest Clippers commercial!

The idea behind this spot revolves around the game experience. There are few experiences like going to an NBA game in downtown Los Angeles. The excitement that surrounds the Clippers, the Staples Center, and the city of Los Angeles can be felt at every home game. We wanted to capture the experience from a spectators perspective. The energy felt at these games is truly awesome.

What’s for dinner this Thanksgiving? A big pile of social media, that’s what!

This week NextBee Media released the findings from its annual holiday media survey and should we be surprised that social media spending is increasing? No, probably not, but what may surprise you is that 70% of the businesses surveyed said they are increasing their social media budgets by 18% while at the same time pulling back 8% from their traditional efforts. This is big for more than one reason.

First, social media spending is positioned to see its largest media buy ever. Call it the recession, call it going green, call it saving on postage, call it better targeting, call it whatever you’d like, the reality is that social media going to take on an incredibly important role this season for retailers. It’s believed that most consumers think they will find better deals or amazing coupons online, to respond to this companies are shifting their media strategies over to the more contextualized and highly indexed areas of social networks the single place where internet users are spending nearly 20% of their online time. Retailers hope to target these frugal shoppers with discounts, last minute promotions, and gift ideas.

Second, the fact that retailers are pulling back 8% of their traditional budgets is even more staggering. We are not talking about half a percent or even one percent, we’re talking nearly 1/10 of traditional budgets getting pulled during one of the most important advertising seasons of the year. It’s also believed that the majority of shoppers will have all their gifts purchased by December 7th this year which means shoppers are looking for discounts now.

This might be the big push social media marketing has been waiting for. The landscape of social media will change dramatically after this holiday season if retailers get the ROI they are looking for, but there is also fear among social networks that this new push will make social communities feel crowded by advertisments. We saw this happen with Myspace a few years ago when it was overrun by advertisers. Users jumped ship to Facebook and Twitter to escape the unchecked and unregulated spam that Myspace openly allowed at that time.

I’ll retouch on this topic once the dust settles in mid-January, but for now, all we can do is get our appetites, email accounts, and status updates ready for the sea of advertisments coming by way of our favorite social networks this Thanksgiving.

When is this market going to turn? Has it already? What indicators should we look to? Everyone has their own set of answers to these questions. Here’s another.

In the past, we would have notice an up swing in traditional media spends as a sign of a positive change, but we haven’t been through this serious of a recession since the world of online was considered a legitimate medium. The truth is, online still only accounts for a very small portion of media spends, but it’s obvious that more and more budgets will be given to online as consumers turn off their TV sets and close the magazines to view content online.

According to eMarketer, online ad spending is up 11% from the first quarter, and ROI on that spend is up approximately 6%. While the actual dollar amounts are still low, a 11% increase is a great thing to see considering how the last 18 months have been going. More encouraging is that ROI is up 6%, which will hopefully cause marketers to look to online as another tactic to add to their arsenal.

Another interesting fact - 22% of all online ads appear on social networks according to Neilsen, with Myspace having a slight edge over Facebook as of September 29, 2009. The more surprising number is 3.5%. That’s the percentage of online spending used on social ads. This is huge. 22% of the ads on the web are being purchased using 3.5% of internet ad dollars! The jury is still out on the true effectiveness of that investment, but being able to speak to very specific targets on the place where Neilsen also reports that American consumers are spending 17% of their internet time is something to take into consideration. Imagine if you could get that type of exposure on television!

Business Week is also reporting an increase in search spending over the past two consecutive quarters by 7.7% This is reflected in Google and Bing as well who both showed at least a 9% increase in search revenue.

Back to the question of indicators. Is this is a sign of recovery? Yes and no. The problem is we aren’t necessarily seeing an increase in actual dollar spending in overall budgets yet. This could simply be a shift in spending. It’s clear that online is beginning to recover nicely, whether this will spider out to other mediums, we’ll have to wait and see.

Here is our latest spot for Pick Up Stix. It hit the air this week! See if you can catch it on TV.

The current issue of Wired magazine has a fascinating story about Facebook and how it plans to crush Google as the master of internet.

And actually, they just might get away with it.

I might have mentioned to some of you before that over the last six months, Facebook has become the number 1 referring site for our agency website. Bigger than the AAAA’s, than Google, than anything else.

The basic tenet behind Facebook’s domination plan is that people would rather get referrals from friends than go through an unscrubbed Google search to find something they need.
The company believes that people will begin to search on Facebook instead of google when they’re looking for something.
It works too.

Try putting “iPhone” in your Facebook search and you’ll see what I mean.
Or maybe it’s just MY friends?!

And Facebook has 40,000 servers filled with all our rich personal information; none of it accessible by Google’s spiders.

No one knows how this will shake out.
Could Twitter become the Edsel of the internet?
Will Google look like Yahoo in 2 years?
Hard to know–but clearly Social Media is beyond a transient trend.

I bring this to your attention today just to prepare you for the fact that executing a social media strategy effectively is going to be time consuming.

In essence we’re starting out micro-casting, building a foundation that will be a big asset for us as we move forward.
At least in the beginning, there’s going to be a lot of effort for not much tangible reward.

We’re going to show you how we can re-purpose and leverage every piece of content we produce to its maximum extent, but at the end of the day, this will require effort from you as an individual for it to be successful. Read the full article here.

Between 1995 and 2001, WebTV was a product heavily supported by Microsoft, a product that many believed would revolutionize the way we think about our TV sets and the internet. Unfortunately, the idea was too expensive, too far ahead of its time, and at 33.6kbit/s, way too slow.

Many believed that the internet would invade our TVs and that one day we would all be sitting on our sofas surfing the web while watching our favorite sitcoms. That’s not quite how it has worked out. Until late 2003, video content on the web was sparse. The majority of videos available were coming from major news and entertainment conglomerates, which showcased only the most interesting or exciting content. At 1-3 minutes in length, these videos were short, mainly due to the capabilities of the available hardware. In 2005 the video world was taken by storm when YouTube launched as site dedicated to user-submitted content. Originally, there were strict regulations on file sizes, which forced most videos to still sit in the 1-3 minute territory. Since then, the average YouTube video duration has grown to 3:17. YouTube, along with other sites that support large volumes of video content, have stirred speculation that users are being conditioned to have a shorter attention span when viewing online content. The latest traffic reports from Hulu are putting that idea into question and has started to blur the line between computer and TV set.

Hulu, a website dedicated to mainstream video content like TV shows, movies, music videos, and documentaries has reported an explosion in the number of streams from last year. With an increase of 490% over 2008, Hulu is now the fastest growing digital content provider having had 373.3 million streams since last year. It now second to YouTube in usage and has beaten out MTV, Fox, CNN, and Yahoo! in video usage.

So what does this mean? First, it appears that our TVs are not turning into computers, but that our computers are turning into TVs. While Hulu aggregates programming from major networks, many others have content directly available in on-demand format. Second, it appears that online video usage habits are changing. Hulu’s success may indicate that viewers are still more interested in professional content over user-submitted content. Third, viewers are now going to the web for their entertainment where they can determine the programming schedule and don’t have to wait for their DVRs or be constricted to just their living rooms to watch their favorite shows.

More importantly, this may be a great opportunity for brands to do something more refined than viral videos on YouTube. The door might be opening for brands to create a continuous online presence in the form of webisodes, podcasts, or short films. Chanel has been doing this with Chanel No. 5 in various short film formats. American Eagle Outfitters also tied its webisode series to TV spots, and fast-food chain Jack-in-the-Box has created an entire web presence tied to its Hang in There Jack campaign. Brands are no longer restricted to the 1 minute viral video, they now have the freedom to create entire stories. It’s clear that audiences are interested in more than just weird dance videos and mindless teenagers jumping from their parents balconies into the pool.

Time Heals All Wounds.

The question on the minds of just about every media buyer and seller is: When is the ad market going to recover? When it comes to local television and radio, there are a few more years of hurting to come, according to a new forecast from SNL Kagan. The research firm is projecting a painfully slow recovery for both media in its forecast period, which stretches out to 2013. Spot TV spending will decline an average 2 percent each year between 2008 and 2013. Radio revenue will dip an average 1.9 percent. Each will see spending flattening out by 2010 or 2011, but any increases will be too slight to bring either back up to pre-recession levels by 2013. Kagan does see a decent bump for spot TV in 2010 from elections and the Winter Olympics. Ad spending will rise more than 5 percent. But even so it will be a down year compared to 2006 and 2008, the last two election and Olympics years, says Justin Nielson, senior analyst at SNL Kagan. “2008 was a down year [compared to 2006], despite record political spending,” he says. “We were going into the recession. TV doesn’t get back to 2008 levels by 2013.” As a point of comparison, forecaster Jack Myers recently issued an equally grim outlook. Myers expects spot TV to post a 20 percent decline in spending this year, down to $20 billion, with spending likely to post another 7 percent decline in 2010. He’s projecting that radio ad spending will plummet 19 percent this year, to $15 billion, and dip another 4 percent in 2010.

Interactive Gets the Edge On Radio.

Internet ad revenues surpassed radio in 2008. Internet ad revenue for the year rose 10.6% to $23.4 billion, up from $21.2 billion the previous year, whereas radio revenue fell 9% to $19.5 billion. Radio revenue is expected by Wachovia to fall another 13% this year. The Internet is now the third largest ad-supported medium, behind newspapers and TV. “We are seeing an ongoing secular shift from traditional to online media as marketers recognize that ad dollars invested in interactive media are effective at influencing consumers and delivering measurable results,” IAB President/CEO Randall Rothenberg is quoted as saying in Radio Ink. Despite a difficult U.S. economy, the report indicates that interactive advertising’s continued growth - though at a slower pace - confirms marketers’ increased confidence in the value in reaching consumers online. In the fourth quarter, internet ad revenues of $6.1 billion marked the first time the interactive advertising industry achieved, and surpassed, $6 billion in a single quarter. The figures represent a 4.5% increase from Q308 total of $5.8 billion and a 2.6% increase from 2007’s fourth quarter, which had revenues of $5.9 billion. 2008 marked the fifth consecutive year of record results, writes Marketing Charts.

Product Placement Goes Local.

While product-placement deals are usually the work of TV networks and major brands, local TV stations are getting into the act. For instance, local stations that air Meredith’s syndicated hour-long lifestyle program “Better” are now running customized videos that feature State Farm Insurance. Program syndicators “are a little bit more open” to adopting branded-entertainment ideas, compared to networks, “who have to deal with their own standards and practices,” says Ed Gold, State Farm ad director. Three-to-five minute videos centered on child-care topics, such as baby-proofing the home, are integrated into Meredith’s “Better” program. The videos are the creation of Meredith’s Video Solutions unit, which has also created custom videos for marketers, including General Electric, Johnson & Johnson and Kimberly-Clark. Other backers of syndicated programming are seeing the value of branded entertainment. Last year the syndicated-programming arm of CBS formed a special unit to introduce product integration ideas earlier in the program development process.

Strangest Media Opportunity of the Week: Ideas Anyone?

If you were at a New York deli or bar recently and suddenly had the urge to jot down an idea, your eyes might have happened upon just what you needed, a piece of paper with blue lines running across like the paper you once used in college. And it seemed to be everywhere–napkins with blue lines and sugar packets with blue lines, tray liners with blue lines. And if you went to the restroom, there it was again, toilet paper with blue lines. The lined paper came compliments of New York’s School of Visual Arts, and it was really an alternative media campaign to promote the school. The intent of the campaign was captured in the one-word tagline that appeared at the bottom of each execution: “Think: The School of Visual Arts.” We may think of Visual Arts as art school, and that it is, as its name makes clear, but the purpose of the campaign was to say that it’s really more. It’s about the creative process. It’s about imagination, about thinking. The campaign was the creation of Frank Anselmo, creative director at New York’s KNARF and also the instructor of a course at the school titled “Unconventional Advertising,” and it came about when the school’s administration asked him to create a campaign to promote the school.