Björn Ognibeni - Alles Gut? Weblog

Donnerstag

11Mrz2010

Good Viral Advertising doesn't need sneaky, convoluted ideas!

11.Mrz.2010 | 13:32

The best viral advertising clips have a very simple, but solid underlying idea, are well produced (which doesn't refer to cost, it's more about having an eye for the detail) and most importantly (really!) communicate the USP of the product in a clear, concise and unambiguous way!

My all time favorite for a campaign that fits this profile is of course Blendtec's Will it Blend. But here is a more recent example from BMW. I don't care much about motorbikes, but after watching this clip, I totally get what this product is about. Do you?

Current view count: 1,144,975 - nice!

Bjoern Ognibeni |

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Mittwoch

10Mrz2010

Why Apple doesn't need a Viral Hit on Youtube

10.Mrz.2010 | 09:20

Is Apple making a mistake by mostly ignoring all the social media channels (Facebook, Twitter, Youtube et.al.) everyone else is (at least) trying to leverage extensively these days? Michael Learmonth thinks so. In an AdAge.com article entitled "Why Apple's Oscar Ad Won't Go Viral" he writes:

Apple's approach is particularly striking given how much energy even the least tech-y major marketers spend to get web views on, say, their Super Bowl campaigns to squeeze additional return on their multimillion-dollar investments. (...)

"They have willfully abstained at a time when everyone else is hopping on this bandwagon," said Matt Cutler, VP at Visible Measures. Apple's enthusiastic user base can be reliably trusted to devour anything related to the company or CEO Steve Jobs. Apple never has to even ask. But given that enthusiastic support, Apple ads tend to underperform on the web (...)

The iPad ad in question currently has about 600K views on Youtube. Not that bad, but Michael is probably right: that's hardly a stunning viral success for a brand like Apple - at least in terms of number of views. But is a high view count on Youtube really that important here?

I think not, because Apple's products are so viral that they don't need their ads to be. It is a lot more interesting to see, how the "underleveraged" global community is transforming this thing into something much bigger without Apple getting involved. It's just a boring TV clip, right? But tons of people around the world keep analyzing it like it's some kind of Rosetta Stone 2.0. Here are just two examples:

Being able to create this kind of excitement/engagement is why Apple's marketing is brilliant. And I think they are not achieving that despite their ignorance of social media (and the calls for more openness), but because of it!

Bjoern Ognibeni |

Good Bye Wordpress, hello Squarespace!

08.Mrz.2010 | 15:07

After playing around with the thought for more than a year I now finally made the jump and moved my site from Wordpress over to Squarespace. And if you can read this, the switch seems to have actually worked! So far, so good...

Squarespace is a hosting service for everyone, who might know what a CSS stylesheet is, but doesn't want to learn how to write one, just to widen the width of a sidebar. Through some Ajax magic Squarespace provides a user interface, which makes changing and updating your website as easy as using Apple's Pages. There are a lot of similar services, which promise similar things. But so far Squarespace is the only one I really like. Take a look at their guided tour. Yes, these things do work as advertised!

Only draw back: I am now sitting in a square box - literally. Gone is the flexibility of Wordpress plug ins. If Squarespace doesn’t provide something natively, chances are you don’t like the options you are left with. I already ran into a few dead ends, where this could become a real headache. But we will see how this plays out.

So now that I no longer have to worry about Wordpress updates & security issues, lets hope I finally find the time again to use this site for what it was meant to be in the first place: BLOGGING...!?

P.S.: The layout isn't final yet. Although changing stylesheets is easy in Squarespace, you still need a professional designer to build a template and I am currently on the look out for someone, who could help me with that. If you have any recommendations, please leave a comment. Thx.

Bjoern Ognibeni |

2 Comments |

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Freitag

27Nov2009

Old Media vs. the Google

27.Nov.2009 | 15:33

This week, I stumbled across two great remarks from two bright heads concerning the „Google earns gazillions while Big Media’s Murdochs & Burdas are left with lousy pennies“ (pseudo-) controversy.

The first one comes from Seth Godin, who thinks Rupert Murdoch has it backwards:

You don't charge the search engines to send people to articles on your site, you pay them. If you can't make money from attention, you should do something else for a living. Charging money for attention gets you neither money nor attention.

The other one from Umair Haque. For him "blocking Google is about as smart as eating a pound of plutonium":

The problem isn't that Google's being an evil monopolist. It's that you used to be evil monopolists, and failed to invest in the quality of production.

Today, you're faced with the same dilemma every fading monopolist is. What do we do now that we suck? The answer's really, really, really simple. Stop sucking. But you're trying to create artificial scarcity instead. That might have worked in the 20th century - but it's a suicide bomb in the 21st. (...)

More from Umair Haque on why Big Media's Anti-Google counter-revolution will fail. Also interesting: an article from Markus Beckedahl on Carta.info: Warum die Verleger zum Internet einfach schweigen sollten (German only)

Bjoern Ognibeni |

Alles Gut ?

Good Viral Advertising doesn't need sneaky, convoluted ideas!

Why Apple doesn't need a Viral Hit on Youtube

Here comes the New Dork

Good Bye Wordpress, hello Squarespace!

Old Media vs. the Google