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Category: Video

Would You Advertise on YouTube?

Published July 31, 2006

This post contains language which may offend some.  You’ve been warned!

After a glorious week off in Cape Cod, I was catching up one morning on my RSS Feeds and came across this chart at Silicon Beat with the updated unique visitor stats on the hot Web 2.0 sites, YouTube, Facebook, Photobucket and MySpace.

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Two things struck me looking at these trends.  First, despite now being owned by “the man”, MySpace continues to grow incredibly.  Clearly the average user hasn’t figured out yet that Murdock didn’t lay down $600 Million so this property could continue to lose money.  Eventually the marketing push at the site will become noticeable and then we’ll see if the growth rates continue to sustain themselves.

My second observation is that YouTube has a faster growth rate than any of the other superstar Web 2.0 sites.  In a traditional portal space, this growth in regular users would naturally translate into the site being a magnet for advertising dollars. But I ask you, would you advertise your company’s brand on YouTube?

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shaveeverywhere.com

Published May 30, 2006

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Have you heard about shaveeverywhere.com yet? If not you really need to visit the site now.

I’d love to get some feedback from you my ever-faithful One Degree reader – yes I know who you are. My gut says this is one of the most effective microsites ever, but I’d love to here pros and cons on the site and the overall marketing strategy at play here.

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Making "Get A Mac" Viral

Published May 7, 2006

I get the whole “new marketing”:http://www.jaffejuice.com/ thing that “Joseph Jaffe”:http://www.getthejuice.com/ talks about in his “Life After The 30-Second Spot”:http://www.lifeafter30.com/. TV just isn’t what it used to be. But that doesn’t mean that _all_ TV ads are a waste of money.
If you are “Apple”:http://www.apple.com/ and you want to take another shot at convincing people to *Get A Mac* then TV might be the right place to do it.
Tell me the ads in the “Get A Mac”:http://www.apple.com/getamac campaign aren’t brilliant and compelling.

Still, Apple could have done a much better job of making the online part of Get A Mac more viral. Here are *seven things I would have done to make this spread faster:*
# Add them to “YouTube”:http://www.youtube.com and “Google Video”:http://video.google.com/. Who cares where people see the ads. Getting them on these highly viral networks in “official versions” (not the fan-uploaded ones you find now) would be a great step forward.
# Make each video linkable. Right now while there is a unique URL for each video at each resolution these don’t seem to be visible to the user. All the ads regardless of content or size seem to come from the same URL (http://www.apple.com/getamac/ads/?restarting_medium). This makes it hard to naturally link to something or to bookmark favourites.
# Make them easy to download. Yes you can download the .mov files if you know what you are doing, but adding a “download this ad” link wouldn’t hurt.
# Copy YouTube and GoogleVideo and make it *very* easy to share the video online by including a “Share this Ad” to e-mail a link, a “Link to this Ad” with a short URL to get to the specific ad, and an “Add this Ad to your Site” link to an embedded player (like the one I used above from YouTube).
# Create a feed people can subscribe to if they want to get new Apple ads sent directly to them via iTunes or a Feedreader. Apple’s ads are so entertaining that I’m sure many people – even non-Mac users would sign-up for amusement sake.
# Archive older ads so that people can always look back at how far we’ve come.
# Bribe people with “link love” by cribbing YouTube’s pseudo trackback for video plays. Called “links to this video”, the feature shows how many people have clicked through to the page from other sites (with live links to the URLs).

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