October 29, 2007

Tide Turns in Favour of Webisodes

With the success of LG15 and KateModern, a flurry of new online video Webisodes has overtaken the space in recent months with big name advertisers now lining up to get in on the action.

We recently reported Bebo's third Webisode installment, Sofia's Diary.

Bebo's lead has now prompted Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. owned MySpace to launch its first scripted online series, with Ford Focus sponsoring, via MySpaceTV. The show, Roommates, follows eight former college roomies that have all picked up and moved to LA. While MySpace owns the editorial content, LA-based Iron Sink Media will handle production.

MySpace has also partnered with Hearst to produce another Web-only reality show targeting first year college students. The new reality show, Freshman 15, will follow 15 girls in the first year of college as they tackle the troubles of adjusting to their new lives.

CosmoGirl magazine and Raw Digital are also partnering on an online soap opera series set in a suburban Michigan high school. The three to four-minute webisodes will air three times a week for five weeks on cosmogirl.com. It will follow the lives and adventures of Jaime and Anna, a pair of best friends.

Meanwhile, Proctor & Gamble have been busy launching their own online and off-deck Webisode called "Crescent Heights", sponsored by Tide. This is one of the first times an advertiser has used both the Web and mobile for distribution of original programming. The company is credited with inventing the soap opera by sponsoring the "Ma Perkins' radio show in the U.S and, later, "Guiding Light," so you would expect such an innovator to be one of the first to try to recreate that success in today's digital universe.

Earlier this month, Australian cross-platform production company Hoodlum won a MIPCOM Mobile & Internet TV award for the drama Emmerdale Online, conceived to run concurrently with British broadcaster ITV's long-running prime-time soap of the same name. Hoodlum's founders Tracey Robertson and Nathan Mayfield talked about digital storytelling at last week's SPAA Fringe event in Sydney and their past project for Yahoo7's PS Trixi.

After a run on the conference speaker circuit from MIPTV in Cannes last month to the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, KateModern creator Miles Beckett is in Melbourne this week to promote mobile media as part of ACMI's Portable Film Festival. His arrival down under is timely, given that the local Australian version of YouTube launched last week.

With the average Webisode being only three to four minutes long, Australian short film makers are some of the most talented in the world and can really tap this space if they wake up to its potential.

Every Australian short film maker should have their own channel on YouTube.

Globally, online dramas have come of age this year, and interest in the developing format from internet publishers, mobile phone carriers, advertisers and even TV networks and traditional production studios has come alive in the past few months.

Advertisers including Procter & Gamble, MSN, Orange mobile and Disney are paying up to $568,000 each to integrate their brands into KateModern, which has attracted 18 million views in 10 weeks.

Local versions of YouTube have already launched in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Britain, France, Italy, Spain, Japan, Brazil, Mexico, Poland, Netherlands and Ireland.

Welcome to the global village.

October 17, 2007

Nokia Leads Mobile Ad Content Push

Nokia's Mosh is a new mobile social networking site where users can upload and share content consumable on mobile phones. Through both Web-based and mobile handset-based interfaces, users can post professional and user-created content for themselves, a group, or the whole network to share.

Nokia's Mosh move is smart and taps the social media gamut after it also announced last month it had entered into an agreement to acquire mobile advertising and marketing company Enpocket for an undisclosed sum.

Worldwide, mobile ad spending is expected to reach US$1.5 billion this year and grow to US$11.3 billion by 2011, according to market researcher Informa Telecoms & Media.

In March this year, Nokia announced two mobile advertising services. Nokia Ad Service, a fully managed service for advertisers to conduct targeted advertising on mobile services and applications consists of a group of mobile publishers forming a mobile ad network and a platform to deploy, manage and optimize mobile advertising campaigns.

Nokia Advertising Connector
, a private label service for third party Publishers and Advertising Aggregators that want to extend to relevant mobile advertising operates as an intelligent switch, selecting between text, visual, audio and video ads - depending on the user's context - and feeding the ad to the device.

In the UK, Vodafone has also carried out trials with both Yahoo! and Google in various markets of a new ad-based model themselves.

Leading research house Frost & Sullivan, said in a recently issued report, another business model that has shown the most positive indications of success is the ad-funded or sponsored-content model, where subscribers get to download or access content for free in exchange for receiving selected ads either as a precursor to the ad or embedded within a downloadable application. Incentive-based ads such as offering cash, free minutes, downloads and discount coupons are also an attractive way of pushing content.

Locally, a recent study by Ericsson's Consumer Lab found that one in four Australian mobile phone users have access to Mobile TV services and a third of those already use the service.

In August, the Australian Interactive Media Industry Association (AIMIA) Mobile Industry Group launched its AIMIA Mobile Advertising Guidelines, which recommends best practices for the creation and sizing of mobile display advertisements in Australia.

The new Guidelines have been developed following extensive consultation with carriers, publishers, content aggregators and content providers, both within Australia and internationally.

The new Guidelines have been endorsed by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB). Further guidelines for text-based sponsored listings, video and animated ads and mobile TV will be needed.

Vodafone itself released its own consumer charter for mobile phone advertising in September. The Vodafone charter goes beyond the technical display advertising standards by tackling self-regulatory issues.

The charter states that customers must opt in to receive an advertising message and be able to opt out, and Vodafone will not release customers' personal information to advertisers. It also covers technical, pricing, complaint resolution and campaign tracking issues. Hutch3G and Optus have conducted similar testing.

In May, Telstra's Sensis division released the findings of its pioneering research into the delivery of display advertising on Australians’ mobile phones. The trials explored mobile advertising from a technical and design perspective, measuring consumer responses to various mobile campaign tools including banners, content sponsorship, mobile search and mobile video advertising. Last month, Sensis commenced a trial for customers to download to their phone promotional coupons that are instantly redeemable at fast food chains Pizza Hut and KFC.

But I think the really exciting acquisition has been the Yahoo! purchase of Actionality, which we reported on in August. This technology is true in-content advertising. Windows Mobile 6 is also coming along with Microsoft's recent purchase of ScreenTonic.

Producer wise, Yamgo is a very cool outfit we like from Oxford in the UK getting in on the extreme sports action for product placement in mobile content.

The number of mobile phones in use is growing much faster than the number of computers. There are 2.5 billion mobile phones around the world compared to the planet's billion or so personal computers.

That's a lot of eyeballs.

James

October 09, 2007

Online Product Placement for Sofia's Diary Webisode

Product placement in online video Webisodes are all the buzz right now, with six-figure deals being reported for Orange, MSN, Procter & Gamble, Disney and now Atlantic Records to appear in KateModern, the Bebo driven web series sweeping the EU social network, with local-language versions of the site expected in Poland and the strong possibility that France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Holland will follow suit by year's end.

Bebo's second web installment Sofia's Diary based on a Portuguese soap looks set to ordain Bebo as the hottest social networking site in the U.K. and Ireland. Bebo and Sony Pictures Television have joined forces to launch the interactive teen Web drama. The interactive 1-3 minute webisodes are impressing advertisers with their ability to reach elusive teens and twentysomethings. Bebo's new partnership with Yahoo! is expected to deepen that focus in offering greater sponsorship and brand integration within Sofia's Diary.

Irish company Campbell Ryan Film Productions Ltd has been selected by Sony Pictures Television and Bebo to produce the first season.

Like KateModern, the series will show in real time the day to day life of UK teenager Sofia and will include daily videos and text updates posted on her Bebo profile. Written by BAFTA-winning Irish writer Danny Stack, Melanie Martinez and Marta Gomes, the show will combine real events with fictional stories, and keep viewers attention with real-time interaction with characters, in order to help direct the storyline.

Mirranda

Branded Entertainment at Mipcom

Bonsoiree, Sofia here in sunny Cannes and we've just been listening to CBS President and CEO Les Moonves deliver his keynote inside the plush new Grand Auditorium at Mipcom.

All eyes on India, but it's day two, in the auditorium that has marketers and producers abuzz with excitement with the latest in Branded Content case studies to be delivered by Justin Wilkes of @radical.media (inc BBH NY, Unilever/AXE The Gamekillers). In fact, a demain the entire lineup looks set to be a Branded Entertainment board 'affaire, with Valerie Accary delivering for BBDO Paris this day.

Ad types climbing the Croix des Gardes with their Blackberries! (pas pun). They must be very keen for content, this I am sure! (James, I am not seated next to Ben Silverman at Le Bilboquet, as I know you will be reading this on the plane!)

Variety's Marlene Edmunds reported Friday last, "most can't create content departments for branded entertainment within their own agencies fast enough. Advertisers and brands themselves want to be seen as partners or even buyers of content, opening up another revenue model for the industry".

BBH's Mark Boyd is quoted as saying, "the larger question is not how programming will be affected by product placement but how our favorite programs will be funded if these funding avenues aren't available."

C'est tout!

Sofia