Obama Camp To Baloon SMS Database with VP Pick Alert

The Obama Marketing Team (aka his campaign) seems to have learned something about SMS opt-in lists that most advertisers have yet to discover. The biggest news of the pre-convention summer will go public via text message, in a bid to heighten the effect of the announcement and giant-size the opt-in list. Illustrating the team's increasing mastery of marketing 2.0, it chose the highly anticipated VP pick event as a catalyst for lightning viral spread of their traditional-media-bypass strategy. Here's the message sent to supporters Sunday night to announce the strategy:

Barack will announce his VP candidate
choice through txt msg between now
& the Conv. Tell everyone to text VP
to 62262 to be the first to know!
Please forward.

Here's the response message:

Welcome to Obama Mobile. You will
now be one of the 1st notified when
the VP candidate is selected. Text
HELP for help. Std charges apply.
Please forward.

New DMA Report Examines Mobile Marketing Offers and Results

The new DMA report is good news for SMS text-based mobile marketers, indicating that people recall and respond to SMS offers at a comparatively high rate. Here's a quick list of the most common business categories that sent mobile offers, according to the surveyed consumers:

• entertainment/music/video -- 44%
• food/beverage -- 21%
• telecommunications/mobile -- 21%
• beauty/personal care -- 15%
• automotive/transportation -- 12%
• business services -- 12%
• consumer electronics -- 12%
• financial services -- 12%
• vacation/travel -- 12%
• healthcare/pharmaceutical -- 7%
• real estate -- 7%

A nice summary of findings is posted at Colloquy.com, a collection of resources for Loyalty Marketers

SMS Coupon Company Gets Some Local Props

The local papers love this stuff - SMS coupons from a new Florida text messaging company. Read the article in the Seminole Voice online, here. The provider is called PlumReward

Yes in deed in fact,...

Yes in deed in fact, Jott is better in typing than I am by far. listen Powered by Jott

Jott is a Pretty Sweet Mobile Application

Have you tried Jott.com yet? Jott allows you to also set up links to other online applications so you can send info to them from your cell phone. The next post was published by calling Jott and speaking into my cell phone. Jott is better at typing than I am.

Obama Buzz Spreading With The Aid Of Digital Artists

A top politician is reaping the rewards of widespread online digital expression, and a growing wave of artists are connecting to the campaign through their own creative efforts with fantastic results. This post provides some good commentary and links to see for yourself. That the combination of poster art and politics is as old as the printing press is not the point - viral spread and participatory engagement is. Nevertheless, this NYTimes blog post discusses the novelty (or lack thereof) of modern design in political campaigns. Here in the Philadelphia area, we're the beneficiaries of this political season by-product, with Shepard Fairey digital art campaign posters plastered on the side of bus stop shelters - a real visual treat.

Classical Viral - Literally. Free Music For All The Right Reasons

Tasmin Little is an extraordinary violinist - and she's taking extraordinary measures to draw new listeners to classical music. You remember - classical music - I know, we haven't heard much lately, but as it turns out it didn't die. Not at all. Want proof? Go here: Tasmin Little's Web Site Containing Free Music That You Are Guaranteed To Enjoy For Ever More. She introduces each piece in simple, memorable ways, which serves to vastly improve the chances you'll make it through the first listening - which is important, because it's on the second and third listening that you could fall in love. Give it a try.

Facebook Releases P2P Advertising Platform

Facebook publicly released their new ad platform, based on the concept of fan-sumers – facebook users promote the brand (or their usage, purchases, satisfaction, etc , with the brand’s products) to each other.

This is the outline of the new platform: 1. Users endorse products or brands, 2. brand messaging (like an ad) gets included in the users’ feeds, and 3. friends can click to the brand’s facebook profile. It also includes analytics so the brand can see whats going on.

A good review:

http://tinyurl.com/344jed

(skip to the facebook section – the myspace section briefly discusses the new Myspace ad platform which is a more generic play around matching ads contextually with users profiles)

TechCrunch Live-blogged the announcement here (and there are many embedded links of interest as well):

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/11/06/liveblogging-facebook-advertising-announcement/

Searchles - Video Feed Widget

Testing out a widget from the community news/video aggregator site Searchles.com - with an embedded video player that handles a video playlist. I think the best feature here is the ability to edit the items in the playlist, turning the whole thing into something of a video feed widget. For example - copy this embed code snippet and paste it into your site or blog - boom, you're hosting the same video playlist.

<embed src="http://tv.searchles.com/misc/video_player/main.swf" flashvars="xmlfile=http://www.searchles.com/channels/get_xml/1290" quality="high" bgcolor="#869ca7" width="'450'" height="'366'" name="main" align="middle" play="true" loop="false" quality="high" allowscriptaccess="sameDomain" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage="http://www.adobe.com/go/getflashplayer"></embed>

Now the cool part - next time BarelyPolitical.com debuts a political music video (Romney Girls, any day now?) I update the playlist and you're the first blog on the block with the latest from the folks who brought you "Crush On Obama."

APEC Presents: Aussie TV Comedy Group "The Chaser"

Comedians are now jumping onto the bandwagon of hilarity that was formerly the province of top Western government officials (Bush referring to APEC as OPEC, calling the Australians Austrians, and almost walking off the stage, literally). This year an Aussie comedy group got through two checkpoints dressed as Osama Bin Laden, bearing ID cards clearly labelled with the word "JOKE" - catapulting them from "a bunch of comedians known only to their Australian viewers and the many politicians they've left red-faced (link)" to a comedy stunt team known around the world.

"A prank by a TV comedy crew has turned into an international incident and it could end up making a laughing stock of the entire [APEC] security machine," was part of the ABC News commentary, just one of the innumerable broadcasts relaying the stunt over the last several days on all manner of media. "$160 million was spent to keep dignitaries safe, and a convoy of actors got within yards of President Bush's hotel."

The story was the fourth-most read article on the BBC website, which carried the headline, "Sydney 'ring of steel' breached."

and this additional high security comedy: Too funny...

The Other Debate '08: Crush On Obama vs "Obama Girl vs Giuliani Girl"

The release is off to a good start - 9AM EST and already over 200 views according to YouTube.

I have to agree with "friendlier" though - a little less old school R&B and something more web/music 2.0 would have been cool. But the video is funny and really good natured. Folks are going to like it. I guess time will tell: the original Crush On Obama is standing at over 2.3 million views right now - let's see if Debate '08 can catch up!

Follow Up

Tuesday July 24 - One week later - here's what we got: The new one received plenty of attention, getting mentions all over the media and viral spheres. Heck, even Frank Rich over at the NY Times lyric-checked it in his regular thrash-the-administration Sunday column.

In one week, it was viewed about 758 thousand times, while the original Crush On Obama received an additional 400 thousand views - combined the videos were viewed almost 3.5 million times.

Obama Girl vs Giuliani Girl in DEBATE '08

After a long wait, the movie release date has arrived. No, not Harry Potter - it's Debate '08, another music video from Barelypolitical.com. Following up the Obama Girl video Crush On Obama, the team at Barelypolitical today released the music video pre-billed as Obama Girl vs Giuliani Girl. Stay tuned, there's more to come...

I Found My Run Mapper - Cool!

Thanks to Ross at Byte.org, I found the right web application to work out great routes for the rest of the running season. Guess they thought of everything, including community and viral spread of course. If you walk, run, bike, or all three (among other modes), you may really enjoy it.

Fastfood and Adsense Irony

Well, here it is, the study we've all contemplated authoring - juxtaposing fastfood ad-agency images vs. the actual product - with the added irony of contextual text ads automatically selected by Google at the top of the page. Proof that Adwords text ads do indeed have a branding effect? Link to the study here.

Cookie-based Data Likely Overstating Uniques by 150% : Comscore

Comscore released a new cookie study that is pretty strong evidence of the further erosion of the ability to use cookies to track anything unique. President/CEO Dr. Magid Abraham says that with 7% of computers accounting for 35% of all cookies "just one set of 'eyeballs' at the site may be counted as 10 or more unique visitors over the course of a month. The result is a highly inflated estimate of unique visitors for sites that rely on cookies to count their audience." This also goes for adserver counts of unique users that were served an ad. One more observation worth noting is that 3rd party cookies are deleted at no higher rate than 1st party cookies - contrary to a prevailing rule of thumb that holds that users who utilize security programs to keep their PCs clean are more likely to find 3rd party cookies invasive and choose to delete them, as opposed to 1st party cookies set directly by a friendly web site. Bottom line, if the methodology was correct, Comscore shows that many web site and ad server logs can exaggerate the audience by a factor as high as 2.5, or an overstatement of 150 percent.

So Much For BuzzMetrics

Rafat Ali accuses Nielsen's new BuzzMetrics research product of being just so much "hooey" - and provides compelling proof. Buzzmetrics is the “advanced text-mining algorithms"-based “filtered blog buzz” research" developed to measure buzz in the blogosphere, to monitor consumer-generated media, and to provide backup for social media consulting. I'll let you know if Nielsen responds - wonder if they bother to measure their own blog buzz? From Rafat's post on the subject: "We’re among the top 25 blogs discussing “Sanjaya”, according to Nielsen BuzzMetrics, the “global measurement standard in consumer-generated media”. Well. Funny they mention that, because we haven’t ever written about Sanjaya. American Idol, yes, Sanjaya, zilch. We’re #21 on the list, above Gizmodo (another site I can guarantee never wrote about Sanj). " He goes on: "So let’s stop with this PR glibness, and let’s start developing better ways to measure this." Link to the post on paidContent.org