My Starbucks Via samples arrived and that gave me a chance to do an instant coffee tasting / review. The video review is below (shot using my new Flip Mino HD... awesome). Even as a Starbucks fan and supporter, I found the Via coffee quite disappointing - tasting more like coffee-flavored water than coffee.
The background noise is my dog, Manny.
All of 2008's pop music mashed up into one four minute video. Not only is the music compilation done well - the video mashing and new YouTube HD look terrific. DJ Earworm - United State of Pop 2008 (Viva La Pop)
I love Hulu. Hulu understands the web, delivers great quality, the experience is simple, and understands both search and portability.... better than any other video site on the web.
When YouTube hit it big, much credit was given to Saturday Night Live's Lazy Sunday video - and appropriately so. Hulu hasn't had a Lazy Sunday equivalent - in part because hit videos are now distributed across numerous sources and players. But Hulu did see big growth thanks to the election and the subsequent Sarah Palin hit videos (thank you Tina Fey).
While Hulu can't point to a single video, it can look to Family Guy, American Dad and Saturday Night Live. Hulu sorts videoes by time (all time, week, day, etc) and type (episodes and clips).
For episodes, Fox cartoons account for nearly 100% of the most popular videos:
Today's most watched: 8/8 episodes are Family Guy This week's most watched: 7/8 episodes are Family Guy This month's most watched: 5/8 episodes are Family Guy, 1/8 is The Simpsons All time most watched: 8/8 Family Guy
For clips (usually four minutes and less), Saturday Night Live represents the majority: Today's most watched: 4/8 are SNL This week's most watched: 6/8 clips are SNL This month's most watched: 7/8 are SNL All time most watched: 7/8 are SNL
I understand why SNL dominates Hulu Clips - great content intended to be digested in "clip" format. But I am surprised that Hulu episodes are dominated by a single source... after all, Hulu has great diversity. I have never watched an episode of American Dad or Family Guy on Hulu, but I have watched Arrested Development and The Office... and I would expect that similar shows appeal to larger demographics. This suggests one (or all) of the following:
- As consumers move from viewing clips to full episodes, shows like Family Guy are best suited for that shift (less plot, more one-liners) - Hulu's core user base is younger (according to Quantcast, 50% of viewers are under 34) - Cartoons are simply more viral
Regardless, I hope that Hulu continues to onboard all types of content... after all, I believe Hulu is a key to bringing the internet to the television.
I've always been surprised by how much traffic my "Andy Azula - The Artist in the UPS ‘Whiteboard’ Commercials" blog post continues to drive. It's quite apparent that Andy Azula and his UPS commercials are quite polarizing. The commercials are now a year old and, for the most part, I find them remarkably annoying.
But like my surprising switch on ESPN.com's new Beta, I suppose I am able and allowed to switch my opinion of Andy Azula... I really like the latest commercial (embedded below). I am not sure how they do it, but the mixture of drawing to animation is seamless and really captures the point that UPS is trying to convey.
By the way - I also love the UPS video player. Very creative and well themed.
Earlier in the week, I wrote about how AdMob, Google and Developers seem best poised to monetize iPhone Apps ...instead of Apple. Now AdMob is demonstrating that monetization can uniformly move beyond Applications and across all of the browsing / web-based utilities that the iPhone enables. AdMob has released a suite of iPhone specific real estate / ad units - and the interactivity is far better than the mobile text ads that are rendered through the Blackberry, sit across many sites and/or are used by Applications like Sports Tap (who uses Google). The question is how much rich inventory currently exists for these formats? Asking advertisers to produce a new 'standard' of creatives is always difficult and a potential bottleneck.
I love AdMob's approach: universally release the new ad units and showcase the formats in a simple, well presented video that coincides with MobileBeat 2008. I am excited about the innovations coming out of AdMob and companies like Twitterific and the New York Times who are creatively integrating ads into their popular iPhone applications.
Two nights ago, Bob Costas hosted Buzz Bissinger (author of Friday Night Lights), Will Leitch (founder of the web's largest sports blog, DeadSpin) and Braylon Edwards (starting wide receiver on the Cleveland Browns) on his talk show Bob Costas Now. The debate became an immediate internet sensation... which is probably shocking to stubborn-minded people like Buzz and pretty obvious to web savvy leaders like Will. Once Costas leads with the blogs vs. journalism question, Buzz Bissinger goes wild:
As the founder of beRecruited (a site and service based on user-generated content), I clearly have strong feelings about this:
1. I have met and interacted with Will Leitch on a few occasions. He is smart, articulate and has built a readership larger than most journalists can dream of.
2. You might not enjoy DeadSpin's content - but Will's blog is read nearly 1,000,000 times a day. The market has spoken.
3. More proof that the market has demanded this new media: PerezHilton has a greater readership than People Magazine - the top read magazine year after year. Old Media has followed with constant streams of news and debate. For sports, SportsCenter rolls on ESPN for 6 hours while ESPN2's First Take features (very enjoyable) debate on yesterday's topics. E!, TMZ, Access Hollywood and a dozen other shows do the same things for pop culture. Old Media has moved to constant streams: their own blogs, podcasts, radio, etc.
4A. More proof (again): beRecruited is home to one of the web's largest sports blogs, SportsWrap, which has been read more than 10,000,000 times in the last six months. Look at the server logs (a fascinating part of blogging) and you will notice that people arrive on SportsWrap seeking new breaking news, commentary, and very particular (often strange) tidbits of information. In the last 120 seconds on SportsWrap, users came from Google looking for the following (and this just a small slice of the data):
Candace Parker Tattoo akin ayodele traded to the Miami Dolphins Best Air Jordans Lemans Crash Peyton Manning going insane on the sidelines Mark Jackson Knicks Coach High school football highlihts Paul Pierce fined Atlanta Hawks scorekeeper Maria
4B. Why the market demands this media: once-a-week publications like Sports Illustrated now serve a different purpose than news-breaking sources. SI is the pinnacle of sports reading and I continue to be a subscriber... despite having not found once piece of 'breaking' news in the last few years (it's always already broken and available). I read SI for the writing and commentary - I get my news through other sources: the web, mobile, podcasts, radio, etc. Here is a great example.
Dr. Z (one of the great NFL writers) published his NFL Draft Preview last week in SI. This used to be *the* way to prepare for the draft. Dr. Z is one of the most connected NFL gurus, but has to publish the article days before the draft begins. His results weren't pretty:
- 1 correct pick in the top 10 - 4 correct picks in the top 31 (first round) - predicted 5 wide receivers would go in the first round... not a single WR was picked
I am not critiquing Dr. Z. Rather, I am demonstrating that this new media that Buzz despises has value. We correctly predicted the top 6 picks in the NFL draft on SportsWrap and InGameNow. Does that make us smarter than Dr. Z? Absolutely not. But it does demonstrate the power of constant connectivity.
5. Buzz and Costas clearly don't understand how blogs work. Their attacks on Will were predicated on comments and commenters. Community is unique to blogs and, in my opinion, one of the major reasons that new media content has grown so quickly. An article on DeadSpin might only be a couple hundred words - but the dialog can go on with hundreds of comments and is fascinating. Sometimes its intelligent. Sometimes it's crass. But they are comments, not Op Eds.
6. Braylon Edwards comments on the panel also bugged me. First, like it or not, this isn't the 1960s. Athletes make $10,000,000s - and a good deal of that contract inflation is due to increased media, promotion, awareness, etc... the web plays a major part there. Second, technology is everywhere. Be aware of it. Matt Leinart is a very rich celebrity athlete (and he revels in his celebrity). He should be more than aware that people have cameras and access to publish content... he should consider this before publicly doing beer bongs with herds of females. People should think about this before publishing photos to their own MySpace and Facebook profiles.
7. Another example of why Bob Costas and Buzz Bissinger don't get it: for two smart people, they failed to get their message through effectively and caused massive backlash. Even if you agree with their sentiment (and you're more than welcome to do so) - they didn't deliver the argument well and probably caused a greater divide than existed previously. Bissinger has become an internet celebrity for all the wrong reasons: he surged to the top 10 google searches, had his wikipedia page vandalized throughout the day (hysterical stuff too) and has become the model for old-world thought 'leadership'.
An excerpt from his new Wikipedia entry, which sadly seems very accurate:
H. G. "Buzz" Bissinger (born November 1, 1954, in New York City) is a pompous windbag. He is also an American journalist.
Most recently Bissinger appeared on an HBO's Bob Costas On The Record to discuss the evergrowing sports media landscape. Bissinger then proceeded to make an ass out of himself and lose all credibility what so ever. His journalist tag has now been revoked.
Terrific parody / commercial for the new Lenovo Thinkpad X300:
We don't add stuff on. We build it in.
My favorite ad campaign at the moment is DirecTV's spoof of Comcast and other cable providers. They have the 'Best in Show'-cast starring and John Michael Higgins tries to convince the executives of ways that his cable company should combat DirecTV. The best spot is when Higgins says they need to go viral and "blog it out". Great stuff.
But DirecTV doesn't get it.
The commercials are terrific and ripe for blogging (as they suggest)... but the ads aren't even embeddable or available on YouTube. Here is their flash file in widget form - enjoy the commercial and the irony:
I can't get enough of this TV spot.
Burger King uses power ad agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky and I have always loved their ads. They continually create hilarious, viral ads that somehow always find their way into my inbox... I guess if your spots are routinely emailed around, you're doing a pretty good job: