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Monday, March 24, 2008
Awards for Viral UGC
There's at least one awards show we don't have to worry about dragging on for five hours. The second annual YouTube Awards were announced last week, crediting the hottest user-generated content of 2007 with awards such as Adorable and Instructional. YouTube users voted on six nominees from each category.
And the winners are:
Adorable - Laughing Baby
Comedy - Potter Puppet Pals
Commentary - Lonelygirl15 is Dead!
Creative - The Original Human Tetris
Eyewitness - Battle at Kruger
Inspirational - Blind Painter
Instructional - How to Solve a Rubix Cube
Music - "Chocolate Rain" original song by Tay Zonday
Politics - Stop the Clash of Civilizations
Series - The Guild
Short Film - My Name is Lisa
Sports - Balloon Bowl
Although the NY Times compared the YouTube Awards to Wikipedia coming up with an award for best idea, online superstar known for his "Chocolate Rain" hit Tay Zonday said "It's the new Emmys. It's the next Oscars. The next People's Choice Awards. It'll be interesting to see what happens five years, 10 years from now."
posted by Janine Stevens at 9:44 AM
Monday, March 17, 2008
Pepsi Targets Reborn Digitals
The marketing approach for Pepsi's new calorie-free, carbonated drink, Tava, is generating a lot of buzz. Of course, the campaign is online. That is not the newsworthy part. What has everyone's attention is it's audience.
Pepsi's target audience for this new drink is 35-49-year-olds. It used to be assumed that this demographic was not online. However, Pepsi exec Frank Cooper described this demographic as "reborn digitals."
"This consumer spends significant time online, although what they do differs from the younger consumer," he said. "They're not IM-ing their friends; they're looking at e-mail or looking up information about travel, music and food."
Pepsi is recognizing that this age group is doing more than parking in front of the TVs on a nightly basis. They're parking in front of their computers, too. Pepsi is hoping to take advantage of this and make Tava a household name.
The campaign is completely excluding print and television ads, using its own microsite, Tava.com, and banner ads to encourage people to spread the word. Banners will appear through AOL, chow.com, CitySearch, dailycandy.com, discovery.com, Evite, MSN, oprah.com, People and weather.com. Pepsi will also buffer this online effort by offering free samples to companies like Google, MTV, and Apple.
Pepsi's goal is to "have people experience the product on their own terms and turn them into brand ambassadors."
It will be interesting to see if we will soon be reliving a disaster resembling that of Pepsi One.
posted by Janine Stevens at 11:37 AM
Thursday, February 28, 2008
It's Who You Know
Variety, the entertainment trade magazine, in conjunction with Jobster, a career development web site, launched a new social networking site for the entertainment industry called "The Biz." At www.variety.com/biz, entertainment professionals can network with colleagues from the entertainment industry, recruit new talent or search for jobs for themselves, and exchange ideas about new projects.
It's about time Hollywood caught up and started taking advantage of the internet as a useful tool instead of passively allowing it to be just a portal for gossip.
A video upload device will allow members to include a video resume or demo reel to their profiles as well. Standard social networking features, such as a profile picture, resume information and links, will also be present on The Biz.
The old adage goes “It's not what you know. It's who you know.†This Hollywood social networking site should give a whole new meaning to the term “Name-dropper.â€
posted by Janine Stevens at 3:02 PM
