by Erick Schonfeld on February 5, 2009

By GREGORY SCHMIDT
Published: December 25, 2008

THE bright lights of Broadway draw millions of people to New York’s theater district every year, but having a celebrity’s name on a marquee does not always guarantee a full house. So to fill more seats, theater producers are turning to MySpace to make a few new friends. Broadway, like every other segment of the entertainment industry, has been using the Internet as a marketing tool for years. The Web sites of Broadway shows typically come with the requisite biographies of the cast and creative team, critics’ blurbs and a link to buy tickets online.

Lately, however, producers have been stepping up their online presence in an effort to spread word of mouth among Internet users, a concept known as viral marketing.

Broadway productions now offer pages on social networking sites. For example, the MySpace page for “In the Heights” features a blog with updates about the show, widgets that fans can embed in their own MySpace pages, a jukebox that plays songs from the show and several music videos from the cast. These include a parody of the song “Umbrella” called “Abuela,” and a spoof of “High School Musical” that features Lin-Manuel Miranda, the show’s lyricist and star, singing and dancing in Central Park.

Mr. Miranda has created several videos for the Web, including a series called “Legally Brown,” which lampooned the MTV reality show that chose a replacement for the lead in “Legally Blonde.” In the series, which is at legallybrownonbroadway.com and on YouTube, Broadway stars like Matthew Morrison of “South Pacific,” Allison Janney of the coming “9 to 5: The Musical” and Cheyenne Jackson of “Xanadu” competed to become the next piragua vendor on “In the Heights.”

“It’s another creative outlet,” said Mr. Miranda, who has posted 16 videos on YouTube for his show since it opened Off Broadway. Mr. Miranda said he was able to attract such high-profile names to the “Legally Brown” project after “In the Heights” won the Tony Award for best musical.

“I call ‘Legally Brown’ the most decadent use of post-Tony capital ever,” he said, explaining that he reached out to people he met on the awards show circuit to satirize their celebrity status in his videos. “We’re surrounded by some of the brightest talents around in the theater community, and it’s a shame not to take advantage of that.”

But Broadway is still feeling its way through uncharted territory.

“It’s been more about casting the net and seeing what works,” said Sara Fitzpatrick, the director for the interactive division at SpotCo, an advertising agency based in New York that has worked on campaigns for “In the Heights,” “Shrek the Musical” and “Chicago.” “We’re still in the newer stages.”

Ms. Fitzpatrick says the trend to use viral marketing techniques in theater has been growing in the last year, and it is becoming an important part of a marketing campaign, which also includes traditional elements like newspaper, television and outdoor advertising.

“Shrek the Musical” has its own social network at www.shrekster.com, a Web site with profiles of the show’s characters and the latest news from the kingdom of Duloc. Giving theater fans access to a show through the Internet helps generate interest and sell tickets. Paid attendance for the 2007-8 season dipped 0.2 percent, to 12.27 million, from the previous season, according to the Broadway League, an industry trade association. The decline was attributed mainly to a stagehands’ strike that shut down most Broadway productions for 19 days in November 2007.

There is anecdotal evidence that viral marketing draws theatergoers from all over the world. Mr. Miranda said that he had met fans at the stage door after a performance who told him that his videos inspired them to come to New York to see his show. Some fans even pay tribute with their own videos.

After seeing a video on YouTube of a 10-year-old from New Orleans rapping songs from “In the Heights,” Mr. Miranda said he was impressed.

“He had never seen the show; he just watched clips online,” Mr. Miranda said. “He did this on his own, just because he loved the show.”

When he found out the boy, Nicholas Dayton, and his mother were coming to New York to see the show, Mr. Miranda invited them backstage after a performance to film a video of Nicholas singing the show’s finale with the cast.

Kevin McCollum, a producer of shows like “Avenue Q,” “In the Heights,” “Rent” and “[title of show],” said he was a strong advocate of using the Internet to reach a niche audience that might not be accessible through traditional marketing. His theory is that the more people gravitate toward technology, the more they will hunger for human interaction.

“Technology is the tool, not the destination,” Mr. McCollum said. “The destination is a live audience.”

Marketing agencies are experimenting with ways to benefit from having that live audience gathered to see a show. Situation Interactive, a firm based in New York, used marketing campaigns that incorporated mobile phones for shows like “Blue Man Group” and “Mamma Mia!,” offering audience members a chance to win prizes by sending text messages from their cellphones. For “Hair,” which is headed to Broadway in March, fans will get the chance to text their reviews to the show’s Web site immediately after a performance.

This concept, known as mobile marketing, is a natural fit for live entertainment, said Situation Interactive’s president, Damian Bazadona, because people tend to have cellphones with them at all times.

“Mobile is entrenched in everything we do,” Mr. Bazadona said. “It’s happening full swing. It’s becoming part of the overall marketing plan.”

Situation Interactive experimented with new technology in other campaigns as well. The firm worked with the producers of “Billy Elliot” to create videos that chronicled the rehearsals of the three boys who rotate as the lead character.

For “9 to 5: The Musical,” the firm is working on an online game in which players can upload pictures of their bosses for a shooting gallery. The show’s Web site will feature personalized e-cards, featuring the voice of Dolly Parton greeting recipients.

To help the producers of “Sunday in the Park With George” build a relationship with theatergoers, Situation Interactive set up a Web site that allowed users to digitally recreate Georges Seurat’s “Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte” with personalized dots. For “November,” the playwright David Mamet contributed a blog, writing as the play’s lead character, the president of the United States. Fans were invited to participate in online karaoke for “Hairspray” and a digital ticket rush for “Spring Awakening.”

“The challenge of marketing is how to target people,” said Mr. McCollum, the producer.

Of course, viral marketing is not suited to every show. Some Broadway shows still rely on a more traditional campaign. The trick is to find a balance.

“In the theater, there is only one proven marketing technique that works: to generate word of mouth,” Mr. McCollum said. “Everything else is a shot in the dark.”

The Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers just released their quarterly report on U.S. online advertising revenues. For the quarter, they estimate online advertising revenues were almost $5.9 billion ($5.865 billion, to be exact), which is an 11 percent increase from the same quarter a year ago and a 2 percent increase from the second quarter of 2008.

by Mark Glaser, November 20, 2008

Desperate times call for desperate measures, and that’s where the newspaper business is right now. With profits slashed, unending layoffs, and online ad growth slowing, newspapers have to be open to new ideas that will help them deal with a media shift like no other. Last week I looked at the concept of crowdfunding, with people paying journalists directly for stories. This week, I heard another out-of-the-box idea: having newspapers help local businesses buy key words for Google AdWords or place Facebook ads — acting as a local ad agency.

That idea came from Stephen Gray, the managing director of Newspaper Next, a project of the American Press Institute with one goal: to help newspapers come up with a profitable business model. Gray is a former managing publisher of the Christian Science Monitor, and was president of Monroe Publishing Co., which ran his family’s newspaper in Monroe, Mich. Since 2005, he has been tasked with helping American newspapers save themselves — a tall task, to say the least.

After a year of study in 2006, Newspaper Next released its first report, Blueprint for Transformation (a 98-page PDF file), and in early 2008 followed up with Making the Leap Beyond Newspaper Companies (a 110-page PDF with case studies). Gray has helped run more than 40 public training sessions and 30 private talks with newspapers based on his findings. While he is encouraged that newspapers are finally breaking out of their fixation on mass audiences and launching niche websites (such as mom sites and young adults sites), he feels they still don’t understand how to serve local businesses.

Stephen Gray

“The difficult part is helping newspapers understand that if they want new business they need to get a new job done for businesses that they’re not serving,” Gray told me. “You can’t just sell them the newspaper because you haven’t been able to do that for 50 years. You need to have an offering to get that done.”

So what kind of offering should newspapers have? Gray says they need to help local businesses connect to customers right at the point of interest in a product or service. The problem is that most newspapers are not focused on any kind of local search offering, and cede that ground to search engines such as Google or Yahoo. But Gray thinks the search engine offerings for local businesses aren’t very good, and that presents an opening for newspapers.

“[Newspapers] should become the leading local Internet ad agency, which goes against ancient newspaper instinct of not ever helping anyone who is your competitor,” he said. “But the fact is that audiences have split in a million directions, so here we are in a local market and our job is to help businesses in our local market succeed. If that means we are placing ads on Google and Facebook for local businesses, so what? That’s what it takes to succeed and ad agencies have been making a living off doing that for some time.”

I talked in-depth to Gray about what Newspaper Next has tried to accomplish, and he talked about the group’s findings and its struggles in getting newspapers to change quickly enough. The following is an edited transcript of our phone conversation.

What was the mission of Newspaper Next?

Stephen Gray: It was to provide newspaper companies with a pragmatic set of tools, concepts and processes to expand and diversify their declining business model. The business model was declining three years ago when we were starting out and it’s only accelerated since then. So we wanted to give them an understanding of what was happening from a very different perspective and a set of practical processes they could adopt and use at newspapers big and small to create new solutions, new revenues for new audiences.

So there was a research element of your work first and then you did training and action items?

Gray: The research element was the first year. We started in the fall of 2005 and engaged Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen and his consulting firm Innosite for a year. We looked at the industry, looked at what was happening, looked at initiatives people were undertaking. A fundamental part of it was the Christensen approach, he studied more than 60 disrupted industries to see what the patterns were. We took his work and adapted it to the newspaper industry and saw how they were living out the usual scenario when an established industry gets disrupted.

In the first year we were like a think tank, and recruited seven newspaper sites to become demonstration sites and worked with each of them, teaching them the materials we were developing so they could develop new products for niche audiences. That was in year one, and in September ’06, I took that on the road. For the newer 2.0 report, I went back to a number of companies that had the training early and asked what they had been doing. Their projects became the case-book section of the new report, with 24 new products — print products, websites, combination products, even a consignment store. A variety of things that were generated using the Newspaper Next approach were used as examples in the 2.0 report.

What has worked with your approach?

Gray: What has really taken hold is the concept that while newspapers are mass-market products, and many of them think in that vein about large audiences, the most dramatic success is in getting hundreds of newspapers to develop products aimed at niches. They are generating new revenue streams and have added to the mass audience they have with news. And they can sell advertising to businesses that want to reach those niches.

Recently, I’ve been calling publishers at newspapers of various sizes and I’m finding that to be a pattern everywhere I call. They can list three to five new products that they’ve created in the last year that target audiences that they weren’t reaching effectively before. [These include] a publication for farmers in the agricultural community for a newspaper that is a general interest publication; websites for moms, who are usually too busy to read newspapers; sites for young adults; Spanish-language sites.

And where have you struggled?

Gray: The hardest thing is on the other side of the business. It’s a business that has two customer groups: there’s the consumer side and the business customer. For a business, the newspaper allows them to communicate with a customer or potential customer. In that area, it’s the hardest going. People in newsrooms, reporters, editors, are quite good at visualizing a consumer’s life and creating a package of content that gets at what those people need. That’s being done well in a lot of places in the industry.

What’s not being done is realizing that in your community — say, a 50,000 person community, you have 1,500 or 2,000 active advertisers but there are 8,000 businesses that serve consumers in your market. So three-quarters of them are not your customer. The difficult part is helping newspapers understand that if they want new business they need to get a new job done for businesses that they’re not serving.

Yellow Pages have hit hard times

It’s not that we don’t know what that is. Some of what they want is: a one-to-one relationship with customers; a way to respond to what’s going on in customers’ lives; make sure they hear about me when they make a choice. The traditional product built on that job is the Yellow Pages, but I just read an article saying the Yellow Pages are expected to lose 39% of revenues in the next four years. Increasingly if we want to find something, we don’t go to the Yellow Pages, we go online, and Google doesn’t always work well.

Google isn’t doing it all that well yet, and the Yellow Pages aren’t doing it that well, so we’re saying, ‘Look this is where you [newspapers] should be.’ It’s very hard for ad staffs and management at newspapers to get their minds around the fact that not everyone wants mass reach, and once you understand the needs, you take the technology available today and use them to get the job done.

You talked about a change of mindset for reporters and editors to do editorial for niche audiences. Is it the same problem for ad sales and business staff who have to rethink making big sales for print ads vs. doing things on a smaller scale?

Gray: It’s not necessarily smaller. The Newspaper Association of America lately has been preaching that we have to stop selling products and start selling audiences. I think that’s about one-third of the steps we need to be making. We have been selling products — selling the newspaper or a three-column print ad. But a local business isn’t looking to buy an ad; they are looking to attract a certain kind of customer. NAA started preaching that you should sell audiences, meaning you have the newspaper, the mom site, the young adult site, etc. So you go to an advertiser and say ‘here are all the audiences I can reach for you.’

That’s an improvement, but the business doesn’t want to buy an audience, they want to get their potential customers to know that they exist. Newspapers need to find out what businesses want to do, and then pull out of our bag of tricks (which so far doesn’t have much in it), ideally you’d have 10 different things you could offer, whether it’s a niche website to a text message and on and on. You find out what the business is trying to do, and pull something together from your toolkit to help them do it.

When I talk to newspaper publishers and ad directors I get a very clear picture that newspapers have been slow to understand the value of the Internet to local businesses, but local businesses have been even slower to get that. There are a few who get it, and they have a great website, but mostly it’s ‘we have a website that my nephew did three years ago and it doesn’t do much.’

That’s another piece we should be offering, it’s not just ‘buy banner ads on my news website.’ It’s ‘we can make your business effective on the Internet.’ And that might include doing your website or buying the keywords you should have on Google AdWords for our market. It might involve the newspaper buying ads on Facebook for a pizza place so that college students in Dayton, Ohio, see your ad. Or help set up a widget so the college kid can order pizza off their desktop.

Have you looked at how editorial should shift their thinking, too?

Gray: We made a conscious decision to leave that to others, as there are enough people working on that already. But the methodology that we teach has been applied in newsrooms with fascinating results. In the 2.0 report, there is a case study about the Pocono (Pa.) Record. In the first step of our process, we tell people to go out and talk to people in their communities who you hope would be your customers.

Pocono Record’s coupon section

The Pocono Record sent out 13 people from the newsroom who did 200 interviews with readers of the newspaper. They talked to all these people and came up with a list of eight or nine subject areas that people had difficulty finding in their community. People weren’t getting the kind of education information they wanted, they wanted more on infrustructure, golf, traffic, [and more]. So they figured out ways to beef up coverage of these things in the newspaper and changed some sections, which rolled over into the website, where they had more topic areas.

They did this in 2007 and by the end of the year, their print circulation was up, their web traffic was up 50% and their web revenues were up about 50%. What happened was that the website became known in the community as the place you would find out about everything, so they were able to raise their web ad rates. I think that could be repeated at every newspaper in America.

What about web video? I’ve written about companies helping small businesses do mini-informercials online for their business, and many newspapers also do videos with pre-roll ads. The content of most newspaper videos varies a lot, but what have you found to be best practices for monetizing video?

Gray: For the 2008 report, we partnered with Borrell Associates…and their conclusion was that at most newspapers the photo staff is shooting video and doing news video and posting it on their sites. This is typical of what Christensen found out about how people react in disrupted industries: ‘Uh-oh, there’s a new technology so we better get ahead on that technology.’ But all you’re doing with news video is giving your current customers something else to look at. There’s not a lot of effective sales that use the true potential of advertising on video.

Where Borrell sees the big growth is with the mini-documentaries, the short video that shows what the business looks like, the people who you should trust at that business. And that video sits there as an ad, and you click it because you are interested in what that business does. It’s unlike a pre-roll, it isn’t forced on you. Overlays, pre-rolls and other video ads might work nationally, but locally businesses have a story to tell and they’d like to use video and it’s an opportunity for newspapers to come in at a lower price point than television.

What do you think about crowdfunding, having people pay directly for stories they want to see, with sites like Spot.us?

Gray: I haven’t looked at that as part of this project. My core belief is that it will be really hard to generate sufficient revenue to do any meaningful quantity of journalism on a philanthropic basis. The NY Times had an interesting story about VoiceofSanDiego and other non-profit news sites. VoiceofSanDiego has angel funding and they are soliciting funding from people on their website. I was at the Christian Science Monitor and it could be a poster child for this problem. It was never able to generate enough income to sustain its editorial work, and has always been subsidized by the church.

When I was there, we had a “make a donation” button and put it wherever we could on the site. It turned out a small revenue stream but it was insignificant compared to the cost. The bottom line is: I wish [crowdfunding efforts] the best, and I hope they succeed, but I really doubt there’s going to be much robust journalism done on that basis.

A lot of people think there will be some kind of magic answer for a new business model for newspapers online. It seems more likely that there will be a lot of small revenue streams that add up. What do you think?

Gray: We’ve been saying for three years that there’s no silver bullet and I’ve been looking for three years and there’s still no silver bullet. I was at a meeting of newspaper CEOs and publishers last week, and people there were saying ‘there’s no silver bullet.’ Everyone realizes that. They wish there was something, but there’s really nothing there.

The massive shift for newspaper companies to make is to stop thinking everything is news. They need to start realizing that in this watershed moment, when people stop getting information from a dropper — once a day I get a drop from a newspaper — we now live on the ocean and can dip in at any time and get whatever we want. So we will spend a lot less time with things that are designed for everyone like news and spend a lot more time proportionately finding solutions for me and what will help me in my life today. That is a massive change in local markets happening right now. I am preaching in the field that newspapers need to visualize themselves becoming the local information utlity.

What was the mood like at the meeting of CEOs and publishers? Was it like the economic crisis meeting recently held by President Bush? Was there anybody with positive outlooks?

Gray: I’ve talked to a variety of newspaper publishers, and what I’m seeing is there’s a tremendous amount of focus on what we’ve always done and how that’s shrinking. Managing that shrinkage itself is a huge and difficult proposition in itself. You cannot go from black ink to red ink and keep going. So we are seeing the industry go through this horrible round of cost-cutting and job-cutting which is unavoidable. But at the same time the requirement to create new and different offerings that bring new money in — when is the hardest time to do that? When you’re whacking your existing organization.

So everyone has two very incompatible assignments. One simple piece of advice we’re hearing is that if you have to make cuts, make sure you use that cut as a tool to get you where you need to be in the future — not just as a way to lop off costs you’ll never see again. You can’t cut your way to profitability.

How do you respond from the criticism of Newspaper Next from Poynter’s Rick Edmonds: “I have had a reservation about Newspaper Next from the get-go that continues this round. I am not persuaded that newspaper people can simply be repurposed into ‘disruptive’ entrepreneurs.”

Gray: Nobody said it would be easy. It’s definitely true that some people cannot get out of the mindsets of the core business. And it’s true that being a disruptive entrepreneur is difficult within an organization that is focused almost exclusively on carrying out its traditional functions with traditional structures, processes and products. But we’ve got to try! What’s the alternative if we don’t — ever-smaller revenues from the existing products, and ever-smaller staffs?

Photo of Yellow Pages by Heather Powazek Champ via Flickr.

UPDATE: Jack Shafer of Slate points out to me that Gray’s idea about newspapers acting as local ad agencies is far from new. In fact, entrepreneur Mark Cuban (now under an SEC complain for insider trading) brought up the same idea two years ago on his blog:

From the outside looking in, I think newspapers and any local media organizations have to make a stand and go where you are strong and that is in face-to-face selling and knowing your market better than anyone. You have a local salesforce, they won’t. However, you can create self service publishing and ad buying comparable to theirs that is geared towards your market, and complements your face-to-face selling. You might not be as efficient in monetization as Google, but most of your customers will never know the difference. All they will know is that you have earned their trust as the company that handles all their advertising and website ad publishing needs so that they can focus on selling pizzas, laser surgery and cars. That is huge for any small business.

Just like Google Search created the foundation of traffic that led to their algorithms and AdSense network, your newspaper or TV station can create the foundation that led to the creation of your marketwide salesforce. Why not?

A topic I’ve tackled several times here at Mashable has been the question of Hulu versus YouTube in terms of their advertising strategies. My friend Frederic Lardinois over at ReadWriteWeb brought the topic up today in reference to news from the Financial Times regarding the revenue of the two video business units.

In the past, though, tons of bloggers have taken potshots at YouTube for not realizing the potential of the $1.65 billion investment by Google. One of the more recent times I got on this particular merry-go-round was back in June in response to Mark Cuban, who said that Hulu was in danger of roundly kicking YouTube’s ass in terms of viewership and monetization. Back then, as they do now, the traffic numbers simply tell a different story.

As you can see, back in June through October of this month, Hulu has seen significant gains relative to their current traffic patterns (very likely due to the highly watched election videos and Sarah Palin – watch for this line to drop in December). Compared to YouTube? The difference is still monstrous.

How is it possible, then, that the Financial Times is able to make statements like this:

Neither company breaks out its advertising revenues but Arash Amel, analyst at Screen Digest, forecasts that in 2008 YouTube will generate about $100m in the US, compared with about $70m at Hulu. Next year both sites will generate about $180m in the US, he says. YouTube currently earns around half of its revenues in the US, while Hulu has not yet launched internationally.

Setting aside any quibbles we may have with their estimates, for a moment, very simply put – the Hulu sales team is lightyears ahead of what’s being done at Google.

Aren’t Advertisers Just Scared of YouTube?

That’s the phrase that pays when pundits and analysts come together to talk about monetization efforts on UGC video. Frederic mentioned it in his writeup. Henry Blodgett said something similar when he deigned to advise Google to “throw in the towel” on YouTube. The issue doesn’t have anything to do with advertiser readiness to throw down with the money, and more to do with the limited avenues to do so.

Just as a proof-of-concept on this theory, give yourself a five minute limit to figure out how to put an ad on the side-bar on a Google search result.  Even if you don’t know where to start, you should get there with four minutes to spare, assuming you know how to … you know … type a Google query.

Now try the same thing with YouTube.

Not so easy, is it?  If you’re lucky, on your third or fourth search query, you’ll turn up this page, which YouTube dubs its online media kit. If you have the patience, you can spend about a half-hour watching Googlers tell you how awesome it is to advertise on YouTube, complete with some product manager playing with his plastic dinosaurs.

This is what I’m talking about.  If you actually watch these videos, you get the picture that YouTube is running advertisements on only a fraction of those gazillions of page-views and video views. In fact, they only run ads on videos that participate in the “Partner Program,” a program not easy to figure out how to join, either.

Just think of the money YouTube could make if they ran just a stupid little text-based AdSense unit on every page on YouTube. We started running through this intellectual exercise the last time this topic came up here – we determined that YouTube needed to monetize (generously) 1% of their traffic to thoroughly trounce Hulu.

It’s easy to see here that the same minds that brought us search ads aren’t working on what’s at YouTube, otherwise they’d have this problem licked by now. For further proof, take a gander at your AdWords account, and try to find the button that allows you to advertise on YouTube.  I’ll save you some time – it isn’t there, not even next to the “advertise on radio” or “advertise on TV” links.

Hulu Doesn’t Have an Easy Advertiser Form Either. How Are They Doing So Well?

That’s because they don’t need one. As Blodget notes in his write-up, Hulu gives more money back to its partners than YouTube does with theirs.  What Blodget fails to mention is that this is a pointless statistic, since Hulu is essentially a puppet entity for News Corporation and NBC Universal.

This means that they don’t really need to rely on an in-house sales team as YouTube does, at least not throughout the year. They do the bulk of their big name, high dollar selling at what’s called the “upfronts” every year. Millions of dollars trade hands after the May sweeps at these star-studded events, and YouTube hasn’t made inroads to tap into this market.

If they sold at the upfronts, it isn’t like it would land them the type of money Hulu’s getting.  Even the most watched content on YouTube still doesn’t have the international brand recognition of your average show on the WB. Simply put, the TV networks still have decades of brand recognition built up, and YouTube is technically still a toddler.

As Soon as Google and YouTube Start Playing to Their Strengths…

Here’s the point I’m driving at – YouTube has been doing things right in almost every category so far when it comes to growing the brand and traffic to the site.

They have a lumbering behemoth in terms of traffic, and it looks to me like they’re trying to outlast some dinosaurs of Old Media just long enough so that some of these pesky copyright issues outmode themselves (either by these Old Media companies dying off themselves, or their grasp of New Media catching up with reality). That’s frankly the only explanation I can think of behind why they’d not treat their YouTube traffic like every other type of traffic contained within the Google family.

Playing to their weaknesses, and by that I mean trying to compete with Hulu and other studio produced aggregators head on… it’s akin to looking for the golden needles in the haystack, instead of feeding all that hay into the gold-spinning wheel they have sitting in the back.

November 16, 2008 – 7:03 pm PDT – by Sarah Evans

Sarah Evans is the director of communications at Elgin Community College (ECC) in Elgin, Illinois. She also authors a PR and social media blog.

The inaugural celebration of International Baby Wearing Week also serves as a platform for the Motrin brand’s launch of their new ads (below) targeting what else, “baby wearing moms.” Touting the tagline “we feel your pain,” the Motrin IB ad in particular takes a snarky approach towards moms who carry babies in a pouch or sling.

And on the surface at least, the company accomplished the ultimate in outreach goals:

1. Reach target audience
2. Get them to engage in dialogue about your brand
3. Find way to track message and outreach

Motrin Commercial

The Wrong Move

Sounds great, right? Wrong. While the ads are the number one discussion trend on the microblogging platform, Twitter, the overall grade? A great big “Fail Whale”.

Avid Twitter user and mom, Jessica Gottlieb is the originator of the conversation via her Twitter network. The dialogue (and overwhelming outrage) is growing exponentially. Already there are thousands of comments on #motrinmoms and almost all are negative with many saying they will no longer use the brand name product.

It took only a few short hours to go viral. Katja Presnal, founder of SkimbacoLifestyle.com and LadybugLandings.com, wants Motrin to know that the ads themselves are giving moms headaches.

Presnal says, “Moms have brains, don’t treat us like that and learn to market for us. We spend 75% of our families’ money.”
Will Motrin Respond?

The world of social media is reaching a tipping point and my bet is yes, they will respond.
This is their opportunity to engage and connect with a powerful (and influential) audience. (Perhaps the one they should have consulted before launching the ads?) So, what should they do first?

1. Deliver an apology. (From a person, not just the brand.)
2. Offer an outlet for people (not just the target audience) to share their feelings and emotions – especially important – let people share how they felt when they watched the ads.
3. Talk about what will change or be different (and incorporate feedback)
4. Get a social media presence!!!

If they do respond, their response will be blogged, chatted and tweeted about and will serve as a case study for social media engagement for years to come. No pressure.

I’m waiting with baited breath.

Sarah writes her own blog PRsarahevans.com and is the director of communications at Elgin Community College (ECC) in Elgin, Illinois. She also worked for Advocate Health Care, the largest health care system in Illinois, as the manager of communications and government relations at Advocate Good Samaritan Hospital. She brings a comprehensive background in the knowledge of non-for-profit and health care management.

A concept in video advertising has been bubbling up amongst the professionals I’ve been listening to over the last six months, one that makes a lot of sense and is already in use by several successful podcasters, but one that is rarely described explicitly and definitely lacks a cute buzzword-y name, at least as far as I’ve seen.

Most advertising in video and audio media is treated separately from any other content, text or otherwise. Most blogs and news organizations that regularly (or irregularly) produce and feature video and audio content don’t monetize it at all. Those that do monetize it either rely on remnant advertising methods or sell by CPM, and are often discouraged when production costs outpace the sales returns for the content being created.

I’ve spoken here before many times about the value of sponsorship models for all forms of online content, and their inherent superiority over metrics-based advertising for publishers. The topic has come up a few times when we’ve discussed different ways to monetize Twitter, particularly in the context of making money from a personal brand, rather than trying to look at the content as monetizable inventory:

Folks like Louis Gray and Robert Scoble have been able to launch entire Web 2.0 niches just by describing a problem, and then subsequently promoting a company or set of developers that work to solve those issues. Those are just two names I’m intimately familiar with within the hundreds of Twitter users that have several thousand or more subscribers. Twitter should be striking deals with these users and splitting the cash with them.

And I spoke even more recently about the idea of sponsorship in the context of online video when I explored some of the hidden reasons behind Revision3’s recent cuts:

For a real world example, why is it, do you think, that Cisco signed on to sponsor the Mashable Conversations video podcast (one with zero subscribers at the time when they signed the deal) before we’d ever put out an episode?  Why do you think Seagate continues to sponsor Robert Scoble’s endeavors, despite the fact that he doesn’t have the distribution of larger blogs like us?  The answer is the same in both cases – those advertisers want to have their name associated with the brands they’re buying into.

When you compare the budgets spent on brand sponsorship to metrics based ads on the very same show, the value to the publisher is clear – sponsorship is the way to go, as it can swing the money dial upwards easily by between a factor of 10 and 100.

With a Difference Like That, Doesn’t Advertiser Value Suffer?

Advertiser value, in theory, should go up. The reality of sponsorship situations is that they’re chosen much more carefully, and with much more manual interference. A company simply isn’t going to drop what can easily be a six figure sum on a well known publisher’s brand without some human interaction taking place. Conversely, buys that take place on remnant video inventory or CPC text and image inventory can easily exceed that value, and most of the time it’s handled primarily by automated systems.

Perhaps in a coming age, these sponsorship transactions will also take place by sophisticated automated means (and when that day comes, a lot of folks in the sales and marketing business will be fearful of their jobs), but I rather doubt it.

These types of sponsorships are generally made because careful consideration has been made by both the savvy publisher and the savvy marketer to identify where the audience for the product or service and the content being monetized coincide closely.

For a real example of what I’m talking about, simply look no further than our daily sponsored feature at Mashable, the Sun Startup Review. The content and the sponsorship is strictly textual in nature, but the concept here is the same. Sun decided that a key target for their future business lay in the startup sector, and Mashable’s brand is inextricably tied to the startup business, so thus a sponsor-publisher relationship made sense.

Sun could have simply bid on a text ad on the side bar, or even purchased one of the more expensive graphic ads we sell, but they were looking to shape their image to our audience beyond what may or may not be glimpsed when a reader scrolls through our pages looking for content.

In terms of online video, these concepts are no different, it’s just that the added value of the sponsorship becomes much more stark and visible.

New Media Beats Heritage Media Moguls at Their Own Game

Although I’ve vocally disagreed with Brightcove’s media distribution strategies from time to time, their Vice President Adam Berrey very succinctly made this point about publishers with respect to how they work to monetize their video efforts at a recent roundtable discussion hosted by Beet.TV.

The point that he’s driving at there is that it’s the audience you’re selling, and not the content. This is true for any media organization, and it’s an important distinction for those who are trying to sell any New Media inventory to learn and learn well.

Put another way, New Media publishers hold in their grasp the holy grail that moguls of the olden days spent millions, if not billions, to acquire – the ability to sell against multiple media types. Congress won’t ever pass legislation to break up a media monopoly by an online website in an effort to prevent them from utilizing video, audio, images and text on their website. On the other hand, congressional hearings are routinely held whenever mergers and acquisitions take place that consolidate too much media in the hands of too few publishers.

Just In Case You Need a Refresher on the Value of Video

Case study after case study shows how video and audio are more valuable than simple text content. The old standby study I like to cite was published two years ago by Ken Rutkowski, and it documented the simply amazing response rates to online video advertisements.

It found that of those that watched a video advertisement online, 45% had some sort of measurable response from the ad, and 31% followed through on the advertisement enough to go to the company website. Of those that watched the advertisement, 16% ended up making a purchase, and separate 13% either signed up for a free trial or ordered a subscription.

Plainly, if under half watch the advertisement, and then 45% of those folks respond, you’ve got around a 25% viewer to response ratio, a not insignificant number. Likewise, of all the folks that will view a video, 12.9% will end up buying the product, requesting a free trial, or ordering a subscription.

At this point, evangelism for online video response rates is almost preaching to the choir, no matter who it is you’re talking to. The reasons behind it, particularly for the web savvy, are almost common sense.

• A video advertisement defeats most common forms of web ad-blindness.
• Standard video and audio CPM base rates for even remnant ads are far higher than that of text.
• Video and audio are more memorable and often easier venues for conveying complex ideas, and thus …
• … better at creating a lasting impression of advertiser brands, offers, products and services.

The formulas for CPMs and CPCs are great starting points, but shouldn’t be set in stone. When a publisher is looking to solidify the sponsorship relationship, they should treat all inventory (be it audio, video or text) as ala carte.  The key is, for both advertisers and those who sell ads, to wrap your head around the concept of what a video or audio ad is worth, what your brand and audience is worth, and how to convey that to those who want to partner with you to reach your audience.

The Army’s Web site for potential enlistees, goarmy.com, will feature a series of webcasts about soldiers deployed in Iraq.

By STUART ELLIOTT

FOR the last two years, the Army has presented itself to potential recruits as the way to become “Army strong.” Beginning on Tuesday, Veterans Day, the Army will seek to make its pitch stronger by making the campaign more relevant to the desired audience of Americans ages 17 to 24.

One new feature on a redesigned version of the Army Web site (goarmy.com) called “Straight From Iraq” states, “Now you can find out what it’s really like to be deployed in the Middle East from the men and women stationed there.”

“Soldiers are ready to take your questions,” says a section of the site devoted to a webcast series. The feature represents the first time that visitors can ask questions of soldiers deployed overseas as well as the first time the Iraq war has been referred to so directly and prominently on the Web site.

The goal is to provide those considering the Army — along with parents and others who influence their decisions — with “verifiable information about what being a soldier is really like, what combat is really like,” said Lt. Gen. Benjamin C. Freakley, commanding general of the Army Accessions Command in Fort Monroe, Va., which is overseeing recruitment.

The changes in the “Army strong” campaign place more emphasis on the Internet, event marketing and other methods that connect with young Americans on a closer, more personal level.

To help pay for the new media features, cutbacks are being made in areas like the Army’s sponsorships of professional rodeos.

The changes include an additional theme for the campaign, “Strength like no other,” which will appear along with “Army strong”; a focus on the skills that recruits can learn in the Army, to make a stronger case about how serving can bring personal and career success later in life; and new information about becoming an officer.

“The campaign has been successful conveying the benefits of ‘Army strong,’ the physical, emotional and mental benefits,” said Ed Walters, chief marketing officer for the Army at the Pentagon.

“We wanted to more clearly articulate that,” he added, through efforts like sharing with civilians the video clips of “real soldiers’ stories.”

•

The “Army strong” campaign is produced by nine agencies, eight of them part of the McCann Worldgroup division of the Interpublic Group of Companies. The Army ad budget from 2006 through 2011 is estimated at $1.35 billion.

The Army has met its recruiting goals for the first two fiscal years during which the “Army strong” campaign has appeared. Critics of the military’s practices contend that bonuses being awarded to recruits as well as less stringent entry standards have also helped meet the goals.

“We love the ‘Army strong’ campaign because it resonates with youth,” General Freakley said, and it “says in a nutshell who our soldiers are, that it is a strength they get by serving.”

“This is a progression, an evolution,” he added, referring to the new phase of the campaign.

In addition to the new content on goarmy.com, there will be new TV commercials, meant to help drive traffic to the Web site. The first ones compare the Army to a company, a team and a school by showing young men and women in settings like an office building, a gym and a campus. The scenes shift into scenes of soldiers performing military tasks like marching and saluting the flag.

In the gym commercial, young athletes are seen working out, then stacking sandbags. “There is a team like no other team in the world,” says the narrator, the actor Gary Sinise, who took over the narration work for the campaign last year from the actor Josh Charles.

“When they raise their flag in victory, you will know what these men and women are fighting for,” Mr. Sinise says, “and you will feel fortunate to be counted among them.”

In the office commercial, young workers in business attire suddenly start climbing walls. “This company is filled with dreamers,” Mr. Sinise says, “but they also have courage, strength and honor, and when they leave this company it will be with a thousand opportunities and the respect of millions.”

The intent is “to show the Army in a way you haven’t thought about it,” said Craig Markus, executive creative director at McCann Erickson Worldwide in New York, one of the McCann Worldgroup agencies working on the campaign.

“Obviously, the buzzword right now is ‘relevance,’ ” he added, “and we’re trying to talk to people in a way that’s relevant to them at the moment.”

Coincidentally, it turns out the campaign was developed months before the start of the steep economic downturn. The growing unemployment rate could benefit the Army because young men and women may enlist rather than search fruitlessly for work.

“History will tell you that’s true,” Mr. Markus said, “but I’m not going to predict what may happen.”

The other McCann Worldgroup agencies working on the campaign are: Casanova Pendrill, for ads aimed at Hispanics; the IW Group, for ads aimed at Asian-Americans; Momentum, for event marketing and sponsorships; MRM Worldwide, for the Web site, digital marketing and direct marketing; NAS Recruitment, for medical recruiting; Universal McCann, for media planning and buying; and Weber Shandwick, for public relations.

Another agency, Carol H. Williams Advertising, is creating ads aimed at African-American recruits.

•

Other changes the Army is making include reworking the content of the Virtual Army Experience, a traveling interactive exhibit with games and other displays that is intended for an audience as young as 13. There have been complaints that the exhibit is inappropriate because it makes combat seem to be fun.

“If we show the Army fighting, people say it’s violent,” General Freakley said. “If we don’t, people say it’s not truthful.”

The new content for the exhibit will concentrate on the peaceful purposes the Army can serve, he added, like providing humanitarian aid.

The new elements of the “Army strong” campaign aimed at so-called influencers like parents are scheduled to start in January. Such ads have been part of the campaign since it began in 2006.

Last June, Google introduced a new research and media measurement tool dubbed Ad Planner which we suspected uses the Google Toolbar to collect data. Today, the company is opening up Ad Planner for anyone with a Google account and adding a bunch of features.

Google Ad Planner now support search queries (surprise!) and geo-targeting, which means you can drill-down to specific states or metros (region or cities in geographies outside the US). You can also choose among three new ranking methods to display results from the sites you’re considering running your campaigns on, and there’s also a new interactive ‘bubble chart’ which should help you compare demographics, frequency, traffic, and unique visitors visually.

Google has also expanded demographic audience data to include France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the UK.

To use the service, go to the Ad Planner Homepage and login with your Google account.

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