This is effective advertising for web 2.0: DOVE video

This 1 minute 14 seconds youtube-video produced by Dove drove three times as many visits to the Dove website as did their whole TV campaign over the past two years:

The findings were revealed by Jaap Favier at the Interact conference in Bruxelles today. Jaap Favier is vicepresident at Forrester Research, and the conference is organised by IAB Europe - the european branch of FDIM.

Jaap Favier did a very convincing presention on the task advertisers need to undertake to reach the consumers of the present web 2.0 internet environment. What you need to do, he claimed, is to understand how to influence the group dynamics, that web 2.0 has brought to the forefront.

Realize these four different types of consumers and act on them: Very few are creators, a bit more are critics (commenting what they experience), some 20 % are collectors finding good stuff and sharing it with their peers, while the rest are couch potatoes, “passively” receiving.
(Live blogging from Bruxelles)

The morning of this big day :

Dear all, thanks so much for your Interactions and posts! I hope I'll get some feedback on the Blog about your Interact experience, and I look forward seeing you next year for Interact 2008 in Germany! Greetings and look forward meeting you all in The Plaza hotel....enjoy some AdEx investments figures ;-)

SecondLife: a new networking protocol

Of all the speculations that can be made about secondlife, there is one of which I am certain: secondlife as we know it now is destined for a necessary and radical change, which will make this type of application take off.

I am speaking about the way in which the project is owned and run today as the private property of Linden Lab. Here is a link to the company overview page: http://lindenlab.com/press/overview.

I am not able to imagine that a similar project can evolve very much, since it remains in the hands of a single company; the problem is in managing a thing of such enormous complexity.

At least the history of humanity shows us that above a certain threshold of economic, political and social complexity, a community must formally separate political power and the other powers, as is happening in China or Vietnam.

This is not an ideological argument but a technical evaluation of possible management models.

Today secondlife is an environment with very few rules, all decided arbitrarily by the board of directors and the executive management of Linden Lab, in the interests of the firm shareholders, who in my opinion understand the problem very well, given that so far, they have shown great foresight.

If Linden Lab know how to run this process, it will remain the main protagonist for a long time, otherwise it will be crushed by the development of another secondlife environment having resolved this phase; a solution, perhaps the only one, could be to open the standard to anyone who supports the technical interface - meaning anyone will be able to run the servers and decide the rules connecting to a network of servers.

Everyone together will form the secondlife universe and each of us will be able to have our own server, just as every one of us has an intimate and indivisible individual sphere.

Another phase that we will rapidly see will be where a secondlab provider will decide that the rules can be decided by the citizens through voting.

It will be interesting to see which evolutions these neo-democracies will have, that rapidly overtake the efficiency of the democracies we know today. Just think of being able to vote not once every five years but continuously, drastically reducing political intermediation.

Technically, it is not impossible to imagine this in a community necessarily literate in the use of the information technology.

GoogleBurner is coming your way

What Is The Value Of Online Display Ads?: "Now that Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and WPP have spent collectively $10.4 billion to acquire the largest online display ad platform companies (DoubleClick, Right Media, aQuantive, and 24/7 Real Media) on the bet that display ads will be a key driver of growth for online ad spending, it’s fair to ask exactly what the value of an online display ad is."

The answer? Pretty bleak: display banners can "foster familiarity" but since the advertisers themselves obsess over clicks, the ROI is pretty low.

Google AdSense, on the other hand, is sucking away larger and larger chunks of the online budgets every month. Why? Because GoogleAds "use the format of the universal call to action on the web — the text link."

Interesting to see what happens when (or rather, if) Google buys Feedburner, "the leading provider of media distribution and audience engagement services for blogs and RSS feeds". RSS advertising is coming our way and my bet is, that it's going to be mainly text-based too.

Who'll serve the ads? "GoogleBurner" will. Who'll buy them? The same advertisers who are happy with GoogleAds' ROI. But who will be the media? The usual suspects (portal sites and other online media), but also the bloggers. I know some of the bloggers love reading RSS feeds for its ad-lessness, but when they can make money by inserting AdSense (or DoubleClick) ads in their own blog's feed, believe me: they will.

UPDATE (May 23 2007): $100 Million Payday For Feedburner - This Deal Is Confirmed.