Something original in traditional media

I was very happy to see a new campaign from Lastminute.com land in my inbox a few minutes ago. It is a series of 3 sixty-second TV ads running one after another, but across 3 channels. The idea is you begin on ITV at 9:50, jump to Channel 4 at 9:51 and end up on Five at 9:52.

Working for a digital agency I spend 90% of my time working on digital budgets, and whilst this often involves planning integration with offline, I don't often get chance to plan traditional campaigns these days.

This is a nice reminder that originality is alive and well in all channels, and, oh look... an offline TV campaign is generating online buzz right here. Hmm.

Nice campaign idea, best of luck LM, hope it works.

Now if I was Channel Five I would be giving this away for not a lot of money given that success for LM means an audience will have been 'dragged' from ITV, through Channel 4 and left to settle at 5. I would imagine a smart sales person at ITV asking for a countdown of 5,4,3 rather than the opposite of 3,4,5 !

How did I piss off China??

I was playing around with various tests (as pointed out by SEO by the Sea) and decided to see if my blog was being blocked by the Great Firewall of China... it is!

Test to see if the Chinese don't like you either here.

Record ad spend for Super Bowl

Somewhat surprised to read today that NBC generated $206m in ad revenue from this year's Super Bowl (sorry Arizona office, you got wupped by the Steelers!). Although at $85,000 a second, and advertisers like Doritos (Eric Heimbold), Kellog (Leo Burnett, Chicago). 9 ads for Anheuser-Busch (DDB, Chicago) and Toyota (Burrell Communications, Chicago / Saatchi & Saatchi, Los Angeles), there is clearly still huge interest in this prestige advertising opportunity.

My personal favorite out of the 49 was for CareerBuilder (Wieden & Kennedy) - click here to view or view all the ads here.

Snow on the (on)line

Woke up this morning to a 6-inch thick blanket of snow in Brighton and Hove (actually). Have some friends with me who need to get to London to catch a train to Edinburgh and so need good travel details.

The TV and Radio have been surprisingly useless and typically are deferring people to the web. Very frustratingly, the web is buggered this morning - National Rail, South West Trains and the local BBC radio service are all down. Come on people, we need to be able to cope with some snow better than this!

Personally I have been down to the sea front to take some photos and have a snowball fight with random people, before settling in to do some work.

Thought last year's posting about the snow was still very valid... click here to Rediscover The Soul of the Internet

Discounted Britney

Last week I had the pleasure of attending the annual Client Summit for iCrossing, the digital agency I work for. One of our guest speakers was Google who had some very interesting stats to share.

Britney Spears has been the most popular search term on Google for the last 8 years, but was replaced in 2008 by the term 'coupons'. This is either another sign that the credit crunch is having wide-ranging effects or consumers have become savvy to the way they are shopping online. Will Britney start offering discounts as a result??

Other interesting facts from Google:

• YouTube is now the 2nd largest search engine in North America
  
• 54% of online ads are shown on 4 sites (Google, Yahoo, MSN and AOL), but the same sites only account for 24% of page views. What was particularly interesting for my display group was that Yahoo had a high percentage of that traffic, a sign that their network may be more targeted.
• According to an Inquirer study, consumers are twice as likely to click on an ad on a niche site rather than on a portal. This wasn't a surprise to me as we have seen great uplift in click through rates by targeting niche sites using the principals of social marketing and looking for groupings around the topics most relevant to our clients.
• There were over 300 tweaks to the Google algorithm in 2008
• There are over 800m users of Open Social