Brian Zafron: I Eat Web 2.0 for Breakfast

I was planning to write today about product placement in user-generated videos, but since it’s Monday, I’ve decided to throw down something with more entertainment value.

I went to the Laugh Factory in Hollywood on Friday night, where Dane Cook performed, sandwiched by ten or so C- and D-List celebrities. These other celebs were all semi-recognizable from specials on E! and MTV and/or the orgie of crappy Wayans Brothers’ spoofs. Anywho, Dane Cook talked for about a half hour about his obsession with youporn (www.youporn.com), a video sharing website that’s essentially youtube without clothes.

Dane claimed that he never “flogs his number” to the videos, but spends hours watching them to figure out the meaning behind their often ridiculous titles. He said some of his favorite titles included, “Oral Sex with a Peanut Butter Smack,” “Dog Fashion Disco,” and “Xmas Nut.” I’m not going to link these videos, but if you want to check them out, assuming you’re only interested in understanding their titles, you have my full blessing.

By the way, I tried to ask Dane some follow-up questions after the show about youporn. I wanted to confirm my suspicion that that they pay him a pretty penny to mention their site in his stand-up act. However, he got onto his high horse (read: automobile) and zoomed away before I had the chance. Funny how product placement creeped its way into this post after all.

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Not all marketing pays dividends. Here’s an example that’s bound to bring a delicious smile to your face:

Despite a jam-packed three weeks of promotion for Paris Hilton’s new film The Hottie and The Nottie, the opening weekend numbers were complete cow dung. A romantic comedy starring Hilton, Joel David Moore, and Christine Lakin, it opened Friday to $9,000 on 111 screens, or $81 per screen, according to Box Office Mojo.

For those keeping track on the Paris Hilton temperature scale, that’s NOT hot. In fact, it’s colder than a Eskimo’s refrigerator. Basically, 2-3 people were watching her film, on average, each screening. The weekend gross tumbled in at $27,000. Meanwhile, according to the New York Post, she got “paid $100K to have her 25th birthday at the Hard Rock Hotel in Vegas.” So don’t worry about the princess going broke.

The only comparable box office disaster is Jessica Simpson’s 2007 “star vehicle” Blonde Ambition, which averaged $48 per screen on a Friday opening for a total box office of $384. The film grossed $6,422 domestically before – thank God!/ at long last!/please kill me! – it came to DVD.

Paris had premiered the film in Hollywood and Dallas, appeared in Philadelphia, at Harvard University, and the Sundance Film Festival, and even shmoozed on talk shows such as the Late Show with David Letterman. And even with all that marketing effort, she still couldn’t get people to watch her movie. What did I tell ya? Marketing ain’t easy.

So what does all this mean for the old marketing adage: does sex still sell? Probably. But sometimes content gets in the way.

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“Interactive marketing is the ability to address the consumer, remember what the consumer says and address the consumer again in a way that illustrates that we remember what the consumer has told us.”- John Deighton, Harvard, 1996

With the growth of portable and on-demand technologies, marketers are forced to deal with an increasingly elusive consumer. Bombarding consumers with advertisements is unfortunately not the easy, fix-it-all solution, but rather, it makes matters worse – causing further desensitization and sometimes flat-out resentment.

The trick, evidenced by trends in marketing departments and acquisitions across the world, is including the consumer in the conversation. Here we find the most effective breed of targeted advertising – where the target is also the one taking aim. No one likes being spoken “at” or spoken “to.” Adults, children, extra-terrestrials. No one.

Take Friday’s acquisition of Hot or Not as evidence to the effectiveness of interactivity. The website’s excruciatingly simple functionality is based upon users ranking randomly selected pictures of men and women according to hotness (or notness.) The buyers are investors connected with Avid Life Media, and paid somewhere around $20 million for the site. Moreover, Hot or Not has spurred many generations of knock-offs, most recently Web Hot or Not, created by Technorati founder, David Sifry.

Interactivity is even bleeding into Superbowl commercials. (Click here to watch dem suckers). Sit tight, and let me hit you with some examples:

• The cute girl who sang “Message From Your Heart” in the Doritos spot was featured because she won an online, consumer-generated video content.
• Tide’s talking stain commercial, promoting the Tide Pen, called upon consumers to participate online by sharing their own stories.
• GoDaddy’s spot showed someone at a Super Bowl party visiting their website in order to see content that could not be shown on TV, a subtle little invitation to do likewise. The result: GoDaddy turned a 30 second TV spot into a significantly more lengthy engagement. They recorded a half-million site visitors in the first 30 minutes after the spot, with traffic up 2,434 percent compared to last year’s Super Bowl.

So what does all this mean for marketers? Well, it’s simple: engage the consumer. How? Well, that’s a bit more complicated.

Check back for tomorrow’s article: “10 Outrageously Helpful Tips To Succeed At Interactive Marketing”

www.brianzafron.com/blog/2007/02/12/Interactive-Marketing-Is-The-Tsunami-Of-The-Future:-Take-Shelter! 

First, a little background on my office situation.

(my office)

As you can tell from the pics, I have a pretty swanky setup. It’s part of the deal I worked out for my company and magically (and by “magically” I mean after hours upon hours of bargaining, fighting, and pouting), it’s basically free. Those of you familiar with the world of Venture Capitalism might recognize my office as “incubator space.”

Translated for the lay person: a company gives you free office space and resources, and sticks you in a building with a bunch of caffeine-addicted, over worked, underfunded entrepreneurs. In exchange for your suffering, they take a tiny little piece of what they hope, one day, will be a large tasty pie. The real upside, if you can stomach the Larry Paige wannabes, is the variety of connections you make in this environment (factored into the “incubator” design).

Today’s post is about one of these connections, namely: ProgrammerMeetDesigner.com. What does this company do? Well, it brings together programmers and, you guessed it, designers (as well as entrepreneurs and writers).

The head of PR and marketing at PMD is a wirey, 40 something year old man named David Bernstein who, unbeknownst to himself, is a regular contributor at this blog. By “contributor,” I mean that his bitching about venture capitalists, marketers, and every other person with two eyes and an asshole… well, it kinda rubs off on me - not that I need any rubbing.

Anyway, he’s a constant source of entertainment, so I finally managed to get around to looking at PMD’s site the other day, and believe it or not, I was very impressed.

However, I was even more impressed when I learned - through talking to him - about the early successes at PMD. Apparently, several prominent TechCrunch, TechStars and DEMO companies have come together through his site. One company, IntenseDebate (see: TechCrunch, TechStars, ReadWriteWeb, VC Funded), even details their worldwide meeting/collaboration through their site’s ” about us” section.

I’ve also seen their Facebook application, which announces one’s status (i.e. Entrepreneur seeking Programmer) on several friends’ profiles. When I first heard these guys talk about Facebook, I assumed they were merely looking to score dates with co-eds. But I guess I was proved wrong once again.

Not too shabby, David. Particularly for a guy who keeps a set of his girlfriend’s bra and panties in his desk drawer.

Anyway, long story short: I’m not too angry about sharing an office space with PMD. They might be guilty of obsessively watching “The Hills” and eating lunch at Urth cafe solely to catch a glimpse Tyra Banks gouring herself and any potential cleavage that may or may not result, but they are also responsible for the genesis of various prominent websites and for that, I tip my cap. That’s right. Consider my hat officially tipped.

Stay tuned. One of these days I’ll be sure to sit PMD down for an interview. After all, they’re only down the hall.

 backlink: http://www.brianzafron.com/blog/?p=20