Ford has become something of a leading-edge purveyor of social-media programs. The Fiesta, Explorer and Focus have all spent at least as much time speeding along labyrinthine social-media routes as they have on the traditional media turnpikes of TV and print. The automaker's latest, which officially -- if that is the right word here -- launched this week on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, promotes the 2012 Focus with a new spokesperson, Doug. Ford introduced Doug Monday at a faux press conference, which lives on the Facebook page of John, a fictive Ford marketer. Doug is a puppet of the handheld variety. During the streamed news conference, Doug misbehaves, suggests that he's only doing this because he got a free car from Ford, flirts openly with one of the reporters, whom he calls "pretty pants" and generally causes high anxiety among the faux Fords, who wring their hands as Doug is off on a couch with pretty pants, trying to get her to go for drinks. "You're so ... cute," she says. The series of videos moves on to a just-launched clip showing Doug getting a walkaround of the new Focus. He makes acerbic comments about the side-view mirrors and cap-less gas tank, and how he'd like to smell the female Ford marketer's fingers to see if he can sense an odor of gasoline. Doug is accompanied everywhere by the above-mentioned John the marketer, played by actor John Ross Bowie, per Scott Monty, Ford's head of social media. Monty says the series was a collaborative project of Ford, its agency group Team Detroit, and the comedy troupe The Upright Citizens' Brigade. It was directed by Paul Feig, who has also directed shows like "The Office," "Freaks & Geeks," and "30 Rock," and also features cast, writers and crew from "The Simpsons," "Comedy Central," "SNL," "Borat," "Finding Nemo" and "Curb Your Enthusiasm." The effort was overseen by Ford's lead digital marketing guru, John Beebe. "It's been in development for a while and we have fine-tuned the whole process. As you can imagine, our marketing team and Team Detroit were going back and forth about what the puppet should look like. Believe it or not, we ended up with the prototype, and it just grew on people," says Monty. The program started with three viral videos that appear to have nothing to do with Ford, and seem to have been uploaded by the puppet himself. They are self-promotional clips showing the puppet stopping a thief and saving someone's life in a bus with CPR. "We seeded those a few weeks ago and have gotten hundreds of views," says Monty, who adds that the effort will continue with paid media integration "over the next few weeks and months." Monty says that even without promotional muscle, people are finding the video on various social channels. "People are already interacting with Doug on Twitter and Facebook and he's reacting right back," says Monty. As for the story line and campaign endpoint, "we have left some of it open to the natural flow of conversation and interaction, but have a story arc we will follow as well."
New York independent agency Gigante Vaz has signed on to Casale Media's new Videobox platform, which Casale says transforms standard display inventory in its MediaNet ad network into video-ready media. Advertisers slated to run video campaigns via Videobox include Gigante Vaz client St. Martin's Press, along with Febreze Carpet Care Products and US Airways Vacations. Casale said it has other "leading agencies" on board in addition to Gigante Vaz, but could not divulge their names. Jim McHugh, president of Gigante Vaz, stated that what he values most from Casale "is the branding options they enable on the unit and the total elimination of ad serving costs to make this an easy and effective solution for our advertisers." He added that Gigante Vaz, teamed with Casale, are empowering advertisers "to broaden creativity in online display by leveraging video to engage targeted audiences on a wide scale." Casale said that Videobox consolidates technical assembly, hosting, delivery and media into one platform. Advertisers can also incorporate existing targeting solutions, including audience, demographic, psychographic, technographic, contextual, and associative filters. The ads are available in all standard IAB ad units. When a user interacts with a Videobox-enabled ad, the ad expands to offer features such as social media sharing, player frame controls and multiple viewing choices, all without the user leaving the publisher's site.
I've recently stumbled upon some articles as well as media folks talking about the notion of curating content -- and picking the right content, distributing it across the site, picking the best of the best, the most relevant, the most recent... the best. I think curating content is critical at times, while at other times, machines are your choice pick. This article will discuss some tips on how to use curation and the machines that do it for you and can offer the best content to your users. When you run an organization you always want to know you're doing the best you can to differentiate yourself from your competitors, that you're progressing your product in the right direction and that you're pursuing a meaningful market. By nature, those who try to do a notch too much are risking to end up with nothing. In a similar fashion, curation is a limited resource and should be well used. When to use content curating: (1) Massive traffic single pages. There is a middle ground where curators can select a 20+ list of stories and videos they want to promote on single massively trafficked pages such as the homepage, or category pages -- and allow machines to optimize them based on Personalization, GEO location, or just measuring and optimizing based on what actually works. Here is a good place of combining the two, but leading with content Curators. (2) You're a Hulu look-alike. You can't afford adequate content on your site, but you can afford selecting what comes in. Curate it beginning to end. (3) You're an HBO look-alike. You want to spend a lot of time browsing through many different options before choosing your next project to create the "Larry David" show. It will be hard for machines to help you here. (4) There is a meaningful event going on. For instance, a presidential inauguration. It doesn't happen every day, hence you want to take a close look of the content you promote, and the experience you create for your users. (5) You just have to. Sometimes, there is a need to bias your site traffic because you have a sponsorship or because you have some target to push certain type of content in a certain period. Curate that content and push it across the site. When and why you shouldn't use "curation" of content: (1) "Say my name say my name." Curators can't by definition differentiate their selections to users based on their originating GEO location, users' behavior history, etc. (2) Really hard /non scalable. If you're a business, on the low end, you have several thousands of content items on your site such as videos and articles, and several hundreds of thousands of unique users on your site. If you want to enrich every article with more articles and more videos, people might want to be engaged with it -- but this is really hard to do. The difference between machines to human selected content to machine is in the ~3x (see video). (3) The fact you can count sand does not mean you should. Content is king. If you focus your editors and curators on making sure your content is distinguished, unique, appealing, and reflecting your brand, you're maximizing your editors' unique capabilities. Leave it to the machine to do the rest, and you're mastering the Pareto Principle rule. 80% of the curation should be focused on the content coming in, and on massive traffic pages, the rest of which is mainly distributing that great content across your pages and to the web -- machines. For instance, when I think of Kevin Rose, and Technology I'm thinking Revision3's Diggnation . This is good curation of content and brand recognition. In conclusion, content curation is important and needed, and I think that if you're able to combine the power of curation with the power of content distribution, you're maximizing both worlds. The rest -- might be counting sand.