View Responsibly: Online Liquor Videos Need to Craft Careful Mesage by P.J. Bednarski

A good portion of the world is spending a good portion of this week drunk. No doubt you'll see some of their dumber exploits online. New Year's Eve, historically, is when people alcohol makes people even more stupid. Liquor marketers seem a little constrained by social media and online video, perhaps because they don't want to be accused of targeting youthful drinkers. But the fact is, Generation Y, the people born between 1982 and 1995, have grown up with the Internet, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and other social media. There's nothing more social-or, eventually, potentially socially destructive-than drinking. So manufacturers have ...Read the whole story

Dobrow's Favorite Videos of 2012 by Larry Dobrow

I did the worst-of-the-year thing a few weeks ago. In the interest of balance, then, here's a list of my favorite 2012 clips. They're presented in no particular order and with a gimmicky awards component designed to distract your attention from the repurposing of gently worn content. Best wishes for a happy and healthy 2013, y'all. ...More

  • The Glitch That Stole Christmas (Eve) by Thom Forbes

    Just as some folks were settling on their couches for a long winter's eve of marathon movie streaming the night before Christmas -- from "Jimmy" to "Bing" to "Macaulay" to Miss Piggy -- Netflix went kerflooey. It was a "snafu" of the variety that "rattles customers," the hed on the Greg Bensiger's story in the Wall Street Journal tells us. "Netflix said the outage lasted nearly half a day for some of its users, and stemmed from problems with Amazon's Web Services unit, or AWS, which manages online operations for many companies." ...More

  • What The Video Industry Can Learn From Spotify's Integrated Advertising by Atul Patel

    When you tune in to the ad-supported version of Spotify, the advertising seems more integrated into your experience than most digital ads. I was recently listening to music when a Gillette advertisement featuring Andr 3000 invited me to listen to "Andr 3000's Style Soundtrack," which includes his commentary about "songs that talk about style," in hopes of inspiring you to dance, dress, and (the catch) shave stylishly. What's clever is that the ads are specific to the publisher and extremely contextual, but they didn't require Gillette to produce much. The payoff? Gillette was able to reach a listener who was ...More

  • The Ghost Of Television Yet To Be Defined by Joe Mandese

    That holiday metaphor may be overwrought, but it's also incredibly apt, because the days after Christmas have always proved challenging for television audience measurement, because of the impact all those new gizmo and gadgetry gifts have on the way households watch television -- and even how they connect, or increasingly, by pass it. ...More