This article appeared on my del.icio.us homepage in the "Popular" section this morning.  It is a really interesting overview of what may be happening in the world of brand media.  Some larger advertisers are starting to realize that they can use guerrilla marketing tactics via MySpace at really low cost (note: for more on guerrilla marketing tactics, see my recent post on Ecko’s recent brilliant campaign).  I’ve cited this example before (see article here) — here’s the MySpace page for the Honda Element (and even more bizarre, here’s the MySpace page for a local Honda dealership from Cedar Rapids, Iowa!).

If the old saying is true: "I know that 50% of my media spend works, I just don’t know which 50%", and if it is really true that the web and new media provide higher accountability for media spend, then I think that this Publishing 2.0 article is right that there will be a slowdown of media spend — in traditional media (television, print, etc). 

HOWEVER, as the lines blur between advertisers and publishers, thus lowering the barrier to entry for advertisers to get their messsages out by publishing (via MySpace, blogs, etc — see the GM blog as an example), these new "publishers" are also going to start advertising to get eyeballs and people to their MySpace pages, blogs, etc.  They don’t need to spend $10 million on a Madison Ave agency for a 30 second TV spot, but they need to invest in search advertising and performance marketing to attract users to their new published pages.  And these new forms of advertising provide such a higher level of accountability than the older formats, as advertisers get better and better results, they’ll spend more and more.  It will be interesting to see where these spending levels net out over time compared to traditional media spend.

I love being a part of all of this and seeing how it will play out.

Update: I just read the NYTimes article that Publishing 2.0 references.  There are some great quotes about MySpace:

To expand ad sales, especially to big brands, Mr. Levinsohn plans to
supplement the MySpace staff with a second sales force linked to the
Fox TV sales department. He wants to expand one of Mr. DeWolfe’s
advertising ideas — turning advertisers into members of the MySpace
community, with their own profiles, like the teenagers’ — so that the
young people who often spend hours each day on MySpace can become
"friends" with movies, cellphone companies and even deodorants. Young
people can link to the profiles set up for these goods and services, as
they would to real friends, and these commercial "friends" can even
send them messages — ads, really, but of a whole new kind.

The best way to get, say, a television show in front of the MySpace
audience is not to cut a deal with a programming czar at a Hollywood
restaurant, but to win the hearts, one by one, of thousands of members
who will display the show to all of their friends.

Mr. Levinsohn calls MySpace the antiportal. "It’s not about a central
hub, because that’s not where things are going," he said. "The under-30
set wants choice. It’s not about one destination; it’s about 65
million."

Technorati tags: media, advertising, myspace

Speaking of my post on YPNBlog on Monday about mashups, check out this amazing music mashup of 40+ Beatles songs!

Technorati tags: beatles, mashups

I’ve been playing around with last.fm’s badge builder all weekend, trying to properly configure the layout to match my site’s stylesheet. It is a pretty cool and robust little tool.

I finally got it properly configured this morning such that it doesn’t blow out the left column of my site and also doesn’t have a thick black border (which was driving me crazy).

The trick was selecting the javascript version of the badge rather than the HTML version. And, in a little feature upgrade that completely surprised me (quite pleasantly, I might add!), the javascript badge also automatically includes little green buttons allowing people to stream previews of tracks straight from my site when last.fm has the rights to do so. What a great feature!

And so, check out the Recent Listens section on the left column of my site and feel free to sample the tunes that I’ve just finished hearing!

And in a very nice coincidence-slash-poetic-justice, check out (screenshot below) what song was playing when I finally got everything working correctly:

(Update: Sadly, upon changing my blogging platform, I lost a number of images. This was one of them…the current version is an image pulled from Google Image Search cache. If you can’t read it clearly, what was funny about it is that the song I had been playing on random when I took the screenshot was “kid’s allright” by Bettie Serveert).

Technorati tags: last.fm

I’m on YPN Blog today with a post about mashups.

Technorati tags: YPN, YPNBlog, Yahoo, mashup, mashups

This is one of the coolest guerrilla promotion / viral marketing campaigns I’ve ever seen.

First watch this video of the “tagging” of AirForce One.

Then read this article.

To learn more, check out Marc Ecko’s site.

Technorati tags: ecko, marcecko, airforceone, tagging, viralmarketing, graffiti

Went to dinner with the BarcampLA gang last night at Electric Lotus in Los Feliz.  It was great to see that the energy from BarcampLA (March 4-5) hadn’t really died out.  We had probably 30ish people at dinner and it was really nice to catch up with folks.

A few interesting notes from the evening:  Michael Goff was in attendence fresh off completing the sale of Bayosphere to Backfence (link and link).  He seemed in great spirits about the whole thing and I enjoyed chatting with him about it and about the general state of traditional media going online.  The evening culminated with Adam Bain, EVP of Fox Interactive — who came to the event with BarcampLA co-organizer Kareem Mayan, looking for opinions from the group as to how to promote innovation from within.  There were many interesting suggestions from the crowd (Hack Days; 20% work time for personal projects; get external people excited about helping you innovate; get standard platforms built first then innovate; let newly acquired employees work solo for awhile; create venture capital for internal groups to apply for; etc) and I left the event feeling that Fox is definitely continuing to move forward into the web and new media with guns blazing.  They don’t intend MySpace to be their one trick pony by any means.  He made it sound as though they were really looking to rebuild the way incentives are doled out within his entire organization.  And he even gave away an xBox 360 (via a drawing) to someone in the group as a result of all of the good feedback (which was a good indicator of their willingness to pay for good new ideas!).

Thanks to Heather for organizing the event.  Looking forward to another one soon!

Technorati Tags: geekdinner, barcampla, losangeles, losfeliz, la, heathervescent, reemer, barcamp, 

I try to avoid writing about work on this site but I’m pretty excited about this…
Yesterday, my group at Yahoo! (the Yahoo! Publisher Network) launched our blog at YPNBlog.com.  The introductory article by Will acts as a manifesto of sorts, proclaiming why we are here and what we hope to achieve.  And it is pretty exciting stuff — something I’m really proud to be a part of.

Tip: Click the big group picture for a pretty amusing video.

And finally, Search Engine Journal, a publisher in our beta, has posted an amusing think piece on why we have a sock monkey in our group picture.  I’ll bet you want to know, don’t you!?

Technorati tags: YPN, Yahoo

  Art Storm in Silverlake 
  Originally uploaded by notrivers.

Had a great weekend; my mom came to town from Kansas to visit.  One of the highlights occured at random.  As we were going down Sunset on the way to the CheeseStore of Silverlake to get some sandwiches for lunch, we stumbled upon "Art Storm".  In the little square of greenery along Sunset where the farmer’s market takes place on Saturdays, a group of 5-7 graffiti artists were decorating 25 canvases or so with wonderful colors and designs.  The event was created in order to raise awareness (and some funding) for an art park in LA that would function as a place for taggers and graffiti artists to safely and legally practice and create art.  It was great to watch the guys at work.  Molly and I even bought one of the paintings — from a kid with tagname of "War".  To see more pics from the show, check out more photos on Flickr.

Oh, and I got a tip to check out another show, called SoulSignificance, coming up on April 15.  Check out crewest.com’s gallery page for details.

Technorati tags: artstorm, graffiti, tagging