Tag Archives: Advertising

Business, Economy, Entertainment, Finance, Media, Technology

Social Media: News Feed verse App InMail

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Better Demographic Penetration and Transparency to More Accurately Determine Creative Media Asset Worth

News Media Assets

News Media Assets are created by writers of non-fictional work, coverage of various topics targeted towards the periodical demographic.

Selling Advertising Space

Layered within the news media product, consists of News Media Assets and sold advertisement space. Ad positioning throughout the news media product may have commonality between the product or service being advertised and the news media asset. A goal is the smooth transition between reader of asset and advertisement.

Revenue Models For News Media Assets

  • Deriving revenue from sponsors of news Media Assets
  • Subscription Base of News Media Assets, regular frequency of news media product to subscriber base.

Social Media – News Feeds

The news agencies post to public news feeds a “teaser” headline, a sentence or two describing the news media asset, and a teaser image all to lure prospective readers to clink a link to the news media publisher’s platform. At that point, the publisher sets the “ground rules” for the potential subscriber, e.g. 10 free articles a month, then their digital subscription price of NN goes into effect.

Social Media – InMail (I.e. eMail within the platform)

InMail through the social media platform can come from a variety of sources, for example:

  • Former colleague looking to reconnect
  • Recruiter looking to pitch a potential role
  • Sales / Marketing InMail targeting you as a potential customer of their product or service
The Tools to get the Job Done

As a prior client of LinkedIn Advertising for both ad placement and Sponsored InMail, I found the tools provided and the granularity upon which to refine the demographics impressive, and not lacking in any way.

Personable, Targeted Marketing of News Media Assets, sponsored by 3rd party promoting their product or service.

Delivering News Media Assets to your digital door step, with advertising partners speckled into the asset. Because of the granularity of the InMail advertising controls demographics are at a level of precision. Beyond what a magazine or newspaper, digital or print, can offer.

it’s all about the targeted audience and the granularity of the data collected and then leveraged to meet the desired audience. Much more personal than a link back to the publisher’s platform.

Just like there are expenses to do business in print or traditional digital, the price of doing business with a platform like LinkedIn Sponsored InMail, would be absorbed by the news media agency, net advertisement placement for advertisements.

Although the LinkedIN Social platform was used for reference, other platforms may be leveraged, depending upon the product or services being marketed, such as a Facebook People Magazine article relevant to their demographic, partnership / sponsorship.

Fake News – Not a Problem

Since News Media Agencies will now pair with “sponsors” or commonly know as advertisers, both parties, the news agency and the sponsor have “skin in the game”, it is less likely to be a factitious article.

Business, Economy, Entertainment, Fun, Internal Information, Law, Media, Sports, Technology

2016 Olympics Rating are Down? Don’t Blame Streaming!

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The 2016 Olympic opening ceremonies had just started, and I thought briefly about events I wanted to see.  I’m not a huge fan of the Olympics mostly because of the time commitment.  However, if I happen to be in front of the TV when the events are on, depending upon the event, I’m happy to watch, and can get drawn in easily.

As the Olympics unfolded, I caught a few minutes of an event here and there, just by happening to be in front of a TV.  Searching for any particular event never crossed my mind, even with the ease and power behind several powerful search engines like Bing and Google. The widgets built into search engine’s results showing Olympic standings in line with other search results was a great time saver.

However, why oh why didn’t the broadcasting network NBC create a calendar of Olympic 2016  events that can easily be imported into either Google Calendar, or Microsoft Outlook?  Even Star Trek fans are able to add a calendar to their Google Calendar for Star Dates.

Olympic ratings are hurting?  Any one of these organizations could have created a shared calendar for all or a subset of Olympic  events. Maybe you just want a calendar that shows all the aquatic events?

Olympic Team Sponsors from soda to fast food, why oh why did you paint your consumer goods with pictures of Javelin throwers and Swimmers, but didn’t put a QR code on the side of your containers that directs consumers to your sponsored team’s calendar schedule “importable” into Google Calendar, or Microsoft Outlook?

If sponsors, or the broadcasting network, NBC, would have created these shareable calendars, you now would had entered the personal calendars of the consumer.  A calendar entry pop-up may not only display what current competition is being fought, the body of the event may also contain [URL] links to stream the event live.  The body of the event may also contain links to each team player’s stats, and other interesting facts relating to the event.

Also, if a Team Sponsor is the one creating the custom calendar for the Olympic Events, like USA Swimming’s sponsor Marriott , the streaming live video events may now be controlled by the Sponsor, yes, all advertising during the streaming session would be controlled by the the Sponsor.  All Marriott!  The links in the team sponsor calendar entries may not only have their own streaming links to the live events, but include any feature rich, relevant related content.

There is the small matter of broadcast licensing Olympic Broadcasting Services (OBS)  and broadcaster exclusivity, but hey, everything is negotiable.  Not sure traditional broadcasting rules should apply in a world of video streaming.

All the millions sponsors spend, for an IT Project that could cost a fraction of their advertising budget, and add significant ROI, it boggles the mind why every sponsor isn’t out there doing this or something similar right now.  The tech is relatively inexpensive, and readily available, so why not now?  If you know of any implementations, please drop me a note.

One noted exception, the “Google app” [for the iPhone] leverages alerts for all types of things such as a warning on traffic conditions for your ride home to … the start of the Women’s beam Gymnastics Olympic event.   Select the alert, and opens up a ‘micro’ portal with people competing in the event, a detailed list of athlete profiles, including picture, country of origin, and metals won.  There is also a tab showing the event future schedule.

Business, Development, Economy, Education, Finance, Mobility, Retail, Science, Science Theory, Technology, Work

Building AI Is Hard—So Facebook Is Building AI That Builds AI

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“…companies like Google and Facebook pay top dollar for some really smart people. Only a few hundred souls on Earth have the talent and the training needed to really push the state-of-the-art [AI] forward, and paying for these top minds is a lot like paying for an NFL quarterback. That’s a bottleneck in the continued progress of artificial intelligence. And it’s not the only one. Even the top researchers can’t build these services without trial and error on an enormous scale. To build a deep neural network that cracks the next big AI problem, researchers must first try countless options that don’t work, running each one across dozens and potentially hundreds of machines.”

This article represents a true picture of where we are today for the average consumer and producer of information, and the companies that repurpose information, e.g. in the form of advertisements.  
The advancement and current progress of Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, analogously paints a picture akin to the 1970s with computers that fill rooms, and accept punch cards as input.
Today’s consumers have mobile computing power that is on par to the whole rooms of the 1970s; however, “more compute power” in a tinier package may not be the path to AI sentience.  How AI algorithm models are computed might need to take an alternate approach.  
In a classical computation system, a bit would have to be in one state or the other. However quantum mechanics allows the qubit to be in a superposition of both states at the same time, a property which is fundamental to quantum computing.
The construction, and validation of Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, algorithm models should be engineered on a Quantum Computing framework.
Business, Technology

Advertising Publisher Networks Make a Splash

Advertising Publisher Networks, A.P.N.s, are able to dynamically produce a splash page by ‘My Advertisers’ e.g. for your blog, so in addition to in-line advertising, a sponsors’ page may be dynamically produced, and all your advertisers may have their logo put in the splash page. In addition, the logo may be sized on the page relative to the CPC payout.  Each logo icon will have links to the companies or products being advertised.

Business, Technology

BI Applied to YouTube Yields Value for Advertising, Marketing, & Sales

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Google has scanned and indexed books, and showed the most commonly used words, and added meta data, based on book publishing year, genre, and so on.  It would be great to see that functionality come to YouTube.  Business Intelligence (BI) applied to video libraries yields profit for advertising, sales, and marketing.

Every video, in a batch process, gets analyzed for words used, as well as a word count per word, and there is meta data regarding the video, such as genre, and any other user provided information.  Then as videos get processed, a tag bubble cloud as the high level view shows dynamically the most commonly used words get bigger, and the relatively less appearing / said in the view get smaller.  Someone can then click on that word, and drill down to other information about the word, in a sense business intelligence about the word.  Advertisers, for example, may target certain classes, or word tags for their advertisements to appear.  Another profitable model may be to use this business intelligence for business presentations to understand what are the most frequently used words in business speeches, or presentations, based on a current time period, x and y dates, to track what are the buzz words, and even more granular, the business current buzz words of a specific sector, and global region.

Even the music industry can get into the act by getting ‘current phrases’ and incorporate them into their songs.

Advertising, Business, Entertainment, Technology

Opportunities for Viral Exposure of Amazon and Netflix Unique Content

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It is completely unclear to me why Amazon and Netflix have not developed a widget that allows anyone with a blog, or website to incorporate a particular type of video player widget.  Amazon Associates does have static images for their movies so their associates can enable these plugins on their web sites.  There is also the opportunity to earn some revenue with click through as well as if the click through turns into revenue.  Netflix should also adopt a similar model.  It seems they advertise with select partners. 

What neither company has to drive more revenue is a video widget plugin that allows any blogger to embed it in their site, and plays a trailer of video, a 30 second clip, looped.  This video, once clicked, links to a free view of their  unique content video hosted on the vendor’s site.  The viewers are obligated to rate the video if they want to qualify for a discount.  If it’s a streaming video service such as Netflix,  the discount can be applied to a month of service, or if it’s the purchase of a movie on demand, the discount may be applied to another video of unique content.   They should also track back the revenue earned to the blogger site to pay a nominal referral fee.

Advertising, Books, Business, Music, Retail, Technology

Amazon Content Rich Advertising with Streaming Video & Audio

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The Amazon advertising program should include a plugin for personal web sites and blogs that instead of getting a static image with a link to a movie, or song (with Album cover), the plug in, provided by Amazon, should have an option to have a static image, as per today, or:

  • Any movies, where trailers are available, especially for Amazon Instant Movies, have two formats for an associate plug-in.  The first plugin for low bandwidth sites, the user still continues to see a flattened image of the DVD case or CD album, but in addition, have two links, play trailer, or play music. 
  • The second, more content rich plugin, would have either one, or a rotating collection of playing trailers and/or music, with album image.  The trailer can play the standard or an abridge trailer, as defined in the settings. The music would play at the normal sample length, or an curtailed length, based on the settings.  Finally, there are two image overlays, one in the bottom left, the other in the right, but the user may click, the left has a More Info, the right says Buy @ Amazon.

The user would select a collection of songs as well as movie trailers, or the user may make multiple collections, that have movies, songs, or both.

This same Amazon Associates plugin for web sites or blogs, may be applied to other products, such as Audible.com and audio books with samples.  In the Amazon Associates Product Advertising API WSDL, I did not notice references to ‘sample’ or ‘Trailer’, so I do not think a third party can build this plugin or widget as of yet.

Advertising, Entertainment

Reaping the Dividends of not produced Advertisements, Television, and Movie Scripts

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In an article from the New York Times, Dickens, Austen and Twain, Through a Digital Lens, they discussed may forms of Big Data analysis, including the popular studies from Google’s Book scanning project, which according to the article scanned 20 million books, and the site is used 50 times a minute.  Other studies sited in the article stated movie quotes from the Internet Movie Database, IMDb, as well as looking at advertising slogans raised questions regarding the search algorithms and the people who create them.

Quantitative tools in the humanities and the social sciences, as in other fields, are most powerful when they are controlled by an intelligent human. Experts with deep knowledge of a subject are needed to ask the right questions and to recognize the shortcomings of statistical models.

“You’ll always need both,” says Mr. Jockers, the literary quant. “But we’re at a moment now when there is much greater acceptance of these methods than in the past. There will come a time when this kind of analysis is just part of the tool kit in the humanities, as in every other discipline.”

In the article, it surfaces as a ‘tread lightly’ warning; however, it sounds like an inevitable, troubling, and tantalizing forbidden fruit.  Part of me would recommend scanning in all types of scripts, from Television Shows, Advertisements, and Movie Scripts, produced and also not aired.  There could even be a profitable model to this, and at the same time, make the person asking the questions think real hard on the question before asking, because every answer has a price.  If you put in all of the above scripts into an indexable data warehouse, associate a cost assigned per production company to charge back to the user and provide the fee to the production company if a) the abbreviated content shows up in a search as a line item and b) if the full content is selected by the user to be displayed with the indexable content selected and shown in it’s context.  Two separate pricing models are used for each type, so each action comes with a price.  On the positive side, there are creative talents that went into the creation of the script, and the production company that was able to acquire the script if produced or not, will still reap dividends from the creative artist that produced the script. There are already sites that contain script libraries, so a transformation would be required to utilize the scattered site libraries for analytical processing. Each feed would be allowed to have charge back for the library access, and a fee margin per hit.