How to Get the Most Out of Social Networks and Not Annoy Users

Amid Constant Deluge of Requests, Marketers Must Work Harder to Persuade People to Join Their Pages

by Emma Hall

Published: April 27, 2009

LONDON (AdAge.com) — Welcome to social-media message overload.

The constant barrage of invites to sign up for this group or download that app are starting to wear on social-network users, presenting big challenges for the brands and marketers who are looking to use these sites to aggregate fans and cultivate relationships with customers.

LOVE IT OR HATE IT: The strong opinions of Marmite provide fora fun discussion space.

Nearly a third of social networkers say they are fed up with the constant requests to join groups and try new applications, according to research by the Internet Advertising Bureau in the U.K. That means marketers will need to work harder and keep innovating if they want to harness the consumer power of social networks and persuade people to join their sponsored sites or pages.

When asked “What do you dislike about social networks?” by far the highest response, at 31%, was that there are too many invites to install applications, followed by 16% who said “when advertising isn’t relevant to me.” Slightly more than 5% complained about messages from brands and another 5% actually lamented the addictiveness of social networks. About 12% said they had no complaints. The research showed that 7% of respondents sign up to find out about brands.

“From a marketer’s perspective, social networks look brilliant on paper,” said Alistair Beattie, head of strategic planning at AKQA, London. “It’s a switched-on crowd with a huge amount of time who hold brands close to them. The difficulty is that they regard this as their space. We have all become our own source of entertainment. … But there is a resistance to being advertised at in our own spaces.”

Keeping spam down
Amy Kean, IAB senior marketing manager, said, “Despite [social networking's] popularity, this study shows that respect for the user is just as important in social media. Users will not respond to spam or irrelevant advertising.” And controlling those intrusions will have to become a higher priority for social networks, said Union Square Venture’s Fred Wilson at Ad Age’s recent digital conference.

“One of [social networks'] biggest costs is ‘environmental mediation,’ or keeping the bad people at bay,” Mr. Wilson said.

AKQA had success with a Marmite group on Facebook. The savory spread’s advertising message is “Love it or hate it,” so the group works well as a discussion topic for social networkers. Fans post recipes, discuss weird and wonderful ways to enjoy the sticky black spread, tell tales of conversion to the taste and share frustrations about not being able to purchase it outside the U.K.

Too often, Mr. Beattie said, advertising on social networks is “still a traditional interruptive approach where brands are piggybacking on content that people value.”

The IAB research found that exclusive content, which appeals to 28% of social networkers, and a genuine interest in the message, which attracts 37%, are the keys to a positive response from consumers on social networks. And because only 5% say that they actively dislike messages from brands, there are big opportunities for marketers who can hit the right notes.

“To be popular, brands need to have a personality and be someone that people want to be friends with,” Mr. Beattie said. “The guiding principle is to offer things that are not available elsewhere, things that give social kudos or bragging rights. Brands are part of the fabric of people’s lives and ultimately most are happy to be identified as friends of a brand.”

The IAB study of nearly 2,000 internet users also showed that social networks are taking on extra relevance in the current economic climate. Forty-one percent of members say they now place even more value on ratings and reviews from family and friends on a social network. Mobile social-networking is also on the increase. Updating social-network sites via mobile handsets is increasing, with 25% of all respondents logging on to check or update their pages.

Apple does it once again.

Today on NYT.com Apple has created yet again another amazing rich media display ad. Check it out.

TiVo Promotes Ads It Hopes You’ll Talk to, Not Zap

By STEPHANIE CLIFFORD

Published: April 22, 2009 NYT.com

The company that attacked television advertising is trying to resuscitate it.

TiVo, which allows viewers to digitally record programs and fast-forward through ads, is trying to sell ad spaces on its screens.

It is in a footrace with other companies, including Cablevision, Cox Communications and DirecTV, to offer interactive alternatives to the zapped-through television spots. The ads are called interactive because they ask the viewer to do something — enter in a new channel number, press a button on the remote — to get more information.

“In the last 18 months, the momentum has just lifted,” said Jacqueline Corbelli, the chief executive of BrightLine iTV, which designs interactive ads. “It’s started to become a staple of very large advertisers.”

In December, TiVo began offering ads that appear as a small piece of text when viewers pause a show. Advertisers can choose the specific show or genre they want their pause ad to appear on — Mercedes-Benz USA used it to promote a new car during football games earlier this year. TiVo also offers ads that appear when viewers fast-forward through shows. Advertisers who run regular 30- or 60-second spots can buy these, and when the viewer presses fast-forward, a static box appears. One for Tourism Australia shows a photograph of a girl on a beach with the text, exclaiming, “Don’t tell me I just skipped the Australia ad!” TiVo viewers are instructed to press the Thumbs Up button to see the ad and get more information.

Once a viewer interacts with its ads, TiVo can show them a video about the product, let them request more information or a coupon, or even let them configure a car with different colors and options. TiVo also sells ad space on TiVo Central, its home screen.

“By catching them at a time when they’re pausing the program, when they’ve finished with a program,” said Tara Maitra, vice president and general manager of content and advertising at TiVo, “the viewer’s main reason for being there isn’t being interrupted.”

TiVo is not the only company devising a solution to commercial-skipping. Cable and satellite companies, and technology providers like Microsoft’s Navic Networks, are also working on interactive ads.

The cable offerings vary by market. In Tucson, Phoenix, San Diego and Las Vegas, Cox Communications sells interactive spots, with graphics on top of commercials that direct viewers to vote or ask for more information using their remotes. In the New York metro area, Cablevision sells special video-on-demand channels to companies like Disney, which runs videos about its amusement parks and stars and a “talk to agent” button that is associated with the viewer’s phone number, provided by Cablevision; selecting it results in an immediate phone call from a Disney representative.

Time Warner offers some interactivity, too. Last September, the media company MPG ran a test for the insurance company American International Group with about 180,000 Time Warner subscribers in Hawaii. MPG, a unit of Havas, used Navic technology to send different ads to households with different demographics, and a banner sat on top of the ad as it ran, telling viewers to click a button on their remote for more information. Only 566 of the households interacted with the ad, said Mitch Oscar, executive vice president of televisual applications at MPG. But, he said, that number was promising.

“We’re doing branding spots anyway,” he said. “If advertisers are going to run commercials one way or the other, and we can add this element to it.”

For now, the cable company’s interactive offerings are largely limited to the two minutes of advertising an hour that each local operator sells. But Canoe Ventures, the consortium of the nation’s six largest cable companies, has announced it will make interactive request-for-information ads available by the end of 2009, and those will be available nationally.

The satellite providers, DirecTV and Dish Network, also offer interactive ads that can run nationwide — a recent Nike ad on Dish Network allowed viewers to zoom in to see a shoe, among other features.

Unilever, the consumer products company, which owns brands like Bertolli and Dove, has been aggressive in the interactive television space for the last couple of years, so much so that it held an “upfront” in the winter to book and negotiate for interactive television slots.

“What we love about it is, if you think about it, the remote control and DVRs have really been a marketer’s worst nightmare,” said Anne Jensen, brand-building director at Unilever. “What we’re doing with ITV is we’re actually making the remote control our friend.”

Last week, Unilever introduced an interactive campaign for Axe on DirecTV that had new interactive features. The campaign promoted Axe’s body washes for men, which come in four varieties, like “Shock,” to wake you up, and the exfoliating “Snake Peel,” so “if you’ve had a very questionable hookup you can scrub away the shame,” Ms. Jensen said.

The idea with this campaign was that “guys don’t really talk to each other about personal hygiene,” Ms. Jensen said. The interactive piece, designed by BrightLine, comes when the commercial’s host points to a space on the screen, and a button pops up that viewers can select for more information. Then, there are clips where Axe diagnoses what variety is appropriate for the viewer, and suggests pranks the viewers can play on friends.

Axe receives reports on how many people responded to the ads, what sections of the extra video they watched, and how much time they spent with the Axe material. “What’s nice is that this medium can be quite flexible in terms of how we optimize our campaigns and improve it as we go along,” Ms. Jensen said.

For all of the data and features that interactive ads offer, the fragmentation of the industry tended to scare off advertisers, said Craig Woerz, managing partner of Media Storm, an agency based in South Norwalk, Conn., that has run interactive ads for clients like Magnolia Pictures and the Food Network.

“Advertisers and agencies love to take the easy way out which is, I’m not going to look at this interactive stuff until I’ve got 90 million households, 60 million households,” Mr. Woerz said. “There’s a heck of a base out there. But you’re not going to do it with one phone call.”

TED Interview: Tribes Author Says People, Not Ads, Build Social Networks

By Kim ZetterCategories: TED Conference Wired.com

Seth Godin is an author and entrepreneur. His latest book, Tribes, argues that “lasting and substantive change can be best effected by a group of people connected to each other, to a leader and to an idea,” according to Publisher’s Weekly.

In an interview with Wired.com, Godin discussed the role of ego in a successful leader, finding your inner charisma and whether timing is everything, or even anything.

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Wired: What exactly is a tribe and why is it so important?

Seth Godin: Big world-changing ideas have had three cycles. The first cycle was that you could change the world by building a factory the way Henry Ford did. If you could put productive people to work and make money producing something that made change, then people like Henry Ford and Andy Grove could cause world-changing things to occur.

The second cycle had to do with advertising and TV and media and promotion. The idea that if you talked about an idea enough and pushed it on people enough, it could change the world.

The third idea, the one that I think is really available to a large number of people now without a lot of resources, is this idea of finding and connecting like-minded people and leading them to a place they want to go. You can use Barack Obama as an example, but you can also use Blake Mycoskie of Tom’s Shoes. The internet means geography isn’t so important, so if you can find the 1,000 or 5,000 or 50,000 people out there who want to make a certain kind of change and can connect them and show them a path, they want to follow you. And you can use that tribe, that group of people, to make change that matters.

Wired: What makes one tribe gel over another?

SG: The people who are successful at it, what they have in common is they take action for the tribe and with the tribe as opposed to doing things to the tribe. There are plenty of people out there who have an agenda they want to achieve, but sometimes they get so caught up in themselves and the agenda that they forget that they have to nurture the tribe if they want the tribe to follow them.

Wired: So for a tribe to succeed the leader needs to get his ego out of the way?

SG: Ego turns out not to be relevant. There are some people who do it completely without ego … and [then there's] Steve Jobs who has an ego bigger than the Empire State Building and also leads a movement. The people who are buying Apple stock don’t do it for Steve, they do it for themselves. They do it for the way it makes them feel … like an insurgent, a creative-class member, somebody who is part of something.

Wired: Speaking of Apple, the company managed to build a tribe of people who wanted to identify themselves as being different, but it also created a backlash against the tribe, which was viewed as elitist and snobby. Is there a danger in a tribe becoming too popular?

SG: I think you’re bringing up two interesting points. The first point is you can’t have insiders unless you have outsiders. All tribes have outsiders. That’s what makes them a tribe. If everyone is a member, it’s not a tribe anymore…. So I don’t think there’s any problem at all for Apple with people saying they’re elitist.

The second thing you’re talking about is the paradox of building a tribe of outsiders, building a tribe of people who want to be seen as being different or independent, because once you succeed at that, it’s no longer true. The magical dance that Apple has done … for example with the iPod, at the beginning people like me bought an iPod because we wanted to show the rest of the world that we were cool and different and ahead of the curve. Now people buy an iPod because everyone else has one. And so they have gone from being the insurgent product to the default product. And that is an extremely difficult path to navigate, but they managed to do it.

Wired: You mentioned Al Gore. It’s interesting that if he’d tried leading the global environmental movement 10 years ago, it wouldn’t have succeeded. So it seems the timing has to be right for a tribe to gel.

SG: I think the scientists among us would say it’s almost impossible to prove whether that’s true or not. We do it after the fact. After the fact we say, oh yeah, that worked because the time was right. In terms of social movements, could Barack Obama or someone like him have been elected eight years ago? … All I know is that when it works, it’s proof that the time was right.

Wired: You’ve said that a tribe doesn’t have to be encouraged to connect, they want to connect with each other. And that you as the person in the center aren’t required to do anything.

SG: That part’s not true. It requires you to do a great deal. But what you don’t need to do is sell people on the fact that they want to connect. That’s human nature. We want to connect with like-minded people. What you have to do that’s very difficult is create the platform –- whether it’s a cocktail party or a technology -– where people can get over social friction, where people can make connections that would ordinarily feel awkward. So why does TED as a conference work? It works because after traveling all that way and paying all that money, it’s expected that you will join the TED tribe. Whereas if the TED conference didn’t exist and you just called people on the list and said why don’t 20 of us get together for coffee, that would be a weird phone call to make…. That’s part of what it means to make a movement – do something difficult to overcome the social friction.

Wired: So it’s all about sensing a need and filling the need and encouraging the connection.

SG: The need is always there -– the need to connect, to matter. I think the need comes and then the issue comes, not the other way around…. And what leaders do, whether they’re leading a small Christian evangelical community or trying to organize India to overthrow British imperialism … is they find a particular subset of people who also share a goal … and bring in the right people to support it. If it hadn’t been Al Gore, it could have been William F. Buckley who had led the fight against global warming and it could have been completely filled with people from the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal…. It just happened that the leader who stood up and did it had a natural constituency, a constituency that was looking for the cause and the connection and the movement, and he was the man to do it…. My point is that people don’t become leaders because they have charisma; people get charisma because they’re leaders.

Wired: There are a lot of leaders who don’t have charisma.

SG: Well Al Gore has charisma now. Where did Al find his charisma? The charisma showed up because he was leading. I don’t think you can lead correctly with transparency and create a movement if you’re not passionate about it. The passion and the leadership go together and once you’ve done those things you are seen as being charismatic by the people who are following you…. What makes you a leader is not that you own a company with 150 people. What makes you a leader is that you are leading people who want to be led, going somewhere they want to go.

Wired: How do you put your tribe ahead of others in a land of too many choices and too many other things vying for attention?

SG: The leadership today is about 10 people bringing you 100 and 100 bringing you 1,000. When you have 1,000 true fans, as Kevin Kelly talks about, then they’re the people who are going to turn it into a movement. Not you. Your job is to take care of and feed and nurture those 1,000 people, and those people need to go to their network of people who know them and trust them, who eat dinner with them, and bring them in. It’s not for you to somehow beam your message to strangers and convert them, because you can’t convert strangers anymore. Not one major new consumer brand built in the last five years was built on the back of advertising. Google and Facebook, etc. are built because one person brought another one by the hand, not because someone bought ads on the Super Bowl.

Ford Is Counting on Army of 100 Bloggers to Launch New Fiesta

Automaker Lends New Models to Trendsetters for Six Months as Part of Huge Social-Media Push

by Eric Tegler

Published: April 20, 2009

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — In an aggressive social-media program that goes far beyond what Ford has done in the past — and reaches beyond just the marketing department — the automaker is counting on 100 bloggers to introduce its new Fiesta, which is set to reach U.S. dealers in early 2010. The idea behind Fiesta Movement is to get the model’s target audience to drive and, hopefully, chatter about the car for months to come.

THE MOVEMENT: Ford hopes to build buzz for new Fiesta among target audience.

The Fiesta is Ford’s global subcompact vehicle and was designed in Europe, where it’s been on sale since August 2008. The diminutive hatchback (a sedan will be launched here) seeks to provide stylish transportation in a small package with low acquisition cost, high fuel efficiency and cues that appeal to young consumers.

Ford is loaning 100 German-built Fiestas to social-media trendsetters for six months. The 100 “Fiesta agents,” chosen from 4,000 who applied online, will share their experiences behind the wheel, completing monthly, themed missions from travel to social activism; posting videos; and updating their friends and followers on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and elsewhere. The participants begin training with their Fiestas in late April, and they will begin receiving the cars in the first week of May.

The idea was born last summer when Ford VP-Marketing Jim Farley rhetorically asked Fiesta Product Manager Sam De La Garza, “What could we do with 1,000 [Fiestas] in the U.S.?”

Considering the car’s target audience and the likelihood of extra production capacity from the European Fiesta launch, Mr. De La Garza and the company’s brand and content alliance team asked Ford’s coordinating agency, JWT, to brainstorm a social-media campaign. JWT contacted think tank Undercurrent, and the pair devised the Fiesta Movement as a 100-person test drive.

Product trust
“We realized that the message is increasingly out of our control and that we have to roll with it,” Mr. De La Garza said. “For us it all rests on the quality of this product. We’ve all driven the Fiesta, and we felt so confident about the car that we could start this. We’re going to allow people to tell the story [of the Fiesta] from their lives.”

Faith in a product or no, trusting it enough to unleash 100 to regular consumers and ask them to offer honest thoughts and reviews is a leap for most marketers. It will require a new kind of corporate responsiveness and flexibility, said Scott Monty, Ford’s director-social media.

“No matter how well you plan for something like this, something else always comes up,” he said. “This is not only an experiment for Ford in terms of a marketing program; it’s an experiment for us in terms of how we react to how the market picks up on it.”

Early signs indicate a ripple effect from simply signing agents to the Fiesta Movement. Mr. De La Garza said several of those selected have already gotten interviews with regional newspapers or TV stations based on their acceptance into the program.

The Fiesta Movement extends beyond marketing, since the company had to modify the 100 European-built vehicles to meet U.S. emissions and safety requirements. Both Ford and the EPA will use data gathered form the program, such as city and highway miles per gallon, for future manufacturer global platform launches. Ford is building the Fiesta as a “global” car that can, with minor tweaking, meet differing requirements in the U.S., Europe and Asia.

“The scary thing is we’re opening the door for European-based car companies to say, ‘Ford did this [with a Euro-spec car]; let’s do it too,’” Mr. De La Garza said.

According to Scott Monty, JWT will undertake the bulk of reviewing/posting online content generated by Fiesta agents, while mining data with the new metrics made possible through social media. Attributable Fiesta sales will definitely be a yardstick for success. So, too, will the life of the Fiesta Movement beyond the test drive

Why Pizza Giants Want Customers to Click, Not Call, for Delivery

Pizza Hut, Papa John’s, Others Hope to Boost Online Orders to 50%

by Emily Bryson York

Published: April 20, 2009

CHICAGO (AdAge.com) — The major pizza chains now do 20% to 30% of their business online, but they want that figure to climb a lot higher, to 50%. Getting there will take some doing, but the journey offers lessons for other marketers also seeking to build their business online: Know your customers, make it easy and offer incentives.

Five ways to get more people to purchase your product online

All online and offline ads, even packaging, should promote your website. Make your site “slippery”; speedy transactions foster loyalty. Take the sting out of account setup by making the initial order as simple as possible. Offer incentives for the first purchase and find other reasons for site visits: Coupons, freebies and entertainment tie-ins all goose interest. Manage your database by tailoring offers to consumers who opt in.

There are good reasons for pizza purveyors to move buyers to web ordering. Online customers spend more and are more satisfied, and serving them is more efficient for each individual store. People who order online are also more likely to jump on the promotions that marketers use to drive interest in new products. Bob Kraut, VP-marketing at Pizza Hut, which expects to do $1 billion in online sales by the end of 2012 — a whopping tenfold increase from the May 2007 level of $100 million — said the online pizza buyer is more recession-proof than most.

“We’re seeing very healthy increases year over year with our web business,” he said. “I think that’s because the customer is a little higher income and has a greater connectedness to this form of ordering and tends to not be affected by the economic conditions as maybe other customers.” Pizza Hut has also begun to compete more with casual dining by offering pasta dinners with breadsticks that serve four for $15.

Rob Weisberg, Domino’s VP-multimedia marketing, said the average online buyer spends $2 more than one who orders by phone or in person. Domino’s does about 75 online orders a second, and Mr. Weisberg said the chain now has fewer employees answering the phone and more of them making pizzas. He declined to give the percentage of sales from online.

Papa John’s, which spurred its two much-larger competitors to action in the online arena several years ago, did not respond to requests for comment.

Suited to online sales
Sam Sebastian, director of local and B-to-B markets at Google, who works frequently with Domino’s, Pizza Hut and Papa John’s, said delivery pizza may just be better suited to online sales. All three chains have exploited that advantage by shifting spending to banner ads and search engine optimization from traditional media faster than their fast-food counterparts.

Mr. Kraut said a key for Pizza Hut has been trying to make its website “slippery” instead of “sticky.” That means it is constantly looking for ways to help consumers place their orders more quickly.

Domino’s, home of the pizza tracker, is working on that too. Mr. Weisberg said the company recognizes the first-time order as a barrier to entry because consumers have to take the time to input their addresses and credit-card information, set a password, and build their pizza. But the next time they log in and want to place the same order, it can be done in 15 seconds.

“There’s more of a barrier to exit,” he said. For that reason, Mr. Weisberg said, Domino’s has cookies built into its site that recognize first-time users and offer special discounts. The Pizza Hut site does too.

Taking tie-ins
Pizza Hut and Papa John’s are also attempting to drive online sales through entertainment tie-ins that have traditionally been the bread and butter of burger joints. Papa John’s is partnering with “X-Men Origins: Wolverine,” and Pizza Hut with “Terminator Salvation,” starring Christian Bale. Pizza Hut will offer five minutes of exclusive content from director McG beginning in May. It’s sure to please the fanboys.

Mr. Kraut said the event presents an opportunity to deepen relationships with current customers and attract new ones to the site. It doesn’t hurt that the comic-book and video-game crowds also tend to be a younger, more tech-savvy bunch.

“We’re engaging them on a level of popular and social currency of the movie while also getting people to opt in and buy Pizza Hut,” Mr. Kraut said. “And we’re generating customers that haven’t visited PizzaHut.com before.”

Pizza Hut has done similar promotions with eMusic and Rockstar Games.

Adobe Flash secures set-top deal

Adobe has secured a deal to put its Flash software into many ofthe chips that go inside TVs and set-top boxes.

Source: www.bbc.co.uk

This could be the TV of the future

It will enable developers and content providers to create applications to deliver web-based content such as news,  weather and share prices to TV screens.

Flash will be included on most chips -those made by Broadcom, Intel, NXP and STMicroelectronics – but the deal does not cover TVs made by Sony and Samsung.

The first applications using Flash are expected to hit TV sets early in 2010.

Sony and Samsung already have a number of connected TVs on the market, but they are using Yahoo’s rich media platform of widgets instead of Flash.

More than 420 million TVs, set-top boxes, and media players are expected to ship globally in the next three years and increasingly they are capable of being connected to the net.

Change is coming to TV and we will see more and more content get used Flash director of technology strategy for Flash, Anup Murarka

Adobe hopes it can get Flash inside many of those devices to create a new generation of connected entertainment services, including streaming video in high definition, and applications that can run in real time alongside video broadcasts, such as interactive news tickers, sport scores, quizzes and the weather.

It could also mean TVs being used for many of the tasks now given over to a computer or laptop, such as using a search engine, online maps, and consuming all manner of digital content.

Adobe has signed up video delivery service Netflix, Disney and the New York Times to make the first batch of applications.

The appeal for content makers and developers is the emergence of a single standard for rich media, which will let them create applications that run on many devices.

“Change is coming to TV and we will see more and more content get used and taken to TV,” said Anup Murarka, director of technology strategy for Flash.

Adobe hope Flash can power widgets on your TVs

Flash is installed on about 98% of PCs and almost 80% of all online video is delivered using Flash, according to Adobe.

It powers services such as YouTube, the BBC iPlayer and a new generation of video games inside the browser, such as Quake Live.

Microsoft has been pushing its own rival platform Silverlight, but it has had limited traction with developers and hardware manufacturers.

The company says its second version of Silverlight has been installed on 300 million machines since it became available six months ago.

But analysts think Silverlight is unlikely to challenge Flash across PCs, mobiles and TV screens in the near future.

Microsoft does have the Xbox 360 in the hands of at least 28 million gamers and the machine could be used to drive take-up of Silverlight in the home.

It also has a few deals with the makers of set-top boxes to power the software that runs TV guides and on-demand services over the internet and this too could be a way to spread Silverlight usage.

Flash is the engine behind YouTube and BBC iPlayer video

Flash Platform Business Unit general manager and vice president David Wadhwani said he still hoped to see Flash on the Xbox 360, as it is already running on the PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Wii.

“I don’t think it is beyond the realm of reason that we will see Flash on the Xbox.

“It would add clear value to their platform. But the decision is still theirs to make.”

Adobe is aiming to become the global standard for all rich media in the “three screen” world – PC, TV, and mobile.

Up to 40% of all mobile devices shipped in 2008 are expected to carry Flash Lite. However, the big omission remains Apple’s iPhone.

“We continue to work with Apple to bring Flash to the iPhone,” said Mr Wadhwani.

Cool video on the history of the internet

U.S. Hispanic Web Audience on the Rise

The tally has risen to 20 million unique users

-By Mike Shields, Mediaweek

NEW YORK The U.S. Hispanic audience on the Internet has risen to 20 million unique users, growing over the past year 50 percent faster than that of the general population, according to comScore.

In February 2009, per comScore, there were 20.3 million U.S. Hispanic visitors on the Web, representing a surge of 5.8 percent versus February 2008. During that same period of time, the general Web population grew 3.9 percent. A similar growth disparity was evident for engagement measures such as total minutes spent online and overall page views, where Hispanics exhibited growth five times the rate of the general population.

However, despite that trajectory, the U.S. Hispanic audience has a ways to go to catch up to the general market in terms of total Web use. Hispanics now account for 11 percent of the Web’s population, but only generate 9 percent of the total time spent with the medium. That’s likely driven by the maturity of the general market, which is composed of a large number of longtime Internet users.

“Though U.S. Hispanics are less engaged Internet users on average, they do show a predilection for…high engagement activities that offer a potentially strong marketing opportunity,” Jack Flanagan, executive vp of comScore Media Metrix.

Source: Mediaweek.com

BK’s Square-Butt Spot Makes Viral-Chart Debut in Third Place

What People Watched the Week of April 6, 2009

by Abbey Klaassen

Published: April 16, 2009

NEW YORK (Ad Age.com) — The King likes square butts — and web-video viewers sure like his crooning about them. The Crispin-produced video promoting Burger King’s SpongeBob SquarePants kids meals, which is also airing on TV, entered this week’s viral-video chart in the No. 3 spot with more than a half million views, according to data from video-measurement firm Visible Measures.

It wasn’t quite enough to catch the leader (for the third week in a row), Samsung’s video of LED-strapped sheep. And T-Mobile’s “Dance” also showed staying power, maintaining a top-three ranking and even gaining 2%, despite having made its debut way back in January.

Also new to the chart: a cheeky video from Wilkinson Sword called “Mow the Lawn” (ahem) and a Kia spot that uses hamsters to show off its compact Soul model.

	Last Week	Brand	Campaign	Agency	Current Week Views*	% Change in Views**	Watch the Spot
1	1	Samsung	Extreme Sheep LED Art	The Viral Factory	1,114,491	-33%
2	3	T-Mobile	T-Mobile Dance	Saatchi & Saatchi, MediaCom	742,120	+2%
3	New	Burger King	SpongeBob	Crispin Porter & Bogusky	549,717	New to chart
4	4	Cadbury	Eyebrow Dance	Fallon	438,407	-7%
5	2	Geico	It’s the Gecko/ Numa Numa	The Martin Agency, Horizon Media	388,569	-72%
6	6	McDonald’s	Talking Filet-O-Fish	Arnold	373,292	+60%
7	New	Wilkinson Sword	Mow the Lawn	JWT, New York	261,441	New to chart
8	7	E-Trade	E-Trade Baby	Grey, New York	229,799	-1%
9	New	Kia	Kia Soul: Hamsters	David & Goliath, KMA	215,090	New to chart
10	5	Durex	Get It On	Fitzgerald & Co., SuperFad	201,566	-37%
Source: Visible Measures *The Visible Measures Top 10 Viral Video Ad Campaigns Chart focuses on brand-driven viral video ads that appear on online-video-sharing destinations. Each campaign is measured on a True Reach™ basis, which includes viewership of both brand-syndicated video clips and viewer-driven social video placements. The data are compiled using the Visible Measures Viral Reach Database, a constantly growing repository of analytic data on more than 100 million internet videos across more than 150 video-sharing destinations. Note: This analysis does not include Visible Measures’ paid-placement (i.e., overlays, pre-/mid-/post-roll) performance data or video views on private sites. This chart does not include movie trailers, video-game campaigns or public service announcements. View-count results are incremental by week. **Indicates percent change in views compared with the same period the week before. To notify Visible Measures of an upcoming video ad campaign, or for an end-to-end assessment of your campaign’s overall performance, please contact Visible Measures directly.