Sunday, September 30, 2012

Investigation: Digital Advertising

In the past few years, there has been a massive boom in the "smartphone" industry.  With the addition of internet, apps, and music available on these smartphones, this enables many doors to be opened in the mobile marketing industry.  Another reason companies are now choosing mobile marketing is because the age group for smartphone owners keeps expanding.  Parents are buying iPhone's for their daughters, and the older people are starting to catch-on with the smartphone trend.  Apps are a very popular source of advertisements because they are easy to download and easy to use.  One example of a company who uses apps for advertising is Lexus.  They targeted the game "Draw Something" in order to try and gain a young adult audience.  This particular game has been downloaded over 50 million times, and that does not include all the times the app is opened, so this just goes to show the type of traffic these advertisements receive.  Also, these particular ads are not like the Youtube ads where you can choose to close out of them.  Instead, they are banners which stay in one place and are not allowed to be closed out of.  This is another advantage and you can read the rest of the article here.  There are more numerous amounts of ways to advertise via "mobile marketing" which I will get to in a second.  Statistics show that these smartphone devices keep getting more and more popular.  Overall access to entertainment content in smartphones increased 82% between 2010 and 2011, and a staggering 42% of mobile users have a smartphone. The rest of the article is here.  The use of "cloud" music technology is also an overwhelming presence on smartphones these days.  "Cloud" music is essentially free for the consumers, however, companies use these apps for advertising use.  Almost every single smartphone user has some type of cloud music app such as Pandora or Spotify.  A study showed that women download twice as much content as men.  This is the type of information these companies need in order to figure out where they want to target their ads.  The rest of the article is here.  I was actually listening to Spotify earlier and one of the ads was a Lady Antebellum ad.  Although some men probably like this band, the majority of their fans are women.  Mobile marketing or television ads? Which is better?  According to some statistical trends, television advertising was up 6.8% in 2011 compared to mobile advertising which rose 60.1%.  Companies are starting to realize the importance of mobile ads.  The rest of the ad can be seen here.  How do consumers/audiences feel about mobile advertising?  Well, there's one thing for sure.  They are a hell of a lot less annoying than television ads.  According to an online publisher's association, 79% of smartphone users have taken action after seeing an ad, which means they bought a product that was advertised.  This goes to show that these mobile ads are doing some sort of good, and audiences do not get near as annoyed as television ads.  The rest of the article can be seen here.

Problems With Digital Advertising

Personally I cannot stand digital advertising, all of the pop-ups and banner ads on websites are annoying, and many people agree that digital advertising needs to make some major changes before it can be considered effective.  Some people argue that the majority of people now own DVR’s and TiVo’s, allowing the viewing audience to skip the commercials, rendering the traditional television ads increasingly ineffective.  These people say that due to this phenomenon, digital advertising is the way to go to get the message out to the masses about your product or service.  I find this view to be false.

I believe that digital advertising faces many problems that disallow it from being effective.  For one, on a majority of websites, the ads are displayed as banner ads, and they are ridiculously cluttered.  There are often ten to twenty ads thrown onto a single webpage with no sense of rhyme or reason to their placement.  Also, some ads seem shady as if they are scams trying to rid us of our money.  This has taught us to become wary of banner ads and to promptly “x” out of all pop-ups, never really giving the real ads a chance.  Finally, people want to be in control when they are on the web.  When surfing the web, the last thing I want to do is deal with the usually irrelevant advertisements because I am on the web for a purpose.  For example, I visit ESPN’s website to check the NFL and college football scores and stats, not to view the ad telling me how cool the nexus7 tablet is and why I must buy it.  An audience will watch the humorous ads on TV because they are already there to view something, they’ll listen to the catchy advertisement jingles on the radio because they are already there to listen to something, so how do you catch the audience surfing the webs attention?

A final issue is that more and more people are accessing the internet on their mobile phones and tablets.  The small screens of these devices make the banner ads used on the web extremely ineffective.  It will be interesting to see what changes will be made in digital advertising in order to deal with this relatively new issue.   


Related Articles:
Will Mobile's Massive Growth Ever Equal Real Revenue?
Agree to Disagree: TV vs Digital for reaching a larger audience
A Problem with Online Advertising Is There Are So Many Problems
Problem With Internet Advertising
What's The Problem With Digital Advertising

Investigation: Digital Advertising

The advertising industry has grown immensely due to recent technological improvements. The rise of the internet helped advertising boom emphatically. Through the web, individuals can advertise on popular pages including search engines, social networks, and along side videos. Digital advertising has become even more successful through targeted ads. These are ads primarily on popular sites for which they are selected for relevance to the content of the sites, and for the demographics of the audiences of such sites. This made it that much easier for advertisers to get their products to their preferred customers. Considering how much society relies on technology this day in age, advertisers are even more interested in digital advertising. Whether it's a pop-up for Viagra on a porn site or the E-text ad in between songs on Pandora, digital advertising is simply becoming more effective. There is, however, a negative perspective on advertising because initially, ads interrupt what we're doing, watching, or listening to. Due to this aspect, there have been successful means which other industries have gone to in order to avoid and prevent ads. You can now get pop-up and ad-block softwares or even pay extra on devices like a Kindle Fire to prevent ads completely. Though, for those who don't feel the need to go out of the way to avoid advertisements, there are nice options on sites like Hulu offering a range of ads to play during the show to keep consumers' preference first. Digital advertisement is not necessarily better than other ways of advertising, but I do think it contributes to the rise of the advertising industry through its convenience, subtelness, and effectiveness.


Here are some articles that further discuss digital advertising: 

Display Ads
New Territory for Ads
Social Media Advertising
The Ethics Of Digital Advertising
50% of Advertising

Wednesday, September 26, 2012

Digging Deeper music from the clouds



OK first off I chose to do Pandora considering I use it in my daily life and its one of the fastest growing Internet radio providers besides Spotify. First a little background information on Pandora.” Pandora's Music Genome Project powers the personalization of Internet radio by using musicological "DNA" and constant listener feedback to craft personalized stations.”  In a simpler term you can put in any of your favorite song or artist and it will play that typical song or artist with other music that is closely related to it. First off I like to say that this is one of the greatest ideas in the past ten years to handle music online. I also feel like this helps with the issue of lost revenues, considering that it lets the users experience new music that they might not have listened to in the first place. This is an interesting advantage of Pandora, considering you get to hear artists that you may not have heard on the actual radio which is so commercially controlled and only plays certain popular songs. Internet radio sites like Pandora also pay royalties to record companies to stream this music, which means profits for the record companies, thus helps them regain some of those profits they lost because of this new digital age. Currently Pandora and Spotify have had to pay a higher rate of royalties than cable and satellite radio, with Pandora paying up to nearly 50 percent of its revenues in sound recording royalties. But now there is currently an "Internet Radio Fairness Act" being introduced to congress to help lower the royalty fees paid by Internet music-streaming services, to those paid by other digital and satellite radio stations. Now that most of the back-story has been told this definitely helps the issue of lost revenue but on the flip-side it can hurt them too. Now you might find yourself saying, but wait, if we already download the popular radio music wouldn’t you just download the new music you hear on Pandora. While yes this could be a possibility and would kill my argument I have one thing to refute that point. And that Pandora reported for the second quarter of fiscal 2013, total revenue was $101.3 million, a 51 percent year-over-year increase. Thus case in point I stick by my side that online radio stations like Pandora is a great solution to lost profits and while yes you can argue the other point numbers don’t lie.
Thanks for reading.
you can see the links here and here

Music from the Clouds (Digging Deeper)

Recent technological advancements have been greatly influencing the music industry's economy. We went from vinyls to CDs to mp3s, ect... and now the industry is run by "cloud" technology through applications like Pandora and Spotify. In Randall Robert's article in the LA Times, he discusses the pros and cons of such applications. Though the sentimental value and physical aspect of owning a collection of vinyls is no longer present, Robert agrees that having all his music at the touch of his fingertips is indeed an appealing convenience. He goes on to say that variations of the apps like Match and iCloud are worth the price as he uploads his musical archives onto them. Though Pandora is a free application, Spotify does charge membership fees that vary in price as well as in benefits. And while Pandora doesn't charge it's customers, its revenue is retained solely from advertising. In Ben Sisario's article of the The New York Times, he discusses how Pandora's ad-based revenue has yet to result in a profitable year due to royalty rates. Though he states that Spotify made 83% of it's revenue from subscriptions, Sisario goes on to say that their cost of sales last year was a hefty 97% of revenue. Despite having different business models, both companies face the same economic issues of high costs of musical royalties. This is subject to change in the future if royalty rates ever go down. This simply shows how poorly the digital music industry was handled. Digital services have the potential to boom into a successful and profitable industry if they are economically proportionate.

Music Discovery from the Clouds

  If you're looking for a broad, international selection of great music, then sites like Pandora are the 
answer. Unlike many other "music sites," what i do like about the site is that it seems like it is purely devoted to the music search and discovery. You can type in any artist you'd like and Pandora will actually introduce to you new music based on your previous searches. There's nothing like the feeling of discovering new songs to tickle your ears, which is EXACTLY what Pandora is becoming known for.



  Now, is this bad news for musical artists looking for the dough? Personally, i think it is quite beneficial. There is no real direct downloading from pandora, rather just links that will send you to iTunes, Beatport, etc. The site simply introduces and informs its users. As far as Pandora free listening goes, I really would have a hard time being convinced that sites similar to pandora could be doing anything but helping artists get their music and their name out on the market. In today's world of piracy and illegal downloading, it is really refreshing to see sites like Pandora and Spotify seemingly settling the dust. If you want to learn a little more about sites like these check them out here! :)

Tuesday, September 25, 2012

Music From The Clouds (Digging Deeper)

Personally, I am a huge fan of Spotify, Pandora etc.  However, I also buy all of my music on iTunes as well.  A few years ago, many bands and artists still relied on album sales as a key source of revenue, but that has all but disappeared in today's day and age due to new music platform companies.  There is a fairly new company based out of London called Omniphone, a lot like Spotify.  Their music platform provides over 22 million song tracks to 28 total countries world wide.  Their business is booming.  They just reported an increase of 118% in revenue this past year and are continuing to grow. You can check out the article here.  Now, do we think this is a good thing for artists, bands, etc or a bad thing?  There are several different ways a person can look at this issue.  Although the bands do have a decrease in album revenue, the music platform companies offer enormous amounts of exposure for up-and-coming bands as well as established bands.  I'm going to use Spotify as an example.  The software is incredibly easy to use.  For every band you listen to, there is a tab to the side that lists several bands similar to the one you are listening to.  I have discovered many bands that I had no clue about.  Now that I said that, you might say "Well, you discovered a new band on Spotify, that doesn't benefit the new band you found because you aren't buying their music."  In my case, wrong.  I go straight to iTunes and buy the song I like, and I'm sure this is still the case with tons of people.  Another thing that happens when I discover a new band on Spotify is go straight to their website to see if they have any tour dates in my area, and what do I do when I attend a concert?  I buy merchandise.  Spotify does pay royalties to the artists, but if you are not a big name band, it is really not much at all. Here is the article about the pay from a musicians prospective.  In the "big picture" of things, I believe these "cloud" companies such as Spotify, Pandora, Omniphone, etc. greatly expand the economy of the music industry and open up doors for many artists and bands despite their decreased revenue in album sales.

Monday, September 17, 2012

He's Perfect Digging Deeper

I chose the movie He's Fuckin Perfect by Lauryn Kahn. The movie is about a social media savvy girl who is pessimistic about love finds the perfect guy and decides to use her Internet research skills to turn herself into his perfect match. Of course just by the description you can see it is a comedy if i were the producer for this movie it would be a total green light. People would love to see a comedy about a girl who uses social media to try to become a perfect match for a guy. The writer of the film is perfect to come up with the story she works as a an assistant to multi-hyphenate Adam McKay of Gary Sanchez Prods., a shingle he co-owns with Will Ferrell. While working there she has appeared in many funnyordie.com webisodes and was mentored by McKay. With that track record alone i have faith in Kahn. I also love the script because there is plenty of content and this movie would be very easy to market to our social media obsessed world, this movie has the possibility to turn out huge profits.For the director I would probably get someone like Donald Petrie he has directed other romantic comedies like "How to Lose a Guy in 10 days" and "Ms. Congeniality"which means he probably would have success for this movie also. So for the cast I would go with a bigger budget so I could cast a beautiful and witty girl kind of like a (Emma Stone) to play the social media savvy girl. For the guy I would find a guy that had a track record for being a heart throb to women but could hold his own acting, so maybe even a newer actor on the scene. In recent news Lauryn Kahn actually got the movie green lighted. Last month, Kahn sold her comedy spec "He's Fuckin' Perfect" to Fox 2000 in a deal that is reportedly worth $1 million. Emma Stone is attached to star.

If you would like to check out related materials you can do so here 

Sunday, September 16, 2012

Bastards: The Ultimate Action Film

Keywords: Bastards, Wahlberg, Hardy, Eastwood, Paramount

As an executive at a movie studio, I would choose to greenlight the previously blacklisted movie Bastards.  The movie, written by Justin Malen, is about two brothers, raised to believe their biological father died, find out their mother slept with many powerful and famous men in the 1970’s, and the siblings hit the road to find real father.  The writer intended for the movie to be a comedy, but I would change it to become an action film.  I feel that having the possible biological fathers being dangerous men, such as prominent gang members and drug kingpins, would generate a great action film.  The two brothers would be notorious troublemakers in their hometown due to growing up without a father figure, and on the journey to find their father, they would run into many dangerous altercations such as gun fights, car chases, etc.  I can see Mark Wahlberg and Tom Hardy playing the two brothers, and Clint Eastwood directing and possibly playing one of the potential biological fathers.  Based on these names alone, the movie would need to have a huge budget, and with Paramount financing the movie, this is definitely possible.  I feel that based on this plot, the movie would be quite a bit more successful as an action film than a comedy, and having these already famous actors and director working together on the film would generate tremendous profits, because they have already proven that they can make great action movies.  The movie would practically sell itself, and sell itself tremendously well.      

Check out related materials here.

Tuesday, September 11, 2012

Amazon Allow Users to Pay to Block Ads

This article of The New York Times, written by Reuters, was intriguing to me because the commercials on my Kindle, Youtube, Hulu and Pandora are my greatest pet peeves. Amazon has announced that there will be an opt-out feature offered for those who would like to remove all ads from their Kindle Fire tablets for $15. There are technological conditions that apply here; in the past, one would have to read their passage with interrupting ads and had no way of changing that, but due to the new Kindle Fire features and technological advances, this is no longer the case. This has commercial and noncommercial mandates for Amazon because they will making money regardless of what the costumer decides to do about the ads, but in the noncommercial aspect of the advancement, the customers now have an option available to them that may help them better enjoy their literature. This could result in great benefits for both Amazon and Kindle costumer. I'm sure this idea will grow and become more popular throughout other applications in the near future.

Monday, September 10, 2012

How New Technology Is Rewiring Our Brains

Touchscreens. TiVo. The Undo button. These new technologies and others have changed the way we interact with the world. 

 

http://www.pcworld.com/article/202186/how_new_technology_is_rewiring_our_brains.html 

Mobile Devices and Consumption


check out article here
Traditionally, people used to listen to the news and advertisements by using the radio, television, and the newspaper. Now day’s things have changed. With new technological devices such as desktop and laptops, smartphones, and tablets, people can look for any type of article and information about whatever topic they want by using the Internet on their device. As written in the article, Mobile Devices and consumption: Signs for Journalism in the United States 77% of adults have desktops or laptops, 44% have smartphones, and 18% have tablets. It is estimated that 70% of people still get their digital news on their desk or laptop, 51% receive their news on smartphones and 56% on tablets. It is suggested that as more and more people get new digital devices. They switch from their desktop to their smartphone or tablet.
            People usually use a search engine to find the news they are interested in if they use a desktop while smartphone users use applications tied with their phones such as Flipboard or Topix. Sharing news has become increasing popular.
This makes it a lot easier for people to look up information on any subject they want, and there has been an increase in the population that reads news articles. Now people are looking at social news by using applications such as Facebook and Twitter. Websites like these also makes it easier for companies to expose and send advertisement to people and get people hooked on their product. 
I think we all remember the switch from cable to digital television as a kid, however these minor experiences with media have a different flavor around the world. India has 147 million tv households that will require a big switch in the coming days. Technologically, this is a huge investment for the entire country. It will be interesting to keep an eye on the situation and see whether it is sink or swim.
Check out the link!

http://flowtv.org/2012/07/digitizing-india/

Sunday, September 9, 2012

Reviving cancelled shows


I found this blog interesting because I thoroughly enjoy Netflix, Hulu, etc., because they are a great way to watch your favorite TV shows at your own convenience.  In the article, the author questions why Hulu, Netflix, DirectTV, and others consider airing and sometimes even air television shows that were previously cancelled by the major networks, such as Fox for example.  After reading the blog, I have to agree with the author because I can’t see how airing cancelled shows would bring in any revenue for companies such as Netflix and Hulu.  If certain shows were already cancelled due unpopularity with the masses, why would these companies consider reviving them by showing them again?
 

Portugal examining privatizing broadcast station

I found this article to be very interesting, the Portuguese government is thinking about privatizing their broadcast station (RTP) because of the economic turmoil that has hit the country so hard. The government is trying to plug holes in its finances and the easiest way they believe is to take away some programming from the faithful people. Unlike the United States, Portugal relies on their television broadcasting on for news and more important information. This has the country in an outrage to hear that this is the way they are trying to save money. There has even been more radical options thrown around like cutting (RTP 2) which features arts and cultural programming. Now, we see that there is some similarity between United States and Portugal as we usually cut fine arts first in our society. Some of the opposition say that the privatization could be used as a political angle  for Mr. Passos Coelho to silence a meddlesome critic. But all in all they have yet to make a full decision but they are swiftly trying to make the move to privatize.

If you would like to check out the story for yourself here is the link

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/10/business/media/portugal-examines-privatizing-public-broadcaster-rtp.html?_r=1&ref=media



Cameron Ratcliff     

Games and Storytelling

This article got my attention because I consider myself somewhat of a gamer. It's about how storytelling games are somewhat in a "renaissance" that's shaping the way this genre will be developing its games. It brings up the controversy of the game Mass Effect 3 and it's ending that left its players frustrated. It's games like this that are fueling this renaissance.

Check it out here: Sad Ending: Is good storytelling at odds with 'winning'?

Wednesday, September 5, 2012

AT&T Inks Deal With ESPN for Longhorn Network

AT&T Inks Deal With ESPN for Longhorn Network:

This article interests me because I am a big longhorn fan, and I had no clue they had made this deal yet.  Thanks to the online resource links, I now know.  Good news for a longhorn fan.