South by Southwest (SXSW), the once indie- and DIY-centric music and film festival held in Austin, TX, has come to a close for 2013. In recent years, advertisers and big business have taken notice of the giant marketing opportunity that SXSW is, and many have remarked that the festival has thus become too corporate. SXSW Interactive, the week-long conference dedicated to technology and digital media, has especially been criticized for having lost its edge.
Wherever you may stand on the SXSW critique spectrum, you cannot maintain that SXSW Interactive is insignificant. Attendees waited for hours to meet and take a photo with a grumpy cat, and the closing keynote speech (given by the creator of web comic The Oatmeal) received an overwhelmingly positive response—a first for SXSW. What’s the significance in this, you say? Well, the Web is fickle, but the tech world is ready to be wowed (Grumpy Cat won’t be a phenomenon forever) . And devoted online fans take their devotion—which is both active and contagious—seriously. Marketing is tough and important, and there are countless others to compete with for attention online. But if you can create something more compelling than a cat meme, you may be on track to garner some serious attention, and most importantly, some serious devotion.
Though the Internet is made up of tens of millions of web sites, people spend the vast majority of time on just a handful of them. According to comScore, an Internet analytics company, Americans spend most of their time online on Facebook — 10.8% in December 2012. That month, Americans spent another 10% of their Internet time on Google properties, including Google search and YouTube. Based on comScore’s report, “U.S. Digital Future in Focus 2013,” 24/7 Wall St. identified the 10 Web properties where people spend the most time.
Many of the top online sites have managed to significantly increase the time spent on their sites in the past year due to the rise in mobile devices, such as tablets and smartphones. The top 25 digital media properties in December 2012 increased their reach through mobile channels by 29% compared to December 2011. Some increased significantly more than that. ESPN expanded its digital reach by 56% compared to 2011, more than any of the 25 largest online properties except for Pandora.
Read more about the TVA Channel release at Adweek.com.
New technology released from Collective, the online advertising “audience engine,” allows marketers to re-target online advertisements to television viewers. TVAChannels will use information from cable TV use (via other companies like Rentrak and TRA), to match it with anonymous data from a cookie pool housed by Collective. [click to continue…]
If you’re among the hundreds of millions of Facebook users, you’ll likely agree that the site doesn’t offer a great search experience. “It’s a little embarrassing for them they hadn’t fixed it before now,” says Nate Elliott, analyst at Forrester Research. According to analysts, Facebook had to do this, as it isn’t growing as fast as it once did. They needed to figure out a way to keep users engaged, because if they aren’t engaged, they’ll likely go somewhere else. Remember Friendster? Once profiles and networks were set up, the site got boring, and users went elsewhere.
Along with the ability to now search for photos posted by friends 5 years ago, Facebook also figures out who your “best pals” are, based on signals in the Facebook system. Emarketer analyst Debra Aho Williamson says these new features “might make people aware of how Facebook can compromise their privacy.”
Most analysts don’t currently see Graph Search, which is still in beta, as a major threat to Google. The feature will slowly be rolled out over the next few months, and is currently unavailable on mobile devices.
If you haven’t voted yet, there’s still time to drop off your ballot. Find out where via Ballot Drop (made by Scott Duncombe and Winning Mark’s own Jeremy Sher)
Mitt Romney’s flip-flops and outright lies have been a hallmark of his campaign as well as of his career to date. Winning Mark recently collaborated with hip hop legend Steinski to produce a mash up of Romney’s worst prevarications. Check out the video below as well as the accompanying website.
South by Southwest (SXSW), the once indie- and DIY-centric music and film festival held in Austin, TX, has come to a close for 2013. In recent years, advertisers and big business have taken notice of the giant marketing opportunity that SXSW is, and many have remarked that the festival has thus become too corporate. SXSW Interactive, the week-long conference dedicated to technology and digital media, has especially been criticized for having lost its edge.
