Peter Black's Freedom to Differ

Facebook thinks friends are worth more than 37 cents

I thought I should post an update to the story on the interesting marketing strategy employed by Burger King on Facebook that I blogged about two weeks ago(see here).  From TechCrunch:

Burger King, through their insanely creative advertising agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky (see their recent Burger King perfume launch), launches a Facebook application that encourages users to remove Facebook friends. Sacrifice ten of them and you got a free Whopper. 233,906 friends were removed by 82,771 people in less than a week.

Facebook is overjoyed, right? What a great example to show the Madison Avenue agencies on how a big brand can get real engagement from users. This is the future of advertising. Or it could have been, if Facebook hadn’t shut it down, citing privacy issues:

We encourage creativity from developers and brands using Facebook Platform, but we also must ensure that applications follow users’ expectations of privacy. This application facilitated activity that ran counter to user privacy by notifying people when a user removes a friend. We have reached out to the developer with suggested solutions. In the meantime, we are taking the necessary steps to assure the trust users have established on Facebook is maintained.

Did anyone talk to the sales department before pulling the trigger on this? All that happened is the user being dissed got a message telling them, which helps the application spread virally. Without that feature the app is far less powerful. There is no real privacy issue here, just a policy decision by Facebook that people shouldn’t be notified when you remove them as a friend.

Read more here.

Social Media Club Brisbane January

The inaugural event for the year for the Social Media Club Brisbane is next week, on Tuesday January 20, commencing at 5.30 pm, at the Melbourne Hotel in West End.  Co-hosting this event with SMC Brisbane, and generously covering venue costs and providing refreshments, is the blogger advertising network Nuffnang, established recently in Australia. Nuffnang Co-Founder, Cheo Ming Shen is flying in from Singapore that afternoon and will be at the function, explaining for 15 minutes or so how interested bloggers might be able to benefit from being part of the Nuffnang network.

If you would like to attend this event, please RSVP at the Facebook site for the event here.

37 cents is the value of a Facebook friend

The New York Times blog Bits has a post on an interesting marketing strategy by Burger King on Facebook:

You may not be able to get a coupon for a digital TV converter box, but if you’re experiencing a bit of bloat on your Facebook friend list, you can snag a free burger by dropping 10 of your Facebook friends, courtesy of Burger King.

That’s the gist of Whopper Sacrifice, an advertising campaign from Burger King to promote a new version of the company’s flagship sandwich called the Angry Whopper. To earn their free burger, users download the Whopper Sacrifice Facebook application and dump 10 unlucky friends deemed to be unworthy of their weight in beef. After completing the purge, users are prompted to enter their addresses and the coupons are sent out via snail mail.

The application sends a note to each of the banished friends, bluntly alerting them that they were abandoned for a free hamburger.

...

What price is Burger King placing on a Facebook friendship? At a suggested retail price of $3.69 for the Angry Whopper sandwich, customers are trading each deleted friend for about 37 cents’ worth of bun and beef.

...

For Willie Vanderheyden, 31, a graduate student in Missouri with more than 200 Facebook friends, the free burger seemed like a fair trade for purging his address book.

“It’s a good excuse to get rid of old girlfriends and their families on my account and get a Whopper out of it,” he said in a phone interview. “There are so many people on Facebook that I haven’t talked to in a long time that getting rid of 10 of them who are pretty much meaningless in my daily life isn’t going to be a big deal.”

But in a follow-up e-mail message a few hours later, Mr. Vanderheyden found that eliminating friends was harder than he thought. He said he got stuck at seven. “It’s not like I hate any of these people,” he wrote. “The question is: Do I like one-tenth of a Whopper more than the information these people could one day post on Facebook?”

Emily Koster, a 25-year-old legal assistant and self-described vegetarian in Sacramento, Calif., said she had no such qualms.

Ms. Koster, who currently has more than 400 Facebook friends, said she isn’t worried about any residual awkward encounters among those she selects to delete. “I look at it this way — the upset over any confrontation is greatly outweighed by the pleasure I’m going to get when they actually admit they’re upset over Facebook,” she said in an e-mail message.

She added in a later note, “The relationships will be easily reparable. Chances are, they’ll still be my friend on MySpace.”

Read more here.

Today Facebook, tomorrow Twitter

Techdirt asks did Burger King really just issue a C&D through Twitter?

Now that it's legal to serve papers to someone through Facebook, Burger King has apparently sent a cease and desist via Twitter to the user "whoppervirgins" for an unauthorized use of trademark. "Whopper Virgins" is the latest multi-million dollar ad campaign from Burger King to hit the airwaves, featuring documentary-like ads depicting Hmong, Inuit and Romanian villagers eating burgers for the first time. Sure, "theBKlounge" account may not really be Burger King, or the C&D could actually be an in-character joke. But, really, did nobody at the agency think to simply grab the twitter account "whoppervirgins" to begin with? From the start, this campaign seems to have attracted criticism. In addition to flak for being "corporate colonialism," "cultural bullying" and "the worst kind of Ugly Americanism," this campaign has been ridiculed for not doing enough good SEO to support the campaign. In any case, perhaps Burger King purposely planned these strange moves, in order to generate fodder for bloggers to chew on, since in all honestly, I am really, really craving a Whopper right now.

Read it here.  (And read my op-ed piece on service via Facebook here.)

Some interesting top ten lists

Over the past few days I've come across a few different top ten lists.  The first was Oddee's list of ten of the geekiest graffiti.  This was my favourite:

Next was Politico's list of the top ten political films of 2008, culminating with these two:

2 “Recount.” Helmed by Jay Roach (“Meet the Fockers” and the Austin Powers trilogy) and written by Danny Strong, this made-for-HBO film about the hotly contested 2000 presidential election hardly shows candidates George W. Bush or Al Gore, instead focusing on the backstage drama that took place in Florida between their surrogates. In this fictionalized replay of actual events, Laura Dern and Denis Leary steal the show, adding some zany comic levity with their portrayals of Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris and Democratic strategist Michael Whouley, while Kevin Spacey, as Ron Klain — then Gore’s attorney and now Vice President-elect Joe Biden’s chief of staff appointee — and Tom Wilkinson, as Bush’s proxy James Baker, give the story more gravitas.

1 “Milk.” Anchored by a near-perfect performance from Sean Penn, this biopic of the first openly gay American elected official focuses heavily on the political process that Harvey Milk saw as the gateway for social change. Director Gus Van Sant recently told Interview magazine about his first reaction to the script: “The personal parts of the story were always kind of filtered through the politics, which I’d never seen done before, really.” Van Sant needn’t have worried that the characters talk only about politics — Milk’s life was politics, and the film’s depiction of the struggle against 1978’s Proposition 6, regarding gay public school teachers, bears striking similarities to the ongoing battle over 2008’s anti-same-sex-marriage initiative, Proposition 8.

Read more here.

And the last list is Campaign's list of the top internet viral campaigns of 2008.  These are my favourites:

2 SFW XXX Party Invitation

To celebrate Diesel's 30th anniversary, The Viral Factory decided porn was the only way to party with a bang. After collating clips of 80s porn, it animated the rude bits and added toned down sound effects to avoid any potentially inappropriate scenes and make it SFW XXX (an acronym for "safe for work"). So far, 6,497,507 have clicked, with an average of 116,387 hits per day.

6 Budweiser's ‘Swear Jar'

It was banned on TV because of the implied bad language, but Budweiser's ‘Swear Jar' has been a hit online with over 3.3 million views on YouTube. Part of Budweiser's online viral effort at Bud.TV, it shows characters in an office, swearing their way to make enough money for a case of Bud in boardroom meetings, announcements, and by the photocopier.

Read more here (from Brand Republic).

Offensive, banned and rejected ads

Oddee has put together a list of fifteen of the most offensive, banned and rejected ads.  You can check out the full list here, but I think this was my favourite:

Obama's tech policy

With only a few days before the US Presidential election Barack Obama has released a web ad that is being aimed directly at the science and technology sector:

Lessig on copyright and politics

During the week the New York Times published an op-ed piece from Larry Lessig explaining how copyright law is being used as a tool for censorship:

Copyright law has become a political weapon because of a statute passed a decade ago: the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. That law tells carriers like YouTube that unless they quickly remove material posted by users that is alleged to infringe copyright, they themselves could be liable for the infringement. Understandably, YouTube and others have become quite vigilant in removing allegedly infringing content. Indeed, the Web site has gone beyond the requirements of the law and has begun to shut down the accounts of people alleged to have violated copyright just three times.

The digital copyright act gives the alleged infringer an opportunity to demand that the content be restored. But in the height of a political campaign, even a few hours of downtime can be the difference between effective and ineffective. The law thus creates a perfect mechanism to censor political speech during the only time it could matter. Recognizing this, campaigns and their allies are beginning to exploit this weapon.

The answer to this problem is not to abolish or ignore copyright. Instead, the law should be revised, bringing focus to the contexts in which its important economic incentives are needed, and removing it from contexts where it isn’t.

Read more here.  Lessig was also in the news in the UK this week with The Guardian giving him a gushing editorial:

Lawrence Lessig, a Stanford professor, is a lawyer who gets things changed not for the benefit of corporations but to unleash the creative potential of ordinary people in a digital age. He founded Creative Commons, a non-profit organisation whose licences enable content creators to set their own terms for protection of their intellectual property. He regards extension of copyright as anathema to the YouTube generation and a brake on economic growth. He also thinks it is against the US constitution, which states that copyright should be "limited". The original limit has been extended from 14 to 70 years after the death of the creator, and Prof Lessig points out that one of the main corporations that lobbied for this, Disney, cut its creative teeth by raiding the public domain for works from Snow White to the Hunchback of Notre Dame. If the current term for copyright had existed then, it might have suffocated Mickey Mouse at birth. Prof Lessig is formidably qualified, with degrees in economics, management, philosophy and law, but it was only when he studied philosophy at Trinity College, Cambridge, that his conservative views underwent radical change. His latest book, Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy, will enhance his cult status on the web. This year he launched a web-based campaign to get Congress members to take a stand against corruption. So far only five have signed up, but if - as is possible - Prof Lessig ends up in government then he will have less need to rely on persuasion.

Read it here.  However, not everyone was a fan of Lessig this week.  Business Week's Spence Ante didn't like Lessig's latest book, Remix:

But Remix is Lessig's weakest effort to date, a derivative essay that rehashes a lot of his older work. Like Martin Scorsese doing another mobster flick, Lessig seems uninspired, groping for a fresh take on familiar themes. Most annoying, he devotes only the last 35 pages of the book to his reform plan, and some of those ideas are not even that new.

Read the full review here and then check out Lessig's response here.

The RNC tries make a point with humour

I was intrigued to see this post on The Caucus  (a blog hosted by the New York Times) that the RNC has set up a parody Facebook for Barack Obama, BarackBook.com, to highlight some of his lesser known associations.  An interesting political strategy - and a novel use twist on using socialnetworks for political campaigns - but I'm not sure what audience the RNC is targeting with this site.  The so-called early tech adopters may find it interesting, but they are never going to support John McCain so it seems a fairly pointless, potentially controversial strategy that could backfire.  Plus, as The Caucus points out, if anything it may end up highlighting the weakness of McCain's online strategy when compared to the online phenomenon that is Barack Obama.

Anyway, here is the post:

Here’s an entry you would not expect to see on Barack Obama’s official profile on the social networking site Facebook: “Barack Obama is now friends with Antonin ‘Tony’ Rezko.”

But that’s the first item on Mr. Obama’s “FriendFeed” on BarackBook.com, a Facebook parody site created by the Republican National Committee that it says will go live on Tuesday. According to the R.N.C, the site is intended to showcase some of Mr. Obama’s “notable associations.”

...

Each profile is set to include videos, news articles and sections like “Facts About Me and Barack,” “My Donations and Bundling for Barack” and “What Barack Says About Me.” The R.N.C. says it plans to continue updating BarackBook between now and the election. (Notably, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright, Mr. Obama’s controversial former pastor, does not yet have a profile.)

Users of Facebook – the real one – may be able to install an application on their personal page with links to BarackBook.

Alex Conant, a spokesman for the R.N.C. called the planned site “an interactive way to learn more about Obama’s poor judgment.”

But in using a faux social networking site to highlight what it considers to be some of Mr. Obama’s more controversial acquaintances — past and present — the R.N.C. is also opening itself up to the inevitable comparisons between the Obama campaign’s online efforts and those of his rival, Senator John McCain.

While there is no single metric for success on the Internet, there are some leading indicators. For example, Mr. Obama has about 1.2 million Facebook friends, while Mr. McCain has fewer than 200,000. But the Republicans are making an effort to catch up in the e-campaign. Last week the R.N.C. launched a new Internet browser toolbar to collect “micro-donations” from supporters.

And as the Republicans are trying to point out with their twist on Facebook, having lots of friends can have its downsides.

Read more here.

Vin Cerf on leveraging social media

Vin Cerf discussed how brands can leverage social media:

(Hat tip: Trevor Cook's Corporate Engagement.)

Assessing your phorm

Media Post's Daily Online Examiner looks at how ISPs are responding to the phorm threat:

Behavioral targeting company Phorm hasn’t launched yet, but is already facing more pushback than even the staunchest privacy advocates likely anticipated. The latest news is that Phorm opponent Alex Hanff is calling for people to picket the annual meeting of BT — one of the Internet service providers that’s working with Phorm.

“The purpose of the protest is to make BT shareholders aware of the past and planned use of allegedly illegal interception technologies to sell behavioral profiles to an ex-spyware company,” he
said, according to a report today in the U.K. paper The Register.

At the same time, an anti-Phorm petition in the U.K. has drawn more than 13,000 signatories to date. The petition, stating that Phorm’s plan “would result in the browsing habits of the majority of the UK population being sold to a third party for advertising purposes,” warns that “the opt out system for this technology is vague and unproven.”

“Surely this must be a breach of privacy laws, if not then the privacy laws need to be changed to cover such invasive technology,” the petition states.

These same arguments are increasingly surfacing here. Advocates say marketers shouldn’t snoop on people’s Web-surfing activity to send them ads without first obtaining users’ consent.

If behavioral targeting in general has raised advocates’ ire, platforms that rely on data from Internet service providers especially trouble privacy rights groups. That’s because ISPs know every site users’ visit and every search query they make. Online ad companies argue that the targeting is all done anonymously, so that companies only know which sites particular users have visited, but not their names or e-mail addresses.

But the prospect of ISP-based targeting is so troubling that lawmakers have asked to meet with the Internet service provider Charter Communications before it follows through on a plan to share data with behavioral targeting company NebuAd.

Phorm is poised to launch soon in the U.K., following which it intends to launch in the U.S. as well. If increasing public pressure in the U.K. results in Phorm deciding to seek users’ consent before targeting them, it seems likely that the company will ask U.S. users for their agreement as well. If nothing else, declining to do so would put the company in a very awkward position of explaining why European Web users have more privacy rights than U.S. consumers.

Read more here.

Marketing movies on Facebook

ClickZ looks at how Indiana Jones has been promoted on Facebook:

Paramount Pictures is expected to have a monster hit this Memorial Day Weekend with "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull." Regardless of how the film does in theaters, the studio has scored big on Facebook.

Not with the movie, necessarily, but with a virtual Fedora. Starting Wednesday morning, Paramount offered Facebook users a chance to send their friends a small digital version of Indy's iconic brown hat as a "virtual gift." While some gifts require a $1 fee, the Fedora was offered as a free sponsored gift from the studio.

The Fedoras became available at 4:30am on Wednesday morning, the day before the movie hit theaters. By 3pm, all 250,000 had sold out.

Matt Hicks, a spokesman with Facebook, said that the company couldn't confirm whether it was the fastest a virtual gift had gone, but said it was "definitely among the fastest we've ever seen," especially considering that "people weren't really awake for the first few hours it was available."

Hicks said it was standard practice for advertisers to set an inventory limit on virtual gifts in order to drive demand.

The Fedora was only one part of a larger marketing campaign on the social network, however. Each gift provided a link to the movie's Facebook page, where fans could find local showings, read other users' reviews, post messages, download widgets and other applications, and view stills from the film's production.

The page also included a space for users to upload videos and photos of their own, including an instructional video on "How to Crack a Whip Like Indy" and the infamous Annie Leibovitz Vanity Fair photos of Miley Cryus with a brown Fedora superimposed on her head.

Paramount also ran a series of display ads on Facebook pointing users to the page. As of Thursday afternoon, the page had more than 62,000 fans.

The movie itself, however, seemed to have fewer fans than the page. Paramount established a dedicated section of the page for reviews of the movie, which opened on Thursday, the majority of which were less then flattering. One user called it a "flipping mess," while another called it an "atrocity."

"That's the price you pay for being open," said Ian Schafer, CEO of marketing firm Deep Focus, who has run a number of ad campaigns on Facebook. "That's what you have to do when you advertise in this sort of community." If Paramount had not given users a place to review the movie, Facebook members "would be lambasting them for that," said Schafer. "You're kind of damned if you do, and damned if you don't."

Read more here.

Internet users getting more selfish

BBC News reports that we are getting more selfish when we hop online:

Web users are getting more ruthless and selfish when they go online, reveals research.

The annual report into web habits by usability guru Jakob Nielsen shows people are becoming much less patient when they go online.

Instead of dawdling on websites many users want simply to reach a site quickly, complete a task and leave.

Most ignore efforts to make them linger and are suspicious of promotions designed to hold their attention.

Search rules

Instead, many are "hot potato" driven and just want to get a specific task completed.

Success rates measuring whether people achieve what they set out to do online are now about 75%, said Dr Nielsen. In 1999 this figure stood at 60%.

There were two reasons for this, he said.

"The designs have become better but also users have become accustomed to that interactive environment," Dr Nielsen told BBC News.

Now, when people go online they know what they want and how to do it, he said.

Read more here.

McCainPedia is not a real wiki

"McCainPedia" may well be good name for a website, but the DNC seems to have totally missed the point of using a wiki:

The DNC will tomorrow launch "McCainPedia," a wiki-like hub of their opposition research on the GOP nominee.

The site features a bevy of articles and documents organized into such categories as "economy," "security" and "ethics."

Unlike WIkipedia, though, the general public (and McCain's campaign) can't offer their own edits to the material.

Read more here (from Politico).

Levi's viral hit

Wired reviews an effective viral marketing from Levi Strauss:

The hottest video on YouTube right now showcases a handful of agile hipsters effortlessly hopping, leaping and even back-flipping into their jeans.

Amateur videos of friends performing such stunts are common enough on YouTube, but this video is the work of professionals.

"We didn't want to overtly brand it as Levi's," said Erica Archambault, head of public relations at Levi Strauss, who confirmed Friday that the company is behind the viral video. "We wanted people to discover it on their own."

The acrobatic "Guys backflip into jeans" video ... was created to promote Levi's line of zipperless, button-fly jeans.

First uploaded Monday, the video has clocked a staggering 1.4 million views this week, garnering it YouTube's coveted "most viewed" spot. It's the kind of viral hit that ad agencies and their clients have been cooking up ever since Burger King scratched out an internet hit with its subservient chicken website in 2004.

Levi Strauss worked with San Francisco-based advertising company Cutwater to produce the video, which was shot in March.

Read more here.  And here is the video:

Anti-piracy video controversy

The Sydney Morning Herald reports on an Australian anti-piracy video that has backfired on its creators:

An artist featured in a new campaign pushed by the Australian music industry to discourage illegal file sharing and change the public's perception that musicians live like royalty says he was duped into joining an anti-piracy "witch hunt".

Frenzal Rhomb guitarist Lindsay McDougall, also a radio presenter at Triple J, told the Herald he was furious at being "lumped in with this witch hunt" and that he had been "completely taken out of context and defamed" by the Australian music industry, which funded the video.

He said he was told the 10-minute film, which is being distributed for free to all high schools in Australia, was about trying to survive as an Australian musician and no one mentioned the video would be used as part of an anti-piracy campaign.

Sabiene Heindl, general manager of the music industry's anti-piracy arm, Music Industry Piracy Investigations (MIPI), which partly coordinated the film and is pushing for it to be included in school units related to copyright and file sharing, said all of the feedback she had received so far from other artists and their managers had been positive.

She questioned whether McDougall had actually watched the film and said only 1-2 minutes of it discussed the issue of downloading and how it impacted musicians.

The film, which can be viewed at http://www.in-tune.com.au, features interviews with some of Australia's biggest musical acts including The Veronicas, Jimmy Barnes, Operator Please, Evermore, Silverchair and Powderfinger. They either could not be reached by the Herald yesterday or were overseas.

Heindl rejected suggestions McDougall had been misled, saying all correspondance and signed releases indicated the video was made with the support of MIPI and would be distributed to schools.

McDougall said: "I have never come out against internet piracy and illegal downloading and I wouldn't do that - I would never put my name to something that is against downloading and is against piracy and stuff, it's something that I believe is a personal thing from artist to artist."

"I would never be part of this big record industry funded campaign to crush illegal downloads, I'm not like [Metallica drummer] Lars Ulrich. I think it's bullshit, I think it's record companies crying poor and I don't agree with it."

Metallica were one of the first bands to sue people for copyright infringement and attracted scorn from internet users for helping shut down the peer-to-peer downloading tool Napster.

Read more here.

Lenovo parodies MacBook Air ad

Gizmodo drew my attention to this clever parody ad:

Most parody videos are lame in the sense that they take one joke and stretch it to 60 seconds, but Lenovo's one joke actually works when properly executed. Not to spoil anything, but it's a send-up of the MacBook Air in favor of Lenovo's own X300.

Twitter users = tech elite = influence

Steve Rubel argues that while Twitter has a tiny reach, it is still very influential:

There's been an interesting discussion over the last few days about Twitter's reach. WSJ reporter Kara Swisher surveyed her dinner party and found out that no one there uses the micro-blogging site. Meanwhile Gina Trapani on Lifehacker is running a survey asking if Web 2.0 benefits only the tech elite.

Now let's look at the data. According to figures just out from Hitwise, Twitter is the 439th largest social networking site and 4309 overall. To be sure, growth is booming. But the site is still niche.

...

So all of the signs generally point the same way. Most of the social networking and online communities are definitely geek havens. MySpace, Facebook and YoutTube are three that have gone mainstream. So does that mean these smaller sites, like Twitter, are not worthy of a brand's time? Hardly.

Geeks are by far more influential than any other online contingency, except the big media. Geeks pass the puck from Twitter to blogs back to Twitter. Eventually it hits Techmeme, Saul Hansell at the Times takes notice and then the whole world knows.

That's why smart companies like JetBlue and Zappos are legitimately engaging on Twitter.

Read more here.

Copyright and dancing on treadmills

Techdirt asks can you copyright the idea of dancing on treadmills?

By now, one hopes that you've seen the incredibly creative video that the band Ok Go did for the song "Here It Goes Again." The video, filmed in a single take, has the four band members dancing across a series of treadmills. Yet, as William Patry points out, there may be a bit of a dispute coming over the concept.  Apparently, a television commercial for some vitamin supplement in the UK is making use of folks dancing on treadmills to a different song after taking the supplement. It's clear that the idea is from the band's video, as the moves are even the same. An article in The Scotsman suggests that legal action is brewing, noting that "There was extensive negotiation to use Ok Go (by the JWT advertising agency on behalf of Berocca's manufacturer Bayer] but this didn't bear fruit."

Of course, there's nothing definitive about the band taking action -- and it seems unlikely that the band would actually do anything about this. The band's members have been very vocal about technology and intellectual property issues (in a good way), including writing NY Times op-ed pieces and testifying before Congress. The band has also been very open and encouraging of getting fans to copy their videos (the band has some other popular videos as well). While the band might have a claim on the identical choreography aspect (you can't copyright an idea, but you can on the expression of that idea), it seems like no good would come from such a complaint. It would certainly only help the vitamin supplement company. Instead, hopefully, the band recognizes that this is, indeed, the sincerest form of flattery, and the attention the vitamin ad generates will likely only increase the number of folks who seek out the Ok Go video (and become fans of Ok Go's music).

Read it here.  And just in case you've never seen the video clip, here is Ok Go:

"My Life on Facebook as a Woman and Why Social Network Advertising Doesn't Work"

Allen Stern changes his sex to find out how Facebook targets its advertising:

Last weekend I joked around on Twitter regarding the ads I see on Facebook on the left menu. As a single man in my 30s, the ads are always sexual in nature -- some examples: "Hot Singles Waiting For You" and "30s Singles Looking for Love", etc. Apparently single men in their 30s are only interested in sex says Facebook. I wondered what women see in that spot so I changed my sex as a test. As a woman the ads were much more general. Sure, some are around sex with singles ads, but as a woman I am also presented with a variety of more general ads. Weight loss ads seem to be the most popular because clearly men have no weight issues (??) along with "mature 45+" singles ads coming in right behind. This week I will try female married and female widowed -- any bets on the ads that will be displayed?

Read more here.

A right to snoop

In the US, newspapers are arguing that they have a First Amendment right to snoop on their readers:

Usually, when people talk about the trade offs between privacy and freedom of the press, the argument is about whether the public has the right to know some fact about an individual’s personal life.

The newspaper industry is now arguing that the First Amendment protects its right to follow users around the Internet so it can charge higher prices on advertising.

This argument was made in a filing by Newspaper Association of America commenting on the Federal Trade Commission’s proposal that the companies involved in advertising that uses what is called behavioral targeting create a self-regulatory code that limits their use of sensitive information.

Many newspaper sites, including nytimes.com, participate in behavioral targeting networks such as those run by AOL’s Tacoda or Revenue Science. These sites hope that by finding out which of their readers are shopping for cars or other products, they can raise rates for sections that don’t have natural advertisers, like international news.

The association argued that this sort of advertising technology is needed to pay for the local information and other content that newspapers provide free online. That is similar to many of the other comments that challenged the commission’s ideas. But the newspaper group went further and suggested that restrictions on advertising technology are tantamount to unconstitutional censorship.

Efforts to restrict or limit what newspaper websites publish, and the basis by which editors and advertisers make decisions regarding what to publish, run directly counter to core First Amendment rights, and can amount to a form of prior restraint.

The filing did acknowledge that government can regulate the content of deceptive advertising, but it argued that behavioral targeting is hardly misleading.

While it is possible that an advertiser message accompanying the publisher’s fully protected speech might be deemed false or misleading, no connection between behavioral targeting and falsity or misleadingness has been demonstrated. Quite the reverse: the purported concern is that users may receive not only truthful advertising speech, but advertising speech that meets their interest. That is not fraud or deception—that is customer service.

Read more here (from Bits).

How to make viral videos

This parody video will teach you the "secret strategies" behind many viral videos.  Check out the original TechCrunch article by Dan Ackerman Greenberg here.

(Hat tip: Paul Gulyas.)

Trademark trouble for Google

Media Post's Just an Online Minute considers a series of trademark lawsuits against Google:

When Google decided four years ago to allow trademarked names to trigger paid search ads, the company had to have anticipated that litigation would result.

And it has. American Airlines, insurance giant Geico and computer services company Rescuecom are among those that have sued Google for trademark infringement. They’ve all complained that Google allows their rivals to bid to appear as a sponsored link when users type their names into the query box.

They tend to argue that they’ve built goodwill in their brand names and that it isn’t fair for rivals to capitalize on that by using those brands to trigger ads. Rescuecom went even further than that in a federal appellate court this week. In an argument before the Second Circuit, Rescuecom’s lawyer said that consumers who search on the company’s name expect to see the company — and only the company — in the sponsored results.

But that argument doesn’t appear to be supported by any empirical evidence. In fact, Eric Goldman, a professor at Santa Clara University School of Law, told MediaPost that studies show the contrary: People use brand names as shorthand for broad categories. Certainly in the offline world, people have long done so, using “xerox,” for example, synonymously with “copy.”

Another factor that Rescuecom — and American Airlines and the other litigants — aren’t considering is that people conduct searches for companies for a variety of reasons beyond simply wanting to navigate to retail sites. For instance, if people want to know about Rescuecom’s reputation, they probably don’t want to get that information from the company itself but from more objective sources. That’s one of the reasons why the digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation weighed in on the case, arguing that allowing companies the opportunity to bid on a trademarked term can help protect free speech.

Read more here.

It's back ...

I can't think of a better way to resume blogging than with this great teaser for the upcoming season of Big Brother:

Are Apple ads hurting Microsoft's brand?

CNET's Beyond Binary blog considers whether Apple's "I'm a Mac" ads have hurt Microsoft's brand:

A new ranking of global brands shows Microsoft's reputation sinking in recent years. Among the possible factors: Apple's "I'm a Mac" ads.

Microsoft lands at No. 59 in the rankings for 2007, down from No. 11 in 2004, according to the survey from CoreBrand released Wednesday.

"The effect of Apple's 'Hi, I'm a Mac' advertising campaign may have taken its toll on Microsoft," CoreBrand CEO James Gregory said in a statement. "The launch of a series of new products, following a long, relatively dormant period, will be closely watched to see if it will have a positive impact on the Microsoft brand."

...

In fairness to the folks in Redmond, they have fared far better in other recent brand studies. They were No. 1 on a list of Britain's top "superbrands" last year, and No.2 in an August BusinessWeek ranking of top global brands (trailing only Coca-Cola).

I don't know how much stock I put into the study, or its thesis that Apple is to blame, but it is an interesting question. How has Apple's rise affected Redmond's overall image beyond just a few points of PC market share?

When Apple occupied a smaller niche, it could be argued that what happened on the Mac side of things was less relevant to how Microsoft is perceived. But now that Apple has a larger role, is it affecting how Microsoft as a company is seen?

Read more here.