Interesting News or Morbid Curiousity?

Gulf Spill Lifts Live Viewing for CNN.com

Site delivered a total of 13 million live video streams in June

The Gulf of Mexico oil spill has fueled a heavy flood of live video viewing for CNN.com, as viewers flocked to the news site last month for its ongoing coverage of the disaster.

CNN.com delivered a total of 13 million live video streams in June, during which it provided a constant live feed of the spill from an underwater camera. That’s up from the 8 million video views the site served in May and way up from the roughly 2-3 million live views per month the site averaged earlier in the year.

Overall, according to Nielsen Online, CNN.com generated more video streams in June live or otherwise -- 118 million streams -- than any other site in the category. Close behind CNN in total video streams was MSNBC.com, with 115 million streams, and Yahoo News, with 71 million.

Due in large part to users ongoing interest in the oil spill and its aftermath, the news category had a strong June overall. Yahoo topped all news sites in terms of reach with 39.2 million uniques, trailed by CNN.com's 36.6 million uniques, MSNBC.com (31.6 million) and Fox News (15.8 million).

However, CNN.com bested its competitors in page views (1.3 billion), time spent per person (23.4 minutes) and total minutes (850 million), according to Nielsen.

Dr. Pepper Makes Me Feel Special...

Coca-Cola is facing flak for using porn to attract children on Facebook in a promotional campaign gone wrong.

Coke has withdrawn the ads and apologized for its Dr. Pepper promotion, where users allowed their Facebook status box to be taken over by the company. More than 160,000 people signed up and allowed Coke to send "embarrassing" messages posted under the users name, which would be seen by all who viewed their Facebook profile.

But Coke ran into trouble when the parent of a 14-year-old girl in the U.K. complained her daughter's profile had been updated with a direct reference to a hardcore porn flick notorious for the obscene practices it depicts, according to the Telegraph, and the girl searched for the porno on the Internet.

The message, according to Mrs. Rickman: "I watched 2 girls one cup and felt hungry afterwards."

Mrs. Rickman wrote on the parents' networking site Mumsnet.com: "I am absolutely fizzing with rage and disgust, and want a full apology and explanation." Get it, fizzing? Ha, ha.

Coke says it's investigating what went wrong. "It has been brought to our attention that the Dr. Pepper promotion on Facebook posted an offensive status update. We apologize for any offense caused. As soon as we became aware of this, we took immediate action and removed the status update from the application. We have also taken the decision to end the promotion. We will take all steps necessary to ensure this does not happen again."

Coke offered Mrs. Rickman a night in a hotel and theater tickets for the West End, but the gesture was not well received: "Fat lot of use to me, we live in Glasgow," she wrote.

Other examples of status updates posted by Coke included, according to The Guardian:

* "Lost my special blankie. How will I go sleepies?"
* "What's wrong with peeing in the shower?"
* "Never heard of it described as cute before."

Great piece of insight....

From the Small Agency Summit:

Think of new business pitches like dates. If you go in talking all about yourself, a marketer is probably not going to be that wowed, but if you ask them about their business, they're more likely to want to keep talking. Industry experts have said one of the biggest mistakes they see agencies make is spending disproportionate time talking about their credentials when they could be getting a better insight into the client's challenges.

Want to Sell Issues?...pick your covers carefully...

When Vanity Fair Editor in Chief Graydon Carter put Paris Hilton on the cover in 2005, a smart aleck accused him of using the heiress like "newsstand crack." Times have changed. According to a new analysis of various traits on 11,161 magazine covers between May 2006 and this April, Paris Hilton has become a cover "don't."

Issues with the starlet on the cover attracted smaller-than-average audiences for the magazines in question more often than they attracted above-average crowds, according to the analysis by GfK MRI, which looked for traits with statistically significant correlations to audience swings either 15% above or below average.

Any given issue with the cover trait in question might have attracted a below-average audience, an average audience or an above-average audience, but GfK identified traits that on the whole proved more likely to either hurt or help. Audience figures encompass not just copies sold at newsstands but all readers, including subscribers, people who read friends' or relatives' copies, and readers who pick up a copy in a waiting room or other public place.

Some public figures still have juice, such as Jennifer Aniston, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, according to the GfK MRI research. But Ms. Hilton and former MTV reality star Lauren Conrad aren't drawing readers.

Broader cover traits matter too: The economy, beach bodies, and "best of" treatments all help magazines draw bigger audiences than usual. But "green" coverage, negative emotions and -- perhaps surprisingly -- celebrity scandal are more likely to hurt than help.

The findings only suggest trends, not immutable results, said Anne Marie Kelly, senior VP for marketing and strategic planning at MRI Starch, which plans to make the data available to its clients soon. "We're not saying that no celebrity scandals drive readership," she said. "I think it depends on who the celebrity is. They're not all Tiger Woods."

FourSquare Frenzy?

Dennis Crowley, co-founder of hot location-based social service Foursquare, addressed a roomful of marketers in June. He asked for a show of hands of how many had tried to work with the company but didn't hear back. A lot of hands went up. The simple message: the still-small company is struggling to further develop its service while responding to the avalanche of requests.

Now, with $20 million in new funding, agencies are hopeful the digital world's new belle of the ball will build tools to help them use the service in deeper ways.

Adweek spoke with several agencies that report frustrating experiences with Foursquare. Some have found it both hard to contact and unwilling to come up with marketing ideas. One agency representing a major package-goods client said the company put the onus on the brand and agency to find the best way to use the service.

"They're not responsive and extremely hard to work with," said a digital agency exec who asked not to be named. "It's hard to bring campaigns to life. Nobody knows how to create a badge or ask [Foursquare how] to enable behavior. It's black magic." In general, he said, "it's pretty much unworkable."

One sticking point is Foursquare's strategy of initially limiting advertiser participation. Pepsi, for instance, has an exclusive lock on the soft drinks category. Additionally, Foursquare has identified one "charter advertiser" for some major categories, which it then works with to better understand what works before taking on other advertisers. While less formal than exclusive contracts, it nonetheless leaves some competitors out in the cold, if only temporarily.

"There have been a number of things we've been told we can't do because it's already being done in some markets," said Adrian Ho, a partner with Zeus Jones. Working with Foursquare, he noted, is in some ways similar to working with Facebook in its early days.

Foursquare doesn't "have the infrastructure that makes clients comfortable," Ho added. "It's a bit like the Wild West. It's hard to get meetings in person. It's hard to get time on the phone."

There is the danger the hiccups will sour relationships. Mark Drapeau, Microsoft's director of innovative social engagement, left a scorching comment on a blog post about Foursquare. He said he tried everything from e-mailing to calling to stopping by Foursquare's office in the hopes of doing a partnership for a Microsoft event that would include a custom badge. He said he eventually gave up.

"They're creating a new marketing opportunity," said Andrea Harrison, social media lead at Razorfish, which has yet to work with Foursquare on a program. "They don't have the packaged media kit ready to go."

Many startups, of course, experience growing pains. The company's smaller competitors, for instance, are also still figuring out how to work with businesses. Gowalla, for one, does not yet have self-service tools for businesses. Josh Williams, CEO of Gowalla, said it's working to develop them.

"There's a lot of hype in the space," he said. "There's promise of great things that will happen, but right now it's really fledgling."

Google's Market Dominance or Arrogance?

For a company that has made a big business of indexing third-party websites, a substantial part of Google's display success hinges on its ability to milk YouTube and its other owned and operated properties such as Gmail and Google Finance.

Google Finance did not initially feature advertising, but it now runs rectangle-sized ads.

In fact, those areas were two of the three big priorities outlined by VP Neal Mohan at a press briefing last week where a parade of Google executives described the company's plans to expand its ad business beyond search keywords.

"Display is truly at a tipping point," Mr. Mohan said. "We think it can be substantially larger than the $20 billion it is today, whether [it's] $40 billion, $60 billion, or $80 billion, but there are a lot of challenges that remain."

Mr. Mohan said there were gross inefficiencies to the display ad buying process. As an example, he said it takes 30 days or more to get a creative advertising unit up and running. "That process should be much more streamlined," he said.

Display in Gmail
But perhaps the more significant strategy on display was Mr. Mohan's presentation of what he called the Google Display Network, which included YouTube as well as Google properties Google Finance, Google Maps, Google Books and even Gmail. Mr. Mohan did not detail what a display unit might look like in Gmail, and a company insider said it has yet to work out the specific ad requirements against those properties. Google Finance, for example, did not initially feature advertising, but it now runs rectangle-sized ads.

Beyond Mr. Mohan's remarks, the company last week made a couple more moves that could affect its owned and operated inventory. First, it acquired ITA Software Inc., a software company that specializes in organizing and searching flight information such as ticket prices and flight times, for $700 million in cash. ITA licenses its product to a broad array of websites and airlines, such as Hotwire, Orbitz, American Airlines and Continental Airlines.

Though the deal is sure to draw close scrutiny from the Federal Trade Commission, the acquisition could help the search giant fill out its owned and operated pages as well as further dominate search. Although a company insider says there are no plans at the moment to monetize the flight-travel search pages generated by the purchase of ITA, the deal will no doubt increase Google's lineup of owned properties.

At the Guardian's technology conference last Thursday, CEO Eric Schmidt added more fuel to the rumor that Google is launching a social network called Google Me, which could increase its owned pages. When asked if Google Me is fact or fiction, Mr. Schmidt equivocated in his response, saying, "That would be a product announcement, and I won't say."

Facebook's display dominance
Creating a service to rival Facebook could help Google boost its distant rank among display advertising publishers. According to ComScore, Google sites (including YouTube) place sixth among web publishers for display ad impressions at 25.8 billion, the equivalent of 2.4% of the total impressions for the first quarter of 2010. Facebook easily dominated the display ad market for the same period at 16.2% or 176.3 billion impressions.

Facebook's top spot in display advertising suggests that any attempt by Google to grab more of the pie will surely have to include growing out its own properties. At the same time, the Mountain View-based company plans to also grow its share by better connecting its current crop of publishing partners, which include CNN.com, WashingtonPost.com, RollingStone.com and About.com, to advertisers. The idea there is to serve as a one-stop-shop for both parties, effectively making Google the main go-between for the display business, a role it already owns for search advertising.

"Our publishing partners asked us to help them build out better display buying tools," Mr. Mohan said. "They wanted more control, more streamlining, and that's what we're giving them."