ChasNote

My colleague James Gross put together a great program that paired Diggnation with Ask.com. From James:

“Ask.com wanted to engage with the ‘cultural antennas’ that can be found at Digg by driving consideration for their search engine by showing off their new, rich interface. (One of those cultural antennas, Morgan Webb, apparently watches Diggnation.) By working with Diggnation’s rock stars (check out the video, they really are) Ask.com was able to give the Diggnation community bonus video of backstage footage from the Diggnation London launch. The sponsorship video went live on Friday night and within 3 hours it had over 200 diggs [now over 300, ed.] and was on the home page of Digg.com

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“The only way to see the video was to go to Ask.com and type in Diggnation (here’s the Ask.com results page). This allowed Ask to show off some of the new features of their search engine, including their rich media interface that differentiates their services in many ways from their competitors.

“During the sponsored episode Kevin and Alex show off Ask.com’s new features around blogs, smart search, media, news and more.”

Video of the sponsor steps can be seen here.

Boing Boing TV topped the Today’s Top Podcast list for the tech category, meaning — I think — that Boing Boing TV added more new iTunes subscribers today than any other tech program. (I love to see Diggnation and WebbAlert helping to fill out the top ten!)

The press, too, seems to like what they’re seeing.

The Chicago Tribune:

“As a kind of unbound catalog showcasing what’s ingenious, ignoble or otherwise provocative on the Net, Boing Boing is one of the few sites that deserves to be a fixture in the Bookmarks Toolbar…. Despite the confines of the conventional anchor-and-clip format, it still comes close to being the same loose-limbed feat of curation that the blog has been. Now, however, the emphasis is on what can be shown rather than described, on the image rather than the link….. Boing Boing TV is already a winning effort. But given its pedigree and the rich store of material to draw from, expect it to move closer to must-see as it ventures outside of the studio and into new experiments with content generated by site devotees — and as its makers get a better handle on what can and should be done in the confines of a daily Web video segment.”

The LA Times:

“The show … brings an arty, tech-savvy intellectualism to the online TV realm. Seven-year-old BoingBoing has gained its hipster cred by culling from the vast pool of ephemera on the Web the oddest bits that reflect the Internet zeitgeist. Readers flood the e-mail in-boxes of BoingBoing’s co-editors with URLs and ideas, hoping to prompt a post, and each contributor is credited. The video site will eventually incorporate reader input as well.”

The NY Times (reg required):

“Boing Boing is, by some definitions, one of the leading media sites for young technologically aware folks. And that’s a lot of folks. Since going online in 2000 — it began as a paper ‘zine conceived by Mr. Frauenfelder in 1989 — Boing Boing has become one of the five most visited blogs on the Web, according to Comscore, with a monthly traffic of about 7.5 million page views a month. According to Google, more than 600,000 sites link to the site, making it a maypole for technologists around the world…. None of this necessarily spells doom for established media brands, some of which, when you think about it, have done very well on the Web, including CNN, The New York Times, The Washington Post and NBC. But as platforms become less important and a new audience raised on broadband comes together, seemingly goofy little enterprises like Boing Boing could end up playing very large for their size.”

Check it out here.

How Boing Boing editor Xeni Jardin described it to the LA Times:

“We wanted it to be fun and real and something that felt like a natural evolution of a blog,” Jardin said. “We’ve been approached by big TV networks about doing a BoingBoing reality show or ‘American Idol’ type show. But the idea of having a prime-time network show seems like it would automatically be wrong for us and doomed to fail. . . . We wanted to adapt things that are already part of the vernacular of BoingBoing.”

From AdAge:

“CBS said TV revenue fell 4% to about $2.2 billion in the period from about $42.3 billion from the year-ago quarter, when revenue fell about 1%. Meanwhile, radio revenue fell 11% to about $463.4 million from about $519.1 million, when revenue fell about 10%.”

Dang, I can’t remember the last time I told my boss revenues would be down another 4% this year (after being down 1% last year) and convincing him or her that we should all be pleased.  I guess it works if you put those numbers next to the 11% drop in radio sales!  Tough times for broadcast TV.

Zach Rodgers at ClickZ wrote up Ask.com’s experience with their Ask A Ninja sponsorship:

“Question: What do you get when you cross a ninja with one of those live-read radio sponsorships of old — you know, the ad spots news hosts and celebs used to read on-air?

“Answer: Ask.com’s latest digital ad initiative.

“The IAC/InterActiveCorp-owned search engine has paired with goofball video blog Ask a Ninja on an ad deal in which the show’s host and namesake reads the sponsor copy himself — and then offers bonus clips to fans who query Ask with special ninja-themed search terms. The three-month relationship, which also includes run-of-site display ads, was brokered by Ask a Ninja rep Federated Media Publishing….”

“Early response rates are good. In the first two weeks of the campaign, 8.3 percent of viewers have searched on Ask.com’s ninja-related terms and watched the videos.

“‘There isn’t advertising that is able to drive that kind of response rate,’ said [ChasNote’s own] Chas Edwards, chief revenue officer at FM Publishing. ‘But there certainly is opportunity around the ninja to drive that response rate around himself and his content’ by incorporating a call to action and a pay off that takes place within the search experience.”

Thanks for the coverage, Zach!

A new study by the OPA reports :30s work better than :15s, and that news content is a more effective environment than comedy content.  Especially good news: Online video ads appear to work tremendously well:

“Of the 80 percent of viewers that have watched a video ad online, 52 percent have taken some sort of action, whether it’s checking out a website (31 percent), searching for additional information (22 percent), going into a store (15 percent), or making a purchase (12 percent).”

More at PaidContent.

From the NY Times:

“these companies have found that inviting consumers to create their advertising is often more stressful, costly and time-consuming than just rolling up their sleeves and doing the work themselves. Many entries are mediocre, if not downright bad, and sifting through them requires full-time attention. And even the most well-known brands often spend millions of dollars upfront to get the word out to consumers.”

There has to be a better way, one that produces high-quality messaging that’s relative to the brand, engages consumers and isn’t harder or more expensive to create. I have some ideas! See what Ask.com did or what Intel did or what Cisco did. To the chagrin of the sales reps here at FM (!!), not one of these brands spent a million dollars to create these successful examples of consumer-involved conversational marketing.

From SJ Merc News:

“‘Ask a Ninja’ is one of the most popular independent video podcasts on the Web, averaging between 300,000 and 500,000 viewers for each new episode (released bi-weekly) while collecting more than 3 million viewers for popular episodes such as ‘Ninja Love’…. What started as a small production with 40 Internet subscribers skyrocketed into a Web phenomenon when the ninja duo developed a ‘niche audience that pushed back’ in the question-and-answer format with the ninja as moderator.

“Getting a specific audience and creating your own brand is important, and ‘Ask a Ninja’ has managed to do that,” says Derek Gordon of Technorati.com, a Web site tracker. According to Technorati.com, ‘Ask a Ninja’ ranks in its top 100 blogs, and there are more than 3,100 sites linked to it.”

Late Thursday night, video-podcaster (and FM partner) Ask A Ninja rolled out the first episode in a series of nine that will be sponsored by Ask.com as part of their recent re-branding campaign. At the end of each episode, the Ninja invites his viewers to go to Ask.com (by clicking on an Ask.com banner alongside the video window, or by going straight to Ask.com) and to enter a made-up word. The Ninja tells viewers who do this that they’ll get either the definition of “ninjuice” (via a custom video skit by the Ninja), or — so threatens the Ninja — a sword in the head.

The campaign is smart at one (very simple) level in that it ties together banner ads with integrated, co-branded messages in the video programming. At another level, it’s even smarter in that the Ninja (the featured act) rather than Ask.com (the marketer) makes the call-to-action.

The data from the campaign’s first 20 hours are astounding. One out of every twelve viewers of the Ninja’s “Ninja Sayings” video skit went to Ask.com, queried “ninjuice” and watched the bonus video that the Ninja produced especially for those “certified search ninjas” who completed the assignment. An 8.3% rate of conversion. For comparison, imagine a conventional banner that delivers a terrific click-through rate, say 0.4%. Then assume a whopping 25% of those clickers actually test-drive the product. Even that record-breaking performance would add up to only a 0.1% rate of conversion. The team effort by Ask.com and Ask A Ninja did 83 TIMES better.

Digital marketing has become a martial art!

This concept was a collaboration of FM’s James Gross and Ask’s Sean X Cummings.

More coverage at GigaOM’s NewTeeVee, Clickz (twice) and AdRants.

Update 5/28/07: Ninjuice has made its way to Wikipedia.

Several YouTube super stars (Ze Frank, HappySlip) expressed doubts about YouTube’s recently announced program to share revenue with top content creators. Exclusivity clauses, the loss of merchandise cross-selling opportunities, and sharing a big chunk of the ad dollars are the gripes. From Business Week:

“the ad revenue these sites share often can’t compare with the amount creators could get if they built their own sites into destinations complete with advertising and merchandise. Gambito [of HappySlip] wouldn’t disclose the financial details of the YouTube deal, which is in a testing phase and requires some of her new videos to appear exclusively for two weeks on the site. Revver evenly splits revenue it gets from clicks on ads appended to videos. Gambito’s own site sells t-shirts, bags, and other merchandise. She hopes eventually to sell ads as well.”