ChasNote

The Our TV Picks section of the Fancast site features an eclectic batch of TV show reviews (from sci fi classics to sexy superheroes to contemporary reality TV) by writers from Boing Boing, Dooce, NOTCOT and Ask A Ninja. FM helped put all the pieces together.

Comcast is running banner ads on those same sites, with clips from the authors’ show reviews.

Perhaps it should come as no surprise that ads, for example, on Dooce featuring an excerpt of more Dooce content would drive click-through rates that can be counted in whole numbers. But what can I say — I’m an old-fashioned guy who continues to be impressed by CTRs above 1% on banners that are SFW.

UPDATE 12/10: Xeni Jardin at Boing Boing explains to her readers how the sponsorship works:

“A disclaimer, in the interest of transparent über-sharing: I was paid to write these posts, and the site is an online video hub run by Comcast.

“I wasn’t told what to write about or not write about, and my work wasn’t edited or modified in any way, so I picked freaky stuff I genuinely liked, and in a few cases, had some sort of personal connection with.”

Uber-well done, Xeni and Comcast!

(Credits: Robin D’agostino at Comcast Interactive Media, and Michael Cohn and John Shankman at FM.)

ZenithOptimedia predicts online advertising will be up 18%, Group M expects it will be up only 10%.

Jack Myers is in the middle, at 13.5%, and eMarketer puts it at 8.9%.

According to AdWeek, brands building their own Facebook applications are struggling to stand out among the tens of thousands of other apps, and most — like Nike’s Ballers Network — aren’t racking up impressive install numbers:

“Six months later, Nike is confronting a dilemma familiar to many brands that charged headlong onto Facebook: very few people use Ballers Network. Despite its global ambitions and support in three languages, the application has a mere 3,400 users per month. According to Nike, it’s still testing the application.

“Brands, in general, have found Facebook unforgiving terrain for marketing. It’s well known, for instance, that banner ads perform poorly on the site. (A recent IDC report called advertising on social networks ’stillborn.’) But the Facebook Platform, launched 18 months ago — which lets developers create social applications for users — was thought to offer the perfect opportunity to move beyond banners to provide ‘branded utility.’ So far, however, Facebook apps from brands like Coca-Cola, Champion, Ford and Microsoft are as popular as desolate Second Life islands.”

But to call advertising on social networks “stillborn” ignores many programs where brands successful partner with applications like Graffiti, such as Acuvue, BMW, and Intel, among others.

And it’s a reckless point of view. Facebook is deeply engaged with tens of millions of your customers. Deeply engaged with them. Sure, the marketing models and formats aren’t yet perfect. But taking your ball and going home just isn’t an option.

UPDATE: iMedia is out with its Predictions for 2009 report, in which they asked me for my take. One question is relevant to the above. They asked, “In what news ways will marketers use social networks?” My comment:

“They’ll stop looking at Facebook or MySpace as coherent media ‘things.’ Instead, they’ll view social networks as platforms — like multiple-system operators (MSOs) in cable TV — and work harder to find the communities — the ‘media properties’ — on top of those platforms.”

In a Friday column at NYT.com (The Medium), Virginia Heffernan makes a casual admission that I don’t see very often: That editorial decisions at traditional print publications and newspapers are shaped by ad sales and promotional considerations. It’s an obvious and true admission, but one that is more often directed at the crass and debased kind of journalism that occurs online, especially at, ahem, blogs.

“Take an example from a recent issue of Self magazine. It contains an article about volunteer work, one that could have been written in a million ways. But because it appears in a magazine with newsstand sales, a subscriber base of women and ads from cosmetics companies and pharmaceuticals, it is, perforce, a colloquial personal essay that expresses in its DNA deeply held beliefs about how women’s magazines work and sell and survive. Specifically, it’s produced to engender and justify a cover line, that good old device used by glossy magazines to stand out on newsstands. In this case, the cover line reads, ‘The #1 Happiness Secret You Might Be Missing,’ and the story touts volunteering as a wellspring of contentment. That volunteering story is worlds away from one you would find in a private journal, a hardcover anthology, a paid advertisement or a travel blog.”

In this light, all the scary and revolutionary stuff called “conversational marketing” isn’t so new. The subtle (and deeply important) part of the job is figuring out if you’re Self Magazine, a hardcover anthology or a paid advertisement.

(This article came to my attention by way of a tweet by TheJames.)

GM’s CEO told congress last week that among the bad business practices his company will change, if taxpayers cut the requested check, is an advertising mix that is out of synch with where GM customers spend their time. From a reader comment on Fred Wilson’s AVC:

“When quarried about their 09 expenditures Wagganer very specifically stated ‘We will move a SUBSTANTIAL portion of our ($500 million) advertising budget to online (Internet).’

Previously I was among the bail-out skeptics, but I’m warming up to the idea!

Earlier this week, I claimed that American Express’s OPEN Forum blog had been validated by the mainstream press as a legitimate small business publication. Now sites like Open Business are counting the OPEN Forum blog among the most influential blogs for entrepreneurs, alongside the leading editorial voices on the web: Matt Marshall’s VentureBeat, Arrington’s TechCrunch, MacManus’s Read/Write Web, Guy Kawasaki’s How to Change the World, Fred Wilson’s AVC, Anita Campbell’s Small Business Trends, Blodget’s Alley Insider, and others. Open Business ranks the OPEN Forum site at 21 out of the best 150.

That’s not a total surprise, given that many of the above authors are contributors to OPEN Forum site, and that American Express has the good sense to let them write unfiltered editorial stories that have no direct relation to any American Express product.

(Disclosures: FM works with American Express on the OPEN Forum blog, and the above authors are all part of the FM family.)

Johnson & Johnson’s Acuvue contact lens brand has sponsored the development of a new feature on the Graffiti Facebook app: One click to larger, higher resolution versions of your favorite Graffitis. The Acuvue High-Res button runs at the base of every Graffiti image. (There are tens of millions of them.)

When you click on the High-Res button, a message pops up to tell you what’s about to happen — with an Acuvue ad unit to the right of the message:

And what happens is this: The Graffiti image enlarges and (because the resolution is better) comes into greater focus, like that feeling you get when you pop in your contacts and see a more focused version of yourself in the mirror. If you’re the Joker, it looks like this:

(Graffiti credit: Rainna Langley.)

(Other credits: Rob D’Alto, Scott Haldeman and Eugina Valliades at McCann; Mark Kantor and Tim Suzman at Graffiti; and Jon Ohliger, Stephanie Loleng, Jana Hartz, Michael Cohn, and Paula Pentogenis at FM. Well done!)

Earlier this week, Comcast had an unhappy and hugely influential customer in Guy Kawasaki. Guy has nearly 32,000 people following his Twitter feed, and here’s what he told them:

Comcast proved it was listening, and its Chief Twitterer, @ComcastCares, responded to Guy, right there in the conversation Guy had started in Twitter. Now, 48 hours later, Comcast turned a grumpy customer into a Twittering evangelist.

I’ve viewed American Express’s OPEN Forum blog as a legitimate small business publication for a long time, but, hey, I’m biased. Amex partners with FM and top SMB authors and experts (Anita Campbell, Scott Belsky, Guy Kawasaki, John Jantsch, Mike Masnick, Knowledge@Wharton, the Techdirt Insight Community, et al) to create the editorial content published on the site. (More on the FM / Amex partnership here.)

Turns out, I’m not a alone. Mainstream business publications such as the NY Times, Entrepreneur, FT and Mediapost are four that sourced Amex OPEN blog articles — this week alone.

From Ad Age:

“Dell has pulled out of its long-term contracts to run ads on the back covers of business magazines including Fortune and The Economist, a retreat that only underscores magazines’ vulnerability during this recession…. the broader recession is also combining with the challenges posed by digital media to put pressure on all media channels to prove their immediate worth.”