CBS’ Tassler Discusses Fall Lineup, ‘Hip’ New Hawaii Five-O
Media Week/Marc Berman
Once again, CBS has the strongest fall lineup, with an abundance of hit scripted comedies and dramas and quality non-scripted hours Survivor, The Amazing Race and Undercover Boss scheduled appropriately across the week. The Eye net has, in fact, led in total viewers for seven out of the last eight seasons and there is every reason to believe its winning streak will continue. (more…)
The rise of social media levels the playing field
If there was a single familiar refrain from digital shops over the past decade, it was that their older, traditional-agency brethren “didn’t get it” when it came to digital. But lately, that widely acknowledged gap has begun to narrow to the point where “older” agencies can claim more success in some areas of digital marketing. (more…)
RAIN reviews CBS’s new Radio.com
(Source) RAIN /
Yesterday we reported on CBS Radio and CBS Interactive’s ambitious new integrated streaming platform Radio.com (RAIN coverage here), 
that ties together hundreds of online radio stations from CBS, AOL Radio, Yahoo Radio and Last.fm. It’s a ton of content and the site succeeds overall in organizing those hundreds of stations.
Yet, though it may be inevitable that the “KydzRadio” or “AOL Traditional Gospel” channels get buried, I wonder how someone specifically looking for such channels would ever find them — at least on the homepage. Once you actually start listening to a station, a handy search bar appears that instantly found AOL Traditional Gospel with a search for “gospel.” Why isn’t this on the homepage?
That said, listeners can set favorites for easy access to channels. That’s just the tip of the iceberg for interactivity on Radio.com, too. The player window displays recent tweets about the currently playing artist, artist bios, the ability to scrobble the track, rate it, buy it, share it (displayed below) and even discover similar artists and other stations that play that 
kind of music.
It’s clear CBS is trying to keep Radio.com a “lean in” experience by pouring in such content and interaction. Sometimes though, it feels a bit too crowded, (I spent a few seconds thinking, “how do I just skip the song?”), but listeners will certainly appreciate all the options.
The site is also ad-optimized. New banner ads are displayed on nearly every track and most channels I launched started with a pre-roll video ad. Notably on launching “AOL ’00s Indie,” I had to sit through a video ad and 6 audio spots before hearing a music. Hopefully it was just a glitch, but it would have been enough to turn me away.
So Radio.com may still need some work, but the feat of organizing hundreds of streams from 4 different services into one easily-understandable website is impressive. — MS
CBS Radio Bows New Media Player
(Source) Media Daily News/Erik Sass
CBS Radio has relaunched its online streaming media player, offering an immersive multimedia environment for users and more capabilities and placement opportunities for advertisers. (more…)
Viral Old Spice ‘Responses’ Crush Original Ads in Online
(Source) adage.com
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — The 186 responses that Old Spice pitchman Isaiah Mustafa recorded for fans of his beauty, intelligence and outstanding physique took just a week to eclipse the original TV ads themselves in total views, according to new numbers from Visible Measures. (more…)
Five Things ‘Jersey Shore’ Taught My Agency About Social Media
(Source) adage.com/ Ilya Vedrashko
Shared links have a longer shelf life on Facebook than Twitter, and Buzzfeed sends more traffic through re-shares than direct clicks. That’s two of the things my agency learned when we launched a stealth social-media experiment through a site we created called Jerzify Yourself.
Jerzify Yourself was created in January of this year, a week after the season one finale of the popular MTV show “Jersey Shore” that attracted an audience of 4.8 million. The site, written in a few days in Flash, allows users to upload their headshot onto a stylized body and morph themselves into a Jersey Shore “Guido” or “Guidette.” Or as New York’s Village Voice put it: “The gist is Snooki-grade simple: upload a medium-size jpg, scale the image to fit, choose your spray-tan shade, pick your pose — and holy Freckles McGee, you’re magically recast as a human meatball.”
Why did we do this? To evaluate the power of social media and spreadable content. As an experiment, Jerzify Yourself was highly successful in adding the much needed texture to our knowledge of how content gets passed along online. One obvious caveat here is that the observations below are based on a single experiment, so please treat them as such and not as some kind of immutable laws. That said, we hope our findings will add a new angle to the collective thinking behind online content dissemination.
Here are five social-media learnings that grabbed our attention:
1. The Invisible Impact. If you find yourself measuring the value of referral sources for your campaign, consider their total impact via re-shares in addition to the direct traffic they send your way. Counting only the direct clicks from any site is likely to underestimate the site’s total value; five out of six sites on our top referrers list sent almost as much traffic through re-shares as through direct clicks. It would make for an interesting follow-up experiment to see if this difference holds up for paid campaigns as well as for “organic” content. If it does, and this difference is measured, it would have important implications on how we plan media buys.
2. If It Doesn’t Spread, It’s Half-dead. Dr. Henry Jenkins once made this now-famous remark about the destiny of content in the age of social media: “If It Doesn’t Spread, It’s Dead.” Having looked at the data, we can now say with a degree of confidence that you’ll still get viewers if your link gets picked up by major online publications, but content that’s designed to be spreadable can nearly double the referred traffic through re-shares.
3. Some Sites Are Read By More Active Spreaders Than Others. Some sites on our top list turned out to be a lot more spreadful (for lack of a better word) than others. Buzzfeed, in particular, sent more traffic — twice as much! — via re-shares than through direct clicks. In fact, the number one direct referrer, collegehumor.com, will come last if we re-rank the sites by “boost.” These observations along with our understanding of the reasons behind the differences will influence the way we design online properties meant to encourage content sharing.
It would also be interesting to see if there is a difference in the length of pass-along chains between different sites. On average, the link traveled down two or three generations of users before the chain broke, and we’ve seen chains as long as seven users, but we couldn’t produce a more precise analysis for a technical reason.
4. The Speed of Content Depends on the Medium Through Which It Travels. You know how the speed of sound depends on the medium through which it passes? It’s like that with Twitter and Facebook, and probably other social networks. To repeat an observation made earlier: in our experiment, shared links had a much longer gestation period but also a longer shelf life on Facebook than on Twitter. For the entire January-May period, Facebook has referred 12,789 visitors, 83% of them after the first week. Twitter has referred 10,549 visitors altogether, 97% of them during the first week. This difference probably has to do with how people access the news feeds on these sites. On Twitter, the single stream of news quickly washes away older items. On Facebook, older news can still be the front-page material on the individual slower-moving walls. If you find yourself choosing between the two sites for your next campaign, be aware of this difference.
5. Don’t Reach For the Off Switch. As the 404 errors on formerly popular viral branded destinations demonstrate, it might be tempting to kill the destination site some time after the traffic has peaked. I’ve argued elsewhere that abandoning old microsites in their Long Tail phase means leaving money on the table, and our experiment has demonstrated that not only do off-peak sites attract healthy traffic, these visitors can also be more valuable than the rush-hour crowd.
CBS Debuts New Radio Player
(Source) Cynopsis/ Wayne Karrfalt
Seeking to take the best from both old and new media, CBS Interactive Music Group and CBS Radio‘s news, talk and sports stations launched a new consumer audio streaming platform at the URL Radio.com. The site, powered with some of CBS acquisition Last.fm‘s core technology, adopts many of the features sported by popular web music services, including the ability to browse, search, discover and build customized playlists. Radio.com’s music player allows you to search stations by call letters, city or genre; buy ringtones from features artists; or listen to songs “you may also like.” (Last.fm’s “Scrobbler Software” tracks what artists and genres listen to most to suggest like and kind material.) CBS also launched a free Radio.com iPad app, offering access to radio stations from CBS Radio, AOL, Yahoo via Wi-Fi or 3G.
CBS Radio Debuts New Streaming Media Player
(Source) Radio Ink Magazine
July 16, 2010: CBS Interactive Music Group and CBS Radio launch a new streaming platform at www.radio.com, with streams, music information, and music profile and discovery through Last.fm “scrobbling” technology. The site offers 130 CBS Radio stations.
A Radio.com iPad app debuted in April; the site includes blogs, news feeds, and video and audio from every station, with links back to station sites. The network offers nearly 250,000 content posts each month. Also up is Last.fm trends, a daily bog posts that reflects the more than 40 million “scrobbles” the site receives each day, showing which artists are played the most and who to watch for in months ahead.
Artists and stations can be shared on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and LinkedIn, among other sites.
CBS Radio Launches New Online Player
(Source) Mediaweek /Katy Bachman
CBS Radio Friday (July 16) launched a new online radio player, a central Web site that consolidates all the company’s 130 radio station streams, Last.fm, and hundreds of additional streams from CBS’ partners, all in one place.
The Web site, located at www.radio.com, offers users more features and advertisers more placement opportunities. Among the features on the site are: currently playing information, song history, station and genre searches, presets, blogs, news feeds, and social media tools.
Advertisers that take advantage of the site will get a visual history of audio spots heard, and improved audience measurement.
The site is also available as an iPad and iPhone app.
CBS, MediaMind ‘Extend’ Video
(Source) Mediaweek/Mike Shields
One of the problems with Web video is that there is only so much video ad inventory online, so many publishers shove video spots into traditional display ads.
That leads to another problem: Display ads are often too small — or tucked away too discretely to the side — to properly showcase brands’ big-money TV ads.
CBS believes it has an answer to that conundrum. The company has partnered with the rich-media firm MediaMind (formerly Eyeblaster) to create a new ad treatment called the Video Extender, which allows users to view video ads in as large a screen as they’d like. The unit features an arrow in the bottom left-hand corner, and when loading prompts users to “click and drag to expand video.” Users can then expand the ad unit to the size of their choosing, even covering up content and links that appear on the page. (more…)
Media Week/Marc Berman
Once again, CBS has the strongest fall lineup, with an abundance of hit scripted comedies and dramas and quality non-scripted hours Survivor, The Amazing Race and Undercover Boss scheduled appropriately across the week. The Eye net has, in fact, led in total viewers for seven out of the last eight seasons and there is every reason to believe its winning streak will continue. (more…)
The rise of social media levels the playing field
If there was a single familiar refrain from digital shops over the past decade, it was that their older, traditional-agency brethren “didn’t get it” when it came to digital. But lately, that widely acknowledged gap has begun to narrow to the point where “older” agencies can claim more success in some areas of digital marketing. (more…)
RAIN reviews CBS’s new Radio.com
(Source) RAIN /
Yesterday we reported on CBS Radio and CBS Interactive’s ambitious new integrated streaming platform Radio.com (RAIN coverage here), that ties together hundreds of online radio stations from CBS, AOL Radio, Yahoo Radio and Last.fm. It’s a ton of content and the site succeeds overall in organizing those hundreds of stations.
Yet, though it may be inevitable that the “KydzRadio” or “AOL Traditional Gospel” channels get buried, I wonder how someone specifically looking for such channels would ever find them — at least on the homepage. Once you actually start listening to a station, a handy search bar appears that instantly found AOL Traditional Gospel with a search for “gospel.” Why isn’t this on the homepage?
That said, listeners can set favorites for easy access to channels. That’s just the tip of the iceberg for interactivity on Radio.com, too. The player window displays recent tweets about the currently playing artist, artist bios, the ability to scrobble the track, rate it, buy it, share it (displayed below) and even discover similar artists and other stations that play that kind of music.
It’s clear CBS is trying to keep Radio.com a “lean in” experience by pouring in such content and interaction. Sometimes though, it feels a bit too crowded, (I spent a few seconds thinking, “how do I just skip the song?”), but listeners will certainly appreciate all the options.
The site is also ad-optimized. New banner ads are displayed on nearly every track and most channels I launched started with a pre-roll video ad. Notably on launching “AOL ’00s Indie,” I had to sit through a video ad and 6 audio spots before hearing a music. Hopefully it was just a glitch, but it would have been enough to turn me away.
So Radio.com may still need some work, but the feat of organizing hundreds of streams from 4 different services into one easily-understandable website is impressive. — MS
CBS Radio Bows New Media Player
(Source) Media Daily News/Erik Sass
CBS Radio has relaunched its online streaming media player, offering an immersive multimedia environment for users and more capabilities and placement opportunities for advertisers. (more…)
Viral Old Spice ‘Responses’ Crush Original Ads in Online
(Source) adage.com
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — The 186 responses that Old Spice pitchman Isaiah Mustafa recorded for fans of his beauty, intelligence and outstanding physique took just a week to eclipse the original TV ads themselves in total views, according to new numbers from Visible Measures. (more…)
Five Things ‘Jersey Shore’ Taught My Agency About Social Media
(Source) adage.com/ Ilya Vedrashko
Shared links have a longer shelf life on Facebook than Twitter, and Buzzfeed sends more traffic through re-shares than direct clicks. That’s two of the things my agency learned when we launched a stealth social-media experiment through a site we created called Jerzify Yourself.
Jerzify Yourself was created in January of this year, a week after the season one finale of the popular MTV show “Jersey Shore” that attracted an audience of 4.8 million. The site, written in a few days in Flash, allows users to upload their headshot onto a stylized body and morph themselves into a Jersey Shore “Guido” or “Guidette.” Or as New York’s Village Voice put it: “The gist is Snooki-grade simple: upload a medium-size jpg, scale the image to fit, choose your spray-tan shade, pick your pose — and holy Freckles McGee, you’re magically recast as a human meatball.”
Why did we do this? To evaluate the power of social media and spreadable content. As an experiment, Jerzify Yourself was highly successful in adding the much needed texture to our knowledge of how content gets passed along online. One obvious caveat here is that the observations below are based on a single experiment, so please treat them as such and not as some kind of immutable laws. That said, we hope our findings will add a new angle to the collective thinking behind online content dissemination.
Here are five social-media learnings that grabbed our attention:
1. The Invisible Impact. If you find yourself measuring the value of referral sources for your campaign, consider their total impact via re-shares in addition to the direct traffic they send your way. Counting only the direct clicks from any site is likely to underestimate the site’s total value; five out of six sites on our top referrers list sent almost as much traffic through re-shares as through direct clicks. It would make for an interesting follow-up experiment to see if this difference holds up for paid campaigns as well as for “organic” content. If it does, and this difference is measured, it would have important implications on how we plan media buys.
2. If It Doesn’t Spread, It’s Half-dead. Dr. Henry Jenkins once made this now-famous remark about the destiny of content in the age of social media: “If It Doesn’t Spread, It’s Dead.” Having looked at the data, we can now say with a degree of confidence that you’ll still get viewers if your link gets picked up by major online publications, but content that’s designed to be spreadable can nearly double the referred traffic through re-shares.
3. Some Sites Are Read By More Active Spreaders Than Others. Some sites on our top list turned out to be a lot more spreadful (for lack of a better word) than others. Buzzfeed, in particular, sent more traffic — twice as much! — via re-shares than through direct clicks. In fact, the number one direct referrer, collegehumor.com, will come last if we re-rank the sites by “boost.” These observations along with our understanding of the reasons behind the differences will influence the way we design online properties meant to encourage content sharing.
It would also be interesting to see if there is a difference in the length of pass-along chains between different sites. On average, the link traveled down two or three generations of users before the chain broke, and we’ve seen chains as long as seven users, but we couldn’t produce a more precise analysis for a technical reason.
4. The Speed of Content Depends on the Medium Through Which It Travels. You know how the speed of sound depends on the medium through which it passes? It’s like that with Twitter and Facebook, and probably other social networks. To repeat an observation made earlier: in our experiment, shared links had a much longer gestation period but also a longer shelf life on Facebook than on Twitter. For the entire January-May period, Facebook has referred 12,789 visitors, 83% of them after the first week. Twitter has referred 10,549 visitors altogether, 97% of them during the first week. This difference probably has to do with how people access the news feeds on these sites. On Twitter, the single stream of news quickly washes away older items. On Facebook, older news can still be the front-page material on the individual slower-moving walls. If you find yourself choosing between the two sites for your next campaign, be aware of this difference.
5. Don’t Reach For the Off Switch. As the 404 errors on formerly popular viral branded destinations demonstrate, it might be tempting to kill the destination site some time after the traffic has peaked. I’ve argued elsewhere that abandoning old microsites in their Long Tail phase means leaving money on the table, and our experiment has demonstrated that not only do off-peak sites attract healthy traffic, these visitors can also be more valuable than the rush-hour crowd.
CBS Debuts New Radio Player
(Source) Cynopsis/ Wayne Karrfalt
Seeking to take the best from both old and new media, CBS Interactive Music Group and CBS Radio‘s news, talk and sports stations launched a new consumer audio streaming platform at the URL Radio.com. The site, powered with some of CBS acquisition Last.fm‘s core technology, adopts many of the features sported by popular web music services, including the ability to browse, search, discover and build customized playlists. Radio.com’s music player allows you to search stations by call letters, city or genre; buy ringtones from features artists; or listen to songs “you may also like.” (Last.fm’s “Scrobbler Software” tracks what artists and genres listen to most to suggest like and kind material.) CBS also launched a free Radio.com iPad app, offering access to radio stations from CBS Radio, AOL, Yahoo via Wi-Fi or 3G.
CBS Radio Debuts New Streaming Media Player
(Source) Radio Ink Magazine
July 16, 2010: CBS Interactive Music Group and CBS Radio launch a new streaming platform at www.radio.com, with streams, music information, and music profile and discovery through Last.fm “scrobbling” technology. The site offers 130 CBS Radio stations.
A Radio.com iPad app debuted in April; the site includes blogs, news feeds, and video and audio from every station, with links back to station sites. The network offers nearly 250,000 content posts each month. Also up is Last.fm trends, a daily bog posts that reflects the more than 40 million “scrobbles” the site receives each day, showing which artists are played the most and who to watch for in months ahead.
Artists and stations can be shared on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and LinkedIn, among other sites.
CBS Radio Launches New Online Player
(Source) Mediaweek /Katy Bachman
CBS Radio Friday (July 16) launched a new online radio player, a central Web site that consolidates all the company’s 130 radio station streams, Last.fm, and hundreds of additional streams from CBS’ partners, all in one place.
The Web site, located at www.radio.com, offers users more features and advertisers more placement opportunities. Among the features on the site are: currently playing information, song history, station and genre searches, presets, blogs, news feeds, and social media tools.
Advertisers that take advantage of the site will get a visual history of audio spots heard, and improved audience measurement.
The site is also available as an iPad and iPhone app.
CBS, MediaMind ‘Extend’ Video
(Source) Mediaweek/Mike Shields
One of the problems with Web video is that there is only so much video ad inventory online, so many publishers shove video spots into traditional display ads.
That leads to another problem: Display ads are often too small — or tucked away too discretely to the side — to properly showcase brands’ big-money TV ads.
CBS believes it has an answer to that conundrum. The company has partnered with the rich-media firm MediaMind (formerly Eyeblaster) to create a new ad treatment called the Video Extender, which allows users to view video ads in as large a screen as they’d like. The unit features an arrow in the bottom left-hand corner, and when loading prompts users to “click and drag to expand video.” Users can then expand the ad unit to the size of their choosing, even covering up content and links that appear on the page. (more…)
If there was a single familiar refrain from digital shops over the past decade, it was that their older, traditional-agency brethren “didn’t get it” when it came to digital. But lately, that widely acknowledged gap has begun to narrow to the point where “older” agencies can claim more success in some areas of digital marketing. (more…)
RAIN reviews CBS’s new Radio.com
(Source) RAIN /
Yesterday we reported on CBS Radio and CBS Interactive’s ambitious new integrated streaming platform Radio.com (RAIN coverage here), that ties together hundreds of online radio stations from CBS, AOL Radio, Yahoo Radio and Last.fm. It’s a ton of content and the site succeeds overall in organizing those hundreds of stations.
Yet, though it may be inevitable that the “KydzRadio” or “AOL Traditional Gospel” channels get buried, I wonder how someone specifically looking for such channels would ever find them — at least on the homepage. Once you actually start listening to a station, a handy search bar appears that instantly found AOL Traditional Gospel with a search for “gospel.” Why isn’t this on the homepage?
That said, listeners can set favorites for easy access to channels. That’s just the tip of the iceberg for interactivity on Radio.com, too. The player window displays recent tweets about the currently playing artist, artist bios, the ability to scrobble the track, rate it, buy it, share it (displayed below) and even discover similar artists and other stations that play that kind of music.
It’s clear CBS is trying to keep Radio.com a “lean in” experience by pouring in such content and interaction. Sometimes though, it feels a bit too crowded, (I spent a few seconds thinking, “how do I just skip the song?”), but listeners will certainly appreciate all the options.
The site is also ad-optimized. New banner ads are displayed on nearly every track and most channels I launched started with a pre-roll video ad. Notably on launching “AOL ’00s Indie,” I had to sit through a video ad and 6 audio spots before hearing a music. Hopefully it was just a glitch, but it would have been enough to turn me away.
So Radio.com may still need some work, but the feat of organizing hundreds of streams from 4 different services into one easily-understandable website is impressive. — MS
CBS Radio Bows New Media Player
(Source) Media Daily News/Erik Sass
CBS Radio has relaunched its online streaming media player, offering an immersive multimedia environment for users and more capabilities and placement opportunities for advertisers. (more…)
Viral Old Spice ‘Responses’ Crush Original Ads in Online
(Source) adage.com
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — The 186 responses that Old Spice pitchman Isaiah Mustafa recorded for fans of his beauty, intelligence and outstanding physique took just a week to eclipse the original TV ads themselves in total views, according to new numbers from Visible Measures. (more…)
Five Things ‘Jersey Shore’ Taught My Agency About Social Media
(Source) adage.com/ Ilya Vedrashko
Shared links have a longer shelf life on Facebook than Twitter, and Buzzfeed sends more traffic through re-shares than direct clicks. That’s two of the things my agency learned when we launched a stealth social-media experiment through a site we created called Jerzify Yourself.
Jerzify Yourself was created in January of this year, a week after the season one finale of the popular MTV show “Jersey Shore” that attracted an audience of 4.8 million. The site, written in a few days in Flash, allows users to upload their headshot onto a stylized body and morph themselves into a Jersey Shore “Guido” or “Guidette.” Or as New York’s Village Voice put it: “The gist is Snooki-grade simple: upload a medium-size jpg, scale the image to fit, choose your spray-tan shade, pick your pose — and holy Freckles McGee, you’re magically recast as a human meatball.”
Why did we do this? To evaluate the power of social media and spreadable content. As an experiment, Jerzify Yourself was highly successful in adding the much needed texture to our knowledge of how content gets passed along online. One obvious caveat here is that the observations below are based on a single experiment, so please treat them as such and not as some kind of immutable laws. That said, we hope our findings will add a new angle to the collective thinking behind online content dissemination.
Here are five social-media learnings that grabbed our attention:
1. The Invisible Impact. If you find yourself measuring the value of referral sources for your campaign, consider their total impact via re-shares in addition to the direct traffic they send your way. Counting only the direct clicks from any site is likely to underestimate the site’s total value; five out of six sites on our top referrers list sent almost as much traffic through re-shares as through direct clicks. It would make for an interesting follow-up experiment to see if this difference holds up for paid campaigns as well as for “organic” content. If it does, and this difference is measured, it would have important implications on how we plan media buys.
2. If It Doesn’t Spread, It’s Half-dead. Dr. Henry Jenkins once made this now-famous remark about the destiny of content in the age of social media: “If It Doesn’t Spread, It’s Dead.” Having looked at the data, we can now say with a degree of confidence that you’ll still get viewers if your link gets picked up by major online publications, but content that’s designed to be spreadable can nearly double the referred traffic through re-shares.
3. Some Sites Are Read By More Active Spreaders Than Others. Some sites on our top list turned out to be a lot more spreadful (for lack of a better word) than others. Buzzfeed, in particular, sent more traffic — twice as much! — via re-shares than through direct clicks. In fact, the number one direct referrer, collegehumor.com, will come last if we re-rank the sites by “boost.” These observations along with our understanding of the reasons behind the differences will influence the way we design online properties meant to encourage content sharing.
It would also be interesting to see if there is a difference in the length of pass-along chains between different sites. On average, the link traveled down two or three generations of users before the chain broke, and we’ve seen chains as long as seven users, but we couldn’t produce a more precise analysis for a technical reason.
4. The Speed of Content Depends on the Medium Through Which It Travels. You know how the speed of sound depends on the medium through which it passes? It’s like that with Twitter and Facebook, and probably other social networks. To repeat an observation made earlier: in our experiment, shared links had a much longer gestation period but also a longer shelf life on Facebook than on Twitter. For the entire January-May period, Facebook has referred 12,789 visitors, 83% of them after the first week. Twitter has referred 10,549 visitors altogether, 97% of them during the first week. This difference probably has to do with how people access the news feeds on these sites. On Twitter, the single stream of news quickly washes away older items. On Facebook, older news can still be the front-page material on the individual slower-moving walls. If you find yourself choosing between the two sites for your next campaign, be aware of this difference.
5. Don’t Reach For the Off Switch. As the 404 errors on formerly popular viral branded destinations demonstrate, it might be tempting to kill the destination site some time after the traffic has peaked. I’ve argued elsewhere that abandoning old microsites in their Long Tail phase means leaving money on the table, and our experiment has demonstrated that not only do off-peak sites attract healthy traffic, these visitors can also be more valuable than the rush-hour crowd.
CBS Debuts New Radio Player
(Source) Cynopsis/ Wayne Karrfalt
Seeking to take the best from both old and new media, CBS Interactive Music Group and CBS Radio‘s news, talk and sports stations launched a new consumer audio streaming platform at the URL Radio.com. The site, powered with some of CBS acquisition Last.fm‘s core technology, adopts many of the features sported by popular web music services, including the ability to browse, search, discover and build customized playlists. Radio.com’s music player allows you to search stations by call letters, city or genre; buy ringtones from features artists; or listen to songs “you may also like.” (Last.fm’s “Scrobbler Software” tracks what artists and genres listen to most to suggest like and kind material.) CBS also launched a free Radio.com iPad app, offering access to radio stations from CBS Radio, AOL, Yahoo via Wi-Fi or 3G.
CBS Radio Debuts New Streaming Media Player
(Source) Radio Ink Magazine
July 16, 2010: CBS Interactive Music Group and CBS Radio launch a new streaming platform at www.radio.com, with streams, music information, and music profile and discovery through Last.fm “scrobbling” technology. The site offers 130 CBS Radio stations.
A Radio.com iPad app debuted in April; the site includes blogs, news feeds, and video and audio from every station, with links back to station sites. The network offers nearly 250,000 content posts each month. Also up is Last.fm trends, a daily bog posts that reflects the more than 40 million “scrobbles” the site receives each day, showing which artists are played the most and who to watch for in months ahead.
Artists and stations can be shared on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and LinkedIn, among other sites.
CBS Radio Launches New Online Player
(Source) Mediaweek /Katy Bachman
CBS Radio Friday (July 16) launched a new online radio player, a central Web site that consolidates all the company’s 130 radio station streams, Last.fm, and hundreds of additional streams from CBS’ partners, all in one place.
The Web site, located at www.radio.com, offers users more features and advertisers more placement opportunities. Among the features on the site are: currently playing information, song history, station and genre searches, presets, blogs, news feeds, and social media tools.
Advertisers that take advantage of the site will get a visual history of audio spots heard, and improved audience measurement.
The site is also available as an iPad and iPhone app.
CBS, MediaMind ‘Extend’ Video
(Source) Mediaweek/Mike Shields
One of the problems with Web video is that there is only so much video ad inventory online, so many publishers shove video spots into traditional display ads.
That leads to another problem: Display ads are often too small — or tucked away too discretely to the side — to properly showcase brands’ big-money TV ads.
CBS believes it has an answer to that conundrum. The company has partnered with the rich-media firm MediaMind (formerly Eyeblaster) to create a new ad treatment called the Video Extender, which allows users to view video ads in as large a screen as they’d like. The unit features an arrow in the bottom left-hand corner, and when loading prompts users to “click and drag to expand video.” Users can then expand the ad unit to the size of their choosing, even covering up content and links that appear on the page. (more…)
(Source) RAIN /
Yesterday we reported on CBS Radio and CBS Interactive’s ambitious new integrated streaming platform Radio.com (RAIN coverage here), that ties together hundreds of online radio stations from CBS, AOL Radio, Yahoo Radio and Last.fm. It’s a ton of content and the site succeeds overall in organizing those hundreds of stations.
Yet, though it may be inevitable that the “KydzRadio” or “AOL Traditional Gospel” channels get buried, I wonder how someone specifically looking for such channels would ever find them — at least on the homepage. Once you actually start listening to a station, a handy search bar appears that instantly found AOL Traditional Gospel with a search for “gospel.” Why isn’t this on the homepage?
That said, listeners can set favorites for easy access to channels. That’s just the tip of the iceberg for interactivity on Radio.com, too. The player window displays recent tweets about the currently playing artist, artist bios, the ability to scrobble the track, rate it, buy it, share it (displayed below) and even discover similar artists and other stations that play that kind of music.
It’s clear CBS is trying to keep Radio.com a “lean in” experience by pouring in such content and interaction. Sometimes though, it feels a bit too crowded, (I spent a few seconds thinking, “how do I just skip the song?”), but listeners will certainly appreciate all the options.
The site is also ad-optimized. New banner ads are displayed on nearly every track and most channels I launched started with a pre-roll video ad. Notably on launching “AOL ’00s Indie,” I had to sit through a video ad and 6 audio spots before hearing a music. Hopefully it was just a glitch, but it would have been enough to turn me away.
So Radio.com may still need some work, but the feat of organizing hundreds of streams from 4 different services into one easily-understandable website is impressive. — MS
CBS Radio Bows New Media Player
(Source) Media Daily News/Erik Sass
CBS Radio has relaunched its online streaming media player, offering an immersive multimedia environment for users and more capabilities and placement opportunities for advertisers. (more…)
Viral Old Spice ‘Responses’ Crush Original Ads in Online
(Source) adage.com
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — The 186 responses that Old Spice pitchman Isaiah Mustafa recorded for fans of his beauty, intelligence and outstanding physique took just a week to eclipse the original TV ads themselves in total views, according to new numbers from Visible Measures. (more…)
Five Things ‘Jersey Shore’ Taught My Agency About Social Media
(Source) adage.com/ Ilya Vedrashko
Shared links have a longer shelf life on Facebook than Twitter, and Buzzfeed sends more traffic through re-shares than direct clicks. That’s two of the things my agency learned when we launched a stealth social-media experiment through a site we created called Jerzify Yourself.
Jerzify Yourself was created in January of this year, a week after the season one finale of the popular MTV show “Jersey Shore” that attracted an audience of 4.8 million. The site, written in a few days in Flash, allows users to upload their headshot onto a stylized body and morph themselves into a Jersey Shore “Guido” or “Guidette.” Or as New York’s Village Voice put it: “The gist is Snooki-grade simple: upload a medium-size jpg, scale the image to fit, choose your spray-tan shade, pick your pose — and holy Freckles McGee, you’re magically recast as a human meatball.”
Why did we do this? To evaluate the power of social media and spreadable content. As an experiment, Jerzify Yourself was highly successful in adding the much needed texture to our knowledge of how content gets passed along online. One obvious caveat here is that the observations below are based on a single experiment, so please treat them as such and not as some kind of immutable laws. That said, we hope our findings will add a new angle to the collective thinking behind online content dissemination.
Here are five social-media learnings that grabbed our attention:
1. The Invisible Impact. If you find yourself measuring the value of referral sources for your campaign, consider their total impact via re-shares in addition to the direct traffic they send your way. Counting only the direct clicks from any site is likely to underestimate the site’s total value; five out of six sites on our top referrers list sent almost as much traffic through re-shares as through direct clicks. It would make for an interesting follow-up experiment to see if this difference holds up for paid campaigns as well as for “organic” content. If it does, and this difference is measured, it would have important implications on how we plan media buys.
2. If It Doesn’t Spread, It’s Half-dead. Dr. Henry Jenkins once made this now-famous remark about the destiny of content in the age of social media: “If It Doesn’t Spread, It’s Dead.” Having looked at the data, we can now say with a degree of confidence that you’ll still get viewers if your link gets picked up by major online publications, but content that’s designed to be spreadable can nearly double the referred traffic through re-shares.
3. Some Sites Are Read By More Active Spreaders Than Others. Some sites on our top list turned out to be a lot more spreadful (for lack of a better word) than others. Buzzfeed, in particular, sent more traffic — twice as much! — via re-shares than through direct clicks. In fact, the number one direct referrer, collegehumor.com, will come last if we re-rank the sites by “boost.” These observations along with our understanding of the reasons behind the differences will influence the way we design online properties meant to encourage content sharing.
It would also be interesting to see if there is a difference in the length of pass-along chains between different sites. On average, the link traveled down two or three generations of users before the chain broke, and we’ve seen chains as long as seven users, but we couldn’t produce a more precise analysis for a technical reason.
4. The Speed of Content Depends on the Medium Through Which It Travels. You know how the speed of sound depends on the medium through which it passes? It’s like that with Twitter and Facebook, and probably other social networks. To repeat an observation made earlier: in our experiment, shared links had a much longer gestation period but also a longer shelf life on Facebook than on Twitter. For the entire January-May period, Facebook has referred 12,789 visitors, 83% of them after the first week. Twitter has referred 10,549 visitors altogether, 97% of them during the first week. This difference probably has to do with how people access the news feeds on these sites. On Twitter, the single stream of news quickly washes away older items. On Facebook, older news can still be the front-page material on the individual slower-moving walls. If you find yourself choosing between the two sites for your next campaign, be aware of this difference.
5. Don’t Reach For the Off Switch. As the 404 errors on formerly popular viral branded destinations demonstrate, it might be tempting to kill the destination site some time after the traffic has peaked. I’ve argued elsewhere that abandoning old microsites in their Long Tail phase means leaving money on the table, and our experiment has demonstrated that not only do off-peak sites attract healthy traffic, these visitors can also be more valuable than the rush-hour crowd.
CBS Debuts New Radio Player
(Source) Cynopsis/ Wayne Karrfalt
Seeking to take the best from both old and new media, CBS Interactive Music Group and CBS Radio‘s news, talk and sports stations launched a new consumer audio streaming platform at the URL Radio.com. The site, powered with some of CBS acquisition Last.fm‘s core technology, adopts many of the features sported by popular web music services, including the ability to browse, search, discover and build customized playlists. Radio.com’s music player allows you to search stations by call letters, city or genre; buy ringtones from features artists; or listen to songs “you may also like.” (Last.fm’s “Scrobbler Software” tracks what artists and genres listen to most to suggest like and kind material.) CBS also launched a free Radio.com iPad app, offering access to radio stations from CBS Radio, AOL, Yahoo via Wi-Fi or 3G.
CBS Radio Debuts New Streaming Media Player
(Source) Radio Ink Magazine
July 16, 2010: CBS Interactive Music Group and CBS Radio launch a new streaming platform at www.radio.com, with streams, music information, and music profile and discovery through Last.fm “scrobbling” technology. The site offers 130 CBS Radio stations.
A Radio.com iPad app debuted in April; the site includes blogs, news feeds, and video and audio from every station, with links back to station sites. The network offers nearly 250,000 content posts each month. Also up is Last.fm trends, a daily bog posts that reflects the more than 40 million “scrobbles” the site receives each day, showing which artists are played the most and who to watch for in months ahead.
Artists and stations can be shared on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and LinkedIn, among other sites.
CBS Radio Launches New Online Player
(Source) Mediaweek /Katy Bachman
CBS Radio Friday (July 16) launched a new online radio player, a central Web site that consolidates all the company’s 130 radio station streams, Last.fm, and hundreds of additional streams from CBS’ partners, all in one place.
The Web site, located at www.radio.com, offers users more features and advertisers more placement opportunities. Among the features on the site are: currently playing information, song history, station and genre searches, presets, blogs, news feeds, and social media tools.
Advertisers that take advantage of the site will get a visual history of audio spots heard, and improved audience measurement.
The site is also available as an iPad and iPhone app.
CBS, MediaMind ‘Extend’ Video
(Source) Mediaweek/Mike Shields
One of the problems with Web video is that there is only so much video ad inventory online, so many publishers shove video spots into traditional display ads.
That leads to another problem: Display ads are often too small — or tucked away too discretely to the side — to properly showcase brands’ big-money TV ads.
CBS believes it has an answer to that conundrum. The company has partnered with the rich-media firm MediaMind (formerly Eyeblaster) to create a new ad treatment called the Video Extender, which allows users to view video ads in as large a screen as they’d like. The unit features an arrow in the bottom left-hand corner, and when loading prompts users to “click and drag to expand video.” Users can then expand the ad unit to the size of their choosing, even covering up content and links that appear on the page. (more…)
(Source) Media Daily News/Erik Sass
CBS Radio has relaunched its online streaming media player, offering an immersive multimedia environment for users and more capabilities and placement opportunities for advertisers. (more…)
Viral Old Spice ‘Responses’ Crush Original Ads in Online
(Source) adage.com
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — The 186 responses that Old Spice pitchman Isaiah Mustafa recorded for fans of his beauty, intelligence and outstanding physique took just a week to eclipse the original TV ads themselves in total views, according to new numbers from Visible Measures. (more…)
Five Things ‘Jersey Shore’ Taught My Agency About Social Media
(Source) adage.com/ Ilya Vedrashko
Shared links have a longer shelf life on Facebook than Twitter, and Buzzfeed sends more traffic through re-shares than direct clicks. That’s two of the things my agency learned when we launched a stealth social-media experiment through a site we created called Jerzify Yourself.
Jerzify Yourself was created in January of this year, a week after the season one finale of the popular MTV show “Jersey Shore” that attracted an audience of 4.8 million. The site, written in a few days in Flash, allows users to upload their headshot onto a stylized body and morph themselves into a Jersey Shore “Guido” or “Guidette.” Or as New York’s Village Voice put it: “The gist is Snooki-grade simple: upload a medium-size jpg, scale the image to fit, choose your spray-tan shade, pick your pose — and holy Freckles McGee, you’re magically recast as a human meatball.”
Why did we do this? To evaluate the power of social media and spreadable content. As an experiment, Jerzify Yourself was highly successful in adding the much needed texture to our knowledge of how content gets passed along online. One obvious caveat here is that the observations below are based on a single experiment, so please treat them as such and not as some kind of immutable laws. That said, we hope our findings will add a new angle to the collective thinking behind online content dissemination.
Here are five social-media learnings that grabbed our attention:
1. The Invisible Impact. If you find yourself measuring the value of referral sources for your campaign, consider their total impact via re-shares in addition to the direct traffic they send your way. Counting only the direct clicks from any site is likely to underestimate the site’s total value; five out of six sites on our top referrers list sent almost as much traffic through re-shares as through direct clicks. It would make for an interesting follow-up experiment to see if this difference holds up for paid campaigns as well as for “organic” content. If it does, and this difference is measured, it would have important implications on how we plan media buys.
2. If It Doesn’t Spread, It’s Half-dead. Dr. Henry Jenkins once made this now-famous remark about the destiny of content in the age of social media: “If It Doesn’t Spread, It’s Dead.” Having looked at the data, we can now say with a degree of confidence that you’ll still get viewers if your link gets picked up by major online publications, but content that’s designed to be spreadable can nearly double the referred traffic through re-shares.
3. Some Sites Are Read By More Active Spreaders Than Others. Some sites on our top list turned out to be a lot more spreadful (for lack of a better word) than others. Buzzfeed, in particular, sent more traffic — twice as much! — via re-shares than through direct clicks. In fact, the number one direct referrer, collegehumor.com, will come last if we re-rank the sites by “boost.” These observations along with our understanding of the reasons behind the differences will influence the way we design online properties meant to encourage content sharing.
It would also be interesting to see if there is a difference in the length of pass-along chains between different sites. On average, the link traveled down two or three generations of users before the chain broke, and we’ve seen chains as long as seven users, but we couldn’t produce a more precise analysis for a technical reason.
4. The Speed of Content Depends on the Medium Through Which It Travels. You know how the speed of sound depends on the medium through which it passes? It’s like that with Twitter and Facebook, and probably other social networks. To repeat an observation made earlier: in our experiment, shared links had a much longer gestation period but also a longer shelf life on Facebook than on Twitter. For the entire January-May period, Facebook has referred 12,789 visitors, 83% of them after the first week. Twitter has referred 10,549 visitors altogether, 97% of them during the first week. This difference probably has to do with how people access the news feeds on these sites. On Twitter, the single stream of news quickly washes away older items. On Facebook, older news can still be the front-page material on the individual slower-moving walls. If you find yourself choosing between the two sites for your next campaign, be aware of this difference.
5. Don’t Reach For the Off Switch. As the 404 errors on formerly popular viral branded destinations demonstrate, it might be tempting to kill the destination site some time after the traffic has peaked. I’ve argued elsewhere that abandoning old microsites in their Long Tail phase means leaving money on the table, and our experiment has demonstrated that not only do off-peak sites attract healthy traffic, these visitors can also be more valuable than the rush-hour crowd.
CBS Debuts New Radio Player
(Source) Cynopsis/ Wayne Karrfalt
Seeking to take the best from both old and new media, CBS Interactive Music Group and CBS Radio‘s news, talk and sports stations launched a new consumer audio streaming platform at the URL Radio.com. The site, powered with some of CBS acquisition Last.fm‘s core technology, adopts many of the features sported by popular web music services, including the ability to browse, search, discover and build customized playlists. Radio.com’s music player allows you to search stations by call letters, city or genre; buy ringtones from features artists; or listen to songs “you may also like.” (Last.fm’s “Scrobbler Software” tracks what artists and genres listen to most to suggest like and kind material.) CBS also launched a free Radio.com iPad app, offering access to radio stations from CBS Radio, AOL, Yahoo via Wi-Fi or 3G.
CBS Radio Debuts New Streaming Media Player
(Source) Radio Ink Magazine
July 16, 2010: CBS Interactive Music Group and CBS Radio launch a new streaming platform at www.radio.com, with streams, music information, and music profile and discovery through Last.fm “scrobbling” technology. The site offers 130 CBS Radio stations.
A Radio.com iPad app debuted in April; the site includes blogs, news feeds, and video and audio from every station, with links back to station sites. The network offers nearly 250,000 content posts each month. Also up is Last.fm trends, a daily bog posts that reflects the more than 40 million “scrobbles” the site receives each day, showing which artists are played the most and who to watch for in months ahead.
Artists and stations can be shared on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and LinkedIn, among other sites.
CBS Radio Launches New Online Player
(Source) Mediaweek /Katy Bachman
CBS Radio Friday (July 16) launched a new online radio player, a central Web site that consolidates all the company’s 130 radio station streams, Last.fm, and hundreds of additional streams from CBS’ partners, all in one place.
The Web site, located at www.radio.com, offers users more features and advertisers more placement opportunities. Among the features on the site are: currently playing information, song history, station and genre searches, presets, blogs, news feeds, and social media tools.
Advertisers that take advantage of the site will get a visual history of audio spots heard, and improved audience measurement.
The site is also available as an iPad and iPhone app.
CBS, MediaMind ‘Extend’ Video
(Source) Mediaweek/Mike Shields
One of the problems with Web video is that there is only so much video ad inventory online, so many publishers shove video spots into traditional display ads.
That leads to another problem: Display ads are often too small — or tucked away too discretely to the side — to properly showcase brands’ big-money TV ads.
CBS believes it has an answer to that conundrum. The company has partnered with the rich-media firm MediaMind (formerly Eyeblaster) to create a new ad treatment called the Video Extender, which allows users to view video ads in as large a screen as they’d like. The unit features an arrow in the bottom left-hand corner, and when loading prompts users to “click and drag to expand video.” Users can then expand the ad unit to the size of their choosing, even covering up content and links that appear on the page. (more…)
(Source) adage.com
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — The 186 responses that Old Spice pitchman Isaiah Mustafa recorded for fans of his beauty, intelligence and outstanding physique took just a week to eclipse the original TV ads themselves in total views, according to new numbers from Visible Measures. (more…)
Five Things ‘Jersey Shore’ Taught My Agency About Social Media
(Source) adage.com/ Ilya Vedrashko
Shared links have a longer shelf life on Facebook than Twitter, and Buzzfeed sends more traffic through re-shares than direct clicks. That’s two of the things my agency learned when we launched a stealth social-media experiment through a site we created called Jerzify Yourself.
Jerzify Yourself was created in January of this year, a week after the season one finale of the popular MTV show “Jersey Shore” that attracted an audience of 4.8 million. The site, written in a few days in Flash, allows users to upload their headshot onto a stylized body and morph themselves into a Jersey Shore “Guido” or “Guidette.” Or as New York’s Village Voice put it: “The gist is Snooki-grade simple: upload a medium-size jpg, scale the image to fit, choose your spray-tan shade, pick your pose — and holy Freckles McGee, you’re magically recast as a human meatball.”
Why did we do this? To evaluate the power of social media and spreadable content. As an experiment, Jerzify Yourself was highly successful in adding the much needed texture to our knowledge of how content gets passed along online. One obvious caveat here is that the observations below are based on a single experiment, so please treat them as such and not as some kind of immutable laws. That said, we hope our findings will add a new angle to the collective thinking behind online content dissemination.
Here are five social-media learnings that grabbed our attention:
1. The Invisible Impact. If you find yourself measuring the value of referral sources for your campaign, consider their total impact via re-shares in addition to the direct traffic they send your way. Counting only the direct clicks from any site is likely to underestimate the site’s total value; five out of six sites on our top referrers list sent almost as much traffic through re-shares as through direct clicks. It would make for an interesting follow-up experiment to see if this difference holds up for paid campaigns as well as for “organic” content. If it does, and this difference is measured, it would have important implications on how we plan media buys.
2. If It Doesn’t Spread, It’s Half-dead. Dr. Henry Jenkins once made this now-famous remark about the destiny of content in the age of social media: “If It Doesn’t Spread, It’s Dead.” Having looked at the data, we can now say with a degree of confidence that you’ll still get viewers if your link gets picked up by major online publications, but content that’s designed to be spreadable can nearly double the referred traffic through re-shares.
3. Some Sites Are Read By More Active Spreaders Than Others. Some sites on our top list turned out to be a lot more spreadful (for lack of a better word) than others. Buzzfeed, in particular, sent more traffic — twice as much! — via re-shares than through direct clicks. In fact, the number one direct referrer, collegehumor.com, will come last if we re-rank the sites by “boost.” These observations along with our understanding of the reasons behind the differences will influence the way we design online properties meant to encourage content sharing.
It would also be interesting to see if there is a difference in the length of pass-along chains between different sites. On average, the link traveled down two or three generations of users before the chain broke, and we’ve seen chains as long as seven users, but we couldn’t produce a more precise analysis for a technical reason.
4. The Speed of Content Depends on the Medium Through Which It Travels. You know how the speed of sound depends on the medium through which it passes? It’s like that with Twitter and Facebook, and probably other social networks. To repeat an observation made earlier: in our experiment, shared links had a much longer gestation period but also a longer shelf life on Facebook than on Twitter. For the entire January-May period, Facebook has referred 12,789 visitors, 83% of them after the first week. Twitter has referred 10,549 visitors altogether, 97% of them during the first week. This difference probably has to do with how people access the news feeds on these sites. On Twitter, the single stream of news quickly washes away older items. On Facebook, older news can still be the front-page material on the individual slower-moving walls. If you find yourself choosing between the two sites for your next campaign, be aware of this difference.
5. Don’t Reach For the Off Switch. As the 404 errors on formerly popular viral branded destinations demonstrate, it might be tempting to kill the destination site some time after the traffic has peaked. I’ve argued elsewhere that abandoning old microsites in their Long Tail phase means leaving money on the table, and our experiment has demonstrated that not only do off-peak sites attract healthy traffic, these visitors can also be more valuable than the rush-hour crowd.
CBS Debuts New Radio Player
(Source) Cynopsis/ Wayne Karrfalt
Seeking to take the best from both old and new media, CBS Interactive Music Group and CBS Radio‘s news, talk and sports stations launched a new consumer audio streaming platform at the URL Radio.com. The site, powered with some of CBS acquisition Last.fm‘s core technology, adopts many of the features sported by popular web music services, including the ability to browse, search, discover and build customized playlists. Radio.com’s music player allows you to search stations by call letters, city or genre; buy ringtones from features artists; or listen to songs “you may also like.” (Last.fm’s “Scrobbler Software” tracks what artists and genres listen to most to suggest like and kind material.) CBS also launched a free Radio.com iPad app, offering access to radio stations from CBS Radio, AOL, Yahoo via Wi-Fi or 3G.
CBS Radio Debuts New Streaming Media Player
(Source) Radio Ink Magazine
July 16, 2010: CBS Interactive Music Group and CBS Radio launch a new streaming platform at www.radio.com, with streams, music information, and music profile and discovery through Last.fm “scrobbling” technology. The site offers 130 CBS Radio stations.
A Radio.com iPad app debuted in April; the site includes blogs, news feeds, and video and audio from every station, with links back to station sites. The network offers nearly 250,000 content posts each month. Also up is Last.fm trends, a daily bog posts that reflects the more than 40 million “scrobbles” the site receives each day, showing which artists are played the most and who to watch for in months ahead.
Artists and stations can be shared on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and LinkedIn, among other sites.
CBS Radio Launches New Online Player
(Source) Mediaweek /Katy Bachman
CBS Radio Friday (July 16) launched a new online radio player, a central Web site that consolidates all the company’s 130 radio station streams, Last.fm, and hundreds of additional streams from CBS’ partners, all in one place.
The Web site, located at www.radio.com, offers users more features and advertisers more placement opportunities. Among the features on the site are: currently playing information, song history, station and genre searches, presets, blogs, news feeds, and social media tools.
Advertisers that take advantage of the site will get a visual history of audio spots heard, and improved audience measurement.
The site is also available as an iPad and iPhone app.
CBS, MediaMind ‘Extend’ Video
(Source) Mediaweek/Mike Shields
One of the problems with Web video is that there is only so much video ad inventory online, so many publishers shove video spots into traditional display ads.
That leads to another problem: Display ads are often too small — or tucked away too discretely to the side — to properly showcase brands’ big-money TV ads.
CBS believes it has an answer to that conundrum. The company has partnered with the rich-media firm MediaMind (formerly Eyeblaster) to create a new ad treatment called the Video Extender, which allows users to view video ads in as large a screen as they’d like. The unit features an arrow in the bottom left-hand corner, and when loading prompts users to “click and drag to expand video.” Users can then expand the ad unit to the size of their choosing, even covering up content and links that appear on the page. (more…)
(Source) adage.com/ Ilya Vedrashko
Shared links have a longer shelf life on Facebook than Twitter, and Buzzfeed sends more traffic through re-shares than direct clicks. That’s two of the things my agency learned when we launched a stealth social-media experiment through a site we created called Jerzify Yourself.
Jerzify Yourself was created in January of this year, a week after the season one finale of the popular MTV show “Jersey Shore” that attracted an audience of 4.8 million. The site, written in a few days in Flash, allows users to upload their headshot onto a stylized body and morph themselves into a Jersey Shore “Guido” or “Guidette.” Or as New York’s Village Voice put it: “The gist is Snooki-grade simple: upload a medium-size jpg, scale the image to fit, choose your spray-tan shade, pick your pose — and holy Freckles McGee, you’re magically recast as a human meatball.”
Why did we do this? To evaluate the power of social media and spreadable content. As an experiment, Jerzify Yourself was highly successful in adding the much needed texture to our knowledge of how content gets passed along online. One obvious caveat here is that the observations below are based on a single experiment, so please treat them as such and not as some kind of immutable laws. That said, we hope our findings will add a new angle to the collective thinking behind online content dissemination.
Here are five social-media learnings that grabbed our attention:
1. The Invisible Impact. If you find yourself measuring the value of referral sources for your campaign, consider their total impact via re-shares in addition to the direct traffic they send your way. Counting only the direct clicks from any site is likely to underestimate the site’s total value; five out of six sites on our top referrers list sent almost as much traffic through re-shares as through direct clicks. It would make for an interesting follow-up experiment to see if this difference holds up for paid campaigns as well as for “organic” content. If it does, and this difference is measured, it would have important implications on how we plan media buys.
2. If It Doesn’t Spread, It’s Half-dead. Dr. Henry Jenkins once made this now-famous remark about the destiny of content in the age of social media: “If It Doesn’t Spread, It’s Dead.” Having looked at the data, we can now say with a degree of confidence that you’ll still get viewers if your link gets picked up by major online publications, but content that’s designed to be spreadable can nearly double the referred traffic through re-shares.
3. Some Sites Are Read By More Active Spreaders Than Others. Some sites on our top list turned out to be a lot more spreadful (for lack of a better word) than others. Buzzfeed, in particular, sent more traffic — twice as much! — via re-shares than through direct clicks. In fact, the number one direct referrer, collegehumor.com, will come last if we re-rank the sites by “boost.” These observations along with our understanding of the reasons behind the differences will influence the way we design online properties meant to encourage content sharing.
It would also be interesting to see if there is a difference in the length of pass-along chains between different sites. On average, the link traveled down two or three generations of users before the chain broke, and we’ve seen chains as long as seven users, but we couldn’t produce a more precise analysis for a technical reason.
4. The Speed of Content Depends on the Medium Through Which It Travels. You know how the speed of sound depends on the medium through which it passes? It’s like that with Twitter and Facebook, and probably other social networks. To repeat an observation made earlier: in our experiment, shared links had a much longer gestation period but also a longer shelf life on Facebook than on Twitter. For the entire January-May period, Facebook has referred 12,789 visitors, 83% of them after the first week. Twitter has referred 10,549 visitors altogether, 97% of them during the first week. This difference probably has to do with how people access the news feeds on these sites. On Twitter, the single stream of news quickly washes away older items. On Facebook, older news can still be the front-page material on the individual slower-moving walls. If you find yourself choosing between the two sites for your next campaign, be aware of this difference.
5. Don’t Reach For the Off Switch. As the 404 errors on formerly popular viral branded destinations demonstrate, it might be tempting to kill the destination site some time after the traffic has peaked. I’ve argued elsewhere that abandoning old microsites in their Long Tail phase means leaving money on the table, and our experiment has demonstrated that not only do off-peak sites attract healthy traffic, these visitors can also be more valuable than the rush-hour crowd.
CBS Debuts New Radio Player
(Source) Cynopsis/ Wayne Karrfalt
Seeking to take the best from both old and new media, CBS Interactive Music Group and CBS Radio‘s news, talk and sports stations launched a new consumer audio streaming platform at the URL Radio.com. The site, powered with some of CBS acquisition Last.fm‘s core technology, adopts many of the features sported by popular web music services, including the ability to browse, search, discover and build customized playlists. Radio.com’s music player allows you to search stations by call letters, city or genre; buy ringtones from features artists; or listen to songs “you may also like.” (Last.fm’s “Scrobbler Software” tracks what artists and genres listen to most to suggest like and kind material.) CBS also launched a free Radio.com iPad app, offering access to radio stations from CBS Radio, AOL, Yahoo via Wi-Fi or 3G.
CBS Radio Debuts New Streaming Media Player
(Source) Radio Ink Magazine
July 16, 2010: CBS Interactive Music Group and CBS Radio launch a new streaming platform at www.radio.com, with streams, music information, and music profile and discovery through Last.fm “scrobbling” technology. The site offers 130 CBS Radio stations.
A Radio.com iPad app debuted in April; the site includes blogs, news feeds, and video and audio from every station, with links back to station sites. The network offers nearly 250,000 content posts each month. Also up is Last.fm trends, a daily bog posts that reflects the more than 40 million “scrobbles” the site receives each day, showing which artists are played the most and who to watch for in months ahead.
Artists and stations can be shared on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and LinkedIn, among other sites.
CBS Radio Launches New Online Player
(Source) Mediaweek /Katy Bachman
CBS Radio Friday (July 16) launched a new online radio player, a central Web site that consolidates all the company’s 130 radio station streams, Last.fm, and hundreds of additional streams from CBS’ partners, all in one place.
The Web site, located at www.radio.com, offers users more features and advertisers more placement opportunities. Among the features on the site are: currently playing information, song history, station and genre searches, presets, blogs, news feeds, and social media tools.
Advertisers that take advantage of the site will get a visual history of audio spots heard, and improved audience measurement.
The site is also available as an iPad and iPhone app.
CBS, MediaMind ‘Extend’ Video
(Source) Mediaweek/Mike Shields
One of the problems with Web video is that there is only so much video ad inventory online, so many publishers shove video spots into traditional display ads.
That leads to another problem: Display ads are often too small — or tucked away too discretely to the side — to properly showcase brands’ big-money TV ads.
CBS believes it has an answer to that conundrum. The company has partnered with the rich-media firm MediaMind (formerly Eyeblaster) to create a new ad treatment called the Video Extender, which allows users to view video ads in as large a screen as they’d like. The unit features an arrow in the bottom left-hand corner, and when loading prompts users to “click and drag to expand video.” Users can then expand the ad unit to the size of their choosing, even covering up content and links that appear on the page. (more…)
(Source) Cynopsis/ Wayne Karrfalt
Seeking to take the best from both old and new media, CBS Interactive Music Group and CBS Radio‘s news, talk and sports stations launched a new consumer audio streaming platform at the URL Radio.com. The site, powered with some of CBS acquisition Last.fm‘s core technology, adopts many of the features sported by popular web music services, including the ability to browse, search, discover and build customized playlists. Radio.com’s music player allows you to search stations by call letters, city or genre; buy ringtones from features artists; or listen to songs “you may also like.” (Last.fm’s “Scrobbler Software” tracks what artists and genres listen to most to suggest like and kind material.) CBS also launched a free Radio.com iPad app, offering access to radio stations from CBS Radio, AOL, Yahoo via Wi-Fi or 3G.
CBS Radio Debuts New Streaming Media Player
(Source) Radio Ink Magazine
July 16, 2010: CBS Interactive Music Group and CBS Radio launch a new streaming platform at www.radio.com, with streams, music information, and music profile and discovery through Last.fm “scrobbling” technology. The site offers 130 CBS Radio stations.
A Radio.com iPad app debuted in April; the site includes blogs, news feeds, and video and audio from every station, with links back to station sites. The network offers nearly 250,000 content posts each month. Also up is Last.fm trends, a daily bog posts that reflects the more than 40 million “scrobbles” the site receives each day, showing which artists are played the most and who to watch for in months ahead.
Artists and stations can be shared on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and LinkedIn, among other sites.
CBS Radio Launches New Online Player
(Source) Mediaweek /Katy Bachman
CBS Radio Friday (July 16) launched a new online radio player, a central Web site that consolidates all the company’s 130 radio station streams, Last.fm, and hundreds of additional streams from CBS’ partners, all in one place.
The Web site, located at www.radio.com, offers users more features and advertisers more placement opportunities. Among the features on the site are: currently playing information, song history, station and genre searches, presets, blogs, news feeds, and social media tools.
Advertisers that take advantage of the site will get a visual history of audio spots heard, and improved audience measurement.
The site is also available as an iPad and iPhone app.
CBS, MediaMind ‘Extend’ Video
(Source) Mediaweek/Mike Shields
One of the problems with Web video is that there is only so much video ad inventory online, so many publishers shove video spots into traditional display ads.
That leads to another problem: Display ads are often too small — or tucked away too discretely to the side — to properly showcase brands’ big-money TV ads.
CBS believes it has an answer to that conundrum. The company has partnered with the rich-media firm MediaMind (formerly Eyeblaster) to create a new ad treatment called the Video Extender, which allows users to view video ads in as large a screen as they’d like. The unit features an arrow in the bottom left-hand corner, and when loading prompts users to “click and drag to expand video.” Users can then expand the ad unit to the size of their choosing, even covering up content and links that appear on the page. (more…)
(Source) Radio Ink Magazine
July 16, 2010: CBS Interactive Music Group and CBS Radio launch a new streaming platform at www.radio.com, with streams, music information, and music profile and discovery through Last.fm “scrobbling” technology. The site offers 130 CBS Radio stations.
A Radio.com iPad app debuted in April; the site includes blogs, news feeds, and video and audio from every station, with links back to station sites. The network offers nearly 250,000 content posts each month. Also up is Last.fm trends, a daily bog posts that reflects the more than 40 million “scrobbles” the site receives each day, showing which artists are played the most and who to watch for in months ahead.
Artists and stations can be shared on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and LinkedIn, among other sites.
CBS Radio Launches New Online Player
(Source) Mediaweek /Katy Bachman
CBS Radio Friday (July 16) launched a new online radio player, a central Web site that consolidates all the company’s 130 radio station streams, Last.fm, and hundreds of additional streams from CBS’ partners, all in one place.
The Web site, located at www.radio.com, offers users more features and advertisers more placement opportunities. Among the features on the site are: currently playing information, song history, station and genre searches, presets, blogs, news feeds, and social media tools.
Advertisers that take advantage of the site will get a visual history of audio spots heard, and improved audience measurement.
The site is also available as an iPad and iPhone app.
CBS, MediaMind ‘Extend’ Video
(Source) Mediaweek/Mike Shields
One of the problems with Web video is that there is only so much video ad inventory online, so many publishers shove video spots into traditional display ads.
That leads to another problem: Display ads are often too small — or tucked away too discretely to the side — to properly showcase brands’ big-money TV ads.
CBS believes it has an answer to that conundrum. The company has partnered with the rich-media firm MediaMind (formerly Eyeblaster) to create a new ad treatment called the Video Extender, which allows users to view video ads in as large a screen as they’d like. The unit features an arrow in the bottom left-hand corner, and when loading prompts users to “click and drag to expand video.” Users can then expand the ad unit to the size of their choosing, even covering up content and links that appear on the page. (more…)
(Source) Mediaweek /Katy Bachman
CBS Radio Friday (July 16) launched a new online radio player, a central Web site that consolidates all the company’s 130 radio station streams, Last.fm, and hundreds of additional streams from CBS’ partners, all in one place.
The Web site, located at www.radio.com, offers users more features and advertisers more placement opportunities. Among the features on the site are: currently playing information, song history, station and genre searches, presets, blogs, news feeds, and social media tools.
Advertisers that take advantage of the site will get a visual history of audio spots heard, and improved audience measurement.
The site is also available as an iPad and iPhone app.
CBS, MediaMind ‘Extend’ Video
(Source) Mediaweek/Mike Shields
One of the problems with Web video is that there is only so much video ad inventory online, so many publishers shove video spots into traditional display ads.
That leads to another problem: Display ads are often too small — or tucked away too discretely to the side — to properly showcase brands’ big-money TV ads.
CBS believes it has an answer to that conundrum. The company has partnered with the rich-media firm MediaMind (formerly Eyeblaster) to create a new ad treatment called the Video Extender, which allows users to view video ads in as large a screen as they’d like. The unit features an arrow in the bottom left-hand corner, and when loading prompts users to “click and drag to expand video.” Users can then expand the ad unit to the size of their choosing, even covering up content and links that appear on the page. (more…)
(Source) Mediaweek/Mike Shields
One of the problems with Web video is that there is only so much video ad inventory online, so many publishers shove video spots into traditional display ads.
That leads to another problem: Display ads are often too small — or tucked away too discretely to the side — to properly showcase brands’ big-money TV ads.
CBS believes it has an answer to that conundrum. The company has partnered with the rich-media firm MediaMind (formerly Eyeblaster) to create a new ad treatment called the Video Extender, which allows users to view video ads in as large a screen as they’d like. The unit features an arrow in the bottom left-hand corner, and when loading prompts users to “click and drag to expand video.” Users can then expand the ad unit to the size of their choosing, even covering up content and links that appear on the page. (more…)
