My Great Uncle sent this to my family (100+)….Talk about VIRAL MADNESS!

“This is extremely important.Did you know that the right for African Americans to VOTE will expire in the year 2007? Seriously! The Voters Rights Act signed in 1965 by Lyndon B. Johnson was just an ACT. It was not made a law.

Does anyone realize that African Americans are the only group of people who require PERMISSION under the United States Constitution to vote”!

I read this. I freak! This could change my life. But would it happen? I need to do my own research.

From urbanlegends.about.com:

“In reality, all the Act does is keep in place a set of so-called ‘extraordinary remedies’ meant to enforce the Fifteenth Amendment at state and local levels, where, in defiance of federal law, obstacles to the voting rights of black people were still in place in some parts of the country as of the early 1960s.”

From Wikipedia:

“Fifteenth Amendment (1870): Prohibits the federal government and the states from using a citizen’s race, color, or previous status as a slave as a qualification for voting“.

I found more noting my Great Uncle’s information as net-lore.

So is the act still needed?
perrspectives.com
commonblog.com

Ah, the internet, what a great place to find information. Right?

When I refer to any constitution it’s usually mine. In the end I was able to ignore my constitution and learned a little bit more about The Constitution.

All thanks to my Great Uncle! Don’t worry; I gave my family links to The Constitution.

In my previous post about Our Lives Online, I raised the specter of our impending digitization. And, as it turns out, the Storage Cloud is out there, and it’s waiting. What is this ominous-sounding Storage Cloud? According to Jeremiah Owyang, it “is/will be the amorphous entity of online data that will be uploaded from a variety of sources, retrieved from a variety of tools, and rehashed into new forms and outputs.” While this may be an apt description for the conceptual interface for our future, it has greater implications than the above business requirements. The Storage Cloud is the Earth flattened.

Whereas we exist in a society tiered by different levels and combinations of trust, experience, calculated risk and physical awareness, the future of Cloud-World is one where all acts are created equal, where access is objectively evaluated, where all results are assumed innocuous. When the playing field is level, everyone’s a target. Here’s one version of that story [click on “Epic 2014 ” or 2015].

I know I sound paranoid, but they said television would be good for us too.

Have you seen the latest GEICO Caveman commercial where the Caveman is walking through the airport?

The spot, created by The Martin Agency, shows the Caveman carrying his travel bag and tennis racket gliding past different ads on a moving sidewalk in an airport. He slowly passes a GEICO sign that shows a prehistoric caveman holding a club and reads, “So easy a caveman can do it.” He goes out of the frame and then returns to double-check the sign. The spot ends with him shifting on both of his feet, crossing his arms and glancing around with a look of hurt, embarrassment and frustration.

Every time I see this spot, I crack up. It’s one of the few TV spots that really succeeds in elevating Brand awareness by using humor to poke fun at a sore spot shared amongst almost everyone: the fear that we will be made fun of. After all, how many of us have not at one point experienced embarrassment or frustration because someone did not take us seriously or made fun of one of our own personal caveman traits?

Another favorite of mine is the TBWA\Chiat\Day Nextel Dance Party spot, which generated a huge fan base and won Best Spot awards. Two techies are busy in their office dancing while a third sits on a file cabinet with a boom box. These guys are the epitome of geeks. They can’t dance but they dance so badly without reservation that they are actually pretty good. Geeks and cool guys alike can relate – the fear of dancing badly has no boundaries.

And then there is the latest online marketing sensation – Loneygirl15. She became a viral phenomenon not because of her talents, striking good looks, or socialite status but rather because of her candor on a subject that everyone can relate to but are often afraid to share – her isolation and vulnerability.

What these campaigns share is a trend that seems to be more and more embraced by advertising agencies and their clients: the shift from projecting aspirational visions to the celebration of our everyday lives and imperfections. And it seems to be working.

For years I have been a fan of Yahoo! This has been driven by my deep antipathy to their competitors and respect for their professionalism in an often unprofessional business.

Yet over the last months as video and Consumer Generated Content (CGC) have exploded, Yahoo! has felt increasingly out of touch. Their big news of the year was the re-launch of Yahoo! Finance, not exactly visionary and certainly poorly over-priced in a highly competitive market. Their initially well orchestrated entry into search advertising, the purchase of Overture has sputtered. Now their struggle to launch a branded search product appears both incompetent and irrelevant. Why not just do a deal with Google and re-allocate precious resources to fighting the war for the Future.

The question is, can they find the battlefield? Yesterday at the Goldman Sachs Conference CEO Terry Semel gave warning of lowered expectations for Q3 results, pinning the blame on external issues: “weakness in some of the most economically sensitive categories” or possibly “issues in advertisers’ client businesses”. Replay the webcast here.

Neither the price of gas nor slow car sales are at the root of Yahoo’s problems. It is simple lack of vision. Yahoo! completely missed the boat on CGC/Video/Community phenomenon. They showed no interest in developing viral content or functionality, either of which could have re-energized their communities. They’ve missed multiple opportunities for content partnerships (their just announced partnership with CurrentTV has no launch date). Their mobile content isn’t up to snuff. And, critically, Yahoo! isn’t cool any more - when was the last time someone sent you a link to content on Yahoo!?

Solution: find out how people are using media and how they want to use media but can’t yet and deliver whatever that is before Google does.

Microsoft has entered the fray of video sharing with Tuesday’s introduction of Soapbox. No real surprise here. With the mass reach that these networks have, the advertising dollars Microsoft can make could be massive. The problem, as always with Redmond, is the Me Too mentality that inhibits innovation.

Bill Gates made the misstep in ’93 that internet was something frivolous. Microsoft made their mark in business software, and that was where they would stay. But computers actually jumped out of the realm of work. They became creative outlets. And communication centers. Users began to log on in their spare time to chat, share, create and game. Computers (and the internet) became a part of our daily lives. Microsoft tooled away at making our work more efficient, while companies like Apple and Google found ways to make our lives easy and fun.

Slowly Microsoft has begun to loosen its tie and play catch-up. Xbox is a great gaming system, and often trumps it’s competition in the cool factor. But then you have misses like the Zune, which is hoping to make, well, brown the new black. Really, brown? And the launch of a new video site seems to be based solely on marketing potential, and not entrenching themselves in everyday life of the web. We all have to make money, and I definitely do it through marketing as well. Just think next time with your heart and mind, and not your wallet, and you may come up with the next iPod/YouTube/MySpace killer that we cannot live without.

Microsoft Hopes to Sell Zune Using Brown [CNET]
MSN Unveils Video-Sharing Site [MediaPost, registration required]

Advertising in video games is not receiving enough attention. It’s a relatively new medium with great potential that marketers aren’t taking notice of because of common questions asked by advertisers when first introduced to the new concept. Is the target right? Can we grab the target’s attention? Will we increase our Return on Investment? If your target audience is the young, web savvy MySpace and YouTube visitors, then the answer to all these questions is yes.

First we need to understand the development of this new way of advertising. Massive, the ad-serving company that invented the technology for advertising in games is only a few years old and has already been acquired by Microsoft. Not only will Microsoft’s games feature the technology, but Massive has also signed contracts with Electronic Arts and Ubisoft, the top two video game distributors in the world. Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony PlayStation experienced the success of online play with their previous consoles and are building their new consoles with emphasis for online gaming, giving them the capability to use this advertising technology.

A study done by Neilsen found that three-quarters of households with televisions with a male 8-34 years of age own a video game system; and these gamers watch less TV the older they get. But males are not the only ones that you can advertise to through video games. Ubisoft and EA have started trying to appeal to females as well. All this is creating one great resource for advertising.

Outlets such as MySpace and YouTube are over populating the scene and in turn becoming a drawn out trend that will lose consumer interest. So we need to be ready to adapt the next new way to advertise. Video games could be the key.

Are gaming platforms the next entry to the web? Nintendo seems to think so. With the Wii console, gamers will not only be able to chat with friends like XboxLive, but possibly share photos, and check the weather and news via Wii Channels. Can’t wait to see how this develops.

Wii

As a designer I must know my target audience, what media they like, live and trust online and off. So when I see something changing I need to act on it.

Myspace and YouTube, two sites I have enthusiastically pitched to clients increasingly have less relevance. Now, versus just 3 months ago, a Brand page on either site positions that Client as a follower not a leader, undermining the brand. This is the beginning of the end for what was an interesting and over-reported trend: Brand advertising on Myspace and YouTube.

How it began? The advertising world saw the “success” Wendy’s had with its Myspace profile. Wendys put social networking advertising into media plans. More and more advertisers jumped on that bandwagon. Peter Blackshaw, chief marketing officer for Nielsen BuzzMetrics, warned of the issues that could arise when advertisers blurred the lines between authentic content creation and advertising. He was right.

YouTube’s deal with Time Warner only intensifies this danger. Giving Warner its own branded channel and powers such as the right to censor “offensive” material transforms YouTube into portal. One that may be safer for advertisers, but considerably less appealing to YouTube loyalists - the reason advertisers want to be there in the first place.

The era of putting brand content on Myspace and YouTube is coming to an end. This is not to say that advertising on social networks is ending but its time to re-think how we do it. Create the next new trend, let it be over-hyped and let it die. It is an advertising tradition. And, as long as we can help our Clients successfully ride these waves, which means knowing when to get off, we will have done our jobs.