Measuring advertising exposure in video networks

(Originally for Satama Research Blog)

Huh, what a title…

Anyway, yesterday’s article from ClickZ made a very interesting point on consumers exposure to ad spots online.

Traditional advertising is now entertainment, just as much as any other piece of video. Type in a search for “commercials” at YouTube. At publication time, there were 44,110 results. The most viewed commercial, for Sony Bravia, has over 3.5 million views. Look at the comments; they illustrate the level of engagement. Impressive.

Try e.g. this YouTube search. You will see that the most watched commericals are by Sony, Volkswagen and Apple. This tells something about the the dominance of these global brands.

Commercials become entertainment – neat. Thus, what will this mean for marketing? Entertainment becomes marketing? Maybe.

Google enters the B2B domain

Google Apps on your domain is Google’s latest approach to offer tools inside companies. They already offer Google Mini to have company-wide search. Now the new program brings e-mail (Gmail), IM+Voip (GoogleTalk), calender (Google Calender) and web editing (PageCreator) to usage of any company.

Now you can offer private-labeled email, IM and calendar tools to all of your users for free*, so they can share ideas and get things done more effectively. You can design and publish your organization’s website, too. It’s all hosted by Google, so there’s no hardware or software for you to install or maintain.

Image Search 2.0

(Originally for Satama Research Blog)

Google Image Search must be familiar to all of us bloggers. Yet, something that I think this great tool does not have is capability to find similar images to another. Thus, I took few minutes to explore that possibilities there are to find images that match another image with other tools beyond Google.

Great starting point for the exploration is Yahoo’s directory. It had a great list of search tools anyone can use in the similar tasks to me. Out of the list popped out the following.

Tiltomo: -playing on Flickr databases and finding similar photos
Retrivr: shape drawing tool based on Flickr
Montage Maker: Create a montage of similar images, not totally similar, but fancy tool anyway, see e.g. trial on ex-Finnish president Kekkonen

I think these tools open interesting possiblities for designers. Think about it – if your image is just not ok, why not to put on Flickr and seek for similar ones which look nearly the same. What a visual exploration journey…

Do you think this would interest you? Do you think this kind of tools would be good for creating e.g. moodboards etc.?

P.S. Remember the web 2.0 classic – Flickr Tag Browser. It is very similar to this thinking…