Viral Ad Network

Reading through the RubberRepublic blog, I thought I’d point the whole of team rubber at the article on the semantics of the word “viral” when applied to marketing.

This is a very interesting topic to me. With my leniency towards very specific definitions, I’m going to start right from the start, and explain that I’m certainly not a believer in Wittgenstein’s views on natural language.

To me, it’s not unreasonable to define a strict subset of natural language with a single, well defined, 1-1 semantic value function for discussing technical matters (and I believe the definition of “viral” should fit into such a subset), in the same way that we define mathematical terms in first order logic (I’m not going to get into provability here).

i.e. I think that it’s possible, and reasonable, to define the meaning of individual words which are indisputable and fixed when talking in technical language.

For this reason, it really drives me up the wall when two people talk about something, use the same word, but are actually discussing different things.

An example is how we have recently changed the naming for our “Syndicated Ad Units” (Previously “Content Units”).

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We are currently working on a range of new features to our reporting systems – both for publishers and advertisers.

We plan to make the changes live in the middle of next week (between the 28th and 30th of January), and you may find that your dashboards are not available for short periods during the update.

Importantly, our syndication and tracking services will continue to run during this period, so as a publisher you will continue to earn during this scheduled update.

Similarly to the way other popular networks work, actions counted by our tracking services are not added to publisher dashboards immediatly, and we will be pausing this feature during mainainance of the dashboards. When we re-start this feature there may be a large amount of data for our servers to process, which may take some time, so do not be worried if your numbers look a little low over this period, once the system has finished analysing every action the dashboards will be back to normal.

Tim Wintle

This is great advertising — so good, in fact, that you don’t have to worry about evaluating the quality of the advertising and can just sit back and enjoy.  I defy you to not have a big smile on your face, even on Monday morning, when watching this:

A very Happy New Year to all our publishers! December was an incredibly hectic month for us as advertisers squeezed out the last remnants of end of year budgets and launched sales driving campaigns for Christmas. In total we were running over 30 campaigns before the start of the New Year!

Of course in 2009 advertisers are going to be more meticulous than ever in assessing the performance of their budgets and efficacy of their campaigns… but this will mean we will be very well placed to attract more advertisers as our medium and content provides exactly those reporting tools and fastidiousness of targeting that advertisers desire. The upswing at the end of 2008 demonstrated just that and we have already been privy to forecasts and projections that suggest our client base will continue to grow throughout 2009.

Which means, of course, that we are on the look-out for more quality publishers. We have found that referrals from our current publishers have worked brilliantly and we would be delighted to know of any sites you would suggest.

Similarly we are finding that our new syndicated content units are performing very well for those publishers who have taken them up, taking time-consuming administrative tasks away and allowing greater flexibility of attractive content. We are always happy to work something bespoke out for your site so do let us know if you want to give them a try!

My Best is Electrabel

Electrabe’s pixilation using 288,000 individual candles. Pixilation and stop motion techniques have been around since the 1900’s. The techniques seam to be growing in popularity, with all the new technology and software that has made these techniques available to any person in their bedroom. It is pushing creatives to think harder and for the final creation to prove beyond doubt that a lot of time was spent on this! This reminds me of all those domino rallies in the 80’s, there must be an universal fascination with finicky tasks that take up a lot of time. When it works it looks like Electrabel and when it tries to hard it’s “Happy New Year! (2009) in HD”

My not so best is Happy New Year! (2009)

This guy having a go in his room is commendable FlippyCat’s channel has 1,026,401 views and currently the 5th most viewed all time for Canada.

Which is the more successful new years message?