Top Stories, 25-Oct

Posted on | October 26, 2008 |

Wassup 2008 - Charles Stone III
W/ tongue placed firmly in cheek, this ad makes visual the top stories of the day and links them directly to the fundamental message of change put forth by the Obama campaign. Like or dislike Obama, director Charles Stone has created a visual, concise and emotive political ad that will take top honors this season.
Top iTunes / iPhone Paid Apps - O’Reilly Radar
One in series of posts by Ben Lorica re: evolution of iPhone application set. Together w/ earlier post re: app genres, one gets feel for emerging trends including: overall and genre growth, app price distribution / rationalization. Key takeaways: linear overall application growth to about 5,000 apps. Growth appears to have plateaued just in the last quarter. iTunes highlights top 100 apps pushing exposures. Average cost of paid apps falling to $2.80 avg. Mode looks to be $2.00. This type of early data bridges the gap until Apple starts to release more financial details about iPhone revenue components including iTunes app store. Want more on Apple (AAPL) performance. See their SEC 8k filing: http://snurl.com/4p1i9.
Trends - Google Labs
Back when I was writing “position pieces” trying to link a company or product to what was then in the news, I never dreamed of a tool like Google Lab’s Trends. Continuously updated throughout the day, it gives you the keywords (subject to several approximations) currently being employed across Google’s 70%-ish search share. Great for you PR and blogger types whose bread and butter is based on relevancy. Major caveat though, machine generated it is very falable. When you dig down on a search term, like any other Google search, you’ll find a lot of semantically-related but rationally-unrelated content.
10 Things Before Going Social - Hansen
Alisa Hansen’s 10 Things… is a reminder of social media tenants. 1. conversation over campaign, 2. holistic not silo, 3. responding not monitoring, 4. real / transparency not corpspeak, 5. influence not lead, 6. strategic not tactical, 7. utility not self-service, 8. attention economy, 9. viral: means not end, 10. liberate content. Intended as a Conference teaser, her objective was not deep insight. Having said that, two interesting terms emerged: “Crowd-source product development”, “attention economy”
Subliminial advertsing - Yawn
AdAge reviews Martin Lindstrom’s Buyology, a book on subliminal advertising. Book was based on “science” of a 3-year neurotechnology study. Basically used MRIs and EEGs to track reactions of 2,000 people to advertising. Finding: Consumers are driven by conscious and unconscious motivations Example finding: researchers analyzed “American Idol” product placements. Found Coke more effective than Ford though both spent $26M. Reason: Coke label and colors were seen more. Note to self: Do not buy this book.