Marketing Pilgrim

Last week, Hulu’s CEO Jason Kilar wrote a blog post about the future of TV and web advertising that folks say was tantamount to him writing his resignation. The crux of the post is that TV execs are stuck doing business the old fashioned way and as such, are squashing the progress of web TV which is much more appropriate for today’s mobile society.

He makes three big points which demonstrate why web TV is more powerful than traditional TV:

• Traditional TV has too many ads
• Consumers want TV to be more convenient for them.
• Consumers are demonstrating that they are the greatest marketing force a good television show or movie could ever have, given the powerful social media tools at consumers’ disposal.

In 2010, The Black Eyed Peas made an estimated 81.6 million dollars from touring, but they didn’t make a dime for their performance at yesterday’s Super Bowl. Why not? Unlike The Blues Brothers, they didn’t lose their fee on a big bar bill, they simply agreed to play for free in the first place.

As preposterous as that may sound, a new article at Forbes.com points out that the Super Bowl halftime acts traditionally work for free in return for the exposure. (Insert Janet Jackson joke here.) Last year, the Super Bowl brought in 106.5 million viewers and this year is on track to break records. So what is 106.5 million eyeballs worth? For advertisers such as Pepsi, Doritos and Carmax, it was around 3 million for every 30 seconds. Imagine if the Peas had bought an ad equal to their time on stage.

Last week, Google was talking about the great success that Google Instant has become. It’s the same feature that drew the ire of many in the tech industry when it was first introduced (me included) but it has apparently fought through that resistance.

As stated in Fast Company magazine last week

Since then, have Google users shunned Instant as a disruptive technology, or welcomed it as the new template for the way we search the web?

The answer to that question, six months later, is emphatically in Google’s favor. According to Ben Gomes, the lead engineer on Google Instant, the engine’s newest feature has had a remarkably small attrition rate: Roughly 98% of users are using Instant, leaving around just 2% of users who have opted out.

AOL’s promise to be a premiere content company is apparently being fulfilled by how willing they are to spend money for established content providers much more than creating that content itself.

The latest example of this desire to pick up major properties in the blog space (like the recent TechCrunch deal) is the purchase of The Huffington Post for $315 million (mostly in cash according to Kara Swisher of the WSJ’s BoomTown blog). What makes this purchase interesting aside from the marquee nature off HuffPo is the assignment of Arianna Huffington as the President and Editor in Chief of AOL’s newly formed The Huffington Post Media Group.

When you own your own business things are bound to go wrong, every now and then. When your business is on the internet, sometimes these mishaps can be a public event. Wouldn’t it be smart to try and at least pull off these types of blunders with a smile that leaves everyone laughing instead of yelling?

Here are three short examples of how some companies are leaving their users with a smile instead of a frown.

Hilarious Unsubscribe Pages

If you have ever unsubscribed from a Groupon email list you are probably already familiar with this stroke of genius. Here, when a user selects to unsubscribe from a Groupon mailing they are sent to a confirmation page that introduces them them to some guy named “Derrick”. Apparently, Derrick, is the one responsible for sending you an annoying email. There is a button below Derrick’s video feed that says, “Punish Derrick”. After pressing it, hilarity ensues! I don’t want to ruin the fun so go ahead and try it yourself! This type of unsubscribe page is not only genius because it puts a smile on an angry face, but also because its so creative that it has dissatisfied customers still talking about your brand in a positive light! That is nothing short of magic in my book!

Creative 404 Pages

404 pages are the black sheep of the internet. No one wants to see them. Seeing a 404 is like hitting a brick wall. But some companies are getting really creative with their 404 pages. Take for example one of my favorite animated web series, Homestar Runner, has a 404 page that is comedic and blends in well with the rest of their site. Which means that even though the user doesn’t get the content they are looking for they still get a chuckle!

HTML full of LOLs!

Everyone already knows that The Oatmeal is no stranger to laughs. But, did you know that his zany sense of humor even extends into his HTML? Don’t believe me? Go ahead and visit his site, right click and select View Source. Now there is no telling why Mr. Oatmeal decided to grace his <head> tags with a Pterodactyl. But as a web developer I can appreciate an entrepreneur that tries to make even their code monkeys happy! Because happy code monkeys, means happy code, and happy code, means happy web sites, and happy web sites, mean happy users!

Yesterday, Verizon had their most successful first day opening in their history when they opened the virtual doors to iPhone pre-sales. But while they were taking in money with one hand, they were changing the rules with the other. That “unlimited monthly data plan,” they’ve been advertising is about to become . . . well. . . limited-ish.

As Verizon puts it, the iPhone network is “a shared resource among tens of millions of customers.” That means that they have to balance the needs of the many by reducing service to a few.

A spokesperson was quoted in the LA Times as saying: