Democratisation of Ads

Today we read about a young student Nick Haley, at the University of Leeds, England. He created a commercial for the iTouch, posted in on YouTube, which was viewed by thousand and got discovered by Apple marketing execs, and was commissioned by Apple’s ad agency to collaborate on a “professional” version of the ad. Watch the original ad by usingthe link below or clicking on the icon in the screen.One its impressive,two Wow!, three we want an iPhone.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKQUZPqDZb0



What is relevant is that people are finding ways to express themselves via community sites and also are offering ideas to those who would not normally see them. Is this the new way to promote content and creative ideas? – Yes. Will there be some hidden gems? – Yes. What is important is the ownership of those ideas and ensuring that IP is rewarded and not abused.

We have already commented on Lego, Chris Anderson and what we call the democratisation of literature, now here is the democratisation of advertising.

Who are You?

Imagine clicking on a search result believing you were going to a Waterstones to find yourself at Borders, or thinking you were going to Wordsworth Editions and found yourself at Penguin Classics. I bet the feathers would soon be flying along with ‘passing off’ legal letters. Passing Off yourself as someone else is a legal offence but like many legal issues on the internet the water can get murky. Remember the days when enterprising folk bought up URLs containing brand names in the hope of selling them on the the brand owner.

Today the Times covers a story about The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), a consumer watchdog who is taking legal action against Google over the way it sells and displays its sponsored links.

In 2005, an Australian classified ads magazine Trading Post, took out sponsored links in the name of two car dealerships from Newcastle, New South Wales. People clicking on the names of the dealerships found themselves on Trading Post’s website. The ACCC dropped a case against Trading Post when the publication said it would stop using its competitors’ names in Google sponsored links. However, the ACCC now claims that Google “engaged in misleading and deceptive conduct” by allowing Trading Post to buy ads in the name of the car dealerships and also that the way Google displays its links is misleading in that it fails to adequately distinguish sponsored links from ‘organic’ search results.

Google Australia described the lawsuit as “an attack on all search engines”
The article quotes that Google has faced a many lawsuits from companies alleging that rivals have bought sponsored links triggered by their trademarked words or phrases. Google has won some cases and lost others. One would dismiss this as maybe a small and insignificant lawsuit until one thinks about the issue a little closer and in the context of initiatives such as Booksearch.

Advertise to your friends on Facebook

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder

Facebook, the social networking Web site, which has 22 million active users, has announced that it is adding free classified ad listings, putting it into competition with many others.

More than half of it users are in high school or college and it hopes that the new feature will offer yet another reason for users to return to its site regularly. They claim that more than 60 percent of the site’s active users log in each day.
Facebook is calling the new service Marketplace and it will allow users to create classified listings in four categories: housing; jobs; for sale, where users can list things like concert tickets and used bikes; and “other,” a catch-all. Facebook users who create classifieds can choose to show them only to their designated friends on the service, or to anyone in one of their “networks” — their high school, college, company or geographic region. They can choose to make the listings appear on their profile pages, and send them out on “news feeds,” the automatic updates that appear when users log in to the site.

Charlene Li, an analyst at Forrester Research is quoted, “The advantage of having classifieds linked to a social network is that you know something about the seller. You are less likely to buy a lemon from someone who is a friend of yours.”

Although the Facebook Marketplace is free, it could eventually create some revenue for the company.