ouroboros

Marlow on Facebook social circles

...stolen from an Economist article, featuring insights gleaned by Cameron Marlow, FB's in-house sociologist/anthropologist:

"What mainly goes up [through the use of Social nets and tech], therefore, is not the core network [of friends] but the number of casual contacts that people track more passively."

"Humans may be advertising themselves more efficiently. But they still have the same small circles of intimacy as ever."

Interesting.

YouTube 'Interactive' Videos

At the suggestion of Andy Tress, YouTube-ist extraordinaire, I just finished Barack/Paper/Scissors, Level 8.

  

[proof]

This BenandEric.com collaboration joins a growing list of "interactive video/choose-your-own-adventure" style clickable/annotated videos, including marketer efforts like Samsung's Follow Your Instinct and now Halo Wars Machinima Interactive Video Experience M.I.V.E.).  Gotta tell you - I like the BPS better...try out the footrace...

No ETA on when YouTube will enable external linking from YouTube videos...

Coraline Marketing

[ Mike Baker's reconceived pulp 'Coraline' cover, from his blog 'Knack for Art':]

You haven't seen a lot from me on W+K's marketing efforts behind Coraline. 

The best gauge of a campaign is what other people say about it anyway, right?   And other folks have done a great job of covering it - Ward @ Drawn and The Future of Ads pretty much nail it, and if you missed anything, 'Evil Buttons' is the unoffical blog we've all been reading to track the campaign and its offshoots. 

Phil Knight was interviewed by AdAge about the Coraline marketing effort and had this to say:

"The original agreement was that Focus [Features] would do the advertising, but in some of the early meetings, it was clear that we had a difference of opinion on the advertising -- "target audience" being one. They were used to doing "data" advertising: They wanted to push this more as a kiddie film, because that's what the data told them. And Nike and Wieden & Kennedy together had grown up with what I call "emotional essence advertising" -- the essence of the product is its emotional core, and you push that. It was two very different approaches, and it kind of became clear in some of those early meetings that we had a very strong difference of opinion. And to Focus' credit, they said, "OK, why don't you guys try it? There's no use in fighting this thing. Let's negotiate a different way to market this thing."

Marketing Quals ("emotional essence" types) and Quants ("data" advertisers) have been slugging it out for a while, so I wanted to share this nugget:

Pundits projected a $9MM opening weekend for Coraline, and $32MM total run gross.

We are damn proud that after a $16.3MM opening weekend take, Coraline's 3rd week US gross stands now at $53.93MM and counting.