Super bowl Ads – Quarter by Quarter Analysis

Super bowl 44 is underway, my money is on Colts – so far I’m doing well

Quarter 4:  Colts 17 – Saints 31

Vizo ad showing integration of internet application to HDTV was nice. I would like to actually see how it works. Will it allow me to watch my show and update my FB and Twitter and browse the web? Point was well demonstrated in the ad, would love to see the demo.

Budweiser ad with a horse and a longhorn: lame. Not this year Budweiser.

Again an E Trade ad with funny baby, still a winner in my book.

Great win for New Orleans Saints, they played really well and came in the game with tons of energy.

Quarter 3:  Colts 17 – Saints 16

Of course Google Ad: I’ve already seen the ad on internet. When I saw it for the first time, I thought it was a great way to tell a story. However, I do not understand the motive behind Google advertising during Super bowl. They have 65% market share and no one anywhere close to them. I understand the value of brand awareness etc, I’m wondering beyond that. They have lot of other products that could use some advertising. Like Google Phone with only 80,000 units sold in first month.

E Trade had really nice ad. Still sticking with their baby theme and it is still funny. There is something about kids in the ad, especially kids who talk like adults. This is probably one of the best ads tonight so far. “Milkaaaa whattt?”

Coke ad about a dude in middle of Africa was kinda good but not as good as Simpson one.

Quarter 2:  Colts 10 – Saints 6

Colts owned first quarter by running the bowl, while Saints found a hole in secondary in 2nd quarter.  Good game so far, expected more points.

Quarter 2 had interesting ads. So far I have seen CareerBuilder, Hyundai, Budweiser, Dove, Bridgestone, FloTV.

Hyundai ad featuring Brett Favre was nice, showing his indecisiveness and other things that I missed.

Budweiser’s analogy of Lost was funny considering Lost last season just started last week and it is being shown on CBS. Tons of Lost fans can relate to plane crash and people being stranded on an island with nothing left.  This was probably the best Budweiser ad so far tonight.

In battle of CareerBuilder vs Monster, CB wins. Not pretty ad, but funny ad J.  Definitely expect lot of buzz around this in office tomorrow.

Dodge Charger: really nice beginning, didn’t expect it to be car ad. I thought it’d be may be a tv show or something related to sports or beer, but not a car ad. Either way, it should have gotten the attention of intended audience, Male consumers.

FloTV – Super bowl is great place to introduce a new product, as people are actually paying attention to the ads and looking forward to watching them. Seems like a cool concept, I’d buy it, don’t there is a need for it, may be want.

So far all the ads are targeting only the male audience, which is understandable considering it’s football game and it’s Super bowl.  However, advertisers have missed reaching female audience who may be actually watching Super bowl just for the ads.

Quarter 1:  Colts 10 – Saints 0

Let’s talk about the Ads.  In the first half, so far i have seen Doritos, Coke, Boost Mobile, Go Daddy.com, Budweiser, Monster ads.  Did i forget anything? 

Best:

From humor perspective Doritos have the best ads so far, hands down.  Everyone will be talking about Doritos ads in the office tomorrow and you will see more of it on TV over the next few weeks.

I also like Coke ad, even though it came only one time, it had great recall.  Plus being Simpson’s fan doesn’t hurt either.  Also, the point of the ad was well portrayed considering current market situation.  Towards the end of the ad, did you see Homer getting being spattered by Coke?  If not, you should be able to see it on Youtube shortly.

OK:

GoDaddy.com ad was alright.  Nothing too exciting.  In Super bowl ads i don’t think there is a need to tell consumers what they sell, unless you are new company.  Everyone knows GoDaddy, you don’t need to tell me i can buy cheap domain name on GoDaddy.  All i want to see is humor, make me laugh.

Budweiser ads have been also ok.  Nothing extra ordinary.  The ad with robot kind of voice is not same as “Watsssssssupppppp” ads.  Now that is something guys can relate to.

Bad:

Boost mobile ads have been by far the worst ad.  It didn’t connect for me, they could have done better having such cool name as Boost.

Stay tuned for Quarter 2.

Social Media This and Social Media That

Everywhere you go everyone is talking about social media.  Hell there is even social media advertising consortium.  Everyday a new report comes out saying social media is really important for businesses.  There is even a new position created called “Social Media Analyst”, if you know the job description of this position do let me know.  You can find tons of presentation on Slide Share that will give you brief tutorial of what social media supposed to be. 

What is all this fuss about?  No one knows.  What everyone knows it that Dell made additional $3 million by using Twitter, so next natural question is:  how does my business make money with twitter?  I am glad you asked.  It’s pretty simple.  It’s all about audience, that’s right.  It’s about audience, it is about who you reach.  Everyone is trying to measure social media but no one is talking about targeting audience in social media.  Measurement is without a doubt really important for any marketing effort.  It is something you do after you launch your campaign, use number of KPIs to see how well your message was received.  But even before you launch your marketing efforts, you need to make sure you are reaching the right audience. 

Big question is how do you reach your target audience with Twitter?  It does not allow you to target people, it just allows you enter you message in 140 characters and basically says let’s hope people will read it.  Plus, depending on how many people an individual is following, many people may not even read your message due to how quickly their twitter stream is moving.  Plus there is not a way to make your message stand out from this clutter.

I realize i still haven’t answered the question:  How do you target people on twitter?  Well, i’m kind of working on that   Of course i’m not going to tell you how, so stay tuned.

Browser Wars

Google’s Chrome came out not too long and lot of are satisfied with it due to it’s speed.  Firefox has in the game for quiet sometime and is gaining momentum rapidly due to popularity of it’s add-ons.  All these browsers made me wonder if IE dominance in browser market has changed and which browser are people using to visit my site.  I was shocked to see the results.  First, let’s see the latest browser market share numbers (worldwide). 

 

 

Browser	Market Share
IE (All Versions)	63.62%
Mozilla Firefox	24.72%
Safari	4.58%
Google Chrome	4.26%
Opera	1.45%
Other	1.06%

Source: Wikipedia, November 2009

Based on this data, IE still dominates but market share is on decline.

Source:  Silicon Alley Insider, Chart of the day

 

Number on my site also shows this sharp decline YoY.  I launched my site in 2004 and below table highlights the how each year visitors using IE to visit my site has been on decline, steadily.

Browser	November, 2004	November, 2005	November, 2006	November, 2007	November, 2008	November, 2009
MS Internet Explorer	90.30%	85.10%	79.40%	73.60%	64.50%	53.10%
Firefox	0.00%	9.30%	13.40%	18.00%	22.80%	23.90%
Google Chrome	0.00%	0.00%	0.00%	0.00%	0.00%	9.20%
Opera	0.80%	1.00%	2.10%	2.80%	3.80%	5.20%
Safari	0.30%	0.70%	0.80%	1.00%	5.20%	5.00%
Mozilla	3.00%	1.60%	1.10%	0.80%	1.10%	1.10%

 

Web masters need to keep an eye on not just Page Views and Uniques but also on which browser visitors are using. Browser friendly site can make big difference in your bounce rate, user loyalty and most importantly your revenue.

 

Tejas Shah

BingTweets Wish List

BingTweets.com was launched today.  Of course it’s in Beta right now, but launch of it came from no where and it’s a great step forward for Bing and great partnership between FM, Bing and Twitter.  Way to beat Google   Overall, i like the way site is setup, it’s a great way to search web and twitter at the same time.  There are lot other sites that does similar things, like mixxr.co.uk and twiogle.com.  However, this comes directly from Bing and not from anyone else.

Here’s my wish list for Bing Tweets:

1. Customization:  It would be cool if portions of the site were customizable.  For example: “Trending Topics”.  It would be cook if they were just like “Groups” in Seesmic desktop.  You can assign users to a group and look at only their tweets.  I think this will make it lot more useful especially for businesses and it will make it more like a tool that doesn’t require any installation.

2.  Web  Slices: Web slices were introduced in IE8 and not lot of people are aware of it or actually use it.  It would be cool if “Tweets” were actual web slices – not sure if this is even possible.  That way no need to check the site again and again, just looking at web slice in IE will keep the user updated.

3.  Mobile:  Mobile version looks really crappy at least on my T-Mobile HTC WM 6.0 phone.  It would be cool to have a nice working mobile version of BingTwitter or at least abridged version

That’s it.  Overall, BingTweet is cool, good product.

Bing beat Google in this one.  One win at a time

T

Analytics in Teaching?

Calling out to all the teachers.

Question:  How do they track if teacher A’s methodology to teach math is better than teacher B’s?  Is that even tracked?

Reason why i’m asking this quesiton is: it’ll be cool, if someone tracks the performance of teacher A’s students over the next 3-5 years and see how they do in math compared to teacher B’s students. 

In the example below i assigned random grades to all the students between 60 and 100.

Based on above, teacher B has taught the basics of match (multiplication, division etc.) well to his/her students than teacher A.  Of course, there are several assumptions we are making here about the student. 

Why do this?  If there was a way to look at historical data and see which teacher’s methodology is better, it should be taken as a best practice for all the teachers.

Bing in Gmail?

I was kinda shocked to see Bing in Gmail.  Very nice – i like. 

 

Also, from today onwards you should be seeing Bing Ads on TV – everywhere.  Check out first of many to come TV ads: http://adage.com/digital/article?article_id=137044.  Other ones are more funny – wait and see

As an official launch Space Needle was turned orange yesterday.  When i searched for “bing space needle”, i got good description (which was nice) but upon clicking on it, it took me to images page – i actually wanted to see the image of space needle as orange.

Bing’s everywhere.

T

Microsoft Vine – Review

Recently i have noticed lot of people getting their Vine invitation on Twitter, so today was my day.  Installed it without any problems on Windows 7 and so far runs pretty well.  So here’s my review of this new tool.

1)  First of all even before i got the invitation, i checked the videos they have on Vine.net and videos made no sense to me.

2)  Installation was quick.

3)  After logging in, i selected my place and radius

4)  I think best part was local news by zip code – but again am i going to log into Vine to see what’s happening in my neighborhood or turn on TV and check local news?

5)  To stay in touch with people you care about, you need to invite them and you can create groups:  family, friends, etc.

6)  To send an alert you simply need to click on “Alert” and you can type in your message and select your group. 

 

My question is:  In case of emergency, will i go online or send a text (to special personalized number provided by Vine) or call my family to tell them everything is ok?

Call me old style but i prefer calling people than to send text – it just takes too long.  I don’t even have unlimited text on my phone   Getting back to Vine, only advantage i see is sending a message/text to a GROUP on Vine – well you can also create a group on phone and send them all same text message.

7)  You can also post a report to your family/friends about what you are up to etc – like status updates.

That’s all i have discovered about Vine so far.

I think this just another tool – nothing extraordinary in my opinion.  I kind of understand what they are planning to do, overall purpose is to help people and keep family/friends updated in case of emergencies – just need to make videos lot better on the website saying what the clear purpose of the product is.

Things Mavs needs to do to win Game 5

I’m no basketball expert.  But here are the top 8 things Dallas needs to do to win game 5:

1) STOP the turnovers – this is giving Denver momentum

2)  Play more defense

3)  Be more aggressive

4)  Stop the 3-pointers

5)  Stop the inside game.  Way too many dunks

6)  Dirk needs to continue playing hard – though he needs some help

7)  JJ needs to step up, play like he did against SA

8)  Stop the fast break points

How to use Twitter to your advantage?

A month ago i finally decided to jump on the bandwagon and started “Twittering”.  When Twitter was first introduced it didn’t make any sense to me whatsoever.  Someone told me, Twitter is like Facebook’s status updates.  Now i know better.  To me, Facebook is to connect with your family/friends and share pictures/notes.  Twitter is more about finding and following people/businesses that i find interesting.  People i follow include, WSJ, ComScore, Hitwise, Silicon Valley Insider to name a few.  I follow these people for most update to news – ok i’ll admit it i’m a news junkie  

So how do you use twitter to your advantage?

Well first by not twitting about things that people do no care about.  Twitts like this

makes me want to say: And i care because?  So i categorize these kind of twitts and people as social – that’s what facebook is for. 

Twitter and also Facebook are more about taking advantage of people power.  Do you know what is the #1 influencer when someone is trying to purchase something?  Family and friends.  Consumers value opinions of family and friends more than any ads or articles.  That’s where Twitter comes into play.  If you are looking for good thai restaurant in Brooklyn, NY – ask other Twitties.  Twitter is useful if you want information about ongoing sale or want an opinion about which camera to buy.

If you are a business owner, twitter is a great way to get consumer’s opinion about upcoming product release or to keep track of what people are saying about your product in real time.  The best example is, couple of weekends ago i visited this great vegetarian restaurant in union square called Maoz.  After having a great falafal, i twitted from my phone about how great the food was.  Before i got home, Maoz already re-twitted my comment and started following me.  I have never seen anything like this.  Maoz is using social media/twitter to it’s advantage and keeping track of what’s being said about it’s food and restaurant.  For website owners/bloggers, it’s a great way to drive traffic to your site/blog (just like what i am going to do to this blog post ) and have a loyal followers.

To summarize, you can use twitter to get opinions about things you are consider buying, get real-time restaurant reviews, opinions.  For businesses, it’s a great way to keep track of what customers are saying about your product and drive traffic to your business.

Tejas

Whatever happened to Cuil? So much for a “Google Killer”

Do you remember Cuil?  Whatever happened to those guys?  They had their 5 minutes of fame and disappeared.  Cuil was supposed to be the next “Google Killer” -  yeah right.  You know what i would want “Google Killer” to be?  Nothing like Google.  Something different and innovative.  Everyone copied G’s clean page  with a text box format (look at Live.com, ask.com), because Google was getting lot of attention.

Here’s what i don’t want “Google Killer” to be:

1)  Not a search engine

2)  Not a personalized page  (iGoogle or personalized Live page), but

A hybrid of Facebook’s alerts and things that are important to me.  I want my browser or my computer to learn which web pages i visit everyday and present me those pages or simply open them up for me only the first time i launch my browser.  I want to know what my friends are up to and who has uploaded new pics – just like Facebook.  However, i also want “Google Killer” to be accessible at all times – on my phone especially.

Overall, i don’t want my “Google Killer” to be anything like Google.  Google is just a search engine (a smart one, might i add) – my life does not revolve around doing new searches everyday but rather it revolves around my family/friends (FB), what’s happening in news that impacts me directly/indirectly, how can i save/make money, how can i improve myself financially and otherwise.  Now, if you can give me all that information in one screen (like executive summary), you’ll be my hero.