Youtube reaches 1 Billion views per Day!

The video sharing website Youtube has just announced reaching the symbolic and impressive threshold of 1 billion video views per day! The Youtube co-founder and CEO Chad Hurley has announced the (good?) news in a post on the website's blog entitled "Y,000,000,000uTube"! I am more than amazed by this massive number, even more when I know that back in January 2009 (so only 9 months ago), the website recorded six billion videos viewed during the whole month!


This clearly reminds me of the now famous "Over xx billion served" catch phrase presented on most McDonalds restaurants!

Another funny thing, the new logo image file is named "logo_holy_crap_1bn_a_day-vfl124472.png"!
Congrats to the Youtube and Google teams, I'm going to watch some videos now! Read the full post

Scary Ideas - Advertising archive

Scaryideas.com is a website that gathers and archives both videos and prints from the international advertising industry.

As the title suggests it, most of the ads you find there come from "scary" ideas. Well, not really scary but different and out of the ordinary. You will find hilarious ones as well as meaningless ones.

Next to each post is a detailed information brief that usually includes the country and advertising agency name. It's a good website if you want to see how creative some people can be and if you want a daily dose of fun and inspiration. Posts are added on a daily basis and you can stay posted thanks to their RSS feed and/or twitter account.

If you like out of the box thinking, then go have a look at their website! Scary Ideas

Below is a video that I just watched and still don't really understand the whole plot! Try to guess what the ad is for before the advertising message comes up at the end! Anyway, enjoy or not!
Read the full post

What the hell is #moonfruit ?!

I won't write an essay about Moonfruit as most of you probably heard about it already.

Moonfruit is a website that lets you design your own great looking site in a few easy steps. They have different types of templates (journal, video blog, business, travel blog, etc.) that you can use and customise.

In order to celebrate their 10 year anniversary, they've decided to give away 10 Macbook Pro laptops.Now in order to enter the draw, you simply need to tweet a message with the #moonfruit hash tag. Knowing the popularity of Apple laptops, having a chance to get one for free obviously got the attention of the Twitter community.
The problem lies there. This online contest drew so much attention that at some point, around 20,000 tweets (Twitter messages) were sent every hour using that tag (still around that rate at the moment I'm writing this post).

I searched the #moonfruit tag on Twitter search and within about 5 minutes, there were already over 1,600 results and counting (see below).


Three main issues could be raised:

1. This kind of contest using Twitter was surely launched in order to profit from the popularity of Twitter. Although this could be very true, it can also lead to an opposite undesired effect. This huge amount of tweets using one similar tag may quickly be seen as some sort of spamming. The Moonfruit will probably benefit from this craze in the end, but many people can have a bad image associated to the website name, and that's one thing you might want to avoid.
   
   
2. Secondly, I have noticed that a lot of people use these commercial hash tags for completely unrelated purposes. Most of which simply want to benefit from the popularity of this keyword with this easy rule: The more popular a keyword is, the more it will be searched and therefore the more people might read your tweet. Hash tags were created in order to discuss a particular topic. But if so many messages become "off-topic", then the whole point of the hash tag is debatable. For example, out of the last 4 tweets containing the #moonfruit tag, 2 persons make a joke, 1 person obviously has no clue what it is, and the last one makes a pointless tweet that doesn't have much sense (to me at least) using multiple tags.
   
   
3. And last but certainly not least, some people have written articles about how these kind of tags could "break" or "kill" Twitter. Don't hesitate to read the article on Mashable concerning the #gorillapenis hash tag attack on Twitter. Personally, I'm not so sure it would actually kill it. However, it definitely does have a negative impact.

In conclusion, brands should definitely be careful on how to use Twitter. In this particular case, the Moonfruit website probably increased their brand awareness by a million but with success rise problems and let's not forget what Newton taught us: "With every action comes an equal and opposite reaction."!

So much said about #moonfruit in this post when the initial purpose of it was to simply give you guys the link :)

Moonfruit

Read the full post

ihaveanidea.org - The community of the international advertising industry

You've read it in the title, ihaveanidea.org is an online community designed to bring advertising agencies, professionals or fans together. After signing up, everyone can then discuss any idea via articles or forums and learn from others by sharing their point of view about a particular topic.

On top of this, ihaveanidea organises events including a "portfolio night" where advertisers can meet and review other advertiser's portfolios. These events, organised around 35 cities in 22 countries, continue to grow in popularity and size.

Registration is free and only takes a few minutes.
ihaveanidea.org Read the full post

No Global Ad Recovery Until 2010

According to a GroupM study, the advertising industry won't recover from the global crisis until 2010. Read the article here:
http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1007155 Read the full post