NBC’s Fashion Star premiered last week to pretty good Nielsen ratings and social ratings which went on to increase for this past Tuesday’s second episode. While from a content perspective, it’s not exactly what I tend to watch on TV, I’m really impressed with the elegance of the program’s architecture and social TV format for three main reasons:
- Strong social TV footprint: Fashion Star hits on what is becoming a standard footprint for these kinds of shows by integrating the Twitter backchannel into the broadcast programming, making episodes available on demand across multiple platforms, and having a beefy social media presence in Facebook, Twitter, and a partnership with GetGlue.
- Test & learn attitude: I absolutely love that Fashion Star is experimenting with “emerging” platforms like Pinterest which is an appropriate and, frankly, perfect place to be in both from a target and user-experience perspective.
- Content as advertising: Most interesting to me is the fact that the show has brilliantly integrated 3 major brands into the content of the show in a way that, in my opinion, sets the bar for sponsorships because it doesn’t feel like a sponsorship – it feels like (because it is) a natural part of the show. Many times brand integrations have an evident and blatant beginning and end – almost like a commercial within the show – but in this case, the brands are editorially woven throughout the show’s content as three retail buyers act, in effect, as the ultimate judges of the designers’ fashions.
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If you’re tuning in to the long awaited season 5 premiere of “Mad Men” this Sunday (and who isn’t?), check out the Newsweek / Daily Beast official
“Mad Men Talking Man Men” live chat featuring our own Lance Jensen.
Details here:
What: Mad Men Talking Mad Men Live Chat
Who: Lance Jensen, Lincoln Bjorkman, Tor Myhren, and David Lipman
When: Sunday, March 25th, 9pm ET – 10pm ET (during 1st hour of Mad Men season 5 premiere)
Hosts: Brian Ries and Chelsie Gosk, Newsweek & The Daily Beast
Where: thedailybeast.com
Twitter hashtag: #MadMenChat
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Today, Facebook provides a mind-blowing array of options in targeting the users – their demographics, interests, affinity, relationship status, real-time actions and behaviors. But despite this unprecedented targeting opportunity that exists nowhere else on- or off-line, marketers continue to voice their unhappiness in measuring ROI on Facebook. This is where Nanigans comes in.
Nanigans is a 50-person start-up here in Boston. Founded in 2010, it is emerging as a dominant advertising platform on Facebook that allows you go way beyond just clicks. Their software platform – Ad Engine – could significantly reduce your pain in running a successful Facebook advertising program at scale. It helps you optimize your creative through multi-variate testing. It allows you to target based on the array of options that is available on Facebook today. And, it helps you optimize towards whatever is your ultimate goal – whether it’s fan acquisition or app install or ecommerce. Along the way, you get to know the real ROI of your activity, not just click- through rates and cost per clicks. Nanigans is an official Facebook Ads API partner and we at Hill Holliday are very pleased to have them as one of our Project Beacon Partners.
I didn’t know much about CampusLIVE when I jumped on board as their point person for Project Beacon. A little ironic, considering they operated out of the cool basement space in my condo building until the end of last summer when they left for bigger digs. Shame on me for not stopping by given the cool stuff happening down there.
What started as a series of college-specific portal pages combining academic information, the local food and social scene, and networking tools has evolved into a real content powerhouse, filled with “challenge”-based destinations for students to compete with each other to win recognition and some pretty sweet prizes.
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Figuring out how to navigate a city has been a challenge for nearly anyone who has departed suburbia’s haunts. With a smartphone, the old way of navigating cities with maps, printed guides and or totally winging it has become a thing of the past. While there are certainly a slew of ways to navigate cities, one of our favorite ways is with our Project Beacon partner MyCityWay.
Founded by a trio of engineers living in New York City in 2009, MyCityWay has rapidly grown with in-depth city guides for more than 70 cities all over the world. The usual fare like dining, nightlife & coffee are supplemented with what might appeal to tourists vs. locals.
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As a young kid, I remember my mother regularly clipping coupons from the Sunday papers. She’d organize them by category before storing them neatly in a red tin that was kept near our living room couch. Then, once each week, she’d pack my siblings and I into the car for a grocery shopping trip. The coupons would be matched to items on our shopping list and then transferred to a Ziploc bag before being redeemed at the store. The whole process was quite a bit of work, couponing included.
Some 25 years later, consumers’ desire to save money using coupons has changed little, but the method in which they do so, is vastly different than it once was. Daily deals flood inboxes, instant specials hit iPhones based on location, and users can even have savings pushed to their credit cards, simply by using a hashtag on Twitter.
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With TVnext a mere 25 days away, we’re thrilled to announce Christopher Gorham as one of our featured keynote speakers.
Chris stars as blind CIA operative, Auggie Anderson, in USA Network’s hit original series COVERT AFFAIRS.
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