My friend who’s seven time zones away pointed out the some of the links on the blog took her to Amazon.com to buy something. You might have noticed that there’s advertising on the website if you read the blog there; this isn’t a commercial endeavor, but I do pay for it out of my pocket, and I don’t make a ton of money to begin with, hence the integrated advertising. The links to Amazon.com do provide good info, like trailers or clips of shows sometimes, and info about a movie or band, and people’s opinions. I don’t get paid unless someone makes a purchase anyway. Nevertheless, her concern was duly noted, and as such, links that will take you merchandise pages (usually at Amazon.com) are now colored green orange (at the website, RSS/e-mail readers may vary).
A quick clip and a funny thought (or is that the other way around?)
Before I write the post on integrated advertising, I have to take a nap so that I won’t become a rambling incoherent mess, because then the piece would suck. In the meantime, I just thought I would point out that most of the internet has some type of product placement on it. The website this blog sits on has ads on it from various. . . well, advertisers; though you may not realize that if you’re getting it through RSS or e-mail.
The clip is from a site called Revver. They host your video and integrate an ad at the end of it. If someone clicks on the ad, Revver makes money which they share with the video maker. Whenever I watched the clip here, there was an ad for a television show called Acceptable.TV at the end of it. (The ads are supposed to rotate, so you might get something different.) Acceptable.TV is basically a serialized sketch comedy show with an audience voting element and they have some type of product placement arrangement with Amp’d Mobile, a cell phone company.
Initially, the dude hosting would come out between the sketches and say something like, “Use your Amp’d Mobile phone or any mobile phone to vote!” That wasn’t so bad and obviously fit right in with the phone in aspect of the show. Then someone realized that the sketches go viral, not the interstitials, so they worked the Amp’d Mobile phone into a recurring sketch called Who’s Gonna Train Me?, a pretty funny spoof of boxing reality shows (man, that’s actually a fucking genre!). That’s not the clip I have here.
If you still want to watch the clip I have and you don’t see it on the page, you’ll probably have to click “Continue Reading.” I know that’s a little counterintuitive because you don’t read a video, but that’s what’s you have to do; except you might have to do something different if you’re reading this in an e-mail or RSS feed. The point is, I didn’t want to cram a video into a bunch of people’s inboxes (even if it is only 20 seconds long), so you’ll have to come to the site to see it. I’m sure there’s a link for you to click. . . somewhere.
Zach Braff could take a few pointers from Jennifer Garner
I’m watching the season finale of Scrubs right now and there was just a scene which was essentially a commercial for Travelocity. It’s an example of integrated advertising, the new buzzword for what used to be called product placement. It’s a hardly a new concept, but one that’s been getting a lot of attention lately, because the creative types are getting up in arms over it.
