Inspiration weekly: have a click

19/06/2009 ISSUE 64

Presence of Advertising

Last week it was all about the future of advertising, but how is it doing today? Since I do not believe in Foreverism I think that the future is almost now. It is just one small step ahead. And everybody can make that step, well some have more capable circumstances.

Recently Digg found a formula how to make money in a completly new format:
New Digg ads will appear directly in the news stream and will be clearly marked as sponsored. The more people click on the ads, the lower the price the advertiser will pay. Ads that are buried too often will be priced “out of the system.”
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On the other hand youtube is now releasing yet another idea: Choose Your Own Adventure which translates to choose an ad. Would you?
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This week's special: beta chocolate
Beta is still a word of Web 2.0 but what about the Reality 2.0? Are we there yet? Well it looks like collaborative thinking a la Leadbeater makes sales of real products. Consumers seem to believe that an idea than unfinished product is as good as a finished one. Why is that, one may ask. I think that we trust brands that trust us, and that's it. Would you eat chocolate 0.3 beta?

Another way to tell the story is to talk about Beta. Almost exactly a year ago, we introduced our first chocolate (“Chocolatey”, appropriately enough) at the Entertainment Gathering at the Getty Center in Los Angeles. Since a lot of us have tech backgrounds, we adopted a familiar idea: we encouraged our users to help us make the chocolate they wanted, in much the same way software developers engage beta testers. We called what we were doing Beta chocolate, and put it in plain brown bags with rubber stamps to identify the contents. As we subsequently found out, this is not the way it’s done in the chocolate business. But the idea struck a chord as customers became creators, helping us formulate this release after 1,026 iterations over the past year.

Tcho