Barack Obama Wins President Elect

I had my doubts that he could pull it off, but I very happy for the new President Elect Barack Obama. This truly historical event makes me proud to be an American. During the news media coverage of the election, I experienced many different types of content and technologies that I wanted to document. What did you experience?

CNN Now Has Holograms

So... I assume the host is just talking to the air and pretending the other person is there? Photo from Alex Hillman

Endless news coverage Here is a collection of news websites that covered the election of Barack Obama. This collection from Jeff Junatas can be seen at this website.

Twitter Election Success Of course there is Twitter, which not only provided the quickest updates about the election but the SMS updates from the news sites had latest breaking commentary long before TV, web or radio. Plus Twitter did not fail and go down.

Updated: 11/5

Election maps from Jason Kottke - kottke.org

Jason Kottke summarizes here: "Most media outlets covering the 2008 US Presidential Election used the familiar red/blue map to track the progress of the race as results from the polls rolled in Tuesday evening. Here are several of those maps, in some ways as similar to each other as they are varied." View them all

What else am I missing?

I will add more as I collect them. What cool technologies or content did you experience during the 2008 Presidential Election?

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TV Advertising needs a viral long tail to gain ROI

On Sunday, prior to watching the Superbowl I was curious if there will be buzz about the TV Commercials in the twitterverse and much to my suprise, there was a Twitterbowl. I randomly found out about the event because I track the word "diet" and my SMS exploded with alerts about the Diet Pepsi ad.

My question before the game was:

"Which super bowl commercial will provide the biggest lift in revenue and provide the long tail word of mouth exposure"

Here is what I remember

1) The brands that I remember are: Bud, Diet Pepsi, Coke, Career Builder and IronMan
2) The website URLs that I remembered are: none, but I did remember GoDaddy asking me to visit their site. I also remember the Tide commercial, it made me laugh and it made me want to visit the site.
3) The ads that were most talked about during the game: From what I saw, the Justin Timberlake commercial for Diet Pepsi had the biggest buzz.

That leads me to determine which commercial would gain actual revenue from these ads. My opinion, the biggest winner will be "IronMan", the movie. The film looks great and now all of America wants to see it. You can't buy that exposure anywhere. Every boy and their father be in theaters for this.

My winner was Tide - because of the viral website.

If you visit the site, My Talking Stain, they have an excellent viral execution using multimedia. Its simple, its funny and it makes you want to enter your information. They do a great job of collecting leads, why? To send you coupons to buy Tide. Overall, it's the most diverse way to get brand exposure and the viral effect of their "Get Famous - Film A Spoof" will last a while. Here is the spoof I created:

In conclusion, I wasn't really impressed with a lot of the commercials. Especially CareerBuilder, it was terrible. But, maybe they wanted to do that on purpose to cut through the clutter. Sales Genie too, did they purposely make the worst ads. I would never go to the site on purpose because they were so bad. There were a few other funny ones, like the AMP and Shaq. I don't even remember the brand that Shaq was a jockey in.

The winners for me are the brands that establish the relationship of the product to the attractiveness of the commercial. Then in collaboration with a great website it a full experience that I will remember. Next time I am in the grocery store I may pick up Tide to clean my dirty shirt. Now the creative concept can really expand using online media/ads, blogs, YouTube and everything else to reach audiences for weeks and even months to come. The viral creative concepts build the long tail brand exposure and produce the best return on investment.

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