• The influence of YouTube on brand marketing in Advertising Age: “With not a penny of paid media and in less than a month, “Dove Evolution,” a
  75-second viral film created by Ogilvy & Mather, Toronto, for the Unilever brand has reaped more than 1.7 million views on YouTube and has gotten significant play on TV talk shows “Ellen” and “The View” as well as on “Entertainment Tonight.” It’s also brought the biggest-ever traffic spike to CampaignForRealBeauty.com“

What it means: notwithstanding the media, I believe viewers always want to be entertained and informed. This film does exactly that, like the Coke and Mentos film. But what does it mean for traditional media if you can create major buzz without spending traditional media money? Can this be reproduced easily? Is there a formula? Is this considered PR? I think major brands have no choice but to embrace these new marketing methods
as part of an integrated media mix for now.

• The influence of YouTube on US mid-term elections in the New York Times: “in this election, YouTube, with its extant social networks and the ability
  to forward a video clip and a comment with a flick of the mouse, has become a source of viral work-of-mouth. As a result, a disruptive technology that was supposed to upend a half-century-old distribution model of television is having a fairly disruptive effect on politics as well.”

What it means: politicians are brands as well and need to leverage these new tools in a media-fragmented world. Don’t forget though that narrowcasting a video might mean broadcasting it with the high-trafficked video sites (read the Ken Avidor example in the New York Times article).

• “How do you measure engagement” on Robert Scoble’s blog: “I’ve compared notes with several bloggers and journalists and when the Register links to us we get almost no traffic. But they claim to have millions of readers. So, if millions of people are hanging out there but no one is willing to click a link, that means their audience has low engagement.
  (…) Compare that to Digg. How many people hang out there every day? Maybe a million, but probably less. Yet if you get linked to from Digg you’ll see 30,000 to 60,000 people show up. And these people don’t just read. They get involved. I can tell when Digg links to me cause the comments for that post go up too.”

What it means: there is an ongoing debate about the value of users in the online ad world. As I often say in the search world, not all searches are born equal. It will eventually be all about conversion and ROI (sales, posting a comment, interacting with your brand, etc.)

Update: MediaPost writes from AdTech NY: “John Stichweh, director of global interactive marketing for The Coca-Cola Company, this morning cast doubt on whether the company thinks engagement is a goal
worth pursuing. The measurement that really matters, he said, is sales. “How many more cases of Coke am I selling? I don’t know”. In fact, Stichweh proposed that the concept of “engagement,” as well as other metrics like “brand awareness” that serve as proxies for sales, fall far short of what marketers require. “What am I getting for the shareholder?” he asked, rhetorically. “I don’t know.”