Tales from the Bleeding Edge

The Tales from the Bleeding Edge session was more of a product-demo roundtable.  Each of the panelists gave a presentation or demonstration of their company and two stood out as being particularly relevant and interesting for marketers and advertisers.

Joe Marchese showed us Social Vibe (which I LOVE) which focuses on how brands can get involved in social media in an effective way.  With Social Vibe “The only way for brands to get into social media is for someone to invite them” – the ultimate in permission based advertising.  Social Vibe allows users to choose and showcase their favorite brands on their social networking sites and earn points that equal donations to their favorite charity.

Why does social vibe rock?  It takes a new approach to social network marketing – users choose their own sponsors (Nike, Apple, etc) and take their sponsors onto the web with them – on their blogs, myspace, facebook, email, etc.  Why is this powerful?  The branding quality is high because the user is making the choice to advertise the brand and is making a personal endorsement.  So what do you get for allowing a brand to sponsor your online activities?  You get $$ donated to a charity that you select. 

On hearing about Social Vibe there were two questions on my mind.  First, how does this not violate the Terms of Service of sites like myspace and facebook?  Since the profile owner is not getting paid, and they are choosing the sponsorship and brand assets, the social networks don’t view it as advertising (putting advertising on your social network profile pages is a violation of the terms of service).  Second, are brands concerned about appearing on sites with inappropriate content?  The social web is a bit of a monster and the reality is that brand messages already appear on social network profiles. Brands can also restrict their sponsorship to certain demographics (ie. teen males, etc).  In my opinion Social Vibe is an innovative approach to social network advertising.

The next company that was doing something interesting was Navteq.  For those of you who don’t already see enough ads in your lives, Denny Reinert from Navteq demoed their location based advertising with GPS systems.  Ads will show up on your Garmin screen while you are driving and may even include coupons.  They will also show you an ad when you are stopped (if you stop for more than 15 seconds) but you will only get one ad every 20 minutes. 

OK, so why the heck would you agree to have ads showing up in your navigation system?  You get access to free lifetime traffic…..  There are two questions that I have about this business model.  First, will people actually agree to have ads in their GPS?  Is access to free traffic meaningful enough for consumers to agree to be advertised at?  The second question is about the quality of the ad impression and the ROI for marketers.  Will consumers act on the ads or will they largely be ignored?  Will advertisers buy in to this model?

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