It’s renowned as the most digitally savvy election campaign yet. The story of how Barack Obama used social media to build grassroots support has become the stuff of social-media legend.

But when David Plouffe, Obama’s campaign manager, took to the stage at the Cannes Lions  International Advertising Festival today, the surprising message for marketers was to keep  it “old school”: email and TV are still critically important.

Continue reading "Obama’s campaign chief tells marketers: “Keep it old school.”"

How exciting can a vending machine get?

If you’re Coca-Cola, the answer is “very” - when it’s a “multimedia Coke machine”.

Also known as the uVend, Coke debuted its interactive, touch-screen vending machines at the Beijing Olympics. It’s now starting to put them into malls across the US. Today, the uVend is a novelty that generates lines stretching around the block - for a machine that still, at heart, just dispenses fizzy drinks.

But for Coke, these networked, brightly lit devices open up a new world of marketing potential.

Continue reading "Coke drags vending machine into interactive age"

With the UK government’s Digital Britain report due tomorrow, it’s not surprising that today has seen a crop of announcements from media companies touting their digital credentials.

Three claimed “firsts” announced today are Virgin Media’s “unlimited” music downloading partnership with Universal Music; broadcaster Five allowing full-length programmes to be embedded (YouTube-style) in third-party websites; and video streaming site Blinkbox offering pay-per-view Warner Bros movies, from the Dark Knight to Casablanca.

Continue reading "Creative thinking ahead of Digital Britain"

“It’s a bummer.”

That’s how Quincy Smith, president of CBS Interactive, described the departure of Last.fm’s three founders, Martin Stiksel, Felix Miller and Richard Jones.

CBS paid $280m in 2007 for Last.fm, an online music service and community now used by over 37m people a month. It remains one of the UK’s biggest buyouts in the web 2.0 era and Last.fm is still a fixture of London’s Silicon Roundabout.

Yet Mr Smith was magnanimous as three darlings of the web scene left CBS Interactive, which as a whole generated revenues of over $600m last year.

Continue reading "Last.fm loses its founders"

The arms race between the UK’s online ticket exchanges shows no sign of slowing.

Seatwave has just received a further $17m (£10m) investment from its venture capital backers. The round comes after Viagogo, its main competitor in the secondary ticketing market, raised $15m in February.

Both based in London, there is little love lost between Seatwave and Viagogo, and their respective founders, Joe Cohen and Eric Baker. The sites allow fans and ticket brokers to buy and sell tickets online, with the sorts of money-back guarantees rarely found from the touts loitering outside venues.

With Accel Partners joining existing investors Fidelity Ventures, Atlas Venture, Mangrove Capital Partners and Adinvest, Seatwave’s series D round takes its total financing to $53m. It reunites the company with Accel’s Sonali De Rycker, who helped found Seatwave while at Atlas.

Continue reading "Seatwave reunites old friends for new funds"

Nokia’s response to Apple’s mobile applications marketplace has finally launched in a blaze of publicity – but hardly the kind the Finnish device maker can have hoped for.

Nokia announced the Ovi store in Barcelona in February, although its Ovi internet services brand has been around since August 2007. Clearly it has built up more anticipation than it could handle, as the “extraordinarily high spikes of traffic” caused the site to crash soon after opening. Even after downloading the Ovi software, some users reported seeing a limited selection of applications available in the store.

Continue reading "Nokia fumbles app store launch"

Many predicted that mobile advertising would suffer in the downturn, as marketers looked to allocate shrinking budgets to more proven media.

But that hasn’t prevented the UK market from almost doubling in size last year, according to a report by PricewaterhouseCoopers for the Internet Advertising Bureau.

PwC’s Eva Berg-Winters said that growth of 99.2 per cent was greater than she had expected. “We have now passed the tipping point where things start moving in the mobile internet,” she said, adding that mobile was taking off faster than internet advertising did at a similar stage of its development in the late 1990s. Continue reading "Mobile advertising: the law of small numbers"

Are there any companies left in Silicon Valley that bloggers haven’t suggested as potential buyers of Twitter?

Since Facebook approached Twitter last November, Google and Microsoft have both been linked with the rapidly growing (and manically hyped) microblogging service.

Now both Valleywag and TechCrunch are reporting that Apple has been in discussions with Twitter about a supposed $700m deal. Apple published a glowing profile of Twitter on its customer case-study pages last week, no doubt fuelling such speculation.

Since November, Twitter’s body language has consistently been that it wants to remain independent. Even so, an Apple deal doesn’t immediately seem logical. Continue reading "Why the Apple-Twitter rumours may be 140 characters short of reality"