BlackArrow, a provider of advertising solutions for ‘New Television platforms’, this morning announced a strategic investment by Time Warner Cable. Joan Gillman, president of media sales for TWC, has been named to the BlackArrow board of directors.
The cable system operator joins BlackArrow’s impressive list of backers, which includes Cisco, Comcast, Intel Capital, Mayfield Fund, Motorola Mobility, NDS and Polaris Venture Partners.
The Time Warner Cable investment and the Motorola Mobility investment from last November complete BlackArrow’s previously announced Series C funding – bringing the total amount raised in the round from $20 million to $27 million.
BlackArrow says the Time Warner capital will be used for the deployment of its Advanced Advertising System to programmers and New TV content distributors.
The system is designed specifically for the technological complexities and business issues within on-demand television advertising environments.
Research firm Harris Interactive asked 2,124 American adults if they agree or disagree that some online companies, singling out such companies as Google or Facebook, control too much of our personal information and know too much about our browsing habits, and found that more than three quarters of respondents agreed (76%) with those statements.
Only one in six disagreed that these companies know and control too much (16%) and even fewer are ‘not sure’ (8%). These are some of the findings of a recent Adweek/Harris Poll survey of U.S. adults surveyed online between April 25 and 27, 2011 by Harris Interactive.
So basically, the report claims the large majority of people in the United States thinks that Facebook and Google are essentially evil corporations that store all sorts of information about us, but that doesn’t exactly stop them from using their services, it wouldappear.
And didn’t Harris Interactive just put out a report showing that Google is considered to be the most reputable company in the United States?
Anyhow, according to Harris Interactive, majorities of both men and women agree that these companies control too much and have too much information about us, although women appear to be somewhat more likely to say this than men are (79% vs. 74%). Also, more affluent Americans are more likely to agree than are Americans who earn less—80% of those who earn $75K or more per year agree, compared to 70% of those who earn between $35 and $50K.
However, says the report, American seem to oppose government intervention to regulate large online companies like Google or Facebook (46%) rather than support it (36%).
From the report:
It seems Americans are torn, possibly between ideals of free enterprise, the products and services that they use and enjoy which these large businesses provide, and their trepidations about companies yielding so much information and power. Either way it will be interesting to track reactions—if people embrace, or rather brace themselves against, these companies as they continue to grow and develop.
My educated guess? The network effect will continue to significantly outweigh any reservations people might indicate when polled online, so Google and Facebook – and other major online companies – needn’t worry too much at this point.
It’s a lot easier to agree with given statements about a service than to actually quit it.
As anticipated, Google unveiled their music service today at their I/O conference, Music Beta. The emphasis is on the “beta” right now as Google clearly isn’t launching the full service they had wanted to — you can thank the music labels for that. So how is it? What does it look like?
We’ve been granted early access to the service and have done a quick walkthrough. Below, find some screenshots of how it will work. As Google notes:
Welcome to Music Beta, a new service from Google that lets you store your personal collection online and access it instantly without the hassle of wires or syncing.
Enjoy your music anywhere — listen on any web browser or your smartphone or tablet running Android 2.2 or higher.
Save your favorite albums, artists, and playlists on your device so you can keep listening even when you’re not connected.
Create your own custom playlists or build them automatically from a single song.
A few other quick notes: this is U.S.-only for now. There are a handful of free songs that you can get on the service to get your started. And yes, Flash is required for it to work.
Google’s mantra of launching products early and often didn’t exactly work with Google TV. It hit the ground with a gimped feature set and limited hardware options. The analogy of Android simply hasn’t held true as hardware makers and retail vendors alike simply haven’t picked up the devices. Today, at Google I/O, new hardware partners were announced as well as an updated OS. Google TV might finally be off the starting line.
As online video advertising continues to grow, and expands to mobile, brands are looking for ways to get more bang for their advertising buck, and viewers continue to yearn for and expect video advertising that is more personalized, targeted, and relevant. And obviously the same is true for brands and advertisers — they, too, want to be able to customize their ad experience to reach consumers that they know will care about their products. So, as technology and the web tools we use on a daily basis continue to get smarter, so should advertising, right?
AdGenesis, a New York-based video advertising startup, wants use the dating, or match-making game, to make the serving of video advertising a more intelligent arrangement. It hopes that its service will bring consumers and brands together for a rewarding, lifetime relationship of loyalty and happiness — not just in a marriage of convenience. In other words, the startup is a white label video advertising platform that partners with publishers to match branded content to a large network of eager, opt-in customers.
And, today, the startup today announced that it is launching a new API that will enable Web and mobile publishers to deliver stand-alone video advertising service to their perfect user. As we all want to be rewarded for having to sit through advertising, the service naturally incorporates a points, badges, and rewards into a program that gives viewers incentive to watch the video, and, in turn, giving advertisers the satisfaction of knowing that they are reaching their target consumer — and that those consumers are actually watching their videos.
So, how does this all work? In the case of publishers, they tell AdGenesis what type of consumer they want to view their video, based on demographics, future purchase intentions, interests, hobbies, and so on prompted by AdGenesis once a publisher joins the service. They then provide AdGenesis with a video, be it 15 seconds to 10 minutes-long, which then loads the video into their system. Based on the data AdGenesis has gathered from its 4 million registered users, it then notifies consumers with corresponding interests via SMS or email that they’ve been “matched”.
Let the swooning begin. These viewers then watch the video, on-demand on mobile or desktop, and confirm that they’ve watched the video in its entirety by entering 2 digits that are overlaid in the video’s content. If the viewer doesn’t enter those digits, the advertiser doesn’t pay. If they do, then the brand pays once for that unique view, but only once, even if the viewer watches the video 80 times.
The advertisers are then asked to present some kind of reward to the viewer for watching the video. This can be credits on AdGenesis, which viewers can later redeem for gift cards, etc, or the brand can enter the viewer in a contest to win a trip to Hawaii, or offer discounted coupons, and so on.
For the consumer, AdGenesis is totally free to join, it’s opt-in, so you’re not forced to do or see anything you don’t want to, and the more you tell AdGenesis about yourself, the more targeted the ads it serves you become, and the more videos you watch, the more rewards you earn.
It sounds a bit like being in a focus group or being paid to do medical testing on a new line of shaving cream, but AdGenesis has become very popular among coupon clippers and aggressive savers. Four months from its launch, AdGenesis has served 1.6 million viewed-videos and generated more than 150K click-throughs to advertiser websites, Facebook pages, etc.
Online video has not been a particularly successful source of click-through rates, and many advertisers have become wary of it, because it’s hard to measure the ROI of video advertising. (Same as it ever was.) AdGenesis, on the other hand, has been demonstrating a fairly impressive click-through rate (an average of 11 percent), which is much higher than the average of about 1 or 2 percent, according to AdGenesis CEO Richard Smullen.
AdGenesis has also announced a partnership with PARADE Magazine, the first publisher to launch with the full array of AdGenesis’ functionality, and Smullen tells me the startup has several big partnerships in the pipeline, both on the publishing side and the rewards/points side.
With many, many advertisers struggling to come to terms with significant spend on advertising campaigns without tried-and-true measures of customer retention, click-through, etc., advertising loyalty solutions are popping up across the Web. AdGenesis is an interesting take, and it wouldn’t surprise me if the match-making, brand-dating game proves to have some traction. After all, I’ve always wanted to date Nike.
Google’s mantra of launching products early and often didn’t exactly work with 
