American Idol in Habbo

American Idol has chosen to become a sponsor of the Teen Virtual World Habbo Hotel.  This was widely reporter — see PaidContent article here.  This is an interesting space to keep an eye on.   As virtual worlds become increasingly popular marketers will need innovative ways to tap into the audience.

Quantcast puts Habbo’s US Quantified unique visitors at 640,000 and is mostly teen girl.

Thoughts:

• Sounds like this was a pretty straight forward sponsorship deal — nothing fancy.  I’d like to see some more integration like allowing the kids to vote on the American Idol contestants from a Habbo chat lounge.  Or at least have the American Idol contestants “live” virtually in Habbo so fans can interact with them.
• Marketers need to be concerned about advertising to kids — Webkinz had a bit of backlash when they introduced banner ads last year.
• When are we going to see online only game shows from the networks?

eMarketer Online Movie Ad Spend Growth

I have a lot of heart for this topic.  I’m a huge movie fan and there is a ton of innovation when it comes to leveraging the Internet to promote movies.  My love started back when Blair Witch came out in 1999.  The agency went well above and beyond to build out the entire back store on the web. To a degree that there was wide belief that the movie was a “real story” — click through on the movie poster below to see the site — still looks great after 10 years.

Blair Witch

The eMarketing data shows that the studios will continue to look towards the web to get kids into the theaters.  With Social Networking and wired Cell phones expect to see some really fun campaigns.

Some Ideas:

- Studios can create online personalities for characters well before the movie starts to be promoted.  Imagine if the Blair Witch trio had 1000 friends each on Facebook — then they disappear.

- Studios, like Disney, have been expanding their movie franchises with Virtual Worlds.  But they are all POST movie release.  How about developing the Viral World first!  Think about this for the upcoming Hobbit movie.

- Think about creating Webisodes around the main characters for the upcoming films and releasing them on YouTube.  You see the networks doing a lot of this now by providing back stories on sitcom characters.  Building out that kind of robustness and level of fan engagement drives bigger audiences by creating uber-fans that spread the word.

Virgin's Kickbacks Program

Here’s a very cool campaign from Virgin mobile.  Virgin customers can grab a unique code off of the site and post it throughout their Social Network profiles (on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc).  If a friend uses the Virgin customer’s code to sign up for the service the Virgin customer gets free minutes and the new referrer gets a discount.

This is pretty much an Affiliate marketing deal — but it is done on a simplistic level that gets Virgin customers to distribute a promotion threw their viral networks.  An interesting plus up might be to give the Virgin customer value for just posting the promo codes on and distributing them – rather than only rewarding them if a new customer signs up.

According the DM New the program has already drive 50,000 new sign ups!  (link)

New report from PEW (link here) came out with some great data points on who is using Social Network sites like Facebook and MySpace and why they use them.  When presenting Social Networking as a valuable online strategy I’m often confronted by traditional marketers being skeptical about adults usage of Social Networks.  Well, if you where ever in doubt — take a look at these numbers:

PEW Data

Growth in Social Networking Sites

Go check out SproutBuilder.com right now.  Don’t even bother reading this post — go and start playing.  Sprout Builder let’s you very easily and quickly make some very cool widgets for iGoogle, MySpace, Facebook, or anywhere you’d expect a Widget.

This is an extremely cool application for a couple reasons:

• Widgets can be very powerful marketing tools and this ap lets you play around with the possibilities without paying a dev shop to make a custom ap for you.  Figure on paying $25m to $100+m for a custom widget.
• More important than the service that Spout Builder provides is the ability for the site to provide this type of interaction in a web page.  The entire notion that web pages are static information can be thrown out the window — web pages are APPLICATIONS.  This is a great example of that.
• As marketers we need to keep pushing the technology to provide the fullest potential to the business.  We can do that by stop thinking of our web sites as just marketing communications tools, which they are and always will be, but to also start to think of our web sites as extensions of the products and services we offer.

So do this now — go build your own custom Widget.  After that site back and take a long look at Sprout Builder and think about how far web pages have come in the last 5 years.