China Ad Market to Grow Double Digits
June 18, 2008
Saatchi & Saatchi China CEO Pully Chau came in and had a chat with us today at the Cannes Fringe HQ at Das Werk Balcony.
Saatchi China alone brought a massive 30 delegates to Cannes this year, and as Pully said this shows the agencies commitment to training its staff and she went on to point out that the first ads in China aired for P&G in the late 80’s and as such China is essentially virgin territory for advertisers in comparison with western markets, yet it still currently yields the worlds third largest ad spend which she says is expected to realistically increase some 15% to 18% year on year.
The amount of Asian activity here at Cannes this year is huge, well done to the Lions for helping this to happen and here at the fringe we are itching to see what the market will produce in the coming years at the Cannes Advertising Festival – we also hope that they will start to embrace Cannes Fringe activities as much as they have the official Lions.
Little Miss Media Anyone
June 17, 2008
I been drinking too much of that 1.25€ a bottle French rose in the Fringe villa when I wrote this post and so I though you’d all like a little pist Fringe click grabbing headline to introduce our favorite Miss Media. So here’s Jess from Contagious Magazine who popped in to make a rare appearance on Cannes Fringe (we need to see you more Miss Media Penny…anyway) and she tells us what’s up and new, and what’s behind this years Titanium Lion and a few tips on the nights winners. Now where the fuck is that Gorilla I’m meant to be interviewing….
Blinkx.com Video Search API or More?
June 17, 2008
Video Search engines – Cannes Fringe talks to Blinkx.com about how their technology works to categorise videos through advanced video scanning that apparently looks at each video and listens to the audio and watches each frame to actually identify the subject and therefore category of the video. This is promised to give users a much more contextual search result.How it does this we’d love to know, according to Frederico Grosso SVP of Business Development for blinkx.com, the technology is protected by some 100+ patents. Well – we asked if the video search could go deeper than just the usual API spidering that we see on most video search sites where the video sites have to submit their feeds to get listed, or for instance could blinkx.com identify and categorise a single .mov file sitting on a web server / page some place – something we feel a real video search engine, hopfully one day should be able to do? The answer was not too clear, and apparently the system currently seems to just search and categorise hosted videos on sites such as youtube, metacafe and the rest of the API based video website - you know the usual suspects.
Blinkx.com is indeed a very good video search destination and under test it does return some very interesting and in-depth search results from a very wide - if not the widest we’ve seen group of sites – even if they do all seem to be API based and from the major video sites and not free “video file formats”. But if your looking for a good video search tool to point out what videos are out there on the growing number of video websites Blinkx.com would seem to be a good choice, for users and networks looking for a video search partner.
Intext advertising leaders Vibrant Media
June 16, 2008
Nope, it’s not the cast of a new Flintstones movie, it’s Sean Finnegan CMO of Vibrant Media and me, talking about how publishers and advertisers can use intext advertising and how it can help users by adding relevant advertising to a sites body of text.
What’s the Fringers view on this in text advertising, we are not convinced about the little green links that Vibrant Media put on your pages as they link to advertising content – as a user a) you don’t know they are links to adverts and users will role over to explore - but will they ignore them once they know it’s advertising - and b) do you really want adverts in your text? Well whatever we think it seems to be a growing market and potentially another potential way for advertisers to leap out of the page at web users to grab their time and attention.
If your thinking of adding intext advertising to your site, to help you monetize your content, Vibrant Media seem to be the main players they quote click through rates of between 5% to 6% CTR .
At the end of the day what Vibrant Media are doing is providing the intext network, and there is nothing wrong in that, the key to making this network work is good creative executions, and at least VM are in Cannes and other ad festivals now trying to involve creative agencies in the process, this can only be a good thing for users as the company seems to be expanding and building strength as the leader in the growing intext advertising market.
Cannes Fringe meets Pius Walker
October 19, 2007
Announced as the most successful person in Swiss advertising, Pius Walker can be pretty proud of his world’s smallest ad agency!
Cannes Fringe chats with Oliver Czok
October 19, 2007
We meet the President of the Interactive Jury, Oliver Czok! Wasn’t easy to get him in front of our camera, but we finally made it!
Cannes Fringe talks to Frank Dopheide
October 18, 2007
First thing after arriving in Portoroz for Frank Dopheide was to meet Cannes Fringe for a chat!
