Visible Measures Blog

As the UK heads into the final days before electing its next Prime Minister, it faces a distinctly new and different media landscape for consuming political news. Television is stronger than ever, with this election marking the first ever televised ministerial debates in the UK. Each of these debates were uploaded online, enabling viewers to watch and re-watch the candidates' every answer, look, and move. Beyond helping viewers watch debates they may have missed, online video adds an extra dimension to political theater, highlighting the good, magnifying the bad, and amplifying the embarrassing.

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Did Fox and ABC reject a Lane Bryant lingerie ad? Well, no, but that didn't stop Lane Bryant from declaring network bias against women with boobs and having model Ashley Graham take a media tour last week to talk about the issue.

Imagine you're planning an upcoming online video campaign. You might use Evian's Live Young and Microsoft's Project Natal online video campaigns as points of comparison. At first glance, these two campaigns appear similar. They both have over 1,500 placements, suggesting significant community participation. But upon deeper analysis, you discover that over 60% of the views for Live Young are brand-driven, compared to only 20% for Project Natal. This distinction – seeded versus viral performance – is critical for forecasting online video advertising performance and will impact your planning, benchmarking, and overall understanding for how your audiences interact with your video content.

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Wieden & Kennedy held on to three of the top four spots last week, with its Tiger Woods ad firmly in second place. A closer look, however, reveals that of the 2.3 million Tiger views for the week, 1.3 million or 60% were for the derivative, or lampoon ads.

Historically, Apple hasn't been all that active in the world of online video. Not because it can't, but because it doesn't really try all that hard. Up until recently, Apple hadn’t even bothered to upload any videos to its corporate YouTube channel. And when it did, with its recent series of iPad ads, the comments were disabled. However, despite Apple’s relative ambivalence about social video, the online video audience is anything but ambivalent about the brand. Indeed, fans have posted hundreds of copies of the iconic “Get a Mac” and “iPhone” ads.

We're honored to announce that Trends, our online video performance benchmarking solution, has been selected by Streaming Media as one of their 2010 Editors' Picks, an annual list of "the most innovative, most important, and just plain coolest stuff in online video." 

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- After 10 months, a grand total of 102 million views, 130,000 comments and 500,000 Facebook fans, Evian is finally putting its babies to work on TV. The ads started running in the Los Angeles market this week and New York this summer, a change in strategy for what had been an entirely online campaign, at least in the U.S.

Tiger didn't win the Masters over the weekend, but he did score a viral video hit. His latest Nike ad, featuring a voiceover from his late father Earl, has been the talk of the town since its launch late Wednesday, just before the Masters began.

Each month, our partner Visible Measures compiles a list of the top ten most popular web video series, and we share those results with you and provide analysis. Visible Measures tracks views, comments and other data on web video.

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- It's official: Old Spice and agency Wieden & Kennedy really do get the web. This week a new Old Spice campaign "Odor Blocker" joins the "Your Man" TV ad that has been hanging around the chart for the past few weeks. The campaign consists of three different creatives with "Flex" performing the best of the three.

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- What makes an ad go viral? Cute babies, furry animals, juvenile humor, implausible stunts, and, well, a real stunt from billionaire investor Warren Buffett.