The online advertising industry has been buzzing over the recent introduction of a couple of new media planning tools and whether or not they had the potential to shake up the industry. Now that advertisers and media planners have had the opportunity to examine the tools, the reviews are beginning to roll in. Here are two interesting articles examining ad industry reaction: David Smith’s take in Mediapost’s Metrics Insider and Mike Shields’ article in MediaWeek.

Hi, I’m Edward Hunter. I’ve been a gamer for many years and now have the perfect job working with comScore clients in the gaming industry.

I’d like to share some things I’ve learned along the way. My advice might not be sage or even wise. In fact, without comScore numbers at my disposal, I'm pretty powerless. But, I do know a couple of things.

Never, ever, let anyone see behind the curtain.

Pretty simple, right? Well, you'd be surprised how many MMO's have lost their mojo by violating this simple rule. I remember the first GM position I took a long time ago. It was for an exceptional text based MMO that I really loved. I was sort of a trouble maker, but I was creative so they gave me a shot.

The process involved my creating a new account with GM powers. I would log in and appear in the GM lounge and that was that. But it wasn't. Right away, I was no longer bound to the constraints of players. I could have any item. See any creature and with a simple word or gesture, dispatch it. I was in heaven, or so I thought.

Everything was great until I tried to play the game as a player again. I couldn't do it. The goals of reaching great heights no longer held any appeal to me, and, why should they? Just moments before I was creating creatures, now defeating them just didn't have any appeal.

I never played that game the same way again, and eventually quit. I had loved that game.

I used to play Ultima Online and wow, I was doing great. I was a woodcutter by trade and was just having fun sort of building stuff and you know, life was good.

Then I got an emulator. Yeah, I could run my very own UO shards, create objects, maps, buildings -- you name it. Very cool, until of course, I tried to actually play UO again. That was more than 7 years ago. Haven't ever gone back.

I played an MMO in beta recently. Decent game, it really was. It was a new metaphor for the genre, one I won’t reveal because frankly anyone halfway savvy reading this would immediately identify it. Anyway, played the beta, even preordered. That’s how cool it was.

I logged in on the last day. I was excited for the server wipe because like many beta players, I had firsthand knowledge of how to get a leg up before the unwashed masses started playing.

I went to a local NPC shop and, to my horror, there were experience books there. They were cheap and allowed me to instantly level my beta character to the highest level possible. Of course I did it. Of course I ran off and obtained what I tried so hard to obtain in the beta, what I knew I would try equally hard to obtain in the live game.

So there I was with all the goodies. It was great.

I never played the game again once it went live. I tried, once, but...I had already seen behind the curtain. Once I had experienced end game content, the mystery was gone and so was the appeal.

The lesson I learned is: don't promote paying players to GM's unless you have a damn good system in place.

Another lesson is: don't design your games so they can be emulated. Always keep something so key to the game’s operation that it keeps the smart ones guessing. And when they figure it out, change it. Change it again, and again. At random. Make it clear to your paying subscribers that any client detected having played on an emulator will be permanently banned from the live game.

Finally, don’t ever expose your end game content during beta to players who haven't gotten there by their own means. It might seem like a great reward, but I'm here to tell you, it’s a game killer. Period.

I was recently privileged to be asked to appear in Adam Buxton’s excellent new BBC3 pilot, MeeBox.

While my fleeting performance in the all too familiar guise of “cheeky cockney rogue” did little to set the world ablaze, the screening of the show itself represented an important signpost in the evolution of online video. As the Times Online recently put it, welcome to the world of Internet TV.

When I made my last post a month or so ago, I focused on the technological implications of the convergence of television and the Internet, but what is also becoming increasingly interesting is the cultural effects that online video is beginning to have on the traditional television medium.

MeeBox is made up entirely of online video style content, a full length television sketch show dedicated to the humorous clips of the online video world. The whole thing is polished off with an exclusive soundtrack from the awesome and equally online savvy, Radiohead, reaffirming that what was once thought the preserve of a very niche community of early adopters has now well and truly made it into the mainstream.

Even more captivating is that the show – like almost all of the BBC’s content these days – was made instantly available online via the BBC iPlayer. So that’s online videos, packaged together and screened as a television show, distributed over the Internet…what’s that about life imitating art… imitating life?!

The comScore figures certainly underline the uptake in online video usage over the past year. According to comScore, YouTube alone has grown 71 percent over the past twelve months to reach 307 million worldwide visitors in May 2008, with 18.4 million of these visitors coming from within the U.K.

Analysis from comScore Video Metrix, which was launched in the U.K. earlier this year, shows that online video viewing in the U.K. is rising sharply. The number of videos being watched by U.K. viewers grew significantly over the first quarter of 2008, increasing 13 percent from December 2007 to reach 3.5 billion videos for the month of March, while the total time spent watching videos online grew 10 percent, to reach a total of 172 million hours in March.

The growing importance of online video technology – to both the Internet and traditional media alike – cannot be overstated, and to view this medium simply as a technological advancement that offers an alternative way of distributing moving pictures would be to underestimate its appeal. This sector has become a cultural phenomenon that is changing the way we think about and interact with media, and as the screeing of MeeBox last weekend showed, this is a culture that looks set to become ever more engrained into the mainstream.

Last week, I spoke at a widget conference, WidgetWebExpo. The prior (and only other) time I’ve spoken at a conference on this topic was a year ago. At that time, widgets were just starting to get legs, so to speak, and we had just introduced a service to measure them, comScore Widget Metrix.

My over-arching reaction as I looked around one year later was “what a difference a year makes.” The conference a year ago was packed, and had a whole Gen-Y, very edgy feeling — held in an old movie theatre in SoHo; most of the attendees were very young, many dressed in shorts, t-shirts and baseball hats. There was a lot of energy, with a feeling that was closer to a frat party than a conference. On my panel, the speaker next to me proclaimed “the thing about widgets is…if you’re over 30, you just don’t get them.” Ahem. I am indeed well over 30. (Of course I took that to mean I must look very young :))

But to me, there were red flags. There was a lot of fun, cool applications, with no clear value proposition, and for most, no path to monetization. The general thinking was “get distribution, then we’ll worry about that.” I remember one talk where the CEO and founder of a company showed a very fun widget that allowed you to animate an image of yourself, and the audience loved it. Then, he asked the audience (rather somberly): “But who will pay me for this?” No one answered.

This was the state of the widget world at the time: lots of cool technology, and our numbers clearly showed that audiences were gobbling them up — not just in the US, but also abroad. People clearly liked the idea of distributed content — a little nugget they could grab and place in their space that delivered information, content, fun, or a combo of the three. However, with a few exceptions, that pesky little topic of how to actually make money in the space remained unanswered.

That is in stark contrast to this year’s conference. I recognized very few faces from last year. The attendees were fully clad in the usual business casual attire – but, not one baseball cap to be seen. The organizer/sponsor of last year’s conference is no longer in the widget business, and their executives have moved on to other companies. The community has also aged quite a bit — almost everyone in attendance was now over 30, many over 40. There were also many fewer attendees. Overall, the conference was ….. well, let’s just say there was nothing edgy about it.

Although they have changed the way many use the web, widgets clearly have not lived up to the hype they created a year ago. There are a lot of reasons why, including that pesky little problem of having to eventually make money, which has caused more than one of these companies to either fold or pivot and change direction. I learned that Facebook is moving all the widgets to a separate tab so that they don’t show up on the profile page. The term “de-widgetization’ was mentioned more than once. Even Fred Wilson, a big early supporter of widgets both as a user and an investor who spoke at the conference, discussed this in his blog, culminating in his proclamation that ‘widgets suck.’

And yet, VC money continues to flow into the space. According to an article in MarketWatch by Scott Austin, who is an assistant managing editor at VentureWire: “At least 12 start-ups that build or distribute widgets have raised $191 million so far this year, including RockYou, which earlier this week announced a $35 million round of funding.” Feels very circa 1999 to me.

Yet as I see it, something very important is being missed here, or at least not broadly understood. As marketers, it’s not often that we see an environment as we do with both search and distributed content, where we literally have people waving their arms, saying “Hey, over here! I’m interested in this subject/function/content/type of game, etc.” Talk about the opportunity to target!

It’s clear that widgets have demonstrated the potential to do three key things:

1. deliver a very coveted target to advertisers — people who skew younger (both male and female) as well as slightly older groups
   
2. reach an audience of global proportions, often in a very short timeframe
   
3. reach people at the time of engagement—capitalizing on the interest levels, emotional availability, etc.

Those are three very powerful characteristics. So my question is: why aren’t more of these widgets delivering advertising in some form?

Some of them are. I know that Slide, for example, includes advertising, although I have not seen it personally. A notable exception is Splashcast. They develop widgets for the likes of Nike that, based on IP address, will deliver localized widgets with in-language branding and content. That’s a great example, I think, of how to use this medium to reach and build a global audience that widgets can deliver. But I haven’t seen a lot of that.

Being with a measurement company, my bias is of course, that measurement could make an important contribution here. So here’s the project I’d love to do: an ad effectiveness study to quantify the difference in impact between ads delivered in widgets to those same ads delivered to that same target, using traditional placement strategies. For example, I’d like to compare the branding impact/clickthrough/engagement/conversion rates (pick any metric) for a photo-printing ad for Kodak, delivered via a photo-sharing widget as compared to that same ad delivered via a normal campaign. Would the effectiveness of the ads be greater when a young mom is looking at recent pictures of her kids than they would if she saw those ads on other sites while she was, for example, reading the news? What about Nike — will kids be more likely to click on the Nike ad and view the newest cool sneaks when they are engaging with the NCAA widget that delivers the most recent scores than they would on other sites?

I’m betting yes. And while it wouldn’t be a silver bullet for the widget industry, it would be a strong point of quantified value and differentiation that would allow widgets to plant their flag in the busy landscape of the media mix. Perhaps it would even bring back some of those young developers with big ideas in shorts and baseball caps. I miss them.

Many of the readers of this blog will probably remember comScore’s report on Radiohead’s “pay what you want” distribution model for their 2007 album “In Rainbows” back in November. The results of this study precipitated a lively debate in the blogosphere on the merits of this groundbreaking approach to music sales.

It was clear that this “pay what you want” model represented a fascinating case study in both economic theory and human nature. Harvard Business School evidently agreed that it warranted further academic exploration in formulating a new case study entitled “Radiohead: Music at Your Own Price,” based on the comScore data. The two parts of the HBS case study can be found here and here.

The publication of this case study comes on the heels of comScore’s recently published article by our CEO Magid Abraham in the Harvard Business Review on the offline impact of online advertising.

I’m delighted to tell you that if you are an academic interested in using comScore data for a B-School case study or other academic research purposes, please feel free to contact us online.