A set of product placement ads for Microsoft’s Bing ran during NBC’s The Philanthropist. The ads showed two of the characters from the actual show in scenes in which Bing was being used – clearly ads, but still integrated with the actual program.
Have You Seen Bing’s Commercials Yet?
Microsoft has set up a YouTube channel for its new search engine Bing. There are a variety of Bing-related videos here, including a few commercials. Here are two of them:
Google Now Lets You Easily Create Your Own TV Commercials
Google has partnered with SpotMixer to launch a self-service video ad creation solution within the Google TV Ads platform. This is a very cool concept that should be huge for small businesses with tight advertising budgets. Basically, you create a ready-for-television commercial all on your own.
YouTube Putting Commercials in Videos
The other day, YouTube released its "HotSpots" feature as part of YouTube Insight. It is an analytics feature that allows users to pinpoint the moments in their videos that are the most popular.
ABC Stuffing More Commercials Into Online TV
Feeling safe in the knowledge that I could catch up online, I skipped "Lost" last Thursday night and watched PBS’s "Carrier" instead. Then, on the ABC website, everything worked fine. But in the future, watching shows on the ABC site may be a little more annoying thanks to extra commercials.
Ripoff TV Commercials & Online Advertising
Mark Cuban has a popular post today about informercials and ripoff TV commercials degrading the quality and hurting TV networks. He also points out that his own network HDNet will never take these type of commercials.
He summarizes his thoughts with the following quote:
Google Brings “Commercials” to the Web with Video Ads
If you’re a Google Adsense Publisher or participate in Google’s Adwords program, by now you’ve heard the news that they’re now offering “video ads.” That’s right! Now you have the option of text, image and video ad formats.