Monday, August 21, 2006

More product placement- in pornography!

We all know pornography is one of the first industries that took off with the popularity of the internet. The Girls Gone Wild empire is supposedly worth over US$ 100 million! The growth rate for this industry has been between 30-40% for the last 7 years. Marketers take advantage of growing industries. They come up with ways to incorporate advertising on peoples cell phones, so why has it taken so long to combine pornography with product placement? Perhaps it's because clothing and pornography are not really associated with each other.

This is the first incident of it that I have seen - I was directed to it by ProductDose and thought the idea was amazing, and can't think of a reason why no one has thought of it earlier. Actually, I can- there would be a number of legal issues that may not reflect so well on the company and the messages it sends to kids and teenagers in this medium will definitely be considered taboo.

A French clothing brand Shai is the first I know of to incorporate pornography in its ads and make it interactive. I don't know how many people think of shopping while watching porn, but I'm sure these ads will drive a lot of people to their website- possibly reaching a more accurate target audience than a TV commercial would. Here are the ads!

Thursday, August 10, 2006

Friendster meets... everything?

I hadn't logged in to Friendster for a long time. Although I have accounts on some social networking sites, I'm not big on the whole scene. An old friend left me a message on Friendster, so I logged in recently. I was surprised to see a whole bunch of changes, which were .. somewhat neat, somewhat annoying.

The word convergence took a whole new meaning when I saw blogs, videos, classifieds, photos, customizable pages and more! It is a case of Friendster meets Flickr, YouTube, Craigslist, Blogger, Match.com and MySpace. Nice concept, but is that enough to get people on Friendster? And keep them there?

Although I was impressed with the changes Friendster has made, I was very turned off by how bad the overall design and navigation is. Not to mention Friendster taking you to a whole page of advertisments when you are trying to get to another page. It definitely is not the type of ad you overlook or are trained to ignore, so, in a way, it is effective. Annoying, nonetheless.

Where's the marketing and promotion for all these new and great features anyways? I've been on Friendster for a while and I didn't know about them till a few days ago. How will they get new users to sign up? There's still more that can be done to make Friendster better. Will we see a chat program directly from Friendster, like Google Talk? Maybe link up with cell phone providers and offer discounted text messages, or just enable users to text message directly from their Friendster account.. there's a lot more that can be done.

Once again, great concept, followed by not so great execution.