Posted on May 1, 2006 at 11:39 AM in @earthlink
Note: The below is an archived entry from Earthling, formerly EarthLink's official blog. The blog itself has been decommissioned and is no longer updated, and comments are trackbacks are no longer accepted.
We're finally there. Rocketboom's new EarthLink ads make their debut today at around noon eastern time. In addition to the usual daily video content goodness, there will be a new Rocketboom-produced EarthLink ad each day this week on Rocketboom.com. Or you can see just the ads themselves as they are revealed over here (note: link not active until noon).
Rocketboom also unveiled a new search capability on their site today, which allows you to search through the full text of all of their content. I messed with it last night. It's pretty neat. When you click on highlighted words in the search results, It brings you to the exact place in a video clip where the text appeared. I did a few searches, and can report that to date, Amanda has never said the words "granola," "dave coustan," or "incentivize." Nor has she ever mentioned my dog, Toofis.
If you've been following this on Earthling, you'll remember that EarthLink bought the ads on Rocketboom back in mid-February, becoming the second advertiser ever on the show after TRM. In the interim Rocketboom's viewership has grown to over 300,000 visitors a day. So what took us all so dang long?
I followed the process from the sidelines, and I saw several concepts worked through before the project found its true path. First ideas are often the best, and as it turned out, a variant of Rocketboom's initial suggestion is what was ultimately made into the finished spots. Yesterday afternoon I asked Rocketboom's Andrew Baron and EarthLink Marketing Manager Scott Cuppari for some perspective on the process. Both emphasized that the extra time was well worth it to make sure they ended up with a finished product that both fulfills Earthlink's goals and feels right in the Rocketboom world. "We're all proud of what we're about to launch," Scott said, and Andrew echoed those sentiments: "We're so proud of what we achieved with production values that our regular viewers might end up thinking we outsourced the ads."
Read on for more thoughts from Andrew and Scott.
I asked Andrew what he'd learned from the experience, and he said that it was an education in the whole process of producing creative to the specifications of an external client. It sounds like it was a crash course in becoming a small ad agency. He explained that the collaboration with TRM was more freeform, which was rewarding in its own way. But he took from the EarthLink project a better understanding of everything from working with external partner timelines to client relationship management to external communication. In fact, to help scale their media efforts, Rocketboom has developed a sort of self-service ad purchasing system that will make it easier for would-be advertisers to request ads while building in reasonable expectations and timelines. That will launch in the next few days.
To Scott, the Rocketboom collaboration represented an important opportunity to apply a lesson EarthLink learned in some of its recent experiments with emerging media advertising. When EarthLink placed a 30-second ad on Adam Curry's Podshow podcast that had been initially produced for radio, many bloggers and commentators criticized the ad because it felt out of sync with the medium of podcasting. Scott observed, "We need customized creative that's true to the environment, and our approach with RocketBoom has demonstrated a viable way to get to that."
A new ad will air each day on Rocketboom from May 1 to May 5th. You can also go to www.earthlink.net/offers/rocketboom to see the ads by themselves, after they are revealed each day on Rocketboom.
Comments
The ads remind me of those commercials-but-not-commercials that you see before every episode of NOVA. Or like the "commercials" on Sesame Street. Like, "brought to you by the letter E." Neat approach.
Posted by Ben | May 2, 2006 7:46 AM
The way she's dressed, the commercial reminds me of how a fashion expert should always be required on the set, because honey: that yellow shirt with those golden necklace and earrings look like thay can glow in the dark.
Posted by JB | May 26, 2006 2:57 PM