A name-change isn’t news, but the way Sugar Inc. (publishers of PopSugar, CelebSugar, etc.) have gone about building a blog/community “empire” while building an umbrella brand is admirable. Kara Swisher, at the WSJ calls Brian Sugar, Sugar Inc.’s CEO and Founder the “sweet” Nick Denton. While good for an initial chuckle, they have gone about building their empires rather differently.

Nick’s flown in the face of mainstream media. Brian’s using mainstream media to his advantage. Both have been successful, and I’ve learned from both, as well.

I’ve known Brian for longer, but heck, we went to college together. How’s that for some totally irrelevant trivia.

Check out Kara Swisher’s blog interview with Brian Sugar below:

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I just got back from the OMMA Awards, and I’m proud to announce that Deep Focus walked away with 2 wins:


Rich Media Campaign
Agency: Trailer Park
Client: Buena Vista Pictures Marketing/”Meet the Robinsons”
Agency: Avenue A/Razorfish
Client: Washington Mutual
Agency: Deep Focus
Client: HBO/Flight of the Conchords


Viral Campaign
Agency: The Coca-Cola Company
Client: The Extreme Diet Coke & Mentos Experiments
Agency: Deep Focus
Client: Court TV/Parco P.I.
Agency: Eventful
Client: Energizer


Congrats to our clients at HBO and Court TV, and of course, the folks responsible for these campaigns at Deep Focus. You all are more dedicated, and work harder than anyone I’ve ever worked with…and I’m eternally grateful. I don’t need an award to remind me of that.

What’s special about these wins is that they are the results of clients trusting their agency to do things against the norm and against tradition. They listen. They are partners. They help us make “the big idea” happen by trusting our judgment, research, and instincts. They share the information that inform their great decisions, and allow us to not stop our thinking at digital interactive media. After all, all forms of media can be made interactive.

On that note, a special thanks to our friends at Amalgamated, GEM Group, and MediaStorm for their collaboration and support on the “That Girl Emily” campaign for Parco P.I..

One other thing to note. A weird thing, actually.

We were nominated for a category, Home Page Takeover/ Sponsorship, that was completely skipped over at tonight’s show. Guess I’ll have to tune into the website to find out the results…

What’s up with that?

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Dear millions of readers of IanSchafer.com:

We all need a vacation. Some of us more than others. I fall into the latter category. If you don’t see many new posts over the next few weeks, don’t panic. Don’t unsubscribe.

I’ll be back soon. Refreshed. Replenished. Refocused. Re-re-energized.

While I’m out, this might be a good time to solicit some thoughts from you. The reader.

What topics would you like to see me cover? What issues do you feel need to be addressed? What happenings would you like my POV on? What color should I be wearing more of?

Comment away in the comments section below. I would love to hear what YOU have to say.

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As announced by Mike Hudack, its brilliant CEO, Blip.tv is the new home of the vaunted and storied Rocketboom. Mike’s got all the details here, but the big news is that:

a) Rocketboom has moved to Blip.tv.
b) The Sarah Silverman Program is the sponsor of the show, an arrangement made by Deep Focus.
c) The sponsorship employs a new form of Apple’s Quicktime technology to make it look fantastic.

So check it out. Techcrunch already has…

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I’ll be speaking at MediaPost’s OMMA conference at the NY Hilton on Monday, 9/24 at 4pm.

Here’s my panel:

Media Buying Across Social Networks –what works?
4:00pm-4:45pm (MEDIA: Nassau Suite)
Social media provides brands huge reach and fine grain user targets, engagement, personalization and conversational marketing. Since, spending severely lags the potential does social media need a re-think? Should we be buying display ads at all? What are the implications of the marketing model shifting from B to C to C to C and how do you leverage this change? How are clients working to influence brand engagement, adoption and brand “love” through personalization? How can great conversational marketing examples be more broadly adopted? How do you fit and evaluate a social media campaign in your broader media mix? And at the end of the day, does it scale to where marketers can put together large social media campaigns efficiently and be proud to put them front and center of a marketing program?

Moderator: Tom Troja (Pajamas Media)

Panelists:
Ian Schafer (Deep Focus)
Joseph Jaffe (Crayon)
Martin Green (Meebo)
Anna Papadapoulos (EuroRSCG)

This should be a good one…

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In a Google/Nielsen study of 2,000 US moviegoers, we again confirm what we’ve known for years — online content and advertising impact moviegoing audiences’ moviegoing decisions.

Highlights from the study:

TV and the Web hold almost the same amount of sway over potential moviegoers–as 68% of respondents said that TV was influential in their decision to see the film, while 66% said the same about the Internet.

24% of moviegoers polled said they had watched the trailer for the movie they’d just seen online
91% of these said that it was “very or somewhat” influential in their decision to see it.

Moviegoers who had seen ads and content were:
68% more likely to search for more information on the film
130% more likely to visit the official movie Web site
23% more likely to talk to others about the movie than their info-only counterparts.

Respondents who’d seen both ads and Web info pertaining to the movie were 40% more likely to recommend it to their family or friends.

The report also found that the number of moviegoers who said the Web was their first source of information about the movie they had just seen increased from 8% in 2006, to 13% in 2007–a 63% increase year-over-year.

Here’s the rub, though: No matter how much research comes out saying that online advertising impacts moviegoing, it will always be just part of the equation. A very important part, but a part nonetheless. Television advertising is still (for now) what most directly impacts overall audience awareness for a film.

Why? Because there is such a disproportionate amount money spent on television, that it is impossible for online to make a dent. If you watch television frequently, there is no doubt that you will see the same ad for a film a dozen times. For each one of those ads run above the optimal frequency you could have “owned” the homepages of some of the most popular sites on the web in a way that is more targeted, more relevant, and more engaging.

The problem is that the movie business is such a high-risk business, that there just isn’t that much room for experimentation when there is lots of money involved. And that’s got to change. That might mean minimizing the costs of making a film in favor of using dollars to explore new ways of marketing films.

What’s interesting is that while Hollywood continues to not put enough money on the web, the industry that I’m starting to pay attention to the web the most, is the one that’s Hollywood’s favorite ad dollar receptacle: television.

The television industry sees the writing on the wall. Will Hollywood step up?

Hollywood’s online budgets are bigger than they ever have been. But it’s still not enough. And when they do get the money (they will — it’s inevitable), will they know what to do with it? Will they be able to strike the right balance between paid advertising (without too high of a frequency), content distribution, promotions, and buzz-generating/word-of-mouth-driving/zeitgeist-entering ideas?

I sure hope so. If not, I know someone that can help.

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Marc Ecko knows exactly what he is doing. The other white jewish kid from New Jersey (I’m the other one) has purchased Barry Bonds’ 756*th home run ball, and is letting the world vote on just what he should do with it.

According to a Nightline piece that aired last week, Ecko is starting to come out from behind his name, and be more of a personality.

This is a great start.

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We (Deep Focus) were proud to be beta partners in the launch of Google Gadget Ads as they make the leap to being ready-for-prime-time. All the news on this can be found at Advertising Age and AdWeek, and Mashable.

Our campaign was for Yari Film Group’s Kickin’ It Old Skool, and we loved the results. A case study can be seen at Google’s official Gadget Ads site by clicking here.

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In case you haven’t noticed, but Halo 3 is everywhere.

It’s on TV — Pontiac is running co-branded spots touting exclusive content at www.pontiac.com/halo3. It’s on the web too. And not just where you’d expect it, but in the creation of content that parodies it — acknowledging it’s fixture in the pop culture zeitgeist.

Here’s just one example — “Team Tiger Awesome” takes advantage of pop culture relevancy to promote their career. And it’s working.

(Full disclosure: SuperDeluxe is a Deep Focus client.)

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The NY Times on the web is about to end their TimesSelect paid service, making all content free and searchable — and it’s about time.

The NY Times is news. News is so readily available from so many sources, that it makes paying for it antiquated. An ad-supported experience should be the only payment. Granted, the NY Times has great editorial pieces, but that’s part of how they differentiate themselves from wire services.

Per their own article covering themselves (how meta!), and something that frequently happened to me, was a problem based upon search results. Links to NY Times articles appeared in those search results and other links on the web, taking people to cordoned off pages that they’d need to pay to see, missing out on pageviews and ad revenue in the process. More importantly, though, and NOT mentioned in the article is that the cordoning off of the content created a negative user experience.

So bravo to the liberation of content. Bravo to realizing that subscription revenue has only so much upside, especially in a incredibly shrinking newspaper ad market.

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