get the picture?

Well, now here's one killer notion Abode's just offered: Flash everywhere.

With new technologies seemingly raining from the skies, it's easy to lose sight of the Great Leaps Forward when they bubble up.

This is one, so intimately tied to the future of how we'll interact with brands and entertainment that 'game changing' may be too feeble an adjective.

Here's what's up: Adobe's Flash 10.1 will now deliver high-quality video literally wherever there's a Flash socket. Heretofore, Flash functionality was limited to the so-called "PC web"—laptops and desktops.

Now Adobe has jumped the connectivity gap. Everything connected (and configured, of course: there will be upgrades) can now run the same video content: mobile, netbooks, gaming devices, TV.

What this means is revolutionary, not least because Adobe's Open Screen Project has quietly been attracting partners like Google Android and RIM's BlackBerry for the past year. (Apple's iPhone has been temporarily sidelined. Something to do with iTunes, you think?) The OSP is dedicated to creating seamless video experiences everywhere. No longer will mobiles strip out Flash content in formatting web pages for smartphone browsers; no longer will gaming platforms be blind to web video content.

And the kicker? Seamless web experiences for TV...everywhere. The Holy Grail of Convergence is now very, very close. Imagine pure web experiences on your connected TV or gamebox. Or in your car's GPS.

Ubiquity.

And now imagine your brand leading that experience, leading new discovery by multiple niched audiences via the platform of their choosing.

The interactivity now possible for brands to explore new media with their audiences (this WILL be collaborative, folks) is breathtaking; the new possibilities for branded experience across multiple platforms will shape how consumers live and engage each other in the new world of Pull...and how they live with and engage with brands.

Here we go...

Come bearing gifts

One plus one equals...maybe five. Let's take a look at two breaking stories about online video.

The skyrocketing stat.s detailing interactivity with streaming video are pretty well conclusive: the landslide has become an avalanche.

Parse out what the latest ComScore viewer numbers suggest and things get even more interesting. Note that Facebook has climbed into the top ten; while it's a given that Google's properties lead the pack (eg YouTube et al), that a social media site is rising fast in the video engagement sweepstakes is Big News.

What's this mean to media buyers trying to calculate their best venues for IOB (Impact on Business) in the Age of Pull?

Everything.

Social media consumers are the savviest minds on the web. They're the market niches everybody wants: the early adopters, the influencers, the alpha males and the gamma females whose interactions in online communities shape the power of the web. I'll say that again: they shape the power of the web.

And here's the kicker—these folk hate banner ads. One of the most empowering things these folk do is NOT to click banner ads.

They are less likely to click on ads because they overwhelmingly prefer to interact with video.

To these users, video is a gift, an opportunity to interact, not a flat "push" ad—which (if they're anything like the folk I live with on Facebook, they'll ignore as crude and condescending.)

Here's the killer distinction, courtesy Lotame Co-op's interactive creative insight numbers released yesterday:

"Of the banner types in the social media space, we found that video creatives had higher click-through rates than non-video units, with in-page units performing better on average from a CTR standpoint than expandable ads. When compared on the three most common banner sizes on the Lotame Co-op, we found that wide skyscrapers (160x600) had the highest click-through rate performance, followed by medium rectangles (300x250), and leaderboards (728x90), which had roughly the same click-through rate performance...

The full report's here.

In a nutshell, taken together, the August 2009 video stat.s and the Lotame analysis are yet another nail in the coffin of Push.

The takehome is simple: if you want to create a conversation around your brand, use the creative medium that's not only going to change minds but change the very minds whose opinions shape the web.

Streaming creative video.

It's that simple. Be well.

Trust me...if you can find me

Last time we chewed over the Age of Pull and the new art of listening.

OK: so what do you really want to hear from your business?

The cash register. It's all about return on investment, any media decision, correct?

Well, in the Age of Pull, despite the near-complete inversion of media strategy underway (and wait until we have mobile analytics and addressable TV metrics) there's no doubt we have to keep our eyes on the prize of growing sales and innovating our products. That hasn't changed...but damn near everything else has.

Here's a terrific refresher course in what ROI means in the Age of Pull...and that's pretty well what it's meant since the Age of Steam: for every dollar invested in the company, there's an incremental return. The ROI slideshow's author Olivier Blanchard isn't a social media skeptic: far from it.

While he's 'media-agnostic', Olivier's all for it. He just thinks that the ka-ching off the till is the be-all and end-all.

But here's where he and I part company: where in the Age of Push, media spend used to be a direct linear equation (more or less), as Olivier so wittily and thoroughly details—and I love the slideshow's old sci-fi motif: brilliant—now it's not.

Olivier's analysis of SM metrics is masterful...it's a clear roadmap for the whys and wherefores of social media expenditure vs return. I don't think he goes far enough. But he's built the basement beautifully.

And for media investors looking at their company's value chain (with their customers out there in the haze at the far end, looking like they're beginning to run the show), it's a Wonderland. Where to begin?

Engagement with the brand. That's terra firma.

And what does that mean in the Age of Pull, when the audience is running the show?

It means BEING FOUND.

If your web presence is simply no more than a corporate website glowing with product info...who really cares?

If no one really cares enough to search for you, why will they come to your site?

Here's why...and it's ALL about branding your engagement experience. Nothing else matters.

Why? Because social media is the most powerful tool for creating conversation but it's also an amazing amplifier of your messaging. Right here. Right now.

And I'm not talking flat Twitter metrics or friends on Facebook. You gotta drill down deeper, because in the Age of Pull, it's not mere hits that count—it's what they're saying about you (which you can respond to: it's a conversation out there) and, equally importantly, it's how they're saying what they're saying about you (who are the opinion leaders? why are the lurkers watching and what are they watching/waiting for?)

Check this out. Liana Evans isn't a social media evangelist. She's a hard-core search engine analyst. She loves data. But she also gets PULL...and the conversations PULL engenders. And she knows that people who live on web—for product reference, for consumer advice, for intelligence of all stripes to live their lives better—increasingly trust social media. Why?

Aside from the fact ComScore tells us that YouTube—the king of social media sites—has just passed Yahoo as the No. 2 search engine (my 10 year-old taught himself Photoshop off YouTube in three days FYI: talk about convergence), there's a dead simple answer.

IT'S RELEVANT. I personally source all my automotive repair decisions off the Swedish Bricks blog, dedicated to Volvo owners. I can get complete diagnoses and parts/service advice from Volvo mechanics and enthusiasts...within minutes. Free, from a community of people I trust. I save $70/hr bench time and on parts as well.

That's what I call Pull. Nobody's shilling at me: I'm creating a conversation around my steering rack and there's a community out there just dying to help me. (It works for every consumer decision from lawyers to leaf blowers to laundry detergent. The answer's out there.) Do I buy Volvo parts from Volvo? Yep. Do I overspend on repairs? Nope. I now know what I'm doing when I bring my car in for repairs. Should Volvo be part of this conversation? Uh huh. Are they? Nope.

Liana gets this. I'm not sure Olivier does...and for sure he gets the importance of being found. He just doesn't appear to grasp the pent-up power for changing and opening minds out there is something far deeper than marketing AT people.

It's about trust. Win their trust and you'll be top of mind when they reach for the product on the shelf or click your product into their online shopping cart.

People trust social media now. And their appetite for the abundance of intelligence online is bottomless.

So you have to ask yourself, in the Age of Pull, "how are they gonna find me?"...and—killer question—"why should they trust me?"

Engagement, baby. They'll find you if you've made the effort to engage your audience on their terms, with content they find relevant, useful, applicable, hypercustomized, in a voice they believe, in an experience they find at once authentic and intimate.

Final note: if you have any doubts that social media aren't going to rule the engagement game of the future, take a gander at this demo of Google Wave. Email is going to become realtime chat: out of the inbox and into the conversation. The message is the medium. (Sorry, Marshall.)

Next time around: "come bearing gifts"—comedy and the art and science of engagement in the Age of Pull. Be well.

Listen. Then listen again: welcome to the Age of Pull

We all know there's a supernova of social media out there, a space rich with smart people ready to share opinions and open debate that builds consensus, about everything from online banking to diapers to eco-tourism to...your brand, right?

There's also an attendant terror of "losing control of the message." A valid concern...but one that the history of the web is washing over a warpspeed.

Welcome to the Age of Pull. The Age of Push—one-way communications and marketing predicated on hierarchy and control and enforced scarcity rather than the abundance of online interaction—it's over. So over. (For more on why, read Jeff Jarvis' terrific roadmap to Web 3.0, What Would Google Do?)

What Fresh Baked does with our branded comedy webisodes is engage those "high-value" folk who are your best lifetime customer investment. (There's precious little point in starting anywhere else, is there?) We figure the brightest and most vocal have a real penchant for funny. And they know how to "onpass" conversations authoritatively and objectively.

So who to learn from best? Who best works with the niche-dwellers who lead opinions, who're early adopters, and who beat the drum most effectively for a new brand experience? We'd submit it's those organizations who have most at risk...and the fewest resources: non-profits.

Make no mistake: Fresh Baked wants corporate clients with deep pockets and vivid brand imaginations. But the learning piece for heavyweight corporate clients—the most instructive evidence—may well lie with those organizations who have no choice but to think lean and think creative. They don't have the resources. They need to be smart with the pennies they have (thank you, Bernie Madoff.)

Here's a shop we read routinely, the Non-Profit Marketing Guide, a savvy and simple daily read from the trenches of working the media and the blogosphere for cash-starved non-profits. There's more strategy here than most boardrooms, we reckon.

We'll make it way easy: if you like lists that'll help you clear your head about how best to work with the blogosphere and the battalions of Twitter and Facebook people who're on your radar but not vice versa, check this out: how to figure out your "ROI of Listening" to the digital social media conversation about your brand out there...which is really (of course) in here. Right where you are now: in the digital conversation.

FreshBaked's branded entertainment is one superb medium to engage this conversation, to open up new and innovative ways of having people talk about your brand—with our comedy web series structured around your messaging needs, we're here to launch (and listen to!) a remarkably powerful and memorable conversation about your brand. And—equally importantly–we can help you listen to that conversation in measurable, mission-changing ways.

Laughter—can you beat it for starting a conversation? We think not.

This is gonna be fun...what're you waiting for?

Help me, I'm drowning in TMI

It's elementary. Advertisers and marketers have to go where the consumers are. And that, for now, for sure, is social media.

Question is, what's the best way to engage consumers on their own terms in this strange and wonderful new world?

We think WARC, the UK based advertising research group, has its eyes on the prize: identifying brand experiences that are the most engaging, most powerful modes of all—the ones that build relationships by deepening emotional connections with brand values.

Here's more, from Alexandra Wheeler, Starbucks head of digital strategy:

"A brand can promote the heck out of themselves on Facebook and still not build a following if they don't have anything behind that and only nurture and care about it as marketing but not as relationships...(Another important goal) is the translation and understanding [of] whether these communications add value to the bottom line and the business and we believe they do."

...which is why The Big Heads at Fresh Baked are happily tilling that rich rich marketing soil where comedy meets branded content.

You can Twitter all you like—and Twitter's a superb quick-hit distribution too—but if it's a brand community you want (and that's the Promised Land for marketers: relationships that add up to brand communities) then you need far more than simply a Tweet.

And can anyone top entertainment for brand engagement via social media? Doubtful. Comedy clips made viral video, simple as that.

Want more proof?

First watch this, a stunning YouTube overview of the supernova of social media, right here, right now.

And then weigh those amazing stat.s and the explosion of social media messaging possibilities against this, a terrific GigaOm piece on the failure of realtime search to help us contextualize/personalize the 'gushing firehose' of social media today.

The PR agencies recognize the power of the medium—they're ramping up social media content creation—but is all that content actually engaging anybody the way branded entertainment can?

We say no. Point is, for a brand experience to work, context is everything...without relevance that builds engagement (that in turn builds brand communities), we face brainmelt from Too Much Information.

We're drowning in a sea of TMI—which, contrariwise, is why branded entertainment is innately a messaging aggregator of such power. Why drown your brand when you can engage?

Want to know more? Call Rob or Brett @ 647.346.3521. They'll bend your ear.

Funny you should ask

The evidence keeps piling up that we're sitting on a branded entertainment powder keg here at FBE HQ. (So much so we're thinking of giving the bomb squad the heads up. More on this in a coupla weeks, when we indeed will have a Big Bang to report.)

So where do folks meet to talk about the hottest entertainment URLs? Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and LinkedIn, of course, which are spinning off numbers which suggest very strongly that digital social media is an absolutely vital brand dialog space.

According to data from market research consultants Anderson Analytics, some 110 million people in America visit Facebook or MySpace at least once every month. (Jeez, in my house, there's at least three of us on Facebook at least twice a day.)**

Here's the killer: 52% of those same people have already "friended" a brand—established a peer relationship online with a product—and a further 20% more would "like to" share more dialog from their favourite brands.

Anderson's test group was 5,000 strong; here's what these opinion leader/"early adopters" are up to:

Overall, the average user of web properties like Twitter and LinkedIn visits these sites on five separate days each week, typically doing so four times a day for around 15 minutes at a time.

Within this group, 9% of netizens stay signed in to their portal of choice throughout the day, and are "constantly checking out what's new."

That's an average of five hours a week that nearly two visitors in five to these sites are likely to interact with a brand peer2peer.

That's staggering compared to scattershot TV and print ad.s—and the Anderson numbers don't break out the building tsunami of mobile social media dialog with brands. (That roar you hear in the distance? That's the tidal wave of mobile, heading for shore...)

So where's all this brand dialog going? LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter are the savvy brand marketer's go-to sites for now, especially LinkedIn, with its desirable $89K annual household income benchmark, well above Facebook's $61K AAHI. (The place to connect with the student body? MySpace, because it's the hot corner for music peer2peer; Twitter if you want to spread a clip or soundbite blurry fast.)

Now comes the juicy part: how do you connect with these content-hungry communities? What's the best context for a brand dialog?

That's the web-wide engagement question, right now.

We think (modestly, truly) it's us.

Want to start a memorable conversation at the pub or around the dinnertable? You tell a funny story, right?

Want to start a memorable brand dialog, one that engages from the brainstem up?

We'll get your brand talked about amongst the most articulate and most "likely to share" communities on the web, via episodic comedy experiences that'll burn brand into your target market's funny bone.

Call us. Let's talk webisode.

**with files from subscription-only Wall Street Journal (13 July 2009) and WARC.com (13 July 2009) links

The Grey Lady Speaks Fresh Baked

Well, looks like the universe is catching up with us here at Fresh Baked. In today's New York Times, right there on page B1, there's the low-down: rising broadband capacity and convergence—the public's willingness to play on any digital screen, not just TV—have conspired to create two tipping points.

The first is broadband capacity: it's now no longer a sketchy experience to watch a short film online—entire TV episodes are well established Hulu-fodder. (So much so, Hulu may move to a cable-eseque subscription model entirely.) And Hulu has grown 490% in a single year, making the site the second strongest online video content brand after YouTube.

Web video quality isn't IMAX yet but it's certainly lush enough for the (illicit) viewership of film and TV sites like Surfthechannel.com to explode in past year, never mind the US, UK and Canadian broadcasters cutting entire TV series loose online. Moreover, the proliferation of HD cameras in the hands of web-savvy filmmakers young and old portends a tsunami of content coming down the interweb pipe.

The second phenomenon is where we live. The web literally has no time constraints for streaming content; it's a natural home for short films, as MarketingVox notes, echoing the Times. And that's what we do: branded episodic comedy series for the web.

There's no question now: none whatsoever.

The future of engagement is online and the future of online engagement is video. Here's the gospel from on high, the dude at Nielsen, the measurability people:

"Historically short form, clip-length video has ruled streaming on the web - as demonstrated by YouTube's top spot month after month,” said Jon Gibs, VP, media & analytics, Nielsen Online. "Hulu, along with pure-play providers like Veoh and the TV networks, has spent the past two years trying to convince consumers that the internet can be a good place to watch full length programming as well. April's strong showings of Hulu, Fox, and ABC suggest that consumers are beginning to listen."

And the hottest viral content that consumers want—witness the bottomless online appetite for comic viral video—is comedy.

So, marketers: you want an audience with a vast appetite for comedy we can help you brand, help you build engagement and drive folks to the cash register...what're you waiting for?