MyMai.tv Dev Blog / Social-Web News Feed

Popular live video platform Ustream is adding a new product to its repertoire today: an iPhone application platform called Ustream Live Mobilizer that offers brands, celebrities, and bands a customizable iPhone application that features Ustream’s live steaming capabilities. Each Mobilizer app is branded to the artist’s specifications (in other words, they don’t look like generic cookie cutter apps). The biggest feature here is support for watching an artist’s live video feed through Ustream, but the app also includes support for sharing to sites like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube. It also has Ustream’s ‘Social Stream’ feature, which lets you submit questions to the artist during a live stream and syndicate it out to other social networks.

As big brands move more of their ad budgets online, what they want most is not just to capture clicks, but to capture the attention and mindshare of consumers. The buzzword in the online advertising industry for this attention capturing quality is “engagement.” Every ad platform out there is promising to deliver more consumer engagement. Today, Glam Media, which itself is both a publisher of women’s sites and an ad network, announced an entirely new ad-serving technology platform called Glam Adapt it’s built over the past 18 months to help brands find and target the most engaged consumers. GlamAdapt works with existing ad-serving technologies and networks such as DoubleClick, Atalas, and iBlaster, but Glam CEO Samir Arora has bigger ambitions for it. ”It also can be used as a complete replacement for Doubleclick,” he says. GlamAdapt came out of his own frustrations as a publisher and ad network. ”We were running into a wall in terms of having technology that do what the brands are asking,” says Arora: “targeted properly, engaging, detailed analytics and reporting, the aha of television. I decided to build a third generation ad-serving stack that can work with existing technologies.”

There was a time when YouTube (YouTube) was considered a wild-wild west of content — a place where marketers shied away from uploading their commercials, let alone building a branded channel. But these days, YouTube has become more mini-van than stagecoach. From Toyota Sienna’s high-profile television commercials urging consumers to visit their YouTube channel, to (what might be considered the anti-minivan) Harley Davidson’s fan-centric YouTube universe, there has been a noticeable shift in corporate adoption of the platform.

As I was preparing to write the continuation of this post, I happened to read an article on MSNBC about Fashion Week in NYC and the mixing of elite and more common brands.  The timing couldn’t have been better.  The article explained a variety of the reasons why both the elite and more common brands were at the exclusive event together: mass-market convergence, economics of big brands, increasing brand awareness and so on.  I think a lot of these factors are at play but what it comes down to is really simple:  brands need to be everywhere and anywhere, and the more eyeballs the better.  Some might argue that it is the more modest brands trying to win the more exclusive clientele and not vice versa, and perhaps they have a point, but this trend points to an overall rethinking of channel distribution.

Much like the private shopping clubs, all brands; elite and common alike are fighting for eyeballs.  With the maturation of the Internet, brands now have more tools and resources to control their message and their distribution.  Now brands can deliver their message, not reduce their perceived value and exist on multiple channels, even if any of the particular channels might not seem like the perfect site.  Brands are reaching out to people using any method possible, hoping to gain loyal followers.

Again, who really cares?  People are able to find the products they want across multiple channels.  Shouldn’t it be that way?  Yes, that is exactly the point.  Brands are now moving to strategies where they can and will be on as many productive channels as possible, communicating and attempting to reach as many people as possible without compromising their perceived value.  This is great for consumers and for marketplace owners and entrepreneurs alike.  Consumers benefit from increased accessibility, marketplaces benefit from the increased likelihood of brands willing to give marketplaces a try and finally, entrepreneurs benefit from finding creative ways to allow brands to comfortably be on new channels.