Skeleton Creek is Real (from The Land of Elyon’s Patrick Carman) is a ghost story told through both journal entries (published by Scholastic) and short videos hosted at www.skeletoncreekisreal.com. The first book came out February 10th, with a sequel to follow this September.
Read more: Patrick Carman’s print-video hybrid targets readers for a digital age (Seattle PI)
(via YPulse)
A great collection of Coraline ads and marketing efforts on the Wieden and Kennedy blog.
This caught my eye this morning:
Women’s publisher and advertising network Glam is seeking to make money by editing streams from Twitter, Friendfeed and Facebook’s status updates.
During the Oscars (it’s second run with the idea – first tested over Fashion Week), Glam’s entertainment editors edited down the standard #Oscars Twitter feed into a widget on their homepage. The result was Glam approved commentary that advertisers felt comfortable with, leading Aveeno to sign on as a sponsor of the branded widget.
The micro-blogging widgets are significant because they’re one of the first ways a company has tried to monetize microblogging through editing. Glam is calling its edited news wire “gWire.” Until now, microblogging has largely been either one-to-one or open to all. Glam lets both its own publishers and other third-party publishers embed the widgets on their websites…
Publishers in Glam’s network using the widget get a share of the revenue generated by the advertising. Within “a few weeks,” even publishers outside the network will be able to receive payments, via micro-payments from PayPal.
It will be really interesting to see if more magazines and news outlets go this monetized curating route in upcoming months. Venture Beat has Glam’s chief executive Samir Arora as saying that the feature is best used when anchored to an offline event such as the Oscars since there’s not only a steady stream of commentary, but a sponsor can buy branding on everything from the widget box to the physical event itself to display ads on Glam’s sites, as well as ads on video modules.
(via Venture Beat)
Publisher’s Weekly has a long article about everything from e-books to iPhone’s Stanza app to The Amanda Project in this week’s issue:
“We should worry less about the delivery system and more about inculcating sustained reading in kids,” says Michele Rubin, an agent at Writers House. “Books are something they should see as enjoyable.” No one is arguing. In fact, one scenario that publishers are exploring to raise the fun quotient is mixed media à la Scholastic’s The 39 Clues (the series combines traditional books with online gaming and card collecting).
Patrick Carman’s newly released ghost mystery, Skeleton Creek (Scholastic, Feb.), offers a book and dedicated Web site with videos, while The Amanda Project by Stella Lennon (HarperCollins, Sept. 2009) is even more ambitious. This mystery series, aimed at girls ages 12–14, brings together traditional print with Web games, social networking, blogs, music and merchandise.
Read the whole article here.
MySpace recently launched a new “pilot advertising initiative” that allows users to click through a small overlay on the bottom of music videos to buy the song they are listening to, or jump straight to the artist’s page. The initiative (stemming from a partnership with content detection company Auditude) has debuted on two videos so far – My Chemical Romance’s cover of Desolation Row, and U2’s Get On Your Boots.
Users were presented with the option to buy the song either on Amazon, or (in an interesting twist) on a vinyl disc. Over the 24 hours that the ad ran [on the Chemical Romance video] it posted an impressive 1.2% click-through-rate (significantly higher than rates seen on typical banner ads), encouraging MySpace and Auditude to expand the program to more videos.
The ads are great – the overlay is slick and non-intrusive, and shrinks into a small tab mid-way through. Even better, the overlay replaces the previous ad attempt – a much more annoying (and disconnected) 15-20 second pre-roll.
YouTube launched a similar initiative a few weeks ago, and confirmed that their clickthrough rates have seen significant increases as well.
(via b-side)