Machinima’s already won over the Halo geeks. Now it’s going after the millions of Madden maniacs.

Today, the 10-year-old gamer media company, which has quietly amassed a large and loyal audience on YouTube, will roll out its third channel on the site, Machinima Sports. Premiering on the channel is the series Replay, which will consist of user-submitted sports game highlights, and Playmakers, which will re-create classic sports moments via games.

According to CEO Allen DeBevoise, Machinima already produces 24 original series and pumps out 600 animated clips per week. On YouTube alone, those shows reach over 23 million unique users monthly and have generated more than 1 billion streams.

Machinima tested the strategy of syndicating its content all over the Internet but decided to cultivate its YouTube fans. “It’s a question of focus,” DeBevoise said. “We found that you don’t need a channel everywhere. YouTube is the biggest bang for our buck.”

Kenji Arai, strategic partner manager at YouTube, credited Machinima with using several of his company’s free tools, like YouTube Insight, to respond to its audience’s viewing patterns — as well as to program more effectively. “Machinima really gets how to use YouTube,” he said. “They don’t just post a channel and let it sit there. The whole company thinks about its YouTube strategy.” Continue reading →

Weaving through the throngs of St. Patrick’s Day revelers at the Hoboken, N.J., parade earlier this month was the usual turnout that you’d expect for an event like this — local girls wearing green-beaded necklaces and green-tinted sunglasses, frat boys in green-felt top hats and tape-on leprechaun beards, and sturdy men stomping the asphalt in kilts. There was a lot of singing, of course, and a lot of beer. It was, in other words, a standard holiday turnout.

via Marketing 0.0: Promos on the Cheap.

While some people blithely put all sorts of personal information online, a seven-country Financial Times/Harris Poll finds plenty of others worried about what might happen to their data.

One question in the survey (conducted online last month) asked people to say how concerned they are “about the amount and security of personal online data that can be accessed by search engines you use.” In the U.S., 24 percent said they’re “very concerned” about this. The “very concerned” tally was higher in China (26 percent), but a bit lower in Spain (24 percent) and France (23 percent). It was lower still in Britain and Germany (17 percent each), and lowest of all in Italy (11 percent). Adding in the “somewhat concerned” votes, Germany and Italy were the only countries in which a majority of respondents didn’t voice at least that much worry about this matter. Continue reading →

We have a love-hate relationship with technology. It’s quite possibly the largest boon we’ve ever had as marketers in terms of making our lives so much better, easier, faster, and even cheaper. Unfortunately, it’s the “easier” and “cheaper” parts that distract us to a fault.

We look to automate.

We look to scale.

We look to simplify.

We look to reduce.

Unfortunately life itself is not simple. Relationships are not algorithms; they’re intricate bonds built and reinforced through empathy, consistency, and commitment. Trust is not automatic; it’s earned over time. Our customers are not one’s and zero’s; they’re humans just like us.

via Will the New Marketing Revolution be Automated? | TalentZoo.com.