Thuis is just epic.

Like any writer I can procrastinate with the best of them.  My wife has even been know to catch me actually cleaning my desk when I should be working.

The outstanding distraction to my productivity tho is the Internet.  Web surfing…. oh wait I’m sorry, web researching, twitter, Facebook, e-mail, etc etc.  the distractions are glorious and endless.  I truly see why my writing Idol still uses an ancient Olympian typewriter, maybe it explains his prolific nature.

My sister suggested a website, forget the name, but plays annoying sounds if you stop typing.  (If any of you want the address I could dig it up, but it escapes me currently)  Works great for novelists, just copy and paste into word or pages and your good to go after the session, but for screenplays and their particular format, it’s rather unforgiving.  everything would have to be copied into Textedit, then manually typed into Celtx to format it properly.  That’s more trouble then it’s worth to me, and with a 2 year old in the house, only 1 pause in unacceptable.

Enter Mac Freedom.

Wow does this program rock.  Click it, set a time up to 8 hours, type admin password, and it turns off your Internet for that amount of time.  It’s that simple, and that wonderful.  The only way to get your Internet back is to restart your entire system, or wait the allotted time.

So yeah, go download it now, it’s free, (But if you love it as much as I do, donate a few bucks to the developer) sorry PC peeps, mac only.

Okay, if just over 10% of people click away from a web video in the first 10 seconds, and over half of them are gone before the 1 minuet mark, then why oh why would anyone put their advertisement in front of their content?

Now I know I just answered my own question, so everyone that clicks play sees the advent, but if your loosing 10% in 10 seconds from pure content, think how many more your loosing before you even get to content with a 30 second advert in front.

So what’s a body to do.  There are only three choices.  Beginning, middle and end  You either loose massive amounts of viewers before your show even starts, show it in the middle and hope the viewer is to lazy to click ahead of the commercial to the content, or show the advert at the end when 90% of your viewers have already clicked away.

The key, and so few people understand this, is to make the advertisement the content.

It’s not a crazy concept.  People have been doing it for years.  Look at a fashion magazine like Vogue, it’s probably 80% adverts 20 percent content.  If you took all the ads away, the readership would balk.  They’d be outside the vogue headquarters wondering what in the world happened to their magazine, why was it so thin, where was all their “content”.

How many people get the Sunday paper just for the glossy circulars and sales ads?  Heck I don’t subscribe to a newspaper, but I’m damn sure gonna get one Thursday to see all the adds for black Friday.  Do you get my point now?  I am willingly paying for advertisements.

Who hates missing the previews before a movie?  How long as “this old house” been on?  Who here has actually looked up a funny commercial on you tube and shared it with friends?  Hell how about watched an entire TV show about good or  funny commercials?

The trick is to make people want to watch your commercial, not to cram it down their neck, and I think companies are starting to wake up, they are starting to understand new media and why all their advertisement dollars don’t seem to reach anyone under 40 and online.

There is hope, some start ups and net only companies are all on board with wonderfully funny shows like “Will it blend” and ever Alpo is teaching us that old dogs can learn new tricks.

Embedded below is a perfect example of an advert as content in a wonderfully funny spot from Alpo, watch and enjoy, this is the future of effective online advertising.

testing and junk

Somebody wake up Hicks….

Casey