Lindsay Lohan Sues E-Trade Claiming Baby Ad Is a Parody of Her [VIDEO]
The Super Bowl may be long over, but Brand Battle 2010 continues to rage on, as yet another commercial is bit by the controversy bug — this time one of those adorable spots from E-Trade featuring a talking baby named “Lindsay.”
According to the New York Post, actress Lindsay Lohan is suing the investment site on the grounds that the man-eating, substance-abusing baby in the commercial is based on her.
Lohan’s lawyer, Stephanie Ovadia, is asking that the commercial be taken off the air and every copy of the offending spot be rounded up (which could now be more difficult given today’s coverage). The actress is also asking for $100 million.
According to Ovadia: “Many celebrities are known by one name only, and E-Trade is using that knowledge to profit… They used the name Lindsay…They’re using her name as a parody of her life. Why didn’t they use the name Susan? This is a subliminal message. Everybody’s talking about it and saying it’s Lindsay Lohan.”
Ovadia also says Lohan was mistreated because E-Trade didn’t get her approval nor offer her compensation for allegedly being referred to in the ad. Now, the lawyer says her client is owed $50 million in exemplary damages, as well as $50 million in compensatory damages.
Although Ovadia says that the spot — which debuted during the Super Bowl and aired during the Winter Olympics — helped garner E-Trade mucho money, it wasn’t one of the most popular ads to premiere. It didn’t rank tops with either online viewers or couch potatoes (although the talking baby series has racked up a lot of success in the past).
Still, today it joins a cadre of commercials that cleaned up on hits due to controversy — including the Tim Tebow spot, GoDaddy’s rejected “Lola” ad and men’s-only dating site ManCrunch’s similarly punted ad.
One could argue that by suing E-Trade, Lohan is calling even more attention to the ad in question. As of right now, the ad has nearly 2.5 million views on YouTube. It remains to be seen — most likely tomorrow — what effect this lawsuit has on further increasing visibility. But judging from the fact that it’s been cropping up all over the web since the litigious news hit, you can bet Lohan’s legal ire will ensure the vid’s virality for at least the remainder of this week.
Check out the vid below and let us know in the comments whether or not Lohan has a case.
Reviews: YouTube
Tags: legal, lindsay lohan, MARKETING, Super Bowl, viral video, youtube
Hulu Gets 400 Hours of NFL Video
Hulu struck a deal to host content from The NFL Network in January, including eight shows and highlights from every team in the National Football League. The network has been adding new content to the site ever since, and this week Hulu has posted an impressive 400 hours of NFL-related videos.
Fierce Online Video reports that Hulu plans to add 600 more hours before the next football season starts.
Sports enthusiasts are seeing a big boom in web video coverage; the NCAA college basketball league just launched a website that streams shareable clips from countless March Madness plays.
Meanwhile, Hulu is likely hoping deals like this one will — in tandem with its own in-house reality show If I Can Dream — help make up for the loss of two of its most popular shows, The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. Hulu saw a slight dip in viewership in the month of January, but maybe this vast library of NFL content will help pull the numbers back up.
[via Business Insider]
Reviews: Hulu
Tags: football, hulu, News, nfl, nfl network, sports, video
NCAA Vault Streams a Decade of Major Plays from March Madness
The NCAA has launched NCAA Vault, a new website with videos of nearly a decade of games from the annual NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament. Users can isolate a specific play from each game, and share links to their favorites with friends.
Videos don’t appear to be embeddable, but you can share them to Twitter or Facebook, or simply hand someone the URL. You can search by team, year or player and see highlights or complete games, then break those down into the plays you want to share via social media.
The site also offers featured videos of dunks, great shots, blocks, plays, finishes, the most outstanding players and current stars. NCAA Vault — which is powered by stock footage company Thought Equity Motion — is free because it’s ad-supported. The video quality isn’t amazing but it’s not poor, either.
Sports broadcasters have been wary of putting archive footage up on the web, preferring instead to try to get people to watch on broadcast or cable television, but there have been enough web video successes — particularly in the sports arena — that the folks who run this content are becoming more comfortable sharing it online on sites like this one and YouTube.
Reviews: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube
Tags: basketball, march madness, NCAA, ncaa vault, News, sports, thought equity motion
Social Media Analysis: The 2010 Winter Olympics
Teresa Basich is the Content Marketing Manager at Radian6, the social media monitoring and engagement platform. She blogs at Writing On Purpose and is @TransitionalTee on Twitter.
The Olympics. They’ve been talked about, reported on, blogged about, tweeted, YouTubed, Facebooked, Flickred, and then some. A sporting event of this magnitude is prime fodder for discussion in all senses of the word, so, of course, the committees involved in pulling the 2010 Winter Olympics together did their duty to integrate online conversation into their big media picture.
But, did the Olympic brand do a good job? Unless we’ve got a list of all the goals that were set, and proof that they were or weren’t achieved, all we can really do is take a cursory look at the effort made and guess at how it all turned out, right? Right. So, let’s do that.
The Big Four on Facebook and Twitter
For the U.S., the four major organizations involved in all things Olympics are the International Olympic Committee (IOC), the Vancouver Olympic Committee (VANOC), the United States Olympic Committee (USOC), and NBC.
Each organization crafted their own social media strategy and created multiple Facebook pages and Twitter feeds independent of each other. Both the IOC’s and VANOC’s main Facebook pages have snagged over 1 million fans to date, and have garnered a fair amount of fan chatter despite distinct differences in approach (the IOC has leaned heavily on athlete connectivity, while the VANOC has been focusing more on photos and news). The USOC and NBC, on the other hand, have attracted comparatively modest followings to their Facebook pages. The USOC is the only one among the group, however, that seems to have a flow of Facebook Wall comments coming directly from fans and not the moderating organization.
As far as Twitter goes, almost all the Olympic Twitter feeds are push oriented, offering very little engagement. Graeme Menzies, director of online communications, publications, and editorial services for the VANOC, told the folks at PBS’ Mediashift that he views Twitter as an ideal channel for pushing ticketing and location-oriented information out to followers, and stays away from interaction. Menzies says the same of the VANOC’s Facebook page – the organization stays out of fans’ ways, letting them talk with and comment to each other. The reason? The plan was to have the main hub of the VANOC’s online activity be its website.
Still, in spite of not using their accounts for much engagement with fans, all four groups have succeeded in attracting at least somewhat sizable followings on the two major mainstream social media hubs.
The Extras
All four organizations, again, followed their own paths to flesh out some interactive extras, including podcasts, YouTube channels, mobile apps, video games, and small fan communities.
The big winner in the Extras category, though, is the VANOC’s Cultural Olympiad Canada CODE digital art installation. For the year leading up to the Olympics, the VANOC requested photos and stories from Canadian residents and visitors that they felt represented the country and culture of Canada.
Those who wanted to get more heavily involved in the project were able to collaborate with each other to “remix” the text and photos to be used in the final installation. This digital scrapbook of sorts has been showing on big screens around Vancouver for the duration of the games.
3 Things the Olympics Could Have Done Differently
Though the follower numbers were there for some of these initiatives, as far as jaw-dropping social media programs go, the efforts put forth by the IOC, VANOC, USOC, and NBC didn’t quite make the mark. Did they receive the attention the organizations hoped they would? Possibly. On a global level, promotion for the Olympics felt sparse, though, so it’s not surprising people seemed fairly unaware of these organizations’ social media activities. What could they have done differently to improve? A few things:
1. Engage. After a little bit of listening and monitoring we found that approximately half the online conversations surrounding the Olympics have been happening on sites like Twitter. That’s a major word-of-mouth opportunity missed. If the Olympic committees had used Twitter as a channel to connect versus a channel to push content, the interactivity and conversations that stemmed from that two-way relationship might have spread outside the confines of the Internet, increasing overall attention and interest.
2. Collaborate. Yes, all four organizations have individual messaging and brands that should receive recognition during the Olympics. But, the Olympic brand in its entirety is a brand that speaks directly to collaboration. It would have been nice to see a unified microsite built around the collective social media efforts of these organizations, in addition to the individual efforts we saw.
The most prolific information about the games actually came from media outlets like The New York Times and Yahoo! Sports, not from the committees themselves. A single microsite may have acted as a central hub for that sort of information, putting more eyes and attention on both the collaborative and individual initiatives of the Olympic organizations.
3. Build community. Social media is at its best when it’s used to foster connection between people and brands through passions. The Olympics are steeped in athletic competition and global unity – two passion points poised for some serious community building. A collaborative online community centered around the games could have been (and still be) used to inspire community member and Olympic fan connectivity between events, act as a listening channel to help shape the activities supporting the upcoming games, and keep people interested year-round in the work and pursuits of the Olympic committees.
We look forward to keeping a close watch on the growing Olympics presence in social media, and hopefully seeing stronger conversation and engagement strategies at the next games, London 2012.
How do you think the social media strategies of the main Olympic entities played out this year? Were you able to engage with other fans on social media? Do you think things could have been better? Let us know in the comments.
[img credit: Miss Barabanov]
Reviews: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube
Tags: analysis, facebook, ioc, nbc, olympics, social media, sports, twitter, vanoc
Which Olympic Gold Medalists Are Winning the Most Online Buzz? [STATS]
The Nielsen Company measured online buzz around Olympic athletes and found that skiers Lindsey Vonn (U.S.) and Alexandre Bilodeau (Canada) are the most buzzed-about gold medal athletes for their respective countries.
The analytics company compared online buzz surrounding gold medal winners in both Canada and the United States. The data comes from the company’s database, which continually looks at consumer-created online content in the form of blog posts, blog comments, board/forum discussions and threads, group activity, selected Twitter feeds, citations/links to YouTube videos and news stories.
For those following the Olympic Winter Games this year, it might come as a bit of a surprise that Lindsey Vonn — who has commanded 36.22% of total U.S. Olympian gold medal buzz — dominates another fan favorite (snowboarder Shaun White) by more than a 10% margin, especially given the buzz about his Double McTwist trick.
As for Canada, the Olympics homebase this year, ice dancing gold medalists Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir are receiving nearly equal amounts of online buzz with 16.88% and 16.21% of total gold medal winner buzz respectively. The dominate athlete, however, is skier Alexandre Bilodeau how accounts for 23.33%, or nearly a quarter, of all buzz among Canadian gold medalists.
[img credit: tkellyphoto]
Tags: celebrities, olympics, social media, sports, winter olympics
NBC to Live Stream U.S. vs. Finland Olympic Hockey Semifinal
While NBCOlympics.com has a really cool Twitter Tracker, much of its online strategy for the 2010 Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver has left much to be desired.
In addition to not airing events live to people on the West Coast, the network has made some downright bizarre decisions about what events to stream online at NBCOlympics.com. Fortunately, the Men’s Hockey Semifinals between the USA and Finland will be streaming live today at 3:00 p.m. ET/12:00 p.m. PST.
NBC’s embrace of live event-streaming has been less than wholehearted. NewTeeVee put it best back in January:
“Despite touting more than 835 hours of live video from the Winter Games, less than half of that will be actually be streamed live online.”
Instead, networks like CNBC and MSNBC air some of the daytime events, a strategy that strikes us as just off-base. Think about it, how many of the daytime viewers for CNBC and MSNBC will want to watch the Winter Olympic Games? Wouldn’t it be better to take advantage of people who, I don’t know, might want to watch from work?
Add to that NBC’s attempt to limit the streams to users who pay for cable (though it seems unclear that it can actually verify if you do actually subscribe or not) and you have lots of angry fans.
What do you think about how NBC has handled the Winter Olympics this year? Let us know!
Reviews: add
Tags: livestreaming, nbc olympics, NBCOlympics, olympics, olympics 2010, sports, television
Reebok Ups the Sexual Ante With Nude Workout Video of Chuck Liddell
Reebok is once again looking to stir up the Internet with a racy viral video, this time around featuring Chuck Liddell – of UFC fame — and girlfriend Heidi Northcott working out in the nude. The video, which appears to have been first leaked to TMZ, has the look and feel of being shot without Liddell or Northcott’s knowledge.
However, it’s now being confirmed by a variety of outlets that the stars are in on it and are actually wearing Reebok ZigTech shoes as part of an ad campaign. Liddell has already appeared in other YouTube videos promoting the launch – including this one with some stars from Jersey Shore.
The video follows a series of viral videos launched late last year for Reebok’s EasyTone line, featuring provocative shots and dialogue involving female anatomy. Those ads racked up hundreds of thousands of views, but drew their fair share of criticism along the way. Here’s one of them for your reference:
We have no doubt that the Liddell video will follow a similar trajectory, with the ad already getting buzz both on the web and on television, being featured on Jimmy Kimmell’s show last night (as you can see in the clip here, which, needless to say, may be NSFW).
There’s no question Reebok’s found a formula for generating buzz – but is it the right kind? Let us know what you think of the Liddell ad, and what appears to be a broader strategy for Reebok, in the comments.
Reviews: YouTube
Tags: chuck liddell, MARKETING, Reebok, sports, ufc, viral video
