The Big Fat Marketing Blog

Game maker Electronic Arts will partner with toymaker Hasbro to create a new virtual world for the latter’s line of “Littlest Pet Shop” dolls, the pair announced last month.

The “Littlest Pet Shop Online” world, aimed at the same pre-teen girls who are the target market for the two-inch animal toys, will launch at http://www.lpso.com sometime this fall, the companies said. more

We’re watching more video online these days; according to comScore figures, a record 14.3 billion Web videos of all types in December 2008, up 13% from just the month before. Cable nets time Warner and Comcast are reportedly in talks to serve up cable programming over the Web to subscribers who get both TV and broadband. And two separate reports from The Nielsen Company find that (a) Americans viewing video on the Internet watch three hours per month that way, and that (b) the most popular Web video fare in January of this year was full-length episodes of “Lost,”, “Saturday Night Live” and “Grey’s Anatomy.”

So we’re rapidly getting used to the idea that we can watch what we like when and over what device we like, thanks to both the spread of broadband through the land and changes in our audience behavior. more

The contest isn’t over till you’ve watched the game films. When it comes to evaluating the marketing done around the Super Bowl, those replays can yield a wide variety of results.

That’s especially true this year, with buzz marketing becoming an ever-more-accepted tactic for creating brand awareness and association on the Web. That gives analysts more tools with which to judge the hits and misses in a big broadcast event like Super Bowl XLIII—even if those tools sometimes produce results that contradict other measures, such as search impact, or even themselves.

And yet, everyone seems to like the MC Hammer/ emcee McMahon parley by direct response marketer Cash4Gold.com. more

In a different take on the effectiveness of this year’s Super Bowl ads, other agencies made an effort to quantify the social buzz that is becoming increasingly one aim of a campaign tailored for the big game. Madison WI-based Networked Insights sought to both measure that social conversation and to put a dollar value to it. Its “social ROI” metric purports to put a ruler to the increase in online social interactions created for each $1 million spent on a Super Bowl ad spot. more

I really should revise that bio up top, if only to say that while I may not get Twitter, I’m willing to be persuaded.

But new research from the Pew Internet & American Life Project shows that plenty of U.S, users are way beyond willing and are already incorporating Twitter and other updateable what-I’m-doing-now social platforms into their online and mobile lives. more

User-generated content can take a lot of forms. This past weekend, it came in the shape of a Super Bowl ad about a crystal-ball crotch shot that won the Doritos “Crash the Super Bowl” contest for two amateur filmmakers from Indiana.

But national commercials in $3 million ad slots are the big leagues of UGC; most of the user-produced matter on the Web comes in much humbler forms, such as comments posted to forums or appended to brand social pages or YouTube videos. more