I saw this TV spot during a local commercial break for The Colbert Report in NYC. The spot stopped me in my tracks, as the hip hop styled local car dealership commercial is definitely not something you see everyday (or maybe you do if you live in NYC). The spot is well done for a local commercial with low production values, but the whole messaging of “we’ll give you a car even if you have bad credit” is a little disconcerting.
As part of my (re)introduction to NYC, I have decided to check out the Web 2.0 and tech scene here. So yesterday Zeb Dropkin (a producer at BBH) and I went to a panel discussion hosted by the PGA (Producer’s Guild of America) New Media Council. The topic was on Niche Online Social Networking sites. As sites such as MySpace and Facebook continue to gain popularity, people are searching for smaller sites that are more content specific–hence the niche market that is emerging. The panelists pointed to the already growing segmentation (i.e. Facebook is for college students mainly, LinkedIn for business professionals) in the social networking tools as evidence that this trend will continue to grow.
Zeb made a great point that social networking sites are similar to the gentrification movement in the off-line world. Say you move to an “up and coming” neighborhood because you like the edginess of it, the exclusivity of being “in the know” about something cool that no one else knows about. Suddenly the neighborhood is filled with Starbucks, strollers and investment bankers, so you’re off to seek the next “undiscovered” neighborhood. The same thing seems to be happening in the online space. Friendster turned from being the coolest thing since sliced bread to the world’s most elaborate birthday reminder system; MySpace could easily turn into a place where people simply go to check out the newest bands and musicians.
People continue to seek out exclusive places where they can be in comfortable spaces with their kindred, so the argument goes that online niche networking sites will only continue to grow – and with that growth, advertisers may follow.
Here is a run down of the panelists and some brief notes on their services:
Panelists:
Gene Derose
House Party
Former president of Jupiter Communications Gene Derose started Houseparty.com to be an “end-to-end” party planning social network. It seems to be a mashup of Meetup, Evite and Upcoming tools with a touch of Flickr and a dash of YouTube.
Eric Alterman
KickApps Corp.
Kickapps offers “tools for brands.” Meaning instead of a brand or TV show creating a page on MySpace, they can now have their own social networking tools on their own site using the KickApps platform. This seems like it would be incredibly useful to advertisers and marketers who are looking for an easy plug-and-play way to include social networking tools on microsites or brand landing pages. KickApp offers 3 distinct packages:
Their business model is to get paid based off of impressions (although I’m guessing they also charge for the customizable development as well).
Examples of their sites are here:
Nicholas Butterworth
Diversion Media
Diversion Media is taking a different tactic to YouTube. Instead of the approach that everyone goes to one destination to find lots of different types of content, Diversion Media is developing the “station approach” where they are launching extremely content specific sites. The first site they launched is specific to travelers, Travelistic, and has both UGC and licensed travel videos. They also launched a Snowboarding video community, SnowVision. The way that they obtained a user base for SnowVision is interesting – they started with a simple logo on a MySpace profile and got over 1100 friends, who they are hoping will join and seed the SnowVision site. Diversion Media plans to build over 25 niche sites in the upcoming years.
Dan Melinger
Socialight
Socialight is extending the online social networking world to mobile phones. The concept is nice – you “check in” to an area and immediately you are given “sticky” notes of places to eat, shop or check out in that area on your mobile phone from your friends, peers or groups. For
instance, you can subscribe to the Flickr Graffiti channel and you will get messages of cool graffiti to check out in the area where you “check
in.” The idea of location based tagging could be expanded at some point to include personalized walking tours. You can watch a video about their technology here.
Kai Bond
Ravewireless.com
Rave Wireless (and Get Rave) is a social networking tool that targets colleges and universities. Unlike Facebook’s recent expansion beyond the college set, Rave wants to focus only on that demographic. Since most students carry their cell phones with them everywhere, Rave Wireless creates web and mobile-based communities that include SMS, alerts and other announcements customized for their schools. Apparently part of their revenue model is to sell handsets to students as well (similar to a laptop purchasing program).
Eric Wachtmeister
A Small World
A Small World has been around for 6 years, and is known as the “exclusive” invite-only online community. With investment money from The Weinstein Company (former Miramax founders), A Small World targets the very wealthy jet setters of the world, and their advertising base reflects that. Their advertisers include luxury brands including NetJets, Moët & Chandon and the like, and all the ad units are custom made for the site (i.e. no ad network serving). A Small World claims that since their group is extremely elite, it is a more trusted network, filled with authentic people who are highly influential in trend making and purchasing decisions.