Cameron Olthuis

Leo Burnett is saying that YouTube is the advertising model of the future.

The viral, interactive and community-led nature of the free video-sharing site make it the ideal platform for ads and marketing, said Mark Tutssel, worldwide chief creative officer at the Leo Burnett ad agency…

…YouTube has a greater reach among some US audiences than music broadcaster MTV.

Push vs. Pull. Who wins?

Update: Steve Rubel says that NBC is hooking up with You Tube to run promos.

Widget marketing is really starting to heatup. Today, TechCrunch announced that Hugh Macleaod of Gapingvoid fame has launched blog widgets, you can now show his daily cartoons on your website.

Fergus Burns says… A new space is beginning to develop - widget marketing.

Led initially be desktop widget services such as konfabulator, we are now seeing tons of services supporting widgets/gadgets - especially in social media applications (typepad, wordpress, myspace, aimpages, netvibes, etc).

Widgets are great marketing tools. They give you free exposure and improve the user experience (or sometimes not). They can also be used for SEO, they’re great for building inbound links.

Many companies are missing out on the potential of widget marketing, but there is a right and wrong way to use them.

This post marks number 100. This blog was born the same day as my youngest daughter, Celia, on November 15th, 2005. I had actually planned on starting the blog a few weeks earlier but thought it would be fun to start it the day she was born. Plus it gave me a great topic for my first post.

Since I started this blog a lot of fun things have happened, here’s a few that stick out in my mind…

• It was accepted into 9rules
• I became a partner in ACS
• It’s gone through a couple of redesigns

I never imagined this blog would be as successful as it’s become. I honestly can attribute the success of the great things that have been happening in my professional life lately with this blog. It has opened so many doors it’s unreal. I would encourage any of you that aren’t blogging to start, if nothing else it’s a heck of a lot of fun.

Thank you to everyone who reads this blog. If it wasn’t for the many comments and the great feedback I’ve received I never would’ve kept this up. I can hardly wait until my 1000th post!

Interesting side note: Today also marks the 100th post on our company blog, Pronet Advertising, although we didn’t celebrate with a special post.

Del.icio.us is one of my favorite search engines. It’s basically the only one that I use other than Google and Technorati. Delicious is a social bookmarking site and I’m not even sure it can be classified as a search engine, but I use it as one anyways.

For at least half the searches I perform now Delicious serves up far better results than Google. They’re better because they’re community driven. Other people just like myself have bookmarked and tagged these sites as their favorites. I know that if 2500 other people have bookmarked a site chances are it’s pretty good. Of course there will always be the need for long tail searches and I’m not sure Delicious can ever replace Google in that area, but we’ll see.

I’m convinced this is the future of search. The only problem is that as Delicious gets more popular, spam will start creeping into the results. I can only hope they come up with some way to prevent spam from happening. I can’t imagine it would be hard for someone to figure out a way to game Delicious if the rewards were good enough.

I decided to make a list of the top libraries that I have come across or that I personally use. Libraries can be a web developers best friend. They are great resources to learn from and can save hours and hours of time. These libraries include JavaScript, Ajax, Colors, PHP, and CSS. These should be in any web developers bookmarks, so go ahead and look through these libraries and bookmark your favorite ones. The list is in no particular order.

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I’m stoked! It’s official, I’ve signed and sent in my 9rules agreement and I’m now officially a 9ruler. I’m very honored that I was selected for the 4th round and I look forward to contributing to a great network. For those of you wondering what 9rules is…

The 9rules Network is a community of the best weblogs in the world on a variety of topics. We started 9rules to give passionate writers more exposure and to help readers find great blogs on their favorite subjects. It’s difficult to find sites worth returning to, so 9rules brings together the very best of the independent web all under one roof.

Being a part of 9rules will push me to continually improve this site and the quality of the content. Cheers! Our company blog, Pronet Advertising was also selected.

Last night I posted on page views as a business model and why I think it will work this time around. This morning I stumbled across a new twist on page views.

The Huckin’ Chicken is a viral marketing site setup by Burger King. The site features the Burger King chicken mascot performing stunts on a dirt bike. Here’s the twist, the videos are locked for viewing and as the site gets more visitors then videos are unlocked, and the stunts keep getting better and better.

This is a very clever take on marketing 2.0 to encourage page views. However, the Huckin’ Chicken is missing a few key elements. For example, they should have an RSS feed to notify us when new videos are viewable. This would encourage more return visits that they will otherwise be missing out on.

Will we continue see more stuff like this? Absolutely, I think it’s a fantastic idea and we will definitely continue to see more viral videos like this. It’s an extremely inexpensive form of branding. However, these marketing techniques won’t work if they’re directly tied to ad revenue, you can’t just slap something like this up with some ads and expect it to work. Those that try will fail miserably.