Thanks to Kevin Liu at Outright for discovering this for me, Scribd’s James Yu who’s done some brilliant work for Gap, and the fantastic video production platform xtranormal.

Watch the language

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To be clear, this isn’t an iPhone commercial (Directed by Benjamin Espiritu and produced with Atomic Tom) yet may be one of the best guerrilla / viral marketing campaigns we’ve seen this year. Brilliantly leveraging a spontaneous setting, great content, an innovative performance, and, most importantly, pop culture, Atomic Tom has well-deservedly thrust themselves in the spotlight.

Not only are the instruments played all iPhone based but the shoot was filmed and edited with 3 iPhone cameras (iMovie I suspect). Other apps featured by the band include iShred, Drum Meister, PocketGuitar, and Piano Virtuoso.

Marketing Atomic Tom

On the more troubling side of this experience, from the marketing perspective, Atomic Tom provides yet another sign of a trend amongst brands against owning their own domain. (yes, I know… how’d I make that leap?)
Stemming from a legacy left by AOL (AOL Keyword…), brands are increasingly abandoning their own website in favor of using only Facebook, Twitter, or Myspace. While consumer brands rarely avoid running their own website, they all too often turn to off-domain landing pages or replacements to their own infrastructure. Sure, bands and artists have long done this, and it is arguably less expensive (though debatably so when you can create your own very polished website for a few hundred dollars), the real question for me is why brands so willingly give up equity in their brand to something else.

How do you weigh in on the question of brand equity vs. the benefits of a third party hosted experience?
Bah… enough about work; what do you think of Atomic Tom?

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The universal direction for search engines left SEOs, and businesses, chasing video and local listings much more aggressively than perhaps they should; diverting attention from ensuring their web sites are optimized properly in favor of publishing video or getting listed in every local directory on the promise of get more content indexed by Google. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not advocating avoiding local listings or consider video; this is an exploration of the Universal Search user experience. I’m only pointing out that everything should be taken in context.

Go Yahoo!

The real reason behind this post is a bit of praise for Yahoo! After much criticism on my part, and notwithstanding the replacement of Yahoo’s search engine with Bing, Yahoo steps up the game quite nicely with this redesign of their search results; fluidly incorporating other content without blending the results in a way that dilutes the experience. An AJAX like experience enables users to tab through video, twitter, or image content as it’s available; getting a quick synopsis of other results while leaving the familiar web results readily accessible.

Sparking an arms race in search, Bing can arguably be credited with prompting a spate of innovations in the search experiences in the last few months (some not so welcome). While others before them have attempted to light a fire under the search industry, Bing’s slick, innovative user experience has led, according to Matt McGee, to a increasing share of search volume (and dollars) by Microsoft.

So, go Yahoo! Purely from the user experience standpoint, what do you think of the new directions in search?

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One such technology, that which seems to lead the pack, is TubeMogul, a platform so impressive that they’ve raised capital in these questionable economic times.

TubeMogul’s analytics technology aggregates viewing data giving you access to insight on when, where, and how often videos are watched. Now, you can easily track subtle changes in videos, comparing effectiveness, popularity, and ROI for differences historically only available through other forms of online media.

An attractive solution in that regard alone, more appealing for some is their easy to use distribution model which publishes your videos to a couple dozen different sites. Best of all, you can get started for free.

TubeMogul’s Universal Upload service is used by publishers to upload their content to one or all of the major video sharing sites and social networking sites in one shot. Video publishers then use the company’s aggregated analytics to understand when, where and how often their videos are watched, track and compare what’s hot and what’s not, measure the impact of marketing campaigns, gather competitive intelligence, and share the data with advertisers, colleagues or friends.

Of course, the long sought metric of course, is not views but click through and engagement. For those hosting video, TubeMogul’s InPlay, which is set up in any Flash video player within minutes, tracks rich viewership metrics such as audience engagement, attention span and site performance.

They have an impressive roster of clients, including CBS, Red Bull, and The Home Depot, and a sophistication for data that rivals Avinash Kaushik. My favorite discovery though? That you can get free music lessons with TubeMogul fan Walt Ribiero.

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