My BNET Media posts for the week of October 19, 2009

Let's hear it for blatant self-promotion! This week on BNET Media, I wrestled with Big Ads, NPR's Twitter followers, Balloon Boy and Fox News. Here, in reverse chronological order, are some damn fine posts:

• YouTube's New "Find Your Friends" Feature a Little Too Friendly 
• Is There a Fight Brewing Over Hulu's Business Model? 
• Rolex Ad on Newsweek Site Begs the Question: How Big Is Too Big? 
• Real-Time Search Isn't Yet What It's Cracked Up to Be 
• Will Fox News Cause Collateral Damage to News Corp.? 
• DVR Viewership in Primetime Is Very Consistent 16-17 Percent
• Film at 11! Nielsen Decides to Monitor TV and Internet Usage in the Same Homes! 
• NPR Has 1.3 Million Twitter Followers. How Many Does Your Media Property Have?
• Gawker Pays for Balloon Boy Story, 'National Enquirer' Loses Out 

You can follow our posts @bnetmedia if you want. Have a good weekend.

If you look really hard, maybe you'll see Derek Jeter

Something tells me there's a new series debuting on USA tonight.

So, what is the truth about Tony?

I've spent way too much time today trying to figure out what the point is of this video, "The Truth About Tony" which is currently on the Burger King site and presumably the work of one Crispin Porter + Bogusky. I get that the Tony in question, Tony Stewart, is a NASCAR guy who has an ongoing relationship with The King -- from an endorsement point of view. What I don't get is why, in this video, Tony undergoes a polygraph test, judging how truthfully he answers questions from viewers, closing with the inevitable BK questions -- about whether he loves the Whopper sandwich. (He does, and he didn't lie about it.)

OK, but at the beginning of this post, I said I couldn't figure out what the point of this was. Here are my questions:

1. Why would people sit through 15 minutes of this? It's at least that long.
   
2. Why can't you pause the version on BK.com, or or embed it?
3. Why does the page with the video on it not even indicate how long it is?
4. Why hasn't BK posted this to YouTube? (LiveStream, which provided the streaming for this, posted a blissfully abridged version.)
5. Did Old Spice and Office Depot, whose logos are prominently featured on Stewart's shirt, sign off on this BK stunt?

Anyone who can answer these questions, lemme know.

The Social Media Insider wonders if real-time search is all it's cracked up to be

If you did anything, anywhere on a social network today, you probably saw that Microsoft's Bing is starting to offer real-time search of tweets and Facebook status updates. The Social Media Insider asks if we should be quite so excited about this..

Ads that annoy: Volume 1, Windex

Just saw this Windex ad as a pre-roll to a preview of  "The Biggest Loser" at NBC.com. Not that the guy in this ad would qualify for the show, but do you really think, in the real world, he would snare this woman? (OK, maybe if he worked at Goldman Sachs.) This commercial had to have been concocted by men.

Verizon decides it's time to make fun of the iPhone on two fronts

With Apple still selling iPhones like there's no tomorrow -- it sold 7.4 million of them in the last quarter -- it's not exactly tme to kick the company in the teeth while it's down on its luck. So what's up with the two campaigns out right now from Verizon that make fun of the iPhone specifically, and iCulture in general?

The first is the campaign below for Verizon's new Motorola 'Droid phone; in the nanosecond that the campaign's been out, it's at least managed to gain some notoriety, even though all of those references to "iDon't" makes it sound, well, like a dumbphone unless you're paying attention. The references to iDon't are actually about the iPhone. More than 700,000 YouTube views later, here's the spot, which has led some to speculate that the endless poking of fun at the iPhone may kill any possibility of Verizon becoming an iPhone carrier too. (Damn!)




The second attacks the iPhone in a more obtuse way. In this one, a voiceover intones over and over that, "There's a map for that" instead of the iPhone-esque, "There's an app for that." The maps in question are really ones showing that Verizon's 3G coverage across the U.S. is much stronger than AT&T's — AT&T, of course, being the sole carrier for the aforementioned iPhone, which kind of lives for 3G.