We love partnerships between brands and the partnership between Nike and James Jarvis is no exception. The site looks great and the animation is fantastic.

Apple have just published their results for application downloads for the iPhone since launch and the figure is ….. 1 billion!

Other recent milestones:

Facebook 200 million members.

Twitter has had 1.6 billion tweats.

YouTube now reaches 100 million viewers in the US every month, 40% market share of video watched online.

The BI Norwegian School of Management published research this week that has discovered that those that download music illegally are also 10 times more likely to buy music as well. Interestingly this research shows there to be not two groups of music downloaders, the pirates sailing across file sharing sites looking for free booty and a second group of honorable downloaders buying their music from iTunes and the like, but one group defined by high levels of music consumption.

The study’s sample was made up of 2,000 online music users, all over the age of 15. The most significant insight was that whether these users downloaded from lawful or seedy sources – they were 10 times more likely to pay for music – elevating these scoundrels of the music business to the industry’s largest audience for digital sales.

It would seem as with most passions that these interests have to be maintained as they define us, so rather than identifying someone as a pirate they are just keen music fans consuming what they love whether it be legally or illegally.

Read a piece in Monocle this morning, during my very long commute, that discusses the fact that Australians are generally believed to be the outdoor type and yet they spend 89.2% of their waking hours consuming media.

Within this piece Monocle broke down internet consumption, with Australia sitting at number five in the top ten nations addicted to their computer screen:

* French users spend 95hrs and 19mins per month online
* US users spend 76hrs and 30mins per month online
* UK users spend 56hrs per month online
* Spanish users spend 50hrs 37mins per month online
* Italian users spend 46hrs and 14 mins per month online
* Australian users spend 41hrs and 20mins per month online
* Japanese users spend 38hrs and 21mins per month 0nline
* German users spend 37hrs and 48mins per month online
* Swiss users spend 37hrs and 11 mins per month online
* Brazilian users spend 37hrs per month online

Brazil was a bit of a shock, sitting above Scandinavian nations was not expected at all.

The recent IBM Institute for Business Value research has shown that mass marketing alone struggles to reach the diverse digital audience.

In order to reach these fragmented audiences marketers need to produce niche offerings and contextual approaches that are tailored specifically to emerging platforms, directional offerings and new experiences.

The research references a Lead M&E Analyst of a global research firm, which highlights the shift in consumer power:

“Consumers can no longer be considered ‘the audience’ – they are simultaneously readers, editors and marketers, especially the younger demographics.”

With this quote in mind and the continual adoption of social media, I feel it is becoming more and more beneficial for brands to allow those active within social media complete access to brand collateral.

The ability to track brand sentiment across social media offers a safety net to brands that open up their archives to bloggers. This strategy offers a cost efficient way to reach this diverse digital audience and if a brand is still worried about the limited control in social media then it could limit any perceived threat by restricting to launches.

Maybe this strategy could take the place of microsites built around launches. By providing bloggers with uniquely created and exclusive animated assets, creatives and images for the launch (that you would expect to see on a launch microsite) the brand gets over the biggest hurdle of a bespoke microsite, getting traffic to it, as the blog already has an established audience.

Nice viral video by Ray-Ban, not a shock though they pretty much always get it spot on.

The IAB published their internet advertising spend findings for the second half of 2008 this morning.

The research showed that entertainment and media over took the usual suspects in terms of advertising spend, making up 16.3% of £3.3 billion spent in the second half of 2008. Importantly retail saw a significant growth in the second half of the year from 6.3% to 9.1%, most probably due to the Christmas period, but still great to see this level of investment.

Click on the link below to see all the findings:

http://www.iabuk.net/en/1/2008internetadvertisingspend010409.html