The bell has rung and your favorite print ads and television commercials have entered the ring to stand toe-to-toe in a fight for ad supremacy on Ad Battle.

We recently partnered with Jason Cuthbertson, Senior Art Director at Atmosphere BBDO, to launch a new  application which allows people to vote for their favorite print or television ads submitted by fellow Facebook users. Two opposing ads are pitted against one another in a randomly sequenced order that ensures that no single ad is seen more or less often than the next. The addition of a benchmarking feature lets users build their Ad Battle ranking from Featherweight to Heavyweight - depending upon the performance of their uploaded ads.  An additional social functionality allows users to compare their Ad Battle rankings with others within their network of social contacts.

The application also features a Mystery Ad Game that tests the users advertising IQ. A simple ten question quiz challenges users to match brand names to advertising slogans or to identify the company associated with a print ad from which all branding has been removed. Once again, a social feature lets users compare their Mystery Ad Game scores to those of their friends.

In ten days time, hundreds of ads have been uploaded and users have spent, on average, close to five minutes per visit to the application. Even more exciting is the amount of press we’ve gotten since Ad Battle launched. Advertising Age, Market Watch, Silicon Alley Insider, and Ad Rants have all featured stories on the Ad Battle application. All agree that the application is not only fun, but useful to marketers, as well.

That’s the power of the Ad Battle application. In the past, consumers have relied on advertisers to tell them what to buy. With the social media revolution sweeping across the globe, it’s become evident that people want to voice their opinions when it comes to the way their favorite brands market  products. Essentially, that’s what Buddy Media’s Brand Advocacy Process is all about - gleaning consumer intelligence to build a loyal audience of ‘fans.’ If these Social Brand Advocates are the engine that power the wheels of commerce, shouldn’t they have a say about what direction the vehicle is headed? The Ad Battle application gives consumers a way to communicate their likes and dislikes about advertising campaigns, steering brands down a new road - a road where the consumer is not beset by advertising, but instead they’re engaged with it. The insights gleaned from the preferences of social network users will allow ‘Mad Men’ to see what types of messaging resonates with consumers, and subsequently leverage that intelligence to create more effective ad campaigns.

Check out Ad Battle now to vote for your favorite advertisements. It doesn’t take the eye of the tiger, but it certainly puts the I in advert”I”sing.

Silicon Alley has just released their annual list of Up-and-Comers in the world of digital business for 2008, and Buddy Media CEO Michael Lazerow has made the cut. The list is a ‘Who’s Who’ of New York entrepreneurs, investors, executives, and technologists who are shaping the future of the digital business community.

Michael had the foresight to see the need for a company full of deal-makers who could plan, build, promote, and monitor app-vertisements within the social media space. Through a combination of tech-savvy and business know-how, Michael has shepherded Buddy Media from a tiny start-up to a powerhouse media company in a single year.  In just 12 months, we’ve implemented social media advertising strategies for a diverse list of clients, including such mega-brands as Anheuser Busch, New Balance, Reebok, Priceline.com, and HBO.

We’re really excited about Michael’s inclusion on this exclusive list and even more excited to see him climb his way to the top of the heap in the future. Congrats Mike!

We’re incredibly pleased to announce the arrival of our new Vice President of Product Development, Matt Zarzecki. Matt has spent more than ten years creating engaging, interactive products while managing product, technology, and design teams for a number of successful businesses.

Most recently, Matt created CafeMom, one of the fastest growing niche social networks on the Web. Matt’s fingerprints are all over CafeMom, as his vision shaped the site’s user experience and creative design. His innovation and expertise are evident throughout CafeMom, as is his specialty of understanding exactly what is necessary to the creation of an engaging user-facing product. Prior to CafeMom, Matt worked at Next Jump, Inc., a leading provider of corporate rewards and loyalty programs - another home run for Buddy Media, as Matt will spearhead an initiative to revamp and improve our successful AceBucks rewards platform..

As Vice President of Product Development at Buddy Media, Matt will be responsible for leading the direction and defining the strategy for user-facing products across all social networks.

Matt grew up outside of Princeton, NJ and is a graduate of Tufts University with a BA in English.

We’ve busted out the joy buzzers and exploding cigars to celebrate the launch of our latest app-vertisement, HBO Comedy Climb. This app represents HBO’s first foray into the world of social media and we’re proud to bring a brand that’s synonymous with quality entertainment and great times with friends into the Facebook fold.

Buddy Media conceptualized and developed the application to drive sales of HBO DVDs by highlighting the madcap humor of their original comedy programming. HBO Comedy Climb is a simple quiz application with a social twist.  Users have the opportunity to build a career in virtual entertainment by correctly answering questions about specific episodes of Entourage, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Extras, and Flight of the Conchords. Our research shows that applications that provide users with a chance to strive for performance benchmarks achieve high levels of engagement and repeat usage over time. As a result, we built the HBO Comedy Climb to provide users with challenging goals to strive for on their way to the top, while giving them the chance to improve their ‘career standing’ in the entertainment industry. In addition, a challenge mode that catalyzes competitive impulses amongst friends will help the application ‘go social.’

So grab your thinking caps (with the requisite propeller on top, of course) and prepare yourself to become a Hollywood mogul. Grab a rung of that career ladder, step over your friends and co-workers and strive to reach the top in the HBO Comedy Climb.

If I told you that Reebok was releasing a basketball shoe designed to let athletes display personalized Smack Talk on thier feet, you might think I was talkin’ krazy. What if I said that Buddy Media developed a smack talkin’, butt-kickin’ app-vertisement to promote the release of these ‘white-board’ inspired sneakers? Well, I’m not foolin’. Today marks the launch of our new Reebok Talkin’ Krazy application.

When Reebok approached us with the original specs of the new ATR Talkin’ Krazy shoe and relayed their interest in featuring the sneakers in a Facebook app, we jumped at the chance to work with yet another athletic shoe giant. The ATR Talkin Krazy basketball sneakers allow “ballers” to tag up their shoes with a dry erase marker as a means of smack talking while on the court. We saw unlimited potential for an app-vertisement that would highlight the coolest features of these sick kicks.

The Facebook app offers a number of unique ways to talk smack to your friends. You can:

• Smack Talk - Choose from a variety of pre-written smack talk messages. Tag your virtual Reeboks and send them to friends. (My game and your momma - both nasty!)

• Personalized Smack - Use a virtual dry erase marker to draw custom, personalized messages on your Reeboks. Once you’ve tagged the shoe to your heart’s content, you can shoot it out to all of your friends. The more smack your talk, the better your chances of becoming the King of the Smack Talk court.

• Video Smack - Search YouTube or Vimeo for relevant clips of you displaying your skills on the court and send it to friends, along with your tagged virtual sneakers.

So check it out at http://apps.facebook.com/reeboktalkinkrazy/. You don’t need to be a baller to enjoy this app - you just need to talk a big game.

Evangelizing the power of social media advertising through branded app-vertisements is hard work. It’s an endless grind of phone calls, meetings, conferences, and parties. Our fearless leader, Michael Lazerow, has been all over Manhattan island this week, stumping for Buddy Media and the rapidly growing beast known as social networks.

Mike’s week began at the Social Ad Summit, an invite-only, conference focused on strategic issues driving the growth of advertising in social media, where he treated the crowd of industry insiders to a keynote address entitled, “Social Marketing: Where are we? Where are we going?” The presentation outlined the present state of a burgeoning business and the positive outlook for the future. Mike included a high-level breakdown of strategies for marketing big brands to highly targeted audiences on social networks like Facebook. Mike didn’t pause to rest on his laurels, however, as he remained at Tribeca Rooftop to moderate a one hour panel discussion called “Alternative Social Advertising.”

Tuesday brought the highly publicized announcement of our partnership with Social Media, the largest stand-alone ad network on Facebook. This deal will allow big corporate brands to enter into a single engagement with both companies to plan, develop, promote, and monitor applications on social networks. This deal is huge, as it signals the companies’ intent to work together to help the social marketing space grow quickly and effectively. What does this deal mean for corporate America? It means that social app-vertising campaigns are easier to execute, as well as being more accountable and results-driven. Better yet, it means that brand advertisers have greater support from the two thought leaders in the industry.

All of this jaunting about town has built up to Mike’s big day today at the Jacob Javits Convention Center, overlooking the Hudson River on Manhattan’s West Side. Mike will be speaking twice at the Web 2.0 Expo - the East Coast’s largest tech conference. Web 2.0 is a celebration of the future of the Internet and its myriad of potentials and possibilities. Obviously, Mike fits in perfectly with this crowd and will get a chance to display his breadth of industry knowledge from entrepreneurship (Cashing Out: When, How, and How Much?) to the sundry benefits of brand advertising on social networks (Why Brand Advertisers Will Be the Biggest Beneficiaries of Social Media and How You Can Participate). See Mike’s presentation on Social Marketing above.

What does the future hold for Michael Lazerow? Only time will tell, but you can bet that Mike’s future and the future of social media advertising are intimately linked.

Last week, Buddy Media launched the BuddyBrain. I’m thrilled about the excitement generated by this product and its ability to provide accountable metrics that support the strength and engagement value of branded applications ­ or app-vertisements. We strongly believe that the BuddyBrain helps make social marketing accessible, accountable, and results-driven.

Caroline McCarthy, who covers social media for CNET and has probably seen hundreds, if not thousands, of social marketing technology platforms, broke the story. She nailed what we’re trying to do when she wrote in her The Social column that the BuddyBrain was tackling “one of the challenges of social advertising: that it’s just plain difficult to tell how successful it is.”

We built BuddyBrain to make available to our clients data that we already knew but were providing manually.

I think the findings speak for themselves. In particular, users spent an average of 2 minutes and 35 seconds engaged with our branded applications,or 75 times greater than the time consumers  spend interacting with traditional banner ads and five times greater than the time spent watching a typical TV commercial. And 85% of our users returned for multiple interactions with our app-vertisements, with 56% of the total user base returning 9 times or more during the month of testing.

Another general finding from the BuddyBrain data is that our branded applications are entertaining, fun, and engaging ads.  Better yet, they encourage users to become social brand advocates who evangelize the application, passing it around to their own personal networks. They are a better form of advertising than other ways to market in the digital and social media world. In the end, the apps are ads, ­ albeit a new form of digital ads, that are tied to the social graph and a database.

In short, App-vertising programs are branded experiences that connect brands to people in a fundamentally better way than banners, buttons, and other interruption-marketing techniques. Our clients understand this, which has lead to more than 6 campaigns for our largest clients, repeat business from more the a dozen clients already and significant commitments for 2009.

Many of our clients and potential clients agree with our conclusion that these numbers are game-changing for brands. As Matt Rebeiro of Ryan*MacMillan, a digital marketing agency in London with large clients that include BBC Worldwide, Discovery Channel, TimeLife and others, noted on the company’s blog, Buddy Media’s “figures look like a pretty good reason to ditch banner ads…and instead offer audiences a chance to interact with digital advertising so both parties get something positive out of the interaction.”

Despite technology like the BuddyBrain that provides transparency to clients and our ongoing efforts to educate brand marketers and their agencies, some confusion remains in the marketplace about what branded apps are and why they are successful.

One of the most compelling data points that I took out of the BuddyBrain was the clear differentiation between branded apps and top apps like Slide’s Top Friends application, Rock You’s Super Wall application and games like Texas Hold ‘Em from Zynga and Entourage or (fluff)friends  from Social Gaming Network. Our apps are built for different purposes and the data proves out that we are very successful in building social brand awareness.

Comparing the top applications to branded applications is like comparing the TV show Lost to the 30-second commercials that run during the show. Yes, they both run on the same ‘platform,’ ABC. But Lost has a star-studded cast, significant network promotion and a new, fresh episode every week, with some episodes costing up to $14 million each. Lost is an entertainment juggernaut. The commercial is, well, a commercial.

The applications we build for our clients are marketing programs. The applications built by the top Facebook and MySpace developers are uber-funded entertainment properties that are continually cared for, improved, tweaked and refreshed with new content and features. This takes significant resources and talent. The top 4 application companies alone have raised more than $150 million total. That’s a ton of money to build applications. I only imagine what we could do for a client if they gave us $150 million. Each of the app-vertising programs Buddy Media builds have cost much less!

As social media sites continue to grow in popularity, so will their share of the world’s media budgets. And branded applications will occupy an important part of the smart brand marketer’s tool kit. They won’t be the only tool and will often support a larger program on the platforms. For clients that need massive reach, a banner campaign on MySpace or Facebook will usually make the most sense.

The opening of the social media sites to third-party developers provide brand marketers unprecedented access to engaged consumers. More and more brands, like Anheuser-Busch, FedEx, New Balance and Priceline, want to work with Buddy Media to engage users and increase their social brand loyalty. And the BuddyBrain is helping us show the world that one of the single best ways to engage users is to build compelling app-vertising programs.

I could wile away the hours
Conferrin’ with the flowers
Consultin’ with the rain
And my head I’d be scratchin’
While my thoughts were busy hatchin’
If I only had the BuddyBrain

Guess what?  Now I have one and it’s certainly made my job easier!  After months of aggregating data from a variety of sources and tracking projects and campaigns on a number of different platforms, I’m ecstatic to announce the arrival of Buddy Media’s BuddyBrain!

The BuddyBrain is a social control center for all app-vertising campaigns.  It includes communication and analytic tools, reference materials, and cutting edge social media trends and research. The platform features an intuitive, user-friendly interface that makes social app-vertising campaigns accessible,  accountable, and results-driven.  The folks here at Buddy Media are the most tech-savvy people in the social media space, and they molded the BuddyBrain using their exhaustive experience and knowledge in conjunction with extensive input from our clients and partners. Buddy Media’s BuddyBrain makes managing, tracking, reporting, and analyzing easy, which leaves me more time to write blog posts.

Before we unleashed the BuddyBrain on the world, we wanted to test it’s powers on our ten most recent applications.  After one month of data aggregation and analysis, here’s a sample of what we discovered:

• Users spent an average of 2 minutes and 35 seconds engaged with our applications - 75 times greater than the time consumers spend interacting with traditional banner ads and five times greater than the time spent watching a typical TV commercial
• 85% of our users returned for multiple interactions with our app-vertisements - with 56% of the total user base returning 9 times or more during the month of testing

Buddy Media’s Buddy Brain consists of four distinct components (which we call lobes - clever, huh?), that measure components of a campaign’s Social IQ.  This will allow clients to log-in for continuous tracking and optimization of social app-vertising campaigns from the beginning of a project through the completion of a campaign.

But there’s even more to the BuddyBrain than project management and analytic data. Social media couldn’t exist without embracing a culture of openness, in which everyone was committed to sharing and collaborating. With that in mind, we created a hub for social media resources, including all the latest news, trends, events, and documentation necessary to keep your brain and our Brain stimulated. Want to know when our CEO Mike Lazerow is speaking at a conference? Need information about Facebook Connect or the new Facebook layout? Buddy Media’s Buddy Brain has got all this information and more.

Check out the screenshots for a taste of what we’re cooking. You won’t need to travel through Oz to find this brain. Just follow the yellow brick road to www.buddybrain.com.

Ahoy landlubbers! Buddy Media is pleased to announce our latest application - The Bud Light Party Cruise!

The newest addition to our portfolio is a perfect example of the innovation and creativity that have positioned us as the one-stop source for big brands interested in broadening their relationships with their consumers into the world of social media.

Anheuser Busch was seeking an interactive, social media application to support their annual Bud Light Party Cruise promotion (an offline promotion where winners won an all expense cruise).  They wanted to create a virtual community of winners, that could serve as the official “pre-party” destination for winners to locate, interact and engage with fellow cruisers.  A place to share photos and stories before and while on board, and eventually maintain contact with their new friends via a centralized Bud Light VIP community. We knew Facebook was the perfect environment for such an application, but a problem still remained.  How do we build an application for an inherently social platform while restricting access to all but a few chosen users?

The answer? We developed a entry page accessible to all Facebook users, but in order to get on board the Party Cruise application, winners need to enter a secret promo code given to them by the folks at Anheuser Busch. The code grants winners VIP access to the application, where they can mingle with other lucky contestants.  Users can find each other by searching the “Cruiser Locator”, an innovative feature that integrates Yahoo! Maps with each user’s Facebook profile location.

Winners won’t have to worry about their VIP access being revoked once the cruise ship drops anchor at the final destination.  The application is designed to allow cruise buddies to stay in touch and share memories long after they’ve washed the final grains of sand and salt out of their hair.

We really wish that we could share this application with the world, but it’s VIP access only.  All others will be thrown overboard.

We’re thrilled to announce the launch of our latest application - Bacardi Mojito Party!

Buddy Media’s design and development of the Bacardi application centers on the promotion of several disparate marketing initiatives for the liquor giant. The app(http://apps.facebook.com/bacardimojito/), challenges users to make the perfect mojito, encourages them to plan mojito parties at local watering holes, and drives them off-site to purchase special Bacardi Muddlers to help them concoct the perfect beverage.

Buddy Media, in accordance with Facebook’s age-gating restrictions and accepted social standards, created this unique application that allows Bacardi to engage new customers and interact with their current fans. Overall, the application is intended to help Bacardi build a stronger relationship with the people who buy their products - which it does by employing several features that will lead to greater brand recognition, engagement, and  consumer loyalty.

Our history speaks for itself when it comes to developing and marketing Facebook applications intended for adult audiences of legal drinking age. Buddy Media was the first company to develop age-gating technology that prohibited minors from entering an application designed for a major beer manufacturer’s advertising campaign. The age-gate worked flawlessly and the application was a hit - generating over 200,000 installs in two short weeks.

Meanwhile, Facebook was developing their own age-restriction technology. They asked us to jump on board for their beta testing, and we quickly agreed. We were eager to join forces with the platform that drives our business to help pioneer this new technology. We had several clients in the development pipeline that could leverage the age-gate to reach a target audience of adults of legal drinking age. The first client to take advantage of the age gate and our close working relationship with Facebook was Bacardi.

Check out the app - we’re really proud of it. But make sure you bring your ID - cause the Facebook bouncer is really tough!