By now we’ve all heard how well the 2 US presidential nominees are utilising the digital domain to sell themselves.

This story from ConnectThru.com sums it all up very nicely.

The First Digital Presidential Election

Breaking down barriers and fostering cross-company communication has long been one of enterprises’ most persistent challenges. A tool that was launched last month at TechCrunch50—and then went on to win the conference’s Best in Show award—offers a new solution, however, in the form of a sort of Twitter for the enterprise.

Yammer aims to make organizations more productive through the exchange of short, frequent answers to the question, “What are you working on?” Employees’ responses to that question get aggregated into a private, central feed, enabling coworkers to discuss ideas, post news, ask questions and share information. Anyone in a company can start a Yammer network and begin inviting colleagues—the basic service is free, and access is limited to those with a valid company email address. (Yammer is also careful to stress that information is never shared with third parties.) Every employee can maintain a profile on Yammer, allowing it to serve as a company directory, and all messages are tagged, giving participants the ability to follow feeds specific to both the tags and the people they find most interesting. Content, meanwhile, is searchable by anyone within the organization, effectively making Yammer a knowledge base in which past conversations can be easily accessed and referenced. In addition to the Yammer.com website, users can interact with their network via a desktop client, iPhone, Blackberry, IM, SMS and even email. Companies that want to claim and mange their Yammer networks can pay USD 1 per month per member of the network for administration privileges; special pricing is available for large networks.

read the full story in the latest Springwise newsletter.

” Politics are a complicated subject. To simplify the way consumers really feel about the presidential candidates, Landor Associates and research firm Penn, Schoen & Berland asked survey respondents to compare them to brands.”

read the full story on Brandweek.

The Bookmarks has successfully attracted two internationally renowned digital experts who will assist in judging the inaugural awards. Johan Tesch, Creative Director of leading agency BBH, London; and Dick Buschman, founder and Strategic Director of Achtung! Netherlands. With recognised authorities at the helm,  The Bookmarks will be able to benchmark South African digital creative against what is happening globally, and at the same time, provide local advertising creatives with valuable insight.

For details on the entry categories, the workshops as well as the digital awards ceremony, see their web site: The Bookmarks.

With only a few weeks, 2 to be precise, to go, the video wars are heating up.
See this one from Lessig

Obama ‘08 - Vote For Hope from MC Yogi on Vimeo.

According to a study recently conducted by iPerceptions, text ads rule!

“The study found that, despite current buzz around video ads, marketers do not need to spend on fancy interactive ads in order to reach consumers. In fact, consumers are most likely to click on simple text ads (25% of respondents). Display ads follow in popularity, with 20% of respondents likely to click on right banners and 12% likely to click on top banners. A surprising finding of the study is that video ads are not very popular among most consumers; only 11% of consumers said they were likely to click on video ads.”

Read the report summary on their web site.

YouTube Insight has helped millions of you learn more about your YouTube videos and figure out when, where, and why your videos are popular. But what if you could learn not just which of your videos are hot on the site, but which specific parts of those videos are hotter than others? What if you could know exactly when viewers tend to leave your videos, or which scenes within a video they watch again and again?

Well, in case you didn’t already know, YouTube now has an insight called “Hot Spots” that can help you with exactly this.

See Your YouTube Video: Hot or Not on Google’s blog.