Monday was the first day of MSN and Sympatico running their own portals.

The feel and look is different from each other but not overly that it would alienate the consumer.

Traffic on the homepage for Sympatico.ca dropped 25% from where it was at before. This is inline with what we were to expect.

MSN is still out on what their numbers are… time will tell… will update as soon as numbers are in.

We will be keeping a close eye on both portals so see how traffic progresses.

Stay tuned for more updates. Or follow us at @PHDcanada for immediate information

Today, Sympatico and MSN announced their split.

Both will begin operating independently as of tonight at midnight!

For Sympatico.ca, the change is part of a three-year agreement in which Sympatico.ca and Microsoft will continue to exchange traffic while allowing Sympatico.ca to benefit from greater editorial independence and advertising flexibility.  Sympatico.ca will continue to leverage Bing as a search engine and offer Windows Live Hotmail and Messenger inventory to Canadian advertisers.

As well, Canada’s popular default homepage address www.sympatico.msn.ca, will now be redirected to www.sympatico.ca.

All of our popular content channels that 6.8 million Canadians have come to know and love such as Celebedge.ca, Fashionism.ca, InMusic.ca, Sync.ca, Push.ca and others, will remain available exclusively via the Sympatico.ca portal.  In addition, we announced the launch of four new portal channels today: Autos, InMovies.ca, YourMoney.ca and Best Health, a Reader’s Digest publication.

For MSN.ca,the change will be a simpler and more connected online experience for consumers and advertisers.  Publically available on September 1^st, 2009, MSN.ca will deliver the latest information relevant to Canadians including breaking news, sports scores, gossip, entertainment, and much more—all within a Canadian context and from the experts who know the topics best. As well, MSN.ca will introduce the unique ‘signed-in’ experience of using Windows Live™ Hotmail®, and Bing.ca embedded into the homepage.

Microsoft Advertising now provides a multiplatform digital solutions helping connect with consumers across popular digital touch points including Windows Live™ Hotmail, Windows Live™ Messenger, Windows® Mobile, Xbox®, Microsoft® Media Network, Bing.ca and now, the all-new MSN.ca portal.

The PHD digital folk await patient to see the traffic numbers adjust to the changes. The separation ends the #1 placement and nobody is quite sure who will take the podium.

Don’t forget to check out www.sympatico.ca and msn.ca to see if you can spot the difference!

Who do you think will become #1?

On the eve of the US presidential Inauguration we are encouraged to think of how we are going to be affected by the New US President. If you were thinking of watching history unfold here is a cool way to do it.  CNN.com Live and Facebook have hooked up to bring all of it to life INSTANTLY. Together they are going to  enable users to connect and engage with each other while watching a live broadcast of Inauguration Day events on CNN.com Live.  CNN.com Live is the Internet’s only multi-stream live video news service. On Tuesday, Jan. 20, CNN.com Live visitors will be able to update their Facebook status directly from the CNN.com Live video player.  They’ll also see status updates from their friends and other Facebook users on CNN.com Live.  The status updates for those using CNN.com Live will then be published in people’s Facebook News Feed with hyperlinked tags that read “via CNN.com Live,” so their friends can click the tag and join the CNN.com Live/Facebook experience.

Tomorrow is an exciting and historic day. Sign up for the event and join the two-way dialogue that will demonstrate the power of the social graph LIVE:

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=56799103571&ref=nf

Here is where you can watch history taking place:

http://www.cnn.com/live/

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It’s Cuil (I think pronounced Cool), a new search engine built by some of Google’s former brain-trust and lots of funding.

Its simple, easy to use and follow, seems to have a better grasp for what you are looking for, and is currently completely underutilized.

It will:

Search 121,617,892,992 web pages!

which is 3x as many as Google.  Or, perhaps 3x more irrelevant?

To find out more about them, click here.

For fun, I Cuiled myself, “Brian Wylie PHD” and it froze solid.  Better get those kinks worked out…

In the spirit of sharing some stunning creative for one of our clients (and to give myself a kick-start into our blogging world here!), please have a look at this British television ad for Honda/Acura. For those of you who haven’t yet seen it, prepare to be dazzled! The description accompanying this video reads as follows:

If you thought that the people who set up a room full of dominoes to have them knocked over later was amazing, you haven’t seen anything yet. There are no computer graphics or digital tricks in these images. Everything that you see happened in real time exactly as you see it. The recording required 606 takes and in the first 605 takes there always was something, usually of minor importance, that didn’t work.

It was necessary for the recording team to install the set-up time after time and it took several weeks working day and night to achieve this effect. The recording cost 6 million dollars and it took 3 months to finish, including the engineering design of the sequence. The duration of the video is only 2 minutes, but every time that Honda shows the commercial on British television, they make enough money to support any of us for the rest of our lives.

However, this commercial has turned out to be the most displayed in the history of the Internet. Honda execs think that it will pay for itself simply because of the free showings (as Honda is not paying one cent for you to see it). When Honda senior execs viewed it, they immediately approved it without hesitation-including costs.

There are only six Honda Accords built by hand in the whole world, and to the horror of Honda engineers, the recording team disassembled two of them for the recording. Everything you see in the sequence (besides the walls, floor, ramp and untouched Honda Accord) is part of those two automobiles.

The voice is that of Garrison Keiller.

The commercial was so well received by Honda execs when they saw it, that their first comment was how amazing the computer graphics were. They almost fell out of their chairs when told that the recording was real without any graphics manipulation.

By the way, about the wind shield wipers in the new Honda Accords, they are sensitive to water and designed to start working as soon as they get wet.

Enjoy!!

This morning, Canadian Living co-hosted, with Brandspark a breakfast presentation on food trends and Canadian consumers.  The purpose being to find out what Canadians think and feel about food.  Topics ranged from shopping & eating habits, to who does the cooking and what food trend products are top of mind to Canadian consumers. 

If you’d like to know what "ah-ha’s" came out of this research, contact your Canadian Living rep for more information. 

Or you can turn to Saturday Night Live, they always have an interesting spin on new products in the market!

http://www.nbc.com/Saturday_Night_Live/video/play.shtml?mea=239693

I know what you’re thinking. ‘Gossip Girl’? Really? Well, whether or not you’re a fan of the show, ‘Gossip Girl’ might just be at the forefront of the changing TV model – a model involving everything but a television.

‘Gossip Girl’ launched in September 2007 with mediocre ratings compared to those of teen dramas past. New episodes averaged just 526,000 viewers in Canada during the fall of 2007, and 2.5 million viewers in the U.S.

What was different then about ‘Gossip Girl’ - were people not as interested? It turns out they were indeed watching, just not as much on TV. ‘Gossip Girl’ was the number one streamed show on CTV.ca during the fall of 2007 and quickly rose to the top of iTunes’ most downloaded list. The show was tapping into a younger, tech savvy audience who didn’t need to make sure they were planted in front of the television at a certain hour – they were in control of when and where they watched the show.

In this month’s issue of New York Magazine, they speak about ‘Gossip Girl’ as changing the way in which we watch television. They describe the show as one, “…that may foretell a future of multiplatform entertainment whose success is determined not by traditional ratings but by what Schwartz and co–executive producer Stephanie Savage call “cultural permeation”.

Fans of the show can posts blogs online and speculate about characters and storylines. They can find out where to purchase the clothing or accessories seen in the show. There is even a ‘Gossip Girl’ component in Second Life. The show lives online and so do its viewers.

‘Gossip Girl’ is by no means the first TV program to experience online success. What separates this show from others, however, is its younger audience who already have the tools necessary to easily interact in an online environment. ‘Gossip Girl’ can capitalize on their viewers’ “tech knowledge”, enabling the program and the brand to expand quicker online than a show aimed at an older generation. 

‘Gossip Girl’ has started a conversation with its audience and the viewer doesn’t even need to turn on the television. The challenge to advertisers now is that the viewer is getting more out of this conversation than they did before and may refuse to settle for anything less. If viewers continue to interact with TV programming in this way, does the future of the TV model even include the TV?

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