Finally, a cure for road rage - take it out on a taxi driver online

Jokes and dreams are, of course, what the more fantasial side of social media is built on.  Nowadays you can even have an entire Second Life (Resident population currently nearly 6 million).  But fun and games (or advergames, as the jargon has it) are not in a world set apart from serious branding and marketing activities. Indeed online advertising specialists iLogic claims likeable content is critical to the success of viral advertising, which, in turn, is just one of a suite of online strategies, including pay per click, rich media and SEO (Search Engine Optimisation),that savvy marketers are now very much engaged with."It's not that we necessarily condone the content of Taxi Wars, but we do believe that you have to do something controversial and memorable to stand out in today's marketing clutter, whether offline or online. Our mantra is play, entertain, retain. And that's not easy. Marketers have so many options and so much competition that stand-out creativity and the sharpest of media strategies are pretty well the starting blocks," says iLogic Director, Yoav Tchelet.Online advertising - now estimated to be a R200m revenue industry in South Africa*  - has certainly come a long way from the once ubiquitous but still very much alive static banner ad.  But today's online options are far wider, largely because broadband is a little more widespread and technology, as a whole, has advanced. This, together with a parallel explosion in social media activities such as blogging and video sharing, means that people learn about (and, more importantly, recommend) brands in very different ways. You can, for instance, create and run a branded business on Second Life - and you can, if you're lucky, launch a music career on YouTube. However, there is one very practical factor that makes online advertising attractive to advertisers and that's its infinite measurability - at least in terms of clicks and hits.  Says Tchelet: "What people think and feel about online advertising may still require conventional research techniques but no other medium can measure as accurately the quantitative traffic across sites and, indeed, the very ad or game you have placed on the web. So you know exactly how many times people have played Taxi Wars, every week, every day. every hour if you want. And at a fraction of the price of the conventional research tracking used for offline advertising."Maybe a brave new world has finally arrived - one where you can assault taxi drivers with impunity and actually measure advertising with chillingly accountable accuracy.*  Estimate based on figures from World Wide Worx's "Online Media in South Africa 2005" survey, conducted with the co-operation of the Online Publishers Association.Contact Details:www.ilogic.co.za James+27 11 8322800148 Bree StreetNewtown 2001, South AfricaNOTES TO THE EDITOR: iLogic is an interactive agency that builds brands through the implementation of insight-driven design, experienced and incisive media planning and creative wizardry. Its proprietary advertising technology allows it to offer the full range of online advertising options - from snazzy flash games to comprehensive interactive databases.