Appssavvy pitches new educational application

By: Allison McNeal

An Internet advertising company, Appsavvy, is trying to pave a new way of online marketing towards young adults and college students.

Appssavvy, which sells advertisements for applications on social networks and other Web sites, recently partnered up with NBC to produce a new learning application called iCue.

iCue, short for the immerce of complete understanding and excel, is designed to help teachers and students interact with materials on American history, governement, and English.

This application will show video features from monumental historical events and have well-known journalists report the stories.

Online newspapers such as The Washington Post and The New York Times have also agreed to allow access to some articles under the iCue site.

Even though these newspaper companies are coming on board, Adam Jones, chief financial officer for NBC news, said that he knows many students do not watch or read standard news. Instead, they are watching programs like Jon Stewart or "The Colbert Report".

He is hopeful that this site will help turn things around.

"We’ve always talked about trying to find new ways to reach our future audience," he said.

With the collaboration of NBC and Appssavvy, these programs are also looking to place their advertisements on social networks like Facebook.

The advertisements would be placed on applications instead of on a running banner across the top of a page because users tend to ignore the display ads. With embedding the advertisment in an application, individuals are more likely to click on the product to find out more information.

One possible snag this application could face may be the redesign of Facebook's layout, which could cause some confusion.

Since the redesign, many of the applications are hidden instead of being located directly on an individual's profile page, which could hurt Appssavvy's ads.

Another factor that is hurting online advertisement is the economy.

Even though Internet advertising is fairly cheap, The New York Times reported that TNS Media Intelligence has been measuring Internet ads and "spending on Internet ads increased only 8 percent [in 2002] and a decrease from an 18 percent growth rate in the same period last year."

Even though the economy is influencing online advertisements, Scott Kurnit, the founder of About.com, said that ads will still prosper and become more effective than television ads.

With the development of iCue, the collaboration between NBC, Appssavvy, The New York Times, and The Washington Post shows how different forms of media can interact with one another to try and impliment a new online application.

Will different forms of the media all start to collaborate on online projects in the future? Will individuals embrace the merge of different companies?

These question can only be answered after many organizations start to pair up and get feedback on how the audience views their product.