Good Examples of Digital Creativity and Media Usage including online advertising, web sites and search marketing. Compiled by Dan Calladine, Aegis Media - dan.calladine@aemedia.com All views expressed are my own.
This blog currently receives about 150 unique visitors per day, according to Google Analytics. Follow me on twitter - I'm @dancall
Spotted by @xavi_izaguirre on Brick Lane at the weekend, the url dieselreboot.tumblr.com is a site seeking inspiration from Diesel fans.
Fans upload what inspires them (although according to the ts & cs it can't be copyrighted work) and then it goes on the site, presumably after some moderation time.
Looks good, I think, and it seems that brands have no problem with creating short term (ish) urls for their projects (see also Jay-Z's MagnaCarterHolyGrail.com) instead of tying everything back to the main parent URL.
Apparently it's created by Nichola Formichetti - see his own Tumblr here
Will be interesting to see how this develops, and whether Diesel do learn from their users.
Clearly the album will be immediately uploaded to torrent sites, YouTube etc - but it gives Samsung an element of cool and lots of buzz, and gives Jay-Z a guaranteed amount of money for the music.
"People will be able to download the album with a free app that's coming to the Play store on June 24th, which promises an "unprecedented inside look into the album" with "personal stories and inspiration." The description immediately conjures to mind his book Decoded, which breaks down the lyrics and thoughts that went into the rapper's biggest hits. We'll have to wait until the app is released next week to see exactly what's inside, but the new project's website contains a behind-the-scenes video of the Brooklyn MC in the studio with frequent collaborators Pharrell Williams, Timbaland, and Swizz Beatz. '99 Problems' mastermind Rick Rubin nods along from a sofa, eyes closed and barefoot."
Last week information was leaked to show that the US government was tracking people over a number of web services, including Google, Facebook & Skype (all of whom deny their own knowledge of & involvement in it)
What ever the original charts showed, the design was pretty horrible, and now a designer has created a presentation with new versions of the slides, below.
(in other redesign news, see this site imagining what would happen if Jony Ive got his hands on classic bits of design, in the same way has he has with the Apple OS - e.g. The Dark Side of The Moon album cover)
THINK!, the UK Department of Transport's anti drink driving campaign has produced this new ad.
It's similar in many ways to other stunt or prank videos on YouTube but what I think is interesting is that they're upfront (in the press release anyway) about the people in it being actors:
"The agency took over a pub in London and placed a fake mirror of similar size and shape to a car windscreen in the men's toilets. The agency team then propelled a human mannequin through the fake glass of the mirror, shocking the unsuspecting punters, played by actors, using the toilets. The incident included accompanying, specially-designed sound effects, which brought to life the full horror of a road accident."
I think that the audience are pretty forgiving of this and this will prevent the 'fake' comments that this LG video got.
SeeItShopIt is a new technology that lets companies share product catalogues on Facebook, and lets customers look at and buy the products.
It was developed by colleagues in glue Isobar, and is now being used by three clients, with more to follow.
You can see how it works yourself by sharing some of the pictures from Littlewoods here, (pick the option to just share to yourself on Facebook if you're just doing this to see the technology) and then you can see the products well presented in your newsfeed.
I go to quite a lot of conferences, so I'm now doing short writes ups of them, with links to interesting things. This time - last week's Interact Congress 2013 in Barcelona.
The big highlight was the reveal of the results from the 2012 AdEx Benchmark Survey from IAB Europe, which showed online ad spend around Europe.
The headline figure was that online ad spend grew 11.5% to €24.3bn around Europe, with big growth in video & mobile advertising.
These were the Top 10 in terms of ad spend:
UK – €6.6bn
DE – €4.6bn
France – €2.8bn
Russia – €1.5bn
Italy – €1.4bn
NL – €1.2bn
ES – €0.9bn
Sweden – €0.8bn
Norway – €0.6bn
Denmark – €0.6bn
You can see that the UK and Germany combined make up more than 40% of the spend. It's also interesting that Russia has overtaken Italy, and that there were only 6 countries with a spend of over one billion Euros in 2012. Full press release is here
I moderated a session on display ad formats for brand campaigns, which included Karim Attia of Nugg Ad, Laura Chaibi of Yahoo, and Dean Donaldson, formerly of MediaMind. It's potentially a pretty dry (read 'dull') subject, but I hope we managed to make people understand the importance of it. Ad formats are the sizes of the spaces on websites that the ads fit into. The IAB needs to get consensus over these, as advertisers need to be able to advertise on multiple sites easily, to get their messages to large numbers of people.
Of course we're only talking about the size of the spaces - we're not talking about what goes into them. That's were the real creativity comes in. Over the past few years ads have gradually been getting wider, as screen sizes have got wider, and now tablet and mobile screen sizes are making this more complicated again. & then there are the real time bidding engines which allow automated ad buying, and need to fit ads into as many sites as possible. As we approach the 20th anniversary of the first banner ad, we need to make sure that the format sizes move with the times. I hope that this gets across how it's not such a 'dry' subject. (& no, none of us support horrific formats like this or this or this).
Another session I really enjoyed was the presentation by Geoff Seeley of Unilever who showed examples of their recent engaging ads and content, including this from Lifebuoy:
In another session Geoff said that they always use paid support for content like this:
Seeley: It would be too arrogant to suggest that a piece of branded content can work on its own. Paid needs to still be used #interact13
— Warc (@WarcEditors) May 24, 2013
I thought that it was great to hear a client say this. It's common knowledge in the industry how important it is to pay to support content like videos, and yet you still get articles like this one ("Here's why these 6 videos went viral"), that don't take that into account at all.
I also really liked research by Joe Hall at BBC Worldwide on the use of different devices to find out about the news - this one isn't online yet, I don't think, but will post it if it is.
& finally... It wouldn't really capture this conference if I didn't mention that Harry Styles was staying at the hotel when we were there. He happily signed autographs for people as he lay by the pool, and was by all accounts a nice guy. If he creates that much excitement amongst 30- and 40-somethings at a 5 star hotel then I'd hate to think what happens if he ever tries to walk into a bar... He must lead a strange life. You can see some of the paparazzi pictures of him in the hotel here.
