I just received my copy of the 2009 One Show Interactive Annual. It has some great stuff of current interactive campaigns from the top creatives in the advertising industry. An example is the Axion Banner Concerts that combined the traditonal banner ad on the web and mashed it up with a live concert.
The intro has some great insights about how digital and interactive advertising is consistently changing making it hard to categorize the variety of applications. This is interesting because trying to categorize digital media forces advertisers to think in boxes rather then thinking of how to best communicate with audiences. Michael Lebowitz, the jury chair, says it best “the focus shouldn’t be on which channels we use or how many of them we fill. It’s about how people interpret and interact with them.” In my opinion this is what is exciting about interactive advertising, the idea of a more inclusive model of communication as opposed to talking at audiences. The 2009 One Show annual showcases great examples that do just that, engage audiences with exciting interactive campaigns.
Over the holiday break I have finally had some time to get some reading done. One of them was Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs (The New Rules of Social Media) by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah. It is a very cool book and a super fast read. The text gives a good overview of what’s happening with inbound marketing and is ideal for beginners to intermediate folks in the industry or who want to get started. The book begins by setting up the current environment then moves into basic overviews of using blogs, search engines and social media in your marketing efforts. Next it moves into to capturing customers and capitalizing on your marketing efforts.
I think this book gives a great overview about how and what new media can do for your marketing efforts. It is pretty basic and very prescriptive in its approach in that it gives a “do this, do this, and then do this.” Me personally I enjoy a descriptive approach with more case studies, but since it is a general overview most of the advice is right on. For me as a instructor at a university and teaching in this area I think this might make a wonderful book for students. The book offers great information and definitely worth checking out.
One of my freelance projects is designing the Impressions newsletter that is published three times a year for alumni and friends of the UNMC College of Dentistry. We recently worked to re-design the newsletter to fit into the new UNMC branding guidelines. Read more from the UNMC Branding Initiative.
After hearing and reading in NAPP’s magazine, Terry White’s Podcast, and Photoshop User TVabout it for quite awhile now, I finally broke down and purchased Adobe’s Lightroom. The first version it was hard to convenience me it was much different than Bridge. Seeing more included in the second version along with the growing number of photos I am taking made it definitely worth getting. I am most excited to tag my photos with more metadata making it easier to find certain photos. Bridge gives you the rating stars, but it is still tough to find things without know where you put them. Other features of Lightroom is the no destructive editing, the speed you can edit the photo, and the quick previews. I did get V.2 and Adobe just released the public beta of V.3 so that has me a little peeved, but this is a step in the right direction for me.
A great new campaign has been floating around on the Internet. The Fun Theory is made up of captivating videos that promote simple, fun, ways to change people’s behaviors for the better. The first video has a stairway that is a piano and it plays the notes as you step on them.
Aside for the humor and the amount people who took the stairs, these kind of campaigns are very exciting. Advertising and promotions that encourage interaction without being intrusive, in my mind, are the most effective. The old model of interrupting people’s time is both annoying and generates clutter. TV commercials, radio spots, and newspaper ads get lost in the mix by casting a large net to reach a few folks in the target market. Conversely, new media has the ability to reach people who are interested in your message. This does not mean print is dead, but it is beginning to reverse the push marketing culture to a landscape of audiences seeking out information. We already see this with Google AdSense and Facebook ads, but on some websites, such as Hulu.com, they have turned it up a notch. At the beginning of one of the shows it gave me a choice of which set of ads I would like to see throughout the program. Although this is not ideal, it is a step in the right direction for promotions to give audiences control over the messages they would like to receive. Social media, user generated content, reviews, etc. all give power to audiences by deciding what is good or bad. In turn, this gives creditability to company messages thus making it more effective and benefiting both consumer and advertiser. VW’s Fun Theory is going to be an interesting campaign to watch as well as how it will blossom into the full campaign. The videos are spreading across the Internet creating buzz…it sparked my interest enough to blog about it!
The other day we had a guest speaker at the college, Kaiser Kuo. He was at UNL speaking at the E.N. Thompson Forum and gave a great talk about the Internet in China, the usage stats and their online culture. A few highlights… he discussed how internet cafes in China are widely popular with younger crowds. This lead to a brief discussion on advertising efforts in online and P2P games. The advertising seems similar to the states, but they have large numbers of youth hanging out at these cafes gaming for hours on end. The other interesting area he discussed was the usage numbers of IM in China. It is regularly used and is an effective communication tool in their country. In the US it has faded away, but still used in tighter circles. He made a great point that the digital communication in communist China has created a forum for people to discuss issues, ideas and thoughts even with the so called “great firewall of China.” To an extent this is true for every country, more so than others, but was interesting to hear his experiences.
Kuo also talked about video sites and the high usage numbers in China. (he also works for one) His company is a mix between Hulu and YouTube. He also mentioned P2P sites that allow people to share music and video, which I read about this in FREE by Chris Anderson. It is very interesting the thoughts on “intellectual property” and copyright laws. This will definitely continue to be a topic of interest for everyone.
I teach a couple advertising classes at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and am constantly looking for better textbooks. When I review desk copies of books I always ask about digital versions or other options for students besides hard copies. Many academic texts are very expensive and are consistently replaced with newer versions. In journalism and mass communications it is necessary for our students to have access to current information. Web site, blogs, and newsletters from trade pubs are great but lack the structure for students. There are many print-on-demand, publish your own, and build your own text books, but one has a great model for future textbooks.
So I read about Flat World Knowledge which offers its text books for free that you can read online. They sell print-on-demand copies of their texts as well as mp3s of the text that you can buy per chapter or the entire book. The print books can be bought in black and white or full color. They also offer a variety of supplemental materials as well. This is cool because students can customize how they would like to interact with the text making the classroom a good place for discussion, interaction and application.
The flexibility of this service is wonderful, but on downside that I see so far is the size of the library. Currently, there are only a select few texts, but as it expands it will become quite the resource for both instructors and students.
I have been reading an excellent book by Chris Anderson, FREE: The future of radical pricing. The book describes how companies like Google can offer so much for free and the business models that are emerging from prices progressively moving closer to zero. I am not anywhere near being an economist, but the ideas create an interesting discussion. I teach in a college of journalism where this topic has become more of and issue because of the current situation with newspapers going out of business and moving online. This book fittingly is available free as an audio book.
An interesting section of FREE is the piracy chapter where Anderson tells about China and Brazil’s take on copyright. I think China has an interesting model for the music industry with 95% of the music on the market being free copies, but labels become event planners. The classic example in the US now a days is Radiohead’s In Rainbows where you buy the album online and give what you like. This in turn drives interest in the band making concerts and merchandise.
Along these lines there have been some great videos online about piracy and copyright law that I think are opening the conversation about this topic.
A documentary by Web activist and filmmaker Brett Gaylor RiP: A remix manifesto looks at issues of piracy and mash-ups. Watch it online or download it for what you think its worth!
I have a iPod Touch which continues to amuse and waste time for me, but recently I downloaded FreshGames’ Ranch Rush. One of the more entertaining games I have played on the device. I don’t consider myself much of a gamer, I did have a bunch of the Nintendos back in the day, but the Touch has filled my gaming void via a hand-held device. Anyway, Ranch Rush is entertaining in that you get orders and fill them on a farm. You get to grow, make and raise all kinds of crops and animals which the choice gets larger as you progress through the game. The orders also get progressively harder as well making the game play fast and fun. My favorite and the most addicting part is the trophy room where different tasks are required to earn rewards, which aren’t all possible to do one time through the game. There is also novice and expert modes making the longevity of the game much better compared to others I have played. Definitely worth looking into if you are in the market for a fun, entertaining farm-themed game. Even better it sounds like Ranch Rush 2 is coming soon!
I had been keeping my eye on Flickr in the back of my mind over the years as an option for sharing and backing up my photos. Facebook is nice to share with people on FB but they compress photos and don’t save the original, as do other social sites like MySpace. Anyway finally I made the jump and signed up for another “free” account and loved what I saw… upload multiple photos at a time, geo-tagging, great organization tools, and best of all it makes multiple sizes of the image. This is great because I can share with my family high res images so they can print them. The privacy features are nice giving control over who sees what. In my mind that is worth the $25 a year! Check it out…http://www.flickr.com/photos/adamwagler/
I have a background in design and technology and this blog is a colletion of thoughts, ideas, and interests. My freelance design business, Wagler Designs, has more information.
