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.
