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.
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 am not dead yet, but I do have a Master’s degree now so 2009 is just starting to exist outside of work and school.
Anyway, recently I have been reading this great book by Rebecca Lieb called “The Truth About Search Engine Optimization.” Nice quick read but jam packed with practical information about SEO. I teach a New Media Design class at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and will definitely be referencing this book and recommending it to students. It is easy to understand but also clears ups some gray areas I had about the topic. It is broken down into short sections making it a great reference book that is a great addition to any advertiser, marketer, web designer/developer, graphic design or anyone else involved with working online.
More info here, they also offer it as a PDF download which I am always excited about for classes I teach.
Through various contacts and research on other things I ran into Nxtbook Media’s website where they “find ways to leverage traditional print material for optimized use online.” It is an interesting concept and goes into the whole debate on whether print is dead. I will speak on that at a later date, but they make arguments ranging from easy online integration to environmentally friendly.
I see where they are going with this and seems like a glorified PDF or Google Book. The interface is nice and it is neat how the pages actually flip, but I think it seems like an older crowd application who are hanging onto how they read printed pieces. It is nice to have the printed layout available but there are multiple benefits to provide a web-based layout to include related materials, links, video, interactive charts, and commenting options. In other words take advantage of all the “Web 2.0″ there is some included but it is very clunky.
So I wrote a short paper about web advertising for a marketing class (see below). The text mention banner and skyscrapper ads were not effective. Although I generally agree Apple has a couple great applications of these formats.
Apple began the “Get a Mac” campaign in 2006 with a series of television commercials featuring humorous exchanges between a Mac, Justin Long and a PC, John Hodgman. The campaign also included static internet banner ads to supplement the television effort. In November 2007, they launched a new rich media advertisement on the internet which combined a banner ad across the top and a skyscraper ad along the right side of selected websites. The ad features video of the familiar characters, Mac and PC, in the skyscraper ad commenting on and interacting with the banner ad displaying an unlit sign which says “Don’t Give Up On Vista.” In the ad, PC hits a button to light up the sign but only the “Give Up” part illuminates, he hits the button again and “On Vista” lights up. He then repeatedly hits the button with these two phrases alternating on and off. The ad is a comment on the number of PC users who upgraded to Windows Vista and were unhappy with the new operating system.Clutter is mentioned in the text as a disadvantage for internet advertising with the effectiveness of banner ads on the decline. This ad builds off the popularity of the TV commercials creating good synergy and reinforcing Apples brand image. Another disadvantage it overcomes is annoyance to the user. The initial state of the ad is static with information about the new Mac computers and includes a play button where viewers have the option to view the rich media content. This technique adds to the brand image of a class, innovation, and a customer driven company who thinks of everything. The ad is a creative use of the medium which not only breaks through the clutter of online advertising, but has created a buzz with internet users seeking out the advertisement.
Hopefully to get to the other side, but evidently in Australia people wearing iPods are having trouble with the trafiic.
DDB advertising agency in Sydney, Australia and the New South Wales Police Force have released a road safety print campaign to raise awareness of the fact that teenagers are dying from crossing the road while listening to their iPods. (iPhone Savior)
Visually, think the ads are beautifully done. The play off of a chalk outline with the earbuds snaking around the victim. It reminds me a lot of Melanie Pullen’s “High Fashion Crime Scenes“, which is some amazing photography emitting a sober feeling will viewed similar to these ads. Here are some of the ads from DDB.
