Thursday, July 29, 2010

Audi: Augmented Reality Calendar

Presenting the world’s first car calendar…without the cars. Great Augmented reality stuff by the guys at Audi and Razorfish

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The 73,000 Bar Tab

Innovative campaign by Ogilvy Brazil to educate people about the cost of drink driving!

Check out the video:

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Monday, July 26, 2010

Friday, July 23, 2010

Pilot Handwriting

How cool is this! Write by hand on your computer! The guys at Pilot Pens have developed an application that turns your handwriting into a digital font which you can use to send handwritten e-mails to your friends.

www.pilothandwriting.com

Check out the video below.

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What if money grew on trees?

Interesting campaign by Rabobank Australia. RaboDirect sponsored a ground breaking experiment to see how Australians really react when presented with the ultimate financial fantasy - a money tree!

RaboDirect's mission is to wake up people's lazy money because over the last year Australians missed out on $4.7 Billion in interest on their savings by leaving it in accounts that pay little or no interest. This is what led the experiment. If people ignore money in their account they can't see, do they also ignore money they can see and touch?

They secretly filmed people as they passed by a tree covered in $5 notes and asked a psychologist and financial decision-making expert to monitor and analyse responses.

Check out this video of the experiment:

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Thursday, July 15, 2010

The Social Media Revolution

Just to put things in perspective. This is the new and update version from the original video.

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Wednesday, July 14, 2010

AT&T Augmented Reality Soccer Game - Banner Ad

This is a really cool showcase of an Augmented Reality Soccer Game that ran within a banner ad on ESPN.com.

BBDO and Zoic Studios created a game for AT&T that uses our proprietary motion capture technology (ZugMO) to allow people with a webcam to "head in" corner kicks. Take a look at the video below

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Tuesday, July 13, 2010

The Impossible Brief

This is a pretty cool crowdsourcing campaign by Saatchi & Saatchi. Think you can solve the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict?

Submit your idea at www.theimpossiblebrief.com

Posted via email from The Digital Marketer

Sunday, July 11, 2010

Latest Social Media Stats from Asia

This video from Thomas Crampton/Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence pulls together the latest stats on Social Media from across APAC.

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Friday, July 02, 2010

How To Do Digital Planning

This is a great article by Iain Tait on what’s required of a digital planner in terms of qualities and skill sets. He lists down 10 things that every good/decent digital planner needs. Original post available at http://www.crackunit.com/2007/11/28/how-to-do-digital-planning/

Be good at cutting and pasting

If you’ve ever set up a blog or or a MySpace page you’ll probably have seen funny code knocking around the place. You shouldn’t be scared of this stuff. As the web keeps evolving to become more open and customisable the ability to copy and paste odd looking bits of code from one place to another increases in value.

At it’s most basic level knowing how to customise a feed or add a widget to a blog will at least give you some appreciation of the building blocks of the web. Kind of like Lego is to engineering.

In lots of ways this act of copying and pasting funny geek code from one place to another is a useful proxy for what digital planners need to do all the time. I’m not talking about lifting people’s ideas or ripping them off, I’m talking about applying principles and techniques in a variety of seemingly disconnected places.

I’m guessing at this point some people will be bursting to say things like – “this is all too geeky, you don’t need to know how a car works to be able to drive”. And that’s true. But if your job was designing and selling cars to people, you might find it useful to know how the different bit of a car fit together. And everyone ought to know how to change sparkplugs and tyres right?

Be able to deconstruct the craft

You don’t need to be able to do all of it. But it’s really important that you understand it and can talk about it semi-convincingly.

What is this it of which I speak?

It is the craft of making really good and interesting interactive stuff.

It is made from all kinds of things. Graphic design, programming, information architecture, experience design, typography, HCI, good writing, databases, video production, game design, e-commerce, networks, devices…

Be good at knowing why something is good or bad. There’s a lot of very bad stuff that looks very good out there. And a lot of amazing things that look like shit. You need to be able to see through the veneer and be able to judge things on a different level.

If there was one bit of the craft that I think is super-important for planners to understand it’s user experience. It encapsulates a lot of what we should be concerned about in terms of making things that work for an audience.

Be able to expand (and contract) to fill the space available

There isn’t digital planner shaped hole.

On some jobs it’ll be much bigger than others.

Sometimes you might be the lead strategist on a big paradigm shifting pure play turnkey web commerce integration project, where part of your job is helping a client figure out how and why their business exists.

This requires a different way of thinking and being from an ‘online advertising’ project where your role might be to convince the Cheezy-Puffs client that the idea that they’ve been presented about building a Cheezy Radio Station on Puff Island in Second Life and Podcasting the shows into Facebook might not be exactly the right thing to do. This time.

Then of course you’ll have to deal with the fallout of sabotaging the idea (from whoever it was that came up with it in the first place)…

Other times you’ll be part of a multi-agency team working alongside a number of other really good planners. In these cases it can be best to wind your neck in a bit and focus on the skills you’ve got that complement the rest of the team. And just skip over the ritual of intellectual posturing and corner-pissing nonsense that you’re meant to go through. It’s just a bit boring and pointless.

Be able to be big, and be able to be smaller too.

Be a good, and patient, educator

When you’re dealing with lots of new stuff that isn’t particularly well understood you need to be able to explain complex things to people. And do it in a way that’s simple (but not patronising), accessible (but not dumbed-down) and effective (but not overly salesy).

That’s a hard thing to do.

But then you have to do it, over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. And be as enthusiastic and interested as you were the first time around.

“Right, this Internet thing, it’s basically a bunch of computers…”

Be a cyber-optimist and a hyper-cynic

You’re the person that everyone expects to be really excited by, and interested in, the latest gizmos, widgets and whatnot. And you should be. But at the same time you have to be the one that is able to see beyond the hype and have a critical view on whether it’s just another passing fad or something that we should all care about.

Sometimes you’ll back the wrong horse. We all do. But just as long as you’re backing the horse for the right reasons that’s the best you can be expected to do.

Use the forces of geekdom

Geeks are cool. Well, at least a bit cooler than they used to be.

What is it that planners need to learn from geeks? Maybe it’s passion. Or an obsessive attention to detail. Or is it a drive to understand the how and the why of stuff. I’m not really sure. But there’s an interesting strand of geekism that feels very real, very tangible and very very useful.

There’s something about a need to take stuff to pieces and put it back together again that links the minds of geeks and planners I reckon.

Don’t hate business, it’s your friend

If you’re in ‘the game’ because you want to make film or art then making digital stuff can often drift even further away from your goal than doing traditional advertising.

There’s still a need to create desire and make beautiful things . And there’s lots of amazing digital ‘art’ that gets made in our world. Some of it in the name of art, some in the name of marketing.

But a lot of the projects where we’re really able to add value are things where we get to optimise businesses. Creating revenue opportunities. Selling more stuff. Driving efficiencies. Reducing waste. Things you might find tedious and hateful if you’re in denial about how and why you get paid.

Of course you can have ethics. And lots of the really interesting things that digital enables is rooted in empowering small businesses and creating a level commercial playing field.

But let’s be really clear, digital is not just about creating fascinating communications, it’s about how you can help business end-to-end.

Do things, make stuff

There’s a bunch of plannery mantras in circulation around doing stuff. Whether it’s ‘act don’t say’, ‘always in beta’, ‘embrace failure’ or any variant of this kind of thing. It’s all pointing in the same direction. You should get out there and do things rather than just banging on about them.

And yes, a blog counts as doing something. But no. You don’t have to have a blog to be a planner. Not yet anyway.

Be Non-Stick and Wipe-Kleen

If you’re out there experimenting and doing new stuff, chances are you’ll fail from time to time. No one likes to fail. But some people are much better at failing than others. It’s natural to be gutted if something doesn’t work as well in the real/virutual world as it did in your head.

But if you’re the kind of person that bangs their head against stuff when you don’t win, your temperament might not be exactly right for a game where the things that don’t work are as important as the ones that do.

Say sorry. Explain to yourself and others why it failed. Learn from the failure. Try not to repeat the same failure again. Dust yourself down. Move on.

(This point was inspired by someone at an above the line agency we work with who reportedly referred to our agency as ‘Teflon Poke‘)

Love what you do

Do what you’re doing for the right reasons. In interviews the thing I try to figure out above anything else is whether or not the person I’m seeing actually loves what they’re doing. If they’re in the game because they’re really excited and passionate about it then they’ll learn new things (because they can’t help themselves). If they’re in it because they think it’s a career opportunity or they fancy a change of scene you’re all in for a much rougher ride.

If you’re in ‘digital planning’ for fame, money, groupies and adoration, you’re in the wrong business. Well until next summer anyway.

And isn’t it much nicer when you work with people who love what they do. It’s the kind of thing it’s hard not to fall for.

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How Google Works

Great infographic about how Google works

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Thursday, July 01, 2010

Rethinking the Creative Brief

This is an interesting and insightful deck on how to rethink the creative brief – From what it means, to how to make it better. Kudos to Jasmin Cheng (@min_o) for this great work.