Tag: Google

What Advertising Can Learn From Radiohead

I wasn’t going to blog about the House of Cards video and it’s brilliant integration with Google and the geekosphere. I wasn’t going to blog it because everyone else has. It is bloody brilliant though. Yet another example of how Radiohead really understand the importance of context.

So I wasn’t going to post it, then I realised it’s a golden opportunity for me to share a presentation I did at the Online Marketing and Media Show last month. I got invited by NMA to talk on a Creative Directors Showcase thingy. Me, Flo from Dare, Sam from Lean Mean Fighting Machine and Dom from Glue all got to chat about things we’ve seen recently that we like. The other guys all did a great job and showed us lots of cool online / mobile advertising things.

Instead of doing it on something that I liked, I chose to do 5 minutes on Radiohead ;-)

Basically it’s all about how I don’t like Radiohead, but how, through being interesting and innovative, they’ve made me like the ‘idea’ of Radiohead. Imagine if normal brands could do that. Make you care about products you don’t even like that much. I reckon there’s stuff we can learn from the ‘head.

I tried to format it for online video as best as I could (I added some extra words so it can be followed without me speaking, and I put some music in it to stop it feeling too silent) – but I’m not good enough at that kind of thing to make all the timings quite right, so please forgive any bits that feel too slow or too fast.

I hope no-one minds that I used their footage in there. I specifically use the examples of:

I’ve just noticed that Radiohead are a bit shit at search engine optimisiation though. With page titles like this:

RA DIOHEA_D / HOU SE OF_C ARDS – Google Code

How is anyone supposed to find them. Like anyone will look for all those spaces and underscores ;-)

Admission: I really posted this because I had an odd experience in the pub on Tuesday night, a bloke approached me and asked if I’d done a presentation on Radiohead. He’d seem me do it. Live. I felt almost famous. For a second.

Google Maps Gets Better and Better

Brighton_Map

Maybe I’ve just been using the internet with my eyes half shut. And I’ve no idea how long it’s been there for. But the overlaying of photos and Wikipedia entries to the standard Google Maps offering is really nice.

One Of The Greatest Quotes Ever…

It’s nice to be back…

TV is not vulgar and prurient and dumb because the people who compose the audience are vulgar and dumb. Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests.

David Foster Wallace

From this hugely useful presentation: Best Practices for Spreading Your App without Ruining the User Experience

It’s not a pretty presentation but it contains some absolutely corking soundbytes:

Before you plan your business model make sure you have a pleasure model

And:

If you behave like a disease, people develop an immune system

It’s definitely worth setting aside a bit of time for:

Or you can get the slides here if you prefer it that way.

There’s loads more fantastic presentations from the Google I/O Sessions here, a lot of them are quite tech-biased, but don’t let that stop you.

Thanks to Knotty for pointing to the treasure trove.

Google Ads Phishing

Got this today:

Damn them. It’s a fake that leads to a well disguised Chinese phishing site. Looks like it’s been happening quite a bit. The copy is slightly different but the technique is similar.

Then I got sucked into reading about Fast-flux and soon entered the dark netherworld of botnets and malware. I’d forgotten how sci-fi scary that world gets.

Google Visualisation Gadgets – Cool

I discovered the world of visualisation gadgets through this excellent blog: http://digitalurban.blogspot.com/

They’re things that can basically turn a table full of boring data into interactive gadgets that you can publish and share as you like.

I thought it looked easy. So I tried it out.

I grabbed some European Internet Population data from here. Copied and pasted it into Google Docs (via an Excel html import). Then added a column of country codes from here.

Then just clicked insert gadget and bosh…

It took about 15 minutes total to create something mildly useful. I’ve probably not picked the best information to display in this way – and the data is incomplete. But I was impressed with how simple it was.

There’s lots more types of gadgets – timelines, charts, and all sorts…

You can read documentation of the heatmap gadget here.
The data source is here.

What a Wonk

Following on from the post about URLs out, searches in.

According to Ad Week: W+K in NY have hired a search dude (By the way I’m not suggesting a causal relation between my blog post and the hiring before anyone thinks I’m being a total knob).

Search is something so deeply ingrained in most peoples’ online experiences that there has to be more interesting and creative ways to use it – over and above what we’ve seen so far. It’ll be interesting to see what happens when you put great search people and creative agencies together. It’s something I’ve always wanted to have a go at…

Back to the article… The closing line has to be one of the best I’ve ever seen:

“He knows the nuts and bolts,” said Gleeson. “You can get him in a room of search wonks and he can more than represent. Beyond that, he’s a good strategist and creative thinker.”

I’d never heard the term wonk before. And I don’t know what it means to ‘more than represent’, but it sounds pretty damn good. So I looked up wonk and found it:

wonk (wongk) noun
An expert who studies a subject or issue thoroughly and excessively.

When I grow up I wanna be a wonk!

URLs Out – Searches In

I was watching TV last night and an ad came on for continuing education. It’s one with fingers walking around the place. The ad was OK. I didn’t really pay much attention. But at the end of the ad the call to action was – “search for EMA online”. Not visit direct.gov.uk/ema or what you’d normally get, but just search for EMA online.

So I tried it. And it worked.

On Google both top natural search listing and the sponsored link would have taken me to the right place. On Live search and Yahoo.com the right link was the sponsored top link as well as being number 2 in natural search (not perfect, but good enough).

Then a couple of minutes later I stumbled on this article (via: BoingBoing) about how in Japanese advertising the use of search terms in posters is really kicking off. I quite like how they’re integrating a search box with a suggested search term into their ads.

search_jp2
search_jp

Visit http://www.cabel.name to read the whole thing and see more pictures.

It does seem like a potentially smart way to go now that most of the short and memorable domain names with any meaning have been scooped up. But making sure you’ve got the right people looking after your search engine optimisiation / marketing stuff is EVEN more important than it was yesterday.

Is It Broken?

Brilliantly simple.

We’ve all had those moments when a site’s not working. And you wonder, is it down for everyone or just me? http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/
answers the question for you.

You enter a URL and it tells you.

Smashing.

I did do a double take on the Google ad served up in the bottom right of the results page though! Yowza!

Pissing Contests

I seem to be witnessing more and more intellectual pissing competitions these days. And it’s not just in planner-land, although that’s where I’ve witnessed some of the ‘best’ ones. I’ve seen a few good technical ones, and even designers seem to be getting in on the act.

So how do you spot when the transition between conversation/discussion and pissing match occurs? Typically the conversation will start to move from being a group thing to being dominated by 2/3 members of the group. These people will become the players.

One the players have been established they take it in turns to metaphorically piss higher up the wall than each other. Most of the games I’ve witnessed have been about rather esoteric matters. I guess there’s no fun in facts.

Pissing competition tips:

  1. As a player you might get be having fun. And it’s fine to play with friends in private. But in public it’s not a great thing to be seen doing. It makes you look like a tit.
  2. If you accidentally get drawn into a match, make your best shot fast and early. If you don’t slay the opposition with your first or second go, realise that they’re involved in a war of attrition and retire to a safe distance to minimise splashback.
  3. Games can span multiple meetings – sometimes you’ll have to endure the same players spraying again and again. If possible try to move their ‘game’ into their own separate environment.
  4. Ultimately everyone ends up covered in urine (even innocent bystanders).

Or maybe I’m imagining it all.

Anyone else got any thoughts on Intellectual Pissings? (If I ever make an album I think I might call it Intellectual Pissings, I quite like it).

Image from Geoff (not sure what the etiquette is about using images from Picassa pubic galleries – hope he doesn’t mind).