Three Minds On Digital Marketing @ Organic

Earlier this year I wrote about the initial press for Joost.  With a few minor complaints (text gets cut off in search, advanced search option needed, widgets need work), the interface is really spectcaular.

Here are some sample screenshots.

Two things are needed for Joost to really fly when it finally launches

1. More content providers to come onboard
2. Better video quality

• Currently viewing full monitor video leaves a lot to be desired...
• Blocking and compression artifacts have a large impact on viewing experience
• However when the view screen is reduced to the standard 640X480 view area quality is on par with Quicktime.

Jim Bachalo

I found ustream.tv over the weekend from one of the justin.tv chat rooms. It’s basically another community site + webcams, but what’s cool is that they stream some concerts as well, I guess like AOL.

You can also record and share your broadcast, and you don’t have to be a member to watch some of the streams.  They allow you to setup your own chat rooms, and if need be, you can make it password protected.

I have mine setup at home so I can check on my room, make sure my roommates are not snooping around my things! :)

James Ellis

Jonathan Harris, whose earlier project WeFeelFine.org analyzes blogs for the occurrence of the phrase “I feel ..” recently launched his latest project: Universe.   

The  interface navigates through information based on it’s information-ness as opposed to it’s page-ness.  He explains this more articulately in this video on Coolhunting.

Charlie Zicari

The 32nd America’s Cup starts today in Valencia (well the last of the preliminary rounds anyway). There are 12 teams from the US, Switzerland (defending), France, Italy, Sweden, France, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, the hosts Spain and first ever entries from China and South Africa.

The web sites supporting the events and the team sites are a little disappointing. Sailing is poor as a spectator sport so you hardly get to see it on TV. For sailing junkies like me, the web sites are often the only way to see highlights, track races and keep up with the news. It was especially frustrating to learn that to watch videos and race-tracking animations I have to pay $39.99 for the duration of the event. You can watch a demo, but frankly, it feels like a rip-off.

The one shining light online in the whole thing is Team Shosholoza, the South African entry. It’s an inspiring story and the web site is far and away the best of the bunch. It’s immersive, the navigation is simple and the photography is stunning. I hope they win the whole thing.

And the Brits haven’t got an entry so Go Shosholoza!

Adam Turinas

Great post on Buzzmachine about Dell’s blog Ideastorm.  It’s a great story about how being open, honest and responsive to a problem has helped to earn back the trust of its user base. If any company needs to do that, Dell is a poster boy.

The customer in question, Jeff Jarvis, was very unhappy, very loud and unfortunately for Dell a very influential blogger. They ignored his complaint, he blogged about it and thousands piled on after him. Dell is under new management, well actually old new management, as Michael Dell is back in charge. Part of the turnaround seems to be a mission to reconnect with their customers.

This post tells the story about how they are using their blog to do it.

Adam Turinas

Check this brand new online luxury retailer out www.20ltd.com.  According to this "etailer of authentic, ingenious, beautiful and unexpected things," all items are exclusive to 20ltd.  As soon as a product is sold out, it’s replaced by a new object of desire.  The site design is very clean.

Mike Felkey

This morning I came across a link to this NY Times op-ed on the strange, destructive business decisions made by the recording industry as it attempted to deal with online competition over the last ten years.  It's a great, succinct piece of history, and one that hits close to home for someone like me that actually orders CD's online (as opposed to just purchasing the files) because I love the ritual of opening a new, physical object.

It also makes me think about the auto industry and the changes that may happen as small innovative start-ups as well as open-source, distributed design move beyond software and simple consumer products into more complicated manufactured goods.  Think the XPrize Competition for super efficient cars or the Dutch Open-Source Hydrogen Car.

At yesterday's DaimlerChrysler shareholder's meeting, CEO Dieter Zetsche had this to say about the impact of new technologies on the automotive industry:

"The crucial factor was the unforeseeable shift in demand to smaller, more fuel-efficient vehicles triggered by increased gas prices in the U.S.," Zetsche said. "The Chrysler Group, whose traditional strengths include minivans, pickups and SUVs, was particularly affected by this development." (emphasis mine)

To me, this reinforces the notion that while it is important for us to help our clients understand how new technologies and forms of social interaction impact their marketing initiativess, it is critical to our long-term symbiotic relationship that we also help them understand the implication of these changes on their business as a whole.

Christian Dodd

Just came across the Ford Escape launch site, overall the experience is very well conceived and executed.  Storyline is consistent, but not overkill, throughout the experience.  Banners reveal just enough to draw you in and are contextually relevant.  User clicks through to an entertaining landing page which leads to a microsite that has a good mix of entertainment value and product features.

Check it out at:

www.boredomhurts.com

Russ Hopkinson

Luckily, I checked out the new Wieden + Kennedy site before reading their blog post which introduced it.

The comments are remarkably polarized - the simplicity of the old site against the technicolor tag cloud of the present.

Definitely the new one for me.

The home page is a bit intimidating, but the new scheme pays itself off in spades once you get a little familiar with it.

Love the way the list of clients builds, the way the "work" looks and how when you pull up a specific office, the relational cloud of topics loads in the background.

Virtual Thesaurus, eat your heart out.

Dan Sicko

We met with the social media pros at Technorati, who are helping their advertisers create some exceptional campaigns.  Specifically, innovative advertisers are utilizing their core social media offerings such as blog syndication and community features to create “participatory advertising.”   

One creative example they shared with us was for the movie, “Shut Up and Sing,” where users could submit an opinion (i.e. blog) about freedom of speech within an ad unit, which then automatically populated on the film’s MySpace page.

Another interesting example was a syndication deal they developed with VW in Japan.  For the launch of their Cross Polo car, VW created a site containing bubbles which linked out to personal blogs about the car, thus adding elements of community and buzz.

Cool stuff!

Chris Portella

Of all the “Internet is TV” promises heard over the past few years, Joost is the closest I’ve seen so far to the real thing. After finally receiving my beta test invite (sorry, I don't have any invites left), I’ve had a weekend to try it for myself, and I’m pretty impressed with what I see.

The channel guide is cleanly broken down by title as well as genre, and is of course searchable. The interface is completely transparent and disappears soon after a video starts. The star of the show is of course the full motion, full screen video, which looks pretty good on my MacBook, though it could be a bit annoying to watch on anything larger. It has a channel chat feature (which I could care less about, but some will find it cool), some widget thingies like an RSS news feed and a clock that you can pin to your screen to keep track of how much time you've been wasting spent.

I watched the first episode of Comedy Central’s Stella, some music videos, an indie flick, and last night caught a National Geographic nature show and an episode of Rocky & Bullwinkle with my kid. Something for everyone.

It’s still in beta so a lot of things need to be worked out. I experienced a lot of lagging, stuttering video and in some cases programs became unavailable halfway through watching them. I’d of course love to see more channels and more content (some UGC, perhaps?). I’m sure it’s going to become an advertiser’s dream once the community is built.

Follow-up to “Your Morning Joost” and "Joost First Impressons"

Daniel Modell

Twitter mania is here.  In fact, you know it's gone mainstream because (a) it's in the Wall Street Journal  (b) early adopters have already decided it's over.  To recap, Twitter is a service that combines IMing, social networking and mobile technology. Twitter members use their PCs or a cellphone to send short messages about their whereabouts and what they're doing.  The messages are broadcast to everyone in a Twitter member's network.  Unlike texting, there's a cap on the number of characters allowed, but no limits on the number of messages you can send.   

It's useless and addictive.

But it's easy to dismiss Twitter until you place it in the wider context of youth trends. Twitter, Google-owned Dodgeball, and Finnish newcomer Jaiku are all part of a growing presence broadcasting or lifestreaming trend.  Flickr, MySpace, and even blogging can be considered part of the same phenomenon.  For today's teens and twenty-somethings, you are less defined by your consumption habits, and more the sum-total of your digital footprint.  I blog, therefore I am.  Sites like Twitter strike me as merely the first salvo in the evolution of tools that allow for continuous public self-expression.

Misha Cornes

I saw a very interesting integrated campaign last night on the CW network that was designed specifically to foil ad-skipping.  Several of the commercial breaks during The Search for the Next Doll reality show bled directly into infotainment-style interviews with the contestants, sponsored by Caress shampoo. 

In an added twist, Caress developed a separate story-line featuring a ballet dancer teaching a linebacker to waltz, a nod to ABC's smash Dancing with the Stars.  The commerical ends and viewers have to go to the CW site to watch the rest of the episode.

There is a little bit too much going on for the campaign to be total success.  The Caress content is written in the classic bland housewife's (C)PG fantasy style, which will seem incredible dull to the CW's young female audience, especially when contrasted with the racy content of the show.  It's narrated by Kate Walsh from Grey's Anatomy, but using a voiceover inspired by Wysteria Lane. And it looks like Unilever couldn't get CW to show the Caress URL in their own spot - the viewer is driven to the CW site and you have to dig around to find the link.

But overall it succeeded in that I stopped the Tivo and actually watched the spots.

Misha Cornes

Actual directions from New York City to Paris, France on Google Maps.

Read line #23

Angela Di Pietro

Anyone remember the Max Headroom Show?  In this Reagan-era sci-fi exploration, one of the plot lines introduced blipverts, a new high-intensity television commerical which had the unfortunate side effect of overloading the nervous systems of certain viewers.

Now media saturation and Tivo are making blipverts real.  The Fox network is introducing a series of eight-second shorts featuring Oleg The Taxi Man, a Greek computer-rendered New York cabbie.  Oleg's clips will play between shows, and their quirky appeal is specifically designed to foil ad-skipping.  According to AdAge, Fox is the first major network to experiment with original content as part of its commercial programming.

Interestingly, it's an agency, not the network, that's creating the "spots".  Here's Ideocracy chief Ted D'Cruz-Young:

"Our objective is simple -- we want to change the form and function of the commercial break.  No network would ever sign a deal with an ad agency to create content for commercial breaks -- it's church and state stuff.  I think what we have achieved is truly unique."

The content is peculiar, arresting and somehow familar.  Because it draws on certain ethnic stereotypes, I imagine it will draw the ire of Greek-American interest groups berfore too long.  But overall very interesting work that has potential to grow into its own franchise.

Misha Cornes

We have five free passes to give away, courtesy of the organizers. The Future of Online Advertising takes place June 7-8th.  Unfortunately I can't be there, but you can expect several folks from Organic's New York office as well as a strong line-up of speakers.

The tickets are $895 face-value, so I want to be somewhat equitable.  In you're interested and know you can attend, drop me line (s ub m it  at o rg a ni c d ot co m) with your prediction for the most important digital trend that will mainstream by 2010.  I'll select the most thought-provoking answers as winners and post all the responses to ThreeMinds.

The results are in and we've picked five winners.  Thanks everyone for your comments.   Here's a compilation (PDF) of what you had to say.

Misha Cornes

Kiva is a platform that links small scale lenders with entrepreneurs in developing countries.  For as little as $25, you can invest in a bakery in Kabul, a rice farm in Ecuador, or a dry goods store in Fiji. 

That's right, invest, not donate.  You too can be a banker to the poor.  So-called microlending was first developed to combat poverty in Pakistan by Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus, founder of the Grameen Bank.  The site uses the aggregation qualities of the Internet to bring microlending to the masses.  Like the Grameen model, 100% of the loan amount goes to the receipients.

Putting my web marketing hat back on for a minute,  I admire the way the site puts the customer at the center of the experience.  It features investor profiles alongside details of each investment opportunity, which are obviously real and sometimes quite droll.

Very worthwhile on several levels.

Misha Cornes

How do you create a branded entertainment site for car floor mats?  Ask Milliken Mills . 

www.splatthemat.com

This is way more fun than it should be.

Misha Cornes

Hot on the heels of Adobe's Apollo, Microsoft releases Silverlight, a cross-platform, cross-browser web client runtime for delivering the next generation of media experiences and rich interactive applications.

Download the plugin:
http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/downloads.aspx

More info:
http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/default_01.aspx

Yee Peng Chia

Last week I gave a lecture at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business.   A former professor asked me to speak to her Integrated Marketing Communications class, and I spent some time talking to them about trends in user-centric design, inter-agency collaboration, and a view of the agency world from the MBA perspective.  It's always fun to meet with students, and it was great to be back at my alma mater on a sunny Berkeley afternoon.

I think most students see themselves as brand managers, not ad professionals, and it was great to have an engaging and frank discussion with a bunch of smart future clients.  Among their more interesting questions:

• Can the the interactive channel could hold its own as the center of a marketing campaign? (Yes.  I pointed them to the Jeep Patriot Adventure and Mudds campaigns)
• Should we take a best-of-breed or one-stop shop approach to agency hiring? (Depends.  I think the more engaged a brand's customers are, the more important it is to hire specialists who are experts in their channel.  The Nike/ Weiden & Kennedy split is a prime example of a great ad agency that is not equipped to handle the digital medium.)
• How can we get more into user-generated campaign ideas without giving up control of the brand? (Oy.  There's basically an inverse relationship between your willingness to experiment/ let go and how excited consumers are going to get about your campaign.  Strike a balance between no control (Chevy Tahoe) and no fun (Nissan Sentra).

You can view the slide presentation here.

Misha Cornes

Last week’s news around Google acquiring DoubleClick has created a plethora of water cooler talk here at Organic.  Is it a good thing? Is it a bad thing? Overall, it could be an amazing step forward for Google if they don’t muck it up.

On paper, the combined company has the ability to offer advertisers a centralized view of their data across search, display and rich media banners, video, and any click based tracking (newsletters, textlinks, etc.). This is a very compelling story. Hopefully, they continue to innovate and provide new insight into the serving of ads.

Examples of this could be the serving of pre-roll video for impression (and interaction) tracking or view-through tracking on search. View-through tracking could basically showcase the branding impact of search by providing data on how many people saw a search ad, did NOT click, and then later came back and took an action. As this group reflects around 80% of the users exposed to a campaign, it is a very desireable metric to track.

Since Google has been giving away ad-serving for free over the past view years (while not accepting other ad-servers' tags), this deal is also spelling the end of paid ad-serving. Look for Google to eventually make this a free offering with a charge for Analytics and assistance in pulling/sorting campaign data. The ball is now in the court of Atlas and 24/7 to respond with additional service offerings.

Some of you may be familiar with Chicago Public Radio's weekly show This American Life hosted by Ira Glass.

The program, nearly 15 years running, is an intimate, quirky, hour-long exploration made up stories based on a common theme. Some segments include an improbable love story between an Iraqi prisoner of war and a U.S. soldier, an unknown rock band greeted by obsessed fans at its New York debut show, and more recently, the sudden instant stardom of John Hodgman, the PC in the Apple ad campaign.  It's the kind of show that keeps you sitting in your car, listening intently, well after arriving at your intended destination.

Now, This American Life has been transformed into a 30-minute television show on Showtime: the debut was on March 22. It's actually quite amazing. The TV show does things a little differently–instead of constant narration, the show gives space to both the audio and the visuals. It relies primarily on stationary cameras and wide shots, creating a rich cinematic feel rather than a hand-held documentary look. The intent was to create a TV show that feels the same as the radio show. Nearly the only time that Ira Glass appears on camera is during the segment introduction, where he sits behind a wooden desk in front of an actual location, such as a barren desert, a power plant or the side of a mountain. Regular listeners of the radio show may be familiar with the segments in the first episode as they were filmed in conjunction with the radio show to make the pilot.

If you're not a cable subscriber, you can still catch clips on the Showtime site, or on the trusty YouTube.

There is also an interview with Ira Glass on Charlie Rose here.

Virginia Alber-Glanstaetten, Roger Wong and Daniel Modell

Exceptionally sweet mini-site (read: excessive) by Honda...

Great, unobtrusive menu and a lot of screen real-estate make this site feel great.
The price: long, annoying loading time.

Indulge at: http://www.crvrussia.ru

Lawrence Ardelean

Nike has built a quick ad campaign on the controversy surrounding the firing of radio personality Don Imus.

The print ad ran as a full-page in Sunday's New York Times, and the message is repeated on Nike.com

Does this come across as courageous way to focus on lingering issues of racism and sexism, or as exploitation by a cynical marketer?

Misha Cornes

I've recently gotten into LaLa.com, a social networking site where people can trade used CDs.

The premise is pretty simple. You log your CD collection into your personal "Have List"; this adds your CDs to LaLa's database which allows other members to see your music. In turn, you can peruse other members' CDs and request them in your "Want List".  When a user request one of your CDs, you just pop the disc and artwork into a Netflix-style envelope and voila, you've rid yourself of one more CD from your collection.

The process isn't as instantaneous as downloading music from Itunes, but I've requested CDs and gotten them in a day or two. Not to mention the fact that the price for a full soundtrack is only a dollar ($0.20 of the purchase price goes back to the artist on every trade).

So go ahead and purge/replenish your music collection.  It's addictive!

Angela Di Pietro

Scott Kraft the CMO of Sixapart is a very clever man and it pays to listen to him. One of his friends, Steve Sando, is the founder of Rancho Gordo.  They sell rare organically grown beans that you can’t get anywhere else and they have become a big hit with upscale restaurants in the Bay Area. There is a lovely story about how they got started.

Initially, their online sales were small and Scott suggested that a blog might help create new customer relationships in increase sales. Steve was very skeptical but Scott convinced him to give it a try. He asked him to blog for two months. He helped him set up the blog and gave him some very specific advice on what he needed to do. Here it is:

• Don't write too much. A paragraph or two per post is sufficient
• Posts don't need to be profound - just informative
• You must post at least 3x/week
• Always include at least one picture or video in a post
• Include at least 2 external links in any post and inform the people you're linking to - don't ask for anything from them, just let them know
• Turn on all of the publicity feeds in your account settings ·         Use categories (eventually tags) ·         Think about what you want to be known for and write about that often - in Sando's case: cooking beans
• Turn comments on and answer all of them in the beginning
• Do a blogroll of all your favorites
• Include a bookroll  of all your favorites
• If you have an existing site, e.g, an estore, link to it
• None of this should take more than a few hours a week

We’ve been talking a lot about infographics in the New York office lately: mostly about how we think they’re cool and fun and we really want to use them in more campaigns.

But today I stumbled across this art exhibit that combines photography and infographics to make a statement about American consumption and spending that’s a little more than just “cool” and “fun”.  I normally shy away from political art because it so often seems to be at the sacrifice of aesthetics, but in this case the way the pieces look has been considered as carefully as the messages they portray, and the artist allows the numbers to speak for themselves rather than flinging preachy messages at the viewer.  It’s a simple, clever way to convey a lot of difficult information with an image and just a few words – exactly what I feel like we should be striving for in our work.

Without further ado:

http://www.chrisjordan.com

Anna Hecker

Artist and author Miranda July proves that there's still a place for creative whimsy when it comes to promoting yourself online.

You may think that taking a lo-fi approach is strictly for students, but Miranda is accomplished film director (a prize-winner at Cannes for Me, You, and Everyone We Know), musician, and performance artist. Respect. (thanks to Alexandra Leh)

Misha Cornes

Apparently Google has decided to rebrand  the Froogle offering as "Google Product Search".    No need to fear the Google Product Search just yet as it seems to have all of the same features as the Froogle offering.  But it is streamlined to a certain degree.  The Froogle search pages for example would display more detailed search options in the top left corner of the browser ( under $100, $150-$200, etc…).  These are now relocated to the bottom of the screen.   Additionally Google touts the tighter integration with the  Google Checkout to provide quicker and more secure checkouts.  Beyond that however most people won’t notice much difference.

Could this rebranding be a mistake?  I guess time will tell…

Sam Chesterman

About a year before they came up with the internet, two guys from ARPA got together and started writing about computers as communications and social networking tools.

It's kinda neat to read that 40 years ago, people were already writing bits like:

A communication system should make a positive contribution to the discovery and arousal of interests."

"What will on-line interactive communities be like?  In most fields they will consist of geographically separated members, sometimes grouped in small clusters and sometimes working individually. They will be communities not of common location, but of common interest."

"At a project meeting held through a computer, you can thumb through the speaker’s primary data without interrupting him to substantiate or explain."

"To appreciate the importance [sic] the new computer-aided communication can have, one must consider the dynamics of 'critical mass,' as it applies to cooperation in creative endeavor."

It's also funny because throughout, there are cartoons and "technical terms" such as "mice" are in quotes.

David Freedman

MTV just relaunched, and took it back a notch:

http://www.mtv.com/

I dunno if you were familiar with it before, but they latched onto flash as early adopters, and went overboard with it. There were videos, there were ads, there was music. It was icky. The new site reminds me of OG MTV - refresh the page to see the background and logo change. Good stuff.

Forever 21,

Kelley Barry

The real world is not enough.  Who wants to play with a real toy when you can play with a virtual one?  We've long believed that most products ultimately will  have virtual extensions as companies try to satiate consumers' desire for experience.

From AP:

The nation's No. 1 toymaker on Thursday unveiled Barbie Girls, a multi-pronged brand that features a free Web site, BarbieGirls.com, that will allow children to create their own virtual characters, design their own room and try on clothes at a cyber mall. This summer, Mattel will introduce a Barbie-inspired handheld MP3 music device to interact with the Web site and unlock even more content.

Read more at Forbes.com.

Mark Kingdon

Bobby Neel Adams is a Brooklyn-based photographic artist. As his bio says, a lot of his work "addresses the transformation of the human body by aging and circumstance". Some of his best work, I think, has been what he calls "Age Maps", which are two photographs of the same person from different periods of time (child and adult).

http://www.bobbyneeladams.com/

Dave Sylvestre

During World War II, an enterprising Texas food broker named Gordon Harwell supplied cooked rice to overseas troops under the brand name Converted Rice. After the war, Harwell rebranded the enterprise by pairing his product with an image and a name that have induced a lot of cringes over the years. Allegedly inspired by a Houston-area rice farmer named Ben, Gordon’s 1946 dinner with a friend would supply the infamous image: a picture of the restaurant’s maitre d’, Frank Brown. Thus was born Uncle Ben’s Converted Rice.

So, 60 years later another rebranding is underway. With a $20M budget, Omnicom agencies TBWA/Chiat/Day and Tequila are trying to buff out the old stereotypes and give Ben an extreme makeover by recasting him as the fictional “Chairman” of this wholly owned subsidiary of packaged-food giant Mars, Inc., and their sub-brand, the ironically named Masterfoods.

Really?

I’m going do my best to try and be nice here. This strategy might have worked better if there was some substance behind the smoke and mirrors. But there is too much contradictory data. Ben is the chairman, but he still doesn’t have a surname? He still is called “Uncle” in spite of the fact that this title was a Jim Crow-ism used to avoid the use of the honorarium “Mister”? And Ben’s photographic image is unchanged down to the bow tie? Really!? By refusing to own up to the divisiveness of the character, the effort falls flat for me. The execution is at times lush and extensively populated with content, but the conspicuous absence of Ben himself—in his own virtual chairman’s office, no less—gives the whole endeavor a ghostly vibe that, frankly, creeped me out.

But the New York Times reports that the campaign is just getting going, with a digital Ben set to begin inhabiting the site sometime soon. Really? Frankly, the analog version was more than enough. But perhaps the digital version can be programmed to speak to some of the questions that the first phase of the campaign have so far only served to magnify.

Really.

http://www.unclebens.com/

Daniel Turman, with a big hat tip to Angela DiPietro

Update: Check out Stephen Colbert's sarcastic take here.

This is a nice clean portfolio site for commercial photographer Art Streiber, the work of Jay Lane over at Studio Pyro.

http://www.artstreiber.com