Three Minds On Digital Marketing @ Organic

Put an unknown band in a plastic bubble on NY’s West Side Highway, throw the switch on 24 cameras, and let people watch whatever camera they want at any time of the day or night as the band records an album, snoozes, shaves their bodies… do you get interesting content?  I don’t know. Intermittently. 

Dr. Pepper’s new campaign takes that risk.  Built by our friends at Code & Theory, they take another interesting risk: this is the first time, to my knowledge, that such a massive amount of streaming video has been delivered through flash.  The conservative play was to use Windows Media Player, but the user experience is much better with the more customizable flash player and when you’re dealing with this amount of video and so many choices, the user experience could easily have gotten too messy to succeed.  I still don’t know if the campaign succeeds – right now all I can find is half a guy and some other guy’s shoulder – but I’m impressed with the way it was built.

http://www.drpepperbubble.com/

Matt Rosenberg

Google announced the release of a new addition to its Google Maps platform at the Where 2.0 conference this week. The Street View feature enables users to view 360 degrees of static street-level images. In a Street View enabled area users are able to navigate and zoom to 16x without leaving the image window. The first phase of the rollout covers five US cities – New York, San Francisco along with much of the Bay Area and Silicon Valley, Miami, Denver, and Las Vegas. If you live in one of these areas you can likely go online and take a look at a 3-D image of you home or office.

The 360 degree images which make the service possible were created using an eleven-lens, GPS enabled camera developed by Immersive Media. The Calgary-based company is capable of mapping large areas by mounting the camera on the roof of a car. Google describes the technology as “immersive photography.”

Microsoft’s recently launched Bird’s Eye Views feature for its Virtual Earth and Live Search platforms provides  similarly disconcerting ability to zoom in on static images of your home, business, or vital pieces of infrastructure . The two services are comparable with the main distinction being that the MS offering is from a 45 degree, north-facing, bird’s eye view.

Now, as marketers, all we need is a hybrid map for businesses or special offers. Think dynamic information superimposed on an image of a storefront or office. A tool that allows users to confine search to a visually selected area would also be nice. With steady improvements in web-based mapping functionality expect to see an explosion of location-based mashups very soon.

Thanks Anna and David.

Dan Neumann

I have always admired the creativity of out of home advertising in Asia, specifically in Tokyo.  It's an electronically vibrant city with an overwhelming amount of advertising spattered almost everywhere; advertisers are forced to develop executions which truly break through the clutter. 

To accomplish this, advertisers often develop ways to integrate real products into everyday life.  I wanted to share this image from a recent train journey with you. 

Chris Portella

CORRECTION: The photo is actually taken of me on a train in Seoul, not Tokyo.  My fellow travelers and I took an overwhelming amount of pictures which I mixed up.  Thanks for your comments everyone!  Overall, I was exposed, moved and impressed by out of home advertising in both countries and look forward to seeing what they think of next. 

Reinventing a tired category in the face of aggressive competition.
 
Solving the problem by mining nuggets of customer insight. Converting that insight into a design idea inspired by popular culture. Customizing the design and marketing strategies to different market segments.  

Sounds very familiar. 

Check out this BusinessWeek case study about the redesign of the Norelco razor. I found it very relevant to how we create online experiences.

Adam Turinas

At first glance, this looks like another one of those tired sci-fi themed websites. But then, looks can be deceiving...

DJ and musician Amon Tobin launches a website that allows his audience to interact with his music (and sounds) in a whole new realm. The title of this site says it all — it's an excursion to an immersive audio-visual environment.

Choose the HD version and then explore the field using the radar in the top left to find several different creatures (which are the big blips that show up on your radar). Once you get the hang of using the radar, finding the creatures is much easier. And once you have locked them into your line of vision, you can explore their different sounds.

Listen to all six sounds from each creature to unlock the complete sample, and see the creature perform for you. Each performance is unique and intriguing.

http://www.amontobin.com/field/

Yee Peng Chia 

I recently bought a t-shirt at  the Lacoste store in Soho. It was a pleasant experience with a knowledgeable and helpful salesperson. However besides that, it was a short and somewhat forgettable. At the end of the purchase the cashier asked for my postal address. I'm not sure why I surrendered it, as I normally never give such data away. But I did. Again, even that part was forgettable.
 
Usually, the next thing that would happen might be a promotion email (either way too soon or many months later), or a quarterly catalogue arrives on my door, or a perfume sample etc. Instead, a week or so later, a very cute hand written "Thank You" note appears in my mail box sent by normal post. It was written by Benjamin, the sales person. It was short, nice, fun, referenced my "red" shirt and offered to help again for any future needs. Not over the top in anyway.
 
The personal touch is a great way to win business; I want to go back, I want to shop there again, I want to give him another chance to connect with me, I'm feeling the draw already, I'm pondering my next trip to New York.

I’m a big fan of merging advertising and entertainment online. In an uncharacteristically Microsoft move, Microsoft has done a good job of interjecting humor into their marketing. They’ve created a video and microsite for a parody talk show featuring a stiff host and bumbling ex-CEO-turned-author as the guest.  

www.StuOsbornShow.com

The piece features Fred Willard and Michael Hitchcock, who have stared in several Christopher Guest movies, including Waiting for Guffman and Best in Show. According to the Wikipedia entry (yes, there is a corresponding Wikipedia entry for the campaign, but no MySpace profile), the piece was actually directed by Christopher Guest.

If you enjoy the Christopher Guest movies—which many of us do—you’re going to click the banner featuring these well known, funny actors. The microsite is high on entertainment, and low on the advertising. I think the intent of the campaign is to showcase a new MSN video sharing product called Soapbox, but that’s not at all apparent from the site. In any event, the site is quite amusing and definitely worth a click.

Jake Bennett

 

LiveScribe is like a tablet PC, without the tablet...or the PC.  I worked on it with my previous employer, Elastic Creative. Personal involvement aside, I think it has potential to be a great technology. It's basically a pen that digital records everything you write, as well as audio that might accompany your writing from, say, a university lecture.

The pen uses a custom paper that the company will sell at prices near standard paper. The custom paper can also be printed on certain standard printers.

http://www.livescribe.com/

Anthony Enos

I've worked in online advertising for the past 7 years and have grown to appreciate the medium for its effectiveness in storytelling, animation and interactivity. More and more I find that traditional ads are borrowing from the online ad principles to create experiences offline. There are often "sequenced" ads in magazines - spread out across several pages. This month, Vanity Fair is running a series of 20 different covers featuring Africa.

http://www.vanityfair.com/

To me this is another example of how the inspiration of interactive advertising has eaffected the offline world. One cover just isn't good enough when you can tell a larger story and reach a wider audience with twenty.

Kelley Barry 

So. Let’s see. This is what 400,000 British Pounds buys you these days. With the hubbub reaching a crescendo across the pond, it’s time to start laughing at the spectacle of overpaid designers going all retro ‘80s New York Subway tag with the frickin’ Olympic Games Logo in a hamfisted effort to make the games relevant for young people. Or so the news reports state. Right before they get to the positively scathing words.

One report (Fox News, natch!) goes so far as to say that the animated version found online can cause seizures. Elsewhere, a BBC interviewee gave this take as a measure of the logo’s unhipness (best read in an Ali G. voice): “the equivalent of yer Dad dancing at a party, down wiv the kids innit.” But so far the winning description for me has to be the BBC Sport-penned version: “It looks like a logo designed for young people by old people who don’t understand young people.” 

But whatever you think of it, at least graphic design is front and center in the consciousness of Britons and many others. Wolff-Olins, the logo’s designer, may not be digging the scrutiny, but at least their name is blazing from inbox to inbox faster than Ben Johnson.

Needless to say, this forest fire rages on. A petition is currently circulating to flat reject the logo. Meanwhile, the always-entertaining Sun commissioned a monkey, a blind lady and a 12-year-old boy to make logos—in two hours—as a demonstration of displeasure. After the jump, here are a few of the better takes from other Organics from our internal e-mail thread.

Daniel Turman, with mad props to Kelley Barry for starting the conversation!
 

Amnesty International launched this site that uses satellite imagery of Darfur to show villages that have been destroyed by militias and ones that are in danger of being destroyed. The goal is to allow anyone in the world to bear witness to the conflict and to see with their own eyes the evidence of the destruction and displacement.

“Thanks to high resolution satellite imagery, human rights advocates can now document abuses anywhere in the world - even in countries that are sealed off from on-the-ground researchers. All from 280 miles above the Earth's surface.

To make the Eyes on Darfur project possible, Amnesty International acquired commercially-available high resolution satellite imagery. The images were obtained in GeoTIFF format and imported into ERDAS Imagine and ArcGIS for viewing and analysis. The analysis of the images was undertaken by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) to determine the extent of damage to the structures visible in each image.”
 
It’s a startlingly simple concept that effectively harnesses two advanced technologies (satellite imaging and the internet) to serve a noble cause.

Here's  the URL again: http://eyesondarfur.org

-Whitney Browne

This latest edition of the Air Jordan brand deploys full-screen 3D using the open source Flash library Papervision3D. See beautiful shots of basketball players (and sneakers) suspended in motion within a navigational 3D space (hint: click the up arrow). Navigate sideways (left and right arrows) for video.
This is a fine example of a new generation of websites that take advantage of the capabilities of Flash Player 9, to deliver a fully immersive experience by taking the user outside of the boundaries of the browser window.

http://www.jumpman23.com/xx2/ 

Yee Peng Chia 

As a bit of a foodie and an experimental chef, I find myself online almost daily looking for exciting new recipes to try. The first place I hit up is AllRecipes.com, which does a great job on wealth of content and community features. I can search for recipes via ingredients I have in the kitchen, rate recipes I’ve tried, read reviews of recipes, see pictures, browse categories, create a virtual recipe box, and even print out a usefully organized shopping list. What more could you ask for?

Well, recently I stumbled upon Rouxbe.com, a cross between an online cooking show and recipe resource. With its professionally shot videos that are heavy on high quality close-ups, it provides elegant instructional and inspirational qualities that are not available anywhere on AllRecipes. The site is loaded with your typical fun features like downloads, bookmarking, commenting, etc and some not-so-typical features such as separate music and VO track volumes. But what I am more excited about are the features that show a higher level of thought paid to the end user.