Three Minds On Digital Marketing @ Organic

A couple of weeks ago I presented to the Detroit AdCraft Club about how technology is changing the way consumers connect with brands. I did it through the lens of a consumer set in 2010.  We often develop personas like this in our work because it adds a human dimension to facts, figures and perceptions.  What's this have to do with a stack?  One of the four trends impacting the persona we created was "Digital Dexterity" or the notion that people are becoming increasingly comfortable with a variety of gadgets and that they are increasingly connected.  To illustrate the point, I looked for photos of gadgets which led me to flickr and a wonderful tag called "stack."  We've blogged about "unboxing" but once you've done that, its time to stack. PS that's my stack (or at least as much as I could pile up before it collapsed).

Mark Kingdon 

It's taken a bit of time, but Nike has finally seen fit to reissue some of their classic puddle jumpers from the 1970s. I distinctly remember my father buying the pair above in about '77 or so, in the wake of a mid-life, high-blood-pressure crisis. And so it was that we became a running family. About 150,000 Turman-family miles or so later, Nike has deigned to bring back the shoes that put them on the map in the first place (and my personal map, more specifically).

The site that they launched in support of this does a pretty good job of capturing the quirkiness of the Running Boom in the digital space. They have always been regarded as a brand that "gets it" in terms of online content, but this campaign actually goes one step further. At least for me. It's entertaining in a general sense for the benefit of hipsterdom at large, while being specific enough with the humor and authenticity to make some of us oldy moldies a tad nostalgic. 

See what I mean here.

Daniel Turman 

Unicode has been dubbed "a silent typographic revolution”

Decodeunicode is an open source project to demystify Unicode. Developed under professor Johannes Bergerhausen at the University of Applied Sciences in Mainz, Germany, the project uses wiki-like functionality to collect information on every single character. That way, expert knowledge can be systematically collected and made accessible to the general public.

http://decodeunicode.org

What is Unicode?
A character encoding standard that is already established as a world standard and today, it encodes over 50.000 characters

Where did it come from?
The Unicode Consortium is a not-for-profit organization founded by all the major computer companies and its mission is to ensure consistency in the digital encoding of typographic characters.
 
How does it work?
Unicode provides a unique number for every character, no matter what the platform, no matter what the program, no matter what the language.
 
Why should I care?
Unicode enables a single software product or a single website to be targeted across multiple platforms, languages and countries without re-engineering. It offers significant cost savings over the use of legacy character sets.
 
Enjoy,
 
Monique LaLonde

We've talked about trading down as a social phenomenon. From Dunkin' Donuts to Taco Bell, sometimes it's about slummin' it and lovin' it.  But most brands want to move the other way.  The challenge is to avoid alienating their core audience as they chase the profit margins of higher-end customers.  For every Target success story, there are a dozen Phaeton's (VW) or Forth & Towne's (Gap Inc.).  One restaurant chain that's attempting to achieve this tricky balance is Red Lobster.

If any brand defines the a working class lets-treat-ourselves-to-dinner experience, it's Red Lobster.  Now the casual-dining restaurant, part of the Darden Restaurants group that includes Olive Garden, is going upscale.

New TV ads feature steaming fish with vegetables - gone are the lobster claws dripping with butter or fried shrimp bouncing on the plate.  Inside the restaurants, kitschy elements like fish-shaped tables and tropical-themed plates will slowly be replaced by stone, wood, and muted tones. The menu is being revamped.

Can Red Lobster survive this extreme makeover?

Misha Cornes

Starbucks sells coffee. Lots of it. They’re also in business of selling music on their own Hear label.
       
Music that aligns with the taste of the Starbucks customer. Their artist roster reflects a pretty sophisticated, some might even say elitist, sensibility. Artists like Feist, Arcade Fire and Wilco.
      
Dunkin Donuts sells coffee too. But unlike Starbucks they don’t appear to have any music retail ambitions.
      
But of course the Dunkin’ customer loves music. Who doesn’t?
      
What kind of music would a Dunkin’ Donuts customer want to hear in a new Iced Latte ad? 

Dave Sylvestre

http://www.rhythmoflines.co.uk/ 

You can’t tell what it is, you can’t see what it will become, and you have to use it to figure out how to use it.  But it’s hard to imagine a more ambitious web application to complement this
broadcast campaign:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GVQFKGer0w

This is one of those cases in which Flash is being used to do things that Flash isn’t made to do. It’s also ambitious from a conceptual standpoint — an attempt to recapture an aesthetically powerful experience from a non-interactive medium and open it up as a space that the user can not only explore but literally reshape. The commercial’s core concept — figures described by the colorful arabesques of ribbonlike color bands — has been transformed into the premise for a combination sculpture studio and gallery. 

This experience isn’t quite as affecting as the broadcast spot’s, but it’s a sign of the times that generative art incorporates itself so well with a “traditional” advertising campaign. The element of user-contributed content is, yes, the trend of the moment, but it’s a trend that one ignores at peril. As anyone who’s followed Will Wright’s trajectory will observe, the act of providing the end user with playful tools of creation shifts the forces of combinatorics in your favor. Human brains being the quantum chaos machines that they are, and with the capacity for idle hands to find websites to play with, these forces can add up.

As Flash tools proliferate and the realm of 3D yields itself to further incursions, this site may well prove itself a harbinger of future campaigns in which the core concept resides in no one medium but can manifest in many.  Also, the music is pretty.
 
Peter Balogh 

Seemingly unfazed by the major performance issues of their last outing for Burger King (Simpsonize Me), Crispin Porter is back with My Posh Twin, which seems to be built on very similar technology.

The concept is simple, stupid, and totally addictive.  Upload your photo and let the engine show you what you would've looked like with a public school education.  Thanks to Tim Dyer.

Misha Cornes 

I currently host my site with MediaTemple, a well-known and respected hosting service provider.  Last night I received an email from them introducing their new account center, specifically geared for the iPhone.  The service allows you to do anything from buying a domain to managing your account.

The interesting part about this isn’t necessarily that I can add an email account from the road (though if you wanted to do this, you certainly could), so much as it’s a preview of what’s to come as companies start rolling out iPhone-tailored web apps.  In particular, online-banking seems to be an obvious next step.

http://www.mediatemple.net/iphone/ 

Mark Rozeluk 

Sprint has a site called http://waitless.org/  that plays off a their new unlimited calling feature that starts at 7pm instead of 9pm. They have a time calculator that calculates how much time you spend on a particular activity in a lifetime. They also have a segment called Sprintcuts which is a collection of videos explaining a new faster way of doing something, like a technique for pouring ketchup quicker which is supposed to save 2 weeks over a lifetime or speed tying your shoes. Pretty funny how they try to technically explain all of the techniques.

Robert Lerchenfeld 

This is a great music video done in pixelization style- except that the pixels are dice.

The song is Fuyija Miyagi's Ankle Injury.  Miyagi's label, Factory Records is a great UK based music video production company, and all of their music videos are available to watch online.

Enjoy.

Baron Conway

Perhaps this site is a bit overly energetic, but I love the immersive aspects and the consistency of the treatment throughout. There isn't anything that doesn't have a bell or whistle or something twirling, and everything makes a sound.

http://www.moma56.com/

Bill Camp 

While doing research for a relatively vague ad placement request, I came across a really useful site that archives thousands upon thousands corporate-branded email campaigns.
 
I think it may be valuable for anyone interested in seeing how the competition communicates with their subscribers. Check it out:

ttp://www.newsletterarchive.org/

Rob Neveau

Paypal is beta’ing a new home page. The before and after is quite dramatic. You can toggle back and forth between the old and new.  It’s a great example of simplification.
 
The old site uses Paypal-centric language like merchant. The new site uses much consumer-oriented language and calls-to-action. The information hierarchy is so much better with login top left, streamlined navigation and different experiences for users and merchants with an uncluttered Ajax second level navigation.

One of the biggest challenges in redesigning a site like this is rationalizing between internal priorities and customer needs. The old site seems organized the way Paypal is organized as a company, with features pushed to the top and prioritized based on business issues. As a user, your eye doesn’t know where to go.

The new site seems much better organized around what customers want and when they want it. It's easier for a user to find the information they need quickly and easily and to get their questions answered.

Adam Turinas

Here's a great example of a series of cartograms produced by a collaboration between the University of Michigan and the University of Sheffield. 

The images represent a distorted map of the World where each country's size is redrawn to reflect the relative strength or weakness for a range of global statistics.

For example:

• Alcohol consumption across the World
• HIV prevalence
• House prices 

http://www.itszone.co.uk/zone0/viewtopic.php?t=69206

It's a real elegant way of visualizing the numbers! 

Thanks to Steve Coomber for sharing.

David Feldt 

About 6 years ago, a consortium of Hollywood studios – Warner Bros., MGM, Sony, Paramount, and Universal – launched Movielink.  They had all been incredibly worried by the music industry’s failure to get ahead of the illegal downloading of music (Napster was, at the time they started, in its heyday) and wanted there to be a legal way for people to download movies.  Unlike the music companies, they actually did something about it.  They made a lot of decisions you can argue about – no burning, watching only on your computer vs. your tv, and other DRM issues mostly – but they did it together out of a mutual belief that giving people a legal alternative would potentially stem the rush towards piracy.  They did another smart thing the music companies didn’t: they recognized that the studios aren’t really brands, the titles are, and banded together in a studio-agnostic effort rather than each try set up their own me-only services.  
 
This week it was announced that Movielink is being sold to Blockbuster as part of Blockbuster’s efforts to take on Netflix, Apple, Amazon, and other players in the “delayed on-demand” game.  By which we mean that users have shown that they don’t need on-demand to be instant, as delivered through cable companies, but are satisfied with a bit of delay in exchange for the portability they get from buying digital downloads from iTunes or ripping dvd’s from Netflix to other devices.  (Like you don’t.)  The studios never made money on Movielink and direct sales aren’t part of their core business.  But I think that the fact that they are selling it is not in any way an indication of the failure of the business, but a vindication of their initial strategy.  Now that there are a number of viable businesses selling legal downloads, and now that customers have the bandwidth and are starting to become acclimated to the idea of paying for digital entertainment downloads, the studios can get out of the business and leave further innovation to others.  Strategy successful.  
 
Don’t get me wrong – the studios have a lot of catching up to do, but as my friend Chad says, “Better to be 80% behind than 100% behind.”
 
Matt Rosenberg

Last week a journalist posed an interesting question that gets to the heart of the philosophy behind blogging and the new dynamics of branded communications in The Age of Conversation:

"Doesn't a company blog share a lot of strategic information, specially visionwise? Isn't it dangerous to show better products done by the competition just for the sake of 'editorial independence', whatever that may mean?" 

I thought a lot about the right response, because the answer is at once simple and complicated.  The simple answer is that we can't be scared of great ideas.  What sets a creative agency apart is the ability to come back with more, better, and even cooler ideas.  The complicated version sounded like a great manifesto for ThreeMinds:

We have always envisioned ThreeMinds as an open conversation that mirrors the way we think about experience design.  We wanted to add another facet to the on-going discussion inside the organization about websites we admire, campaigns that were inspiring (or terrible), or new ideas and trends in the digital space.  The creative process should draw inspiration from the best work of others – it’s a self-serving agency myth that every great idea is somehow unique and unprecedented.  By openly discussing the competition, we make our own ideas even better.

We are constantly telling our clients to make their brand more transparent- to allow their customers to participate and critique, to openly compare their products with the competition, to create a community around the brand.  It would be hypocritical not to follow our own advice when it comes to our business.  By engaging in an open dialogue on the blog, it forces us to walk that talk.

I'm not sure this approach is right for every company.  It’s possible because Organic is one of the leading agencies in the space, and what we have to say about the digital environment carries some authority.  Not every blogger has that luxury.  We are also willing to be critical of the competition and our own trade, and I can imagine that wouldn’t fly in many other industries.  So we preach a two-way conversation. 

Aren't there cases where an open dialogue is not the right approach?  Say for a company whose work is strongly based on intellectual property?

(photo credit: thoughtwax- the text of a poem (The Manifesto of Man by Yuri Galanskov) encoded as an image)

Misha Cornes

Any NFL fans out there?  A friend & fellow football head alerted me this morning that NFL.com has launched its new redesign.  Having spent a few minutes surfing the site this morning I can say my first impression is that I’m very pleased with the outcome.  

There’s a wealth of content available from the homepage and content that previously took 3 or 4 clicks to access is now accessible much more quickly.  I especially liked the teams page & the ability to view specific information about any team from one centralized location.  There’s deep video content on the site and there will be highlights packages available for every game.  Having spent numerous hours on the site during previous seasons, this has only added to my anticipation of the upcoming ’07 season.  Go Dolphins!

http://www.nfl.com

Patrick Dunphy

Build a site that caters to their fleeting attention span. That’s what Sneaux did for their latest site. The shoes get replaced every hour with new designs and there are new videos and images to look at every second. How in the world did they get so many videos and images you ask? They use Flickr and Youtube for all their assets. Not so bad... Interesting stuff to look at, and you may just want to buy a pair of sneakers.

Take a look.

http://www.areyoualwaysbored.com/

Rey Peralta

Wikipedia is a great resource. However, recent complaints about inaccuracy and lies have damaged Wikipedia’s credibility.

WikiScanner is a new site that tracks edits made on Wikipedia. You can see where the edits originated.  WikiScanner unearths editors using corporate IP blocks to cross reference Wikipedia’s records.

There are some big surprises here, and some not-so-big surprises. Companies tend to self-edit their pages to protect their brand. Reporters also “anonymously” made updates.  For instance, The New York Times was the “source” for modifying George Bush’s page with the name “Jerk”; the CIA has modified multiple pages; and more!

You can search for info by company name, Wikipedia URL and IP address. Find out who is behind the changes at: http://wikiscanner.virgil.gr/

Chuck Sullivan

Dog food. Toothpaste. Toys. Sure, nobody likes to hear about products that are harmful to their users—especially those intended for the ones we love: our children and our pets. I just saw the mattel ad unit buy today on yahoo announcing the latest recall of some of their toys (lead paint and loose magnets), and it made me realize how much I appreciate accountability. And then I started to think how interesting things would be if the automakers of the world treated their own vehicle recalls in the same manner. Cue the rich media and page takeovers...

http://www.mattel.com/safety/us/

Rob Neveau

In response to an open letter to Steve Jobs, experience design firm Adaptive Path has taken up the call to come up with a design for a device that would transform how diabetics manage their condition.  They pulled together a group of interested employees for an R&D team and dedicated time between projects to work on it.  From start to finish, they spent all of 9 weeks.  

This is a great example of bringing together employees passionate about a particular subject and creating an opportunity for blue-sky concepting that is essentially 100% user-focused; something rarely possible with billable project work where a pre-existing site/product is often the starting point or business/political considerations must be considered.

Adaptive Path president Jesse James Garrett has blogged about the research and design process.  The full story is worth a read.

http://www.adaptivepath.com/blog/category/charmr-project/

Charlie Zicari

The Facebook Platform is less than 3 months old and it's already shaking up the world.  Since it's launch on June 1, we've seen the number of applications on the Facebook Platform grow exponentially and today there are 7,500+ apps (widgets) spread across the 30 million plus active Facebook network.  The top application is "Top Friends" which replicates a MySpace-like friends list experience on Facebook. It was developed by Slide (one of the most popular widget makers on the web today) and has been added to 12 million users' profiles on Facebook since it was released.

Yesterday a sole developer, Craig Ulliott, from Philadelphia instantly became the new widget-wunderkind when it was rumored that TripAdvisor had acquired his "Where I've Been" Facebook application for a reported $3 million dollars! 

Irrespective of whether the rumor is true or not, I believe that this story represents a true tipping point. Craig developed the app in his spare time and launched it on the Facebook Platform less than two months ago. Today his widget has 2.4 million users, more than double TripAdvisor's similar "Cities I've Visited" app (1 million users).

We've entered a new era in technology where the presence of a ubiquitous open-API platform tied to a 30 million plus social network fundamentally changes the game!

I truly hope that the story is true - either way, Craig, you're my hero!

David Feldt