Three Minds On Digital Marketing @ Organic

Quite by accident ( a blog) I came across this 404 page from Jeep.com.

Absolutely brilliant!  The brand experience has been maintained and
extended all the way to a Page Not Found notice!

This is the kind of detail that takes a 9 and makes it a 10.

Kudos to the Organic team for this little nugget.

http://www.jeep.com/en/07wranglerunlimited/index.html

Michael Convery

One of the most interesting trends in social media is the emergence of vertical social networks. One of my greatest passions is sailing, but since I don’t get to do much of it for real these days, I started blogging about it a little over a year ago with the launch of Messing About in Sailboats.  Talking about sailing is not as fun as doing it but it gives me the opportunity to connect with other sailing nerds.
 
As a form of social media, blogging is very different experience to Facebook and myspace. In the latter case, it’s easy to join a social network, reconnect with old friends and make new friends. But it’s also a bit like the first few weeks of college where making friends is easy but frankly a little superficial.
 
Blogging is a different thing altogether. It takes time and a lot of commitment. The social networks are smaller but more intimate. It’s a bit like joining a slightly exclusive club. Personally I find it more rewarding than Facebook and myspace. The downside is that the community is small. The community of sailing bloggers I am connected with is less than 20. You have to post frequently and comment on each others blogs to stay active in the community. It takes work.
 
Like other niche interests, the social network is evolving. In the last few weeks, I have been invited to beta three new sailing-oriented sites. Each one seems to aspire to be “The Facebook for Sailors”.  The first was Boaters.tv, a video podcast on sailing that is beta’ing a social network; next was Sailtrac, a Google maps mash-up with a social network. The most recent is Tripsailor. This one is very Facebook-like in the way it lets you create a profile, connect with other sailors and share stuff.

Like everyone on Facebook I got this message today:

“Now people can search for this listing from Facebook's Welcome page. In a few weeks, it may also be found through search engines like Google.”
 
Our friend Nick Royle from Captains of industry poses this question:
 
“… My understanding is, that if you leave your privacy setting as currently configured, your picture and name will appear on the search engine rankings. Personally, I don't have a problem with this, however, it also appears (I think) that anyone will be able to view someone's friends, poke them, message them and request friendship - this I think has the potential for trouble (especially the ability to view friends and message). Any thoughts, and how do you all intend to adjust your privacy setting?”
 
What does everyone else think?

Adam Turinas 

During my couch potato hour (or two) this weekend...I stumbled across this commercial for All Bran. Its subtle, or not so subtle humor, is worth the time to take a peak. TV/commercial watching may become more entertaining if more companies took this approach :) Cinnamon Pritchard

I was reading my personal AIM email over the weekend to come across a link to the Songs of Summer on the AOL music site. I’ve been building my music library and wanted to check out the top songs from summer to ensure I added my family’s favorites (I also thought there might some links to free downloads such as on the Chrysler Music Legends Podcast Series).
 
The Songs of Summer site blends narrative video (host Egypt) and music videos, and syncs them together nicely for a rich media experience. Another cool feature of the site was a sort of take-over banner but without the banner. See, you can change the skin on the site yourself, but if you’re watching the videos you might just skip over that feature. So while the video is playing, Egypt appears in a smaller window to make a plug for a V Cast Mobile TV skin. Shortly after the plug the site changes to the Verizon skin with a link to the V Cast landing page, unique.
 
Anyway there are a few other features which make the site interesting (and a few more plugs/commercials) so check it out.

Rodney Cooper

Firefox and software developer Wladimir Palant are offering AdBlock Plus, a free add-on to the popular browser that blocks most display ads.  The technology uses a simple filtering system to block the IP addresses that host advertising content.  When I tested it out, the standard filter that came with the plug-in probably blocked 80% of the ads I would normally see.  In fact, AdBlock Plus was so effective that I had to rely on publisher's own demarcations of "advertising content" to differentiate white space on the page from missing ads.

This is a serious challenge to the online advertising industry of Tivo proportions.

As Noam Cohen of the New York Times writes: "the program is an unwelcome arrival after years of worry that there might never be an online advertising business model to support the expense of creating entertainment programming or journalism, or sophisticated search engines, for that matter".

While the project has so far been ignored by large publishers like Google and Yahoo, some smaller sites have responded by blocking the Firefox browser. But with 2.5 million users worldwide and 300-400,000 new users a month, this won't last long.

Unlike the early days of Napster (and you already hear the same accusations of users "stealing content" on the AdBlock blog), I think the initial response of publishers will be to counter with technology, not lawsuits.  In the short term, I see a technology arms race taking off, where publishers look to outwit the filters by, for example, hosting third-party ads on their own sites.  But the open source nature of AdBlock Plus means that users will counter with increasingly sophisticated workarounds to each new technological response. 

In the long term, I think ad-blocking technologies will make the value of high quality branded entertainment content more important than ever.  The challenge will be to bring visitors to interesting and immersive sites - the kinds we often feature on ThreeMinds - without an easy way to attract them there in the first place.

Read more from the New York Times here.  

Misha Cornes

Firefox is offering AdBlock Plus, a free add-on to the popular browser that blocks most display ads.  The technology uses a simple filtering system to block the IP addresses that host advertising content.  When I tested it out, the standard filter that came with the plug-in probably blocked 80% of the ads I would normally see.  In fact, AdBlock Plus was so effective that I had to rely on publisher's own delineations of "advertising content" to differentiate white space on the page from missing ads.

This is a serious challenge to the online advertising industry of Tivo proportions.

While the project has so far been ignored by large publishers like Google and Yahoo, some smaller sites have responded by blocking the Firefox browser. 

In the short term, I see a technology arms race taking off, as in the early days of Napster, where publishers respond by, for example, hosting third-party ads on their own sites, and open source projects like AdBlock Plus counter with increasingly sophisticated workarounds and shared lists of ad IP's.

In the long term, I think ad-blocking technologies will make the value of high quality branded entertainment content more important than ever.  The challenge will be to bring visitors to interesting and immersive sites - the kinds we often feature on ThreeMinds- without an easy way to attract them in the first place.

Read more from the New York Times here.  

According to software developer Wladimir Palant, AdBlock has about 2.5 million users worldwide.

Headlines heralding Apple’s announcement of a new Wi-Fi enabled iPod, ringtone creation service, and nano form factor are already proliferating across the web. These are relatively minor improvements to Apple’s greatest product ever. The ability to download music to an iPod was a long time coming and, while convenient, is really more of a boon to Apple than its users.
 
The real story here is a $200 price cut on the 8gb iPhone and the elimination of the 4gb model. The price cut is a slap in the face for early adopters, many of whom stood in line for hours, even days, eagerly awaiting the most hyped piece of tech ever. People who shelled out $599 and a portion of their soul to AT&T for the privilege of owning said tech have been left out in the cold.  No new features were introduced for the iPhone. The ability to access iTunes over Wi-Fi and ringtone conversion service do not add any real functionality and are really a way for Apple to make a lil’ more $$$.
 
Where’s the love for your core supporters, Steve? Where’s the flash support and wireless sync functionality we’ve been begging for? Personally, I would not forgive this transgression for anything less than a $50 iTunes gift certificate.

Daniel Neumann

In the current, welcome trend towards "conversational" marketing on the web, we often struggle to find the right amount of transparency. While many clients worry that embarrassing content will surface when they relinquish a bit of control, it's important to remind ourselves of the problems that can unearth themselves when we try to hide too much. 

In the post-Soviet world, few facades are more carefully constructed than those around "reality" television; and unplanned exposure of the men behind the curtain can seriously damage an otherwise successful franchise.  Such was the case earlier this summer with the exposure of planned, staged, and otherwise "faked" events on the BBC/Discovery series Man vs. Wild. 

Shortly after this controversy surfaced, I was watching an episode of the very similar (and, by all current accounts, more "real") Discovery series Survivorman.  Being a bit of a dog fanatic, I was slightly alarmed when the show’s star, Les Stroud, “released” a team of sled dogs to simulate an actual loss – only to be airlifted out of his location due to poor ice conditions with no further mention of the dogs’ fate.  A quick trip to the show’s message board showed me that I wasn’t alone in my concern.  In fact, the fate of the sled dogs was the most active topic on the board. 

Eventually, someone posted a response they had received from Discovery stating that the release was planned, and that the dogs were safe.  No one from the Discovery channel or the shows production company addressed the issue directly on the forums, or any of the shows various blogs and official sites.  While this might take away a bit of the shows aura of authenticity (though it was clear that the dogs’ release was done as a demonstration), it would have allayed some potentially negative feelings.  In both cases, a little more transparency would have gone a long way.

Christian Dodd 

Lately there has been a trend towards more hands-on musical devices that remove the barrier between musician and machine/computer. This has resulted in a number of (relatively expensive) devices coming to market that rethink the way musicians create and manipulate their music.

Two such devices are the Genoqs Octopus and the Sequentix P3.

While these devices are excellent takes on the traditional 70's step sequencer, another instrument really caught my eye recently because of it's innovative approach to making music by "drawing" on its surface.

Media artist Toshio Iwai and Yamaha have collaborated to design a new digital musical instrument for the 21st century, TENORI-ON (Japanese for "Sound On Your Palm"). Basically, TENORI-ON is a 16x16 tactile matrix of LED switches which allows musicians to draw music intuitively, creating a "visible music" interface. It can trigger external MIDI instruments, or it's own internal samples - but here's the neat thing - Yamaha designed it double-sided so that the visible changes can be viewed by the audience while it is being manipulated.

There's a great video on SonicState.com of the TENORI-ON in action.

Rod MacQuarrie

Time Inc didn't listen to us, or maybe they did ...

We've witnessed several trends over the past two or three years that show that digital has grown up and has gone mass.  Marketers have embraced the entire paradigm and digital is now increasingly at the center of marketing - just look at the way agencies are evolving, look at the way brands are evolving.  Customers led the way by embracing and integrating all things "interactive" into their daily lives.

Digital innovation is not dead - it just morphed into something new ...

What do you think?

David Feldt

I came across the company AMO which is a subsidiary of Office for Metropolitan Architecture.  They have created designs for specific Prada locations as well as the technology that you see throughout the store. 

I believe Prada stores are some of the most dynamic and interesting retail experiences I have ever had.  One of the most interesting projects on the site is a bar code (above) that they proposed for the E.U. It merges the flags of current EU member states into a new image which includes all the flags colors.  The shop has taken architectural creativeness and expanded it to other areas. 

Check out some of their other designs below.

http://www.oma.eu

St.John Oneil-Dunne 

The Washington Post has launched an interesting news filtering tool to help readers follow the 2008 Presidential race.  The Issue Coverage Tracker sorts both by candidate and by issue. So, for example, if you want to read about Immigration, you can see that it's a hot-button issue for Rudy Giuliani,with 83 press mentions in the last three months, vs. only 24 for Barack Obama.  Or you can hone in on a single candidate and see what he (or she) has been saying across a variety of issues.

The tool is powered by Daylife, a multi-feature news aggregator that uses multiple news articles to, for example, create wikipedia-like overviews of major topics like Iraq or to track the relationships between major news figures.  Daylife is funded by the New York Times company, among others.  Thanks Eric. 

Misha Cornes

…you can always get Short Boring Socks.
 
http://www.boden.co.uk

I just ordered a scarf, a bathing suit and “short boring socks” from Boden.com. What I particularly like about this online haberdasher is their small but appealing selection of wardrobe staples.
 
But that’s not what won me over. Throughout the site, they use adjectives like “boring” as a substitute for even duller adjectives like “grey.”
 
Who knew boring could be so exciting?
 
Tim Armitage

Today, we read an interesting piece in Mediaweek about the different ways TV networks are transforming their approach to delivering their shows over the web.

The article points our that ABC, which had hitherto tried to make ABC.com the single destination for watching re-runs of Lost, Desperate Housewives, and its other programs, is abandoning that strategy because they couldn’t raise sufficient revenue.  Instead, they will be doing something similar to what CBS announced recently, which is to distribute their programming over a network of partner sites.  This is in some ways a second cousin to what NBC and Fox are doing with their confusingly-named Hulu.com, which still aims to be a destination, but also will enable offsite viewing of programming.  Partners include big players like AOL and other large media portals.  

One major difference from the CBS strategy is to syndicate not just the content, but a proprietary viewing technology.  We’re not completely certain why they are doing this.  Could be a quality control effort, could be an effort to maintain itself as the primary seller of advertising against their shows.  Could be that they want to preserve the unobtrusive advertising experience they developed for ABC.com.  But a great user experience it ain’t if different content providers (as the networks now seem to be evolving toward) have different delivery technologies even when their programming exists on the same platforms.  

What’s that?  ABC and CBS content appearing on the same channel?  Wow, that seems somewhat game changing, doesn’t it.  In some ways, CBS’s or ABC’s moves in isolation seem like a modernizing of the old school affiliate model, where shows are delivered by channels not owned by the networks themselves (There are a hundred NBC stations, for example, but only about a dozen are owned and operated by them.  The others sign multi-year affiliate deals where they take the NBC programming for a fee and then sell advertising that appears on it, often jarringly local spots right next to the big national spots that the network sells.)   If you look at this like the affiliate relationship, then you might think that ABC and CBS are doing that thing where old media companies try to stick with outdated models.  But having their programming appear side by side turns that on its head.  It’s like running both Leno and Letterman.  It turns the networks into mere content sources, which is a little risky for them since in many cases they don’t own (or at least wholly own) the content.  At some point the distribution partners may find that they can make deals directly with content creators (writers/directors/actors) and the power may shift so that the tv networks are either irrelevant or, in the extreme case, bid to become the over-the-air distribution partner of the digital distributors.

I'm proud of the way Organic has taken the initiative to conduct our business in a more environmentally-friendly way, from reducing travel, encouraging recycling, doing away with harmful chemical cleaning solutions among other steps, and it appears that at least one of Madison Avenue's big agencies has "gone green" as well.

The WPP Group agency, Grey is setting the example by encouraging the entire ad industry to share energy-saving strategies with it's "Green It Forward" initiative.   They have launched a website where other New York agencies can share and blog about their own internal efforts to reduce, reuse and recycle as well as minimizing carbon emissions.

The site will officially launch during Advertising Week, held each year in New York later in September.

I like that they have taken a stance in challenging others to "walk the talk, and I will be watching with anticipation to see how many agencies join Grey in going Green.

http://www.green-it-forward.com/

Michael Convery

Move over, scent-based marketing.  Pennsylvania's First Flavor has combined the technology behind breath strips with a more sophisticated flavor palette and a twist of print media savvy to create a new kind of taste-based ad.

CBS has ordered up mojito-flavored taste strips to promote Cane, a new Jimmy Smits vehicle.  Smits's character runs a family rum business in the new show.  The strips will be inserted as samples inside Rolling Stone magazine.

This execution shows how the assocations of "taste" could stretch beyond simple food and beverage promotion. (In fact, I doubt most CPG brands would risk trying to replicate their carefully crafted flavors on a filmy-tasting breath strip.)  On the other hand, I don't think every experience has a de facto taste quality.  Even the relationship between Cane and a mojito seems a little forced.  Do you think edibie strips can overcome their heritage in "oral hygiene" to become a bona fide promo tool?  Thanks Marta for the tip.

Misha Cornes

A semi-faithful adaptation of the original 1971 Oregon Trail, Thule Trail has you heading west, not to conquer the wild frontier, but rather the road. The game swaps covered wagons for turbo wagons and lets you hunt fast food instead of wild game. Really takes you back! Via digg.

http://www.thuletrail.com/

Enjoy!

Lau Ardelean

Floor Planner is a free tool for building floorplans.  Not only is this a fantastic use of flash in an online app, but it will soon include 3d (above).

http://www.floorplanner.com/3ddemo

In addition, users can also share their ‘creations’ with others. And by including a user-supported forum, the developers have made it easy to share and contribute to the applications development.
 
http://www.floorplanner.com/weblog/
 
Jim Bachalo 

I just found this site for Hyundai which shows 7 short videos of their “Think About It” advertising campaign.  The videos are beautifully shot with images of cities, horses in a field, driving in the snow, etc. and zero footage of any of their cars.  While you are mesmerized by the video phrases float onto the screen such as, “the logo is to tell you what the car is, not who you are” followed by “Think about it”.  I think this is a really interesting idea considering typical car commercials you are shown every detail of the car.  Even more interesting will be to see if it works to change the consumers’ minds on Hyundai as a car company.  Either way I can’t seem to get enough of watching these videos and that is a pretty good start for me.
 
http://www.thinkaboutit.com/

St.John Oneil-Dunne

As vast as Amazon, eBay, Flickr, and YouTube have become, I welcome any tool that promises to make their warehouses of content more intimate, more navigable. oSkope — a "visual search assistant" — goes a long way toward doing just that. You can search any of these four sites (soon to be more, they promise) and results will appears as a set of thumbnails displayed in whatever format you prefer: grid, stack, pile, list or, my personal favorite, graph — a 4-square matrix that clusters results by timeliness and popularity. Each thumbnail carries along enough info to tell you if it's worth the click. (YouTube results will play right on the page.) Create a free account and you can drag and drop results into a folder for future reference. I could get used to this...

Sam Cannon

Now that the iPod/iPhone hubbub has settled a bit, and credits can be obtained by those early adopters burned by the recent price drop, we can obsess over other things.

For one, there's al the possibilities a robust OS like OS X offers, even on a “small” platform. Many of these we probably can’t even imagine, and others are simply “ports” of existing software projects to the iPhone. One that is sure to raise a few eyebrows is MAME (or Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator).

The project is over a decade old, dedicated to preserving the original playing experience of old video games (minus the cigarette smoke and people accidentally pressing your “hyperspace” button). It’s legal to own versions of MAME, but not necessarily the individual ROMs of the games (most are still covered by copyright).

If it takes hold on the iPhone, it will bring all these issues back into the spotlight. If nothing else, I hope it helps make the device more palatable as a gaming platform. Maybe then I’ll buy one.

Dan Sicko

MotionPortrait has released a new program dubbed “MotionPortrait” (easy enough) that takes a 2d picture and can transform it into a moving, talking 3d model.
 
I could see this easily replacing the cartoonish talking heads you see on social media sites pushing advertising on you. Now you can look forward to a somewhat “lifelike” looking person talking to you.  Read more at Gizmodo.

Jason Law

HP's Toyrama promotes a machine specifically targeted to animators. A visually beautiful site where you can build your own (animations that is). Who new HP had it in them?

http://www.hptoyrama.com/

Bill Camp

I just went to visit the Bathing Ape website when I was confronted with a strange call to action on the first page... DOWNLOAD.  "What’s this all about?" I thought as I pressed the shiny silver button.

Seems like Bape is taking an interesting approach to their website and rather than just having users visit and interact from the browser, you download a standalone player that IS the website. I’m sure we will start to see more companies take this approach as they try and differentiate themselves in a cluttered market.

In another example, eBay is currently working on its codenamed San Dimas Project, which is a standalone version of the eBay site built using AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime, formerly codenamed Apollo). Pretty cool, take a look for yourself!

Rey Peralta

Concept stores are nothing new, especially in the fashion world. From NikeTown to Jimmy’Z to Prada’s store in Waikiki, it seems like every brand is trying to re-invent its retail experience.

Last weekend I visited Ruehl for the first time in the Twelve Oaks mall. I have usually been too intimidated to go in the store. There is just something about a darkly lit “street corner” in the middle of the mall with disinterested text-messaging girls half my age wandering in and out of the darkness that intimidates me. The one in the Twelve Oaks mall is particularly darkly lit to the point where you can’t really see anything from the outside of the “windows” to even make you certain it is a clothes store and not some wormhole to another dimension.

Yet still, the mystery has always intrigued me, so I decided to finally take a step inside. Part of me was really impressed. The layout of the store was unlike any other mall store I’ve been in with its narrow corridors with mirrored walls (which made it fun to try and escape later!!), mood lighting, and occasional rooms with no clothes, just cushions. Some people say it reminds them of a NYC apartment, but it reminded me more of an ultra chic martini lounge.

As of today, Times Select — the New York Times online content that required a subscription to access — is no more. Now readers can read opeds, columns, and archived articles free of charge.  This marks a shift in strategy for the publisher’s subscription model, which they’ve abandoned in favor of higher ad revenue potential through increased page views to these sections.  This shift is largely due to readers arriving at the site via search on Yahoo! or Google as opposed to entering the site from the homepage.
 
http://www.nytimes.com/marketing/ts/  
 
Charlie Zicari

Gadgets and Widgets are new online tools that let customers get the information they want exactly when and how they want it.  And today Google announced that it would allow companies to use their own Gadgets as advertisements within their network for the same price as traditional ads.
 
The primary purpose is to allow customers to interact with (or even download) the information in that ad in a way not possible before.  Users won’t have to click through, but can eventually perform tasks such as: ordering products, watching live video or playing games directly from the page they’re on. 
 
But I’m hardly an expert on the full capabilities of Gadgets, any other great ideas out there?

Joshua Fischer 

A new dance craze is sweeping France. It's called Tecktonik (tek-toh-neek), a mixture of HipHop and Techno dance. What started in a few nightclubs spiralled out of control once people started posting their dance moves to YouTube.

See more videos: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqZfA3Bcc28

Read more from Breitbart

Rod MacQuarrie

A new energy drink from Coca-Cola of Denmark combines caffeine, guarana and sugar: 

http://www.burnenergy.dk/

Check out the Get Lucky Today module.  I played with the site for a while.  One downside, I wish the music changed as I navigated….that drum beat will stay with me the rest of the day.

Michael Heughens

Pangea is the name of the original super-continent before the land mass started splitting apart 250 million years ago. We’ve seen a lot of division since then – and we’re not just talking about national boundaries.
But that might all start reversing on Wednesday, May 28th, 2008.
 
It’s not a date that leaps off the calendar. But on that day – Pangea Day - locales in London, NYC,  Cairo, Jerusalem, Kigali, Dharamsala, Ramallah and Rio de Janeiro will join forces by showing a 4-hour program of powerful films, speakers, and music broadcast live to the world through the web, TV, and mobile phones.

Worldwide connections have been done before, but this one’s a little different. User-generated content –your films– will be the crux of the connection. Pangea Day is calling on a new generation of grass-roots film-makers to submit films that tell stories that might heal the world just a little. Films can be uploaded here.

Learn more at http://www.pangeaday.org
 
Hope to see you on that Wednesday.
 
Mitch Mitchell

After a great weekend in Chicago attending this year’s IIT Institute of Design: Design Research Conference, one of the big ideas that emerged was shifting the conversation away from consumer research methods towards promoting the value design research (or design thinking) offers to business and the C-level suite.

Research & Design departments are becoming increasingly influential in affecting how products are designed and marketed to consumers. Motorola’s Steve Herbst presented an interesting case study in which the insight that the density of a cell phone, rather than its weight, better predicted how consumers would perceive the overall quality of a device. In doing so, the research team helped Motorola’s engineering team refocus their design efforts on a narrower set of features that directly mattered to consumers.

We’re definitely in the midst of some tumultuous, yet exciting times. In the next few years it will be interesting to see how design thinking approaches to problem solving will progress into leadership competencies by evoking empathy and storytelling to shape the way organizations think about their interactions with consumers. As brands struggle to become more “open” and embrace the idea that consumers are equal partners in shaping and evolving a brand’s identity, we’ll need to develop a new set of skills and toolkits to foster the co-creation of deeper meaning and value together with consumers.

In the words of Google’s Tim Armstrong, “the internet is the world’s best platform for connecting people.” What, as brand stewards and design thinkers are you doing to foster conversations with your customers and transform the role of consumer insights in your organization?

Audrey Carr 

Sub Sandwiches. Boring, right? Add in a simple idea, beautifully executed and you get a great piece of viral marketing. I really like the behind the scene’s version....   It makes me wonder, is it better to create content about the real creative process, or in the case of the Halo stuff, is it better to continue the storyline through the use of mock Behind the Scenes footage. If we pull back the curtain to show our real process behind a piece of client work, does the client share the responsibility of production costs since it continues the buzz around their product?

Either way, I wish there was a Erbert’s and Gerbert’s in Toronto.

http://humanflipbook.com/

Eva Neveau

I'm not a serious gamer. But I will admit to staying up late at night, speakers turned up, fully immersed in Halo 2 for an exhausting 6-week period of my life. Part of the reason the game is so alluring, is the story. And of course, the kick-ass weaponry.

Halo 3 is a few weeks away from release and that storytelling is better than ever; actually, the "backstory" telling which consists of a few TV spots, a documentary on the construction of the war monument and the Web site deliver it with emotive craftsmanship. What I found most exceptional in the entire experience was how they used the actual footage of building the museum diorama and other elements to create the documentary. Wonderfully clever. They could've just used the footage to make another behind the scenes bit. I also love the "screenshot" function on the site.

This is multi-channel goodness. Even if you're not a gamer.
 
Adam Wilson
 
Wikipedia: Marketing for Halo 3 entry

YouTube:Museum Ad, Believe Ad, Monument Documentary
 

Amazon has launched a DRM free online music store - it's still in beta and the interface is not a slick as iTunes, but it is cheaper ($0.89/track), and has a good selection.

AmazonMP3 Beta

Finally some healthy competition for iTunes.

Baron Conway

This unique navigation allows the user to experience a photographer’s portfolio in an interesting way. The site also allows the user to set personal listening preferences while they browse through the photography. Check it out – it’s pretty cool.

http://www.leecrum.com

Marsha Haslinger

Stumbled across this and really enjoyed it. The music, subject matter and hand drawn treatment all work well together to create a fun little piece.  It’s interesting how the ‘hand drawn’ look has a powerful appeal.  Even when I see traditional cell animation in a commercial (mini-wheats) I can’t help but look a little longer. 

In the media saturated landscape we live in, so much of the imagery has the perfect path of an illustrator spline, a subtle shadow or bevel.  The slow frame rate of the rotoscope, drawn frame by frame, has a certain endearing quality.  I’d love to try this style out.  Obviously time consuming, yet amazingly expressive.   Could it be that 3D animation (and to some extent computer-aided arts in general) has reached such a maturity that we could be looking backward to the traditional arts?  Could super realistic 3D animation do for 3D what the camera did for painting - liberate it from the bounds of photorealism?  

Allan Estabillo

This is an interesting juxtaposition of a news story and a banner ad. 
 
I don’t know if PetMeds intentionally asked for this placement, but I bet that a good number of the page views are from dog lovers. What a way to get the attention of a captive audience.
 
Mark Himmelsbach

Consider This: the 2007 David H. Liu Memorial Lecture Series in Design begins tomorrow night at Stanford University. Leading off is Jan Chipchase, the mind behind Future Perfect and a Tokyo-based human behavioral field researcher for Nokia.

Also featured over the coming weeks are Janine Benyus, my friend and mentor Sara Beckman from UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business, and Rich Silverstein of the eponymous San Francisco agency.

I am especially pleased to see a major agency figure speaking at a design event. As advertising becomes more and more of a two-way medium, there are obvious synergies between the two kinds of designed experiences.  For example, Organic was one of the earliest agencies to use empathy-driven customer research to inform our own design process.  This is crucial for an interactive marketing firm where the user is in total control of the experience.  Thanks to Diego Rodriquez at Metacool for the tip

Misha Cornes

It's ironic that I often have a harder time getting to meetings with local clients than to offices that are a plane ride away.  In the last few months I have been working with companies based in Foster City and Sunnyvale (30-40 minute drives from Organic's San Francisco office), and my teams have had a weekly struggle trying to find a car to get down there; in this office, no one drives themselves to work.

Things reached a head this week and we were scrambling to find a ride.  Someone suggested Zipcar, so I walked down their local office, two blocks from here, registered online at dedicated PC set up in the front, and in ten minutes I was out the door and into a car parked right across the street.  The speed was truly astonishing. Dropping off the car four hours later was even better.  A permanent parking spot in a lot two blocks from the office probably saved me another twenty dollars in parking fees or cab fare to and from a remote car rental site. 

The final part of the Exceptional Experience- easily accessible online billing and a same-day follow-up email thanking me for my business and asking me to rate my first-time rental.

I think Zip has done a great job positioning itself as the business-friendly, ease-of-use company, versus the non-profit local option (City Car Share) or the first-to-market/category creator (Flexcar).  It's interesting that all three companies play down the eco-friendly aspects of car sharing.  Perhaps because most Americans say that green advertising is "just a marketing tactic"?

Misha Cornes