Three Minds On Digital Marketing @ Organic

Check out this legal firm in Boston - they're a 100 years old and are using a very contemporary video strategy to recruit summer interns and new associates from leading law schools. They've taken real associate stories, edited them down to 30 seconds and used actors to tell their stories ... pretty compelling!

http://www.choate.com/careers.php

Read more in the New York Times.

David Feldt

 

How much would you pay for the new Radiohead album? How about nothing?

Radiohead announced this morning that they're selling their new album for whatever you want to pay for it. Essentially they are giving it away as a free download.

How this strategy changes the recording industry as we know it:

1. MP3's are given away for free, but it generates interest in the release. In addition, in order to buy it an e-mail address must be given which can be used for future marketing campaigns.
2. The more saturation the band gets, the more demand for their live shows. Earlier this year Prince announced that he was giving away his new album for free in the Daily Mail. As a result, his 21 tour dates in London sold out.
3. The artist follows up the free download with CD or Vinyl package or box set for those who want the higher quality format with the liner notes and imagery.
4. Since Radiohead is no longer tied to a label, all the profits remain theirs.
5. While building their fanbase, they can tell their fans they're ready to record their next release and take pre-orders which they can then use  to record and distribute the next album.

We all know that most viral video content is usually short-lived and too amateurish for mass consumption.   One of the ways YouTube is trying to up the quality is by offering promotions and contests that call out to the community for content solid enough to appeal to a broader market.

YouTube, HP and Fox Searchlight are teaming to entice YouTube community to create a unique film experience based on three criteria.  These criteria tie in with the plot of the Searchlight release of Juno in December. The final set of short films will be chosen by the creative staff so the YouTube community can vote on the winner.   
It's a great way to tie in community buzz around a theatrical release and the prize will draw out talented community members who may not have been able to break away from the clutter otherwise.

This is a great example of how marketers such as HP and Searchlight can appeal to the YouTube generation, while YouTube creates quality content for the site.   

http://www.youtube.com/projectdirect

Chris Chavkin

• the move toward smarter technology and expert systems,
• the greater need for mobility and data portability,
• and the line between developer, designer, and end user growing blurry

While some believe that this idea of Web 3.0 is pure hype, there are plenty of items that pop up everyday in the blog-o-sphere that make a good case for the "next stage of the web".

One such example is the upcoming software, Adobe Thermo, that Adobe sneak peaked to the audience at the Adobe MAX conference this week. This software, while the details of how are still unclear, aims to make the development of RIAs (rich internet applications) an easier and more rewarding experience by empowering the designer. The idea is that by giving the designer the tools to create functional components and prototypes, it will improve the workflow between designer and developer, and allow each to do what they are best at.

Other examples of this evolution include Yahoo! Pipes and Google My Maps, that make it possible for any user to create a basic application through a GUI interface. In a short amount of time, I was able to create a wine pairing flavor map of Europe.

As the design and code behind the most engaging applications becomes all the more complicated, I am all for optimizing the process via a rich GUI interface. Other Web 3.0 ideas, I am more skeptical about. Upcoming blog post... expert systems, creepy or cool?

Marta Strickland

Mini’s new Clubwagon launch site is interesting. Mini has developed a program where their content is “aired” at specific times during the week. Even more interesting is the fact that it resides in a space where nothing is really “aired” and everything is on-demand. Mini will provide a 15-second piece to be viewed only through a 1-minute window of opportunity. After that window has closed and it won’t be shown again.

I ended up downloading an extension for my iCal, which will let me know when the next video will run. I set my reminders accordingly, made my cup of coffee and stared at the clock in anticipation. My grandmother always said at Thanksgiving that “anticipation is greater then realization.” The iCal alert had sounded. I logged onto www.theotherview.co.uk to view the latest video installment, but nothing! Blasted GMT time zone!

Anyway, I wait with bated breath still curious of what the actual content is. My actual take away is a great little widget to place on my blog/web site and a iCal extension. This has proved to be successful even without watching any content what so ever. I fell into “the make this viral for us” trap and had emailed 23 people here in our office all while thinking Mini. Now with out any TV media buy, or an online media buy for that matter, there are 24 people in the Detroit office making popcorn and getting ready to snuggle up in front of the computer and tune in to Mini.

John Stoll

The use of autoscroll, the animation, the clever mixing of technology and nature..all add up to an exceptional experience

http://www.rappcollins.com/

Jim Bachalo 

There is a lot of energy being put forth right now into the Semantic Web, making the web more readable for machines, instead of just humans. Rightly so, a smarter web in the end means a better user experience.

The idea is simple... for the search tools to be able to identify the not so subtle difference between something like "Paris Hilton" and a "Hilton in Paris". Now this could be determined by the format of the information (RDF), which would hold different attributes for a person (age, hair color) than a hotel (location, price). However, others have theorized that user search history, like whether you have recently looked up gossip stories vs Parisian restaurants, might soon come into play.

So, with that in mind, if these "expert systems" are really going to be taking a look into how we interact with the web and bring us news, content, and search results based on their interpretation of our tastes... is it cool or creepy?

Examples:
Amazon "The Page You Made" - Cool
Pandora - Very cool
Netflix "Our Best Guess" - Just slightly creepy
Google Search Goes AI - Full out sci-fi creepy

An exceptional experience in "expert systems" is still forthcoming.  And while I am all for a more intuitively organized web, I still would like to believe we are pretty far off from having machines understand the subtlety of things like taste in movies.  Does Netflix really understand my appreciation for things that are so bad they are good?  Doubtful. 

Marta Strickland

This is a very interesting little application - you can share your screen with anyone anywhere for free. The applications of this could be intriguing. http://www.yuuguu.com/ Baron Conway

As a follow up to their snazzy "Color like no other" campaign, Sony Bravia finally put out their awaited Play Doh Bunnies ad. It's definitely a cute ad that illustrates the idea and it goes well with its chosen song. However, it is not until you really think about how this commercial was made that your mind starts to spin.

The high quality version is well worth the wait on their painfully load heavy web site, but if you are in a hurry, you can watch it on YouTube.

Also cool to look at are these behind the scenes photos.

The English national rugby team has a reputation for toughness. Do you have what it takes to stare down this man? Finally, a purpose for Web cams... http://www.o2stareout.com Alex Churchill

Visit trulia.com. It's a significant leap forward in real estate search. The mapping feature simulates the conversation home buyers share with real estate brokers, including features like pricing heat maps, local real estate guides, and user forums. Even better, you get more information out of your search than a broker would provide. Bryan Fuhr

AIGA Detroit presents LUST: Lecture + Presentation

Wednesday, October 24, 2007
College for Creative Studies - Wendell W. Anderson Auditorium
201 East Kirby Detroit, MI 48202
7:00 PM - 9:00 PM
Cost: Free

Last December I visited Lust's studio in the Hague. These guys are incredibly dedicated to their often data-driven design work, and with the funding of the Dutch government behind many of their projects they have really been able to push the envelope. They are as sharp and as nice as they come.

Lori Bender & Sean Rhodes

If any one has any doubts about the ability of Flash 9 to create truly powerful Web2.0 applications, then take a trip to www.splicemusic.com. Splice music is a sophisticated sound synthesizer that includes virtual instruments, a realtime synthesizer, realtime effect plugins, realtime time-stretching, and much, much more!

It’s pretty obvious after using this, that just about any desktop application regardless of sophistication, can be (with a lot of hard work and coding, more than more than 800 classes!!! were needed for splice music), converted to a web application.  And if you’re a flash developer, all you need to know is that the person behind this is none other than German Flash whiz, Andre Michelle.

Jim Bachalo

On Friday, The Grand Rapids Art Museum (GRAM) celebrated the opening of its new gallery. The new space is the world’s very first art museum to be constructed following the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Green Building Rating System.

What an Exceptional Experience!

The new museum truly recognizes the need to create environmentally sensitive structures that use less energy and promote good stewardship of natural resources. The structure in itself is a work of art, while also housing works of art.

http://www.gramonline.org/index.html

Plan on visiting it sometime soon!

Joe Lekovish

Indie heroes Arcade Fire created this mesmerizing interactive music video. The future is now! http://www.beonlineb.com/click_around.html James Crawford

The stop-motion video centers on a pixelated flipbook of sorts. This doubles as the mobile-friendly version of the video (remove the filmed background and...voila!) and carries in it over 100 "subliminal" QR (quick response) matrix codes. When you scan these frames with your reader-enabled camera phone you get URLs relevant to civil liberty issues, hand-picked by Chris Lowe and Neil Tennant. The individual frames can also be downloaded to create your own homemade version of the video, which are slowly popping up on YouTube.

The whole package—music, message, meme, media—comes together nicely. Like the best cultural phenomena, this can be enjoyed at several levels of participation—at least one of which involves a dance floor.

(Thanks to Les Orchard, whose tweet hepped me to this video.)

Sam Cannon

Rentokil, the UK's leading pest control organization, has invented RADAR (Rodent Activated Detention and Riddance), the smartest mousetrap ever. When a mouse enters the RADAR box pressure sensitive pads detect their presence and close the doors. A measured dose of carbon dioxide is released — killing the rodent quickly and humanely, with no toxins going into the environment. Best of all, when the nasty little deed is done and the mouse is a mouse no longer, RADAR sends you a text message or email to let you know it’s safe to step down from the chair.

http://www.uk.rentokil.com/services-and-solutions/service-solutions/mouse-radar.php

Mitch Mitchell

Before my daughter was born, I developed a serious obsession with baby names, and in particular the psychology and social dynamics of naming. I learned from the Baby Name Wizard that names follow a clear fashion cycle, meaning that certain names reach peak popularity in a given decade (Donna or Randy in the 60s, Jennifer or Brad in the 70s, Monica or Chad in the 80s, etc.), and that you can typically expect names to come back into style every 100 years or so, because children are not usually named after living relatives.

Freakanomics adds another twist- that there's a predictable movement of names through social classes, so that today's quirky coastal elite Milo or Violet is tomorrow's populist Eva or Jack. The Web is great place for the name-obsessed to congregate, particularly when you realize how infrequently a typical woman (and this world seems to be populated largely by women) have the opportunity to name a child.

Each post on name expert Laura Wattenberg's blog regularly receives more than a hundred comments. Now in a Semantic Web twist, Laura has teamed up with some hard-core complexity science consultants to offer, what else, a predictive tool for baby names. Nymbler applies a complex predictive algorithm (think the Netflix or Amazon recommendation engine) to suggest clusters of related names.

Adding artificial intelligence to naming is both both comforting (no more reading through 100,000+ Baby Names!) and disturbing, because as a society we like to think of a name as something unique and very much self-directed.  Does this start to take the magic out of it?

Misha Cornes

Great French site for Wilkinson Sword. You have to love this.

http://www.ffk-wilkinson.com

Adam Turinas

Crowd intelligence as digital art!

This is a cool little site that creates images based on a "survival of the fittest" model based on a population of 1,000 random pictures.

You allow the fittest pictures to survive. The higher your rating for a picture the more mutated offspring it produces.

http://mutatingpictures.com/

Baron Conway

This story about MangoMobile (another Omnicom company) caught my eye earlier today.

I’ve been watching the number of Flash-based phones increase steadily over the past couple of years and with wireless carriers upgrading their infrastructure the time is right for rich media marketing to hit the mobile browser market.

Of course not every phone supports Flash Lite and so alternative media is required if you want to reach mass media. For those interested in learning more about Flash Lite3 Adobe is offering this free online seminar.

Rodney Cooper

But the song rocks!

Check it out here

Wayne Mitchell