Three Minds On Digital Marketing @ Organic

Earlier this month I spoke at the Forrester Consumer Forum 2007 in Chicago.  In a sign of the times, this was a two-day conference devoted entirely to social media.  Given the topic, it was inevitable that almost every aspect of the conference was fully blogged, tagged, and uploaded even before the last session concluded.

Just when I thought I couldn't consume any more virtual content, I got a special treat this week in the form of this video widget from coBrandit, a video podcasting team that covered the event.  It really got my attention.  Here in one neat package are interviews with key speakers including Ze Frank, Charlene Li, Richard Edelman, David Armano, even yours truly.  (Thanks David for the heads-up.)

Widgets are going to be the story for the rest of this year, particularly following the announcement of OpenSocial, Google's challenge to Facebook's closed API.  We tend to think of widgets as toys that live inside a particular social network (throwing a sheep at someone on Facebook), but the advent of open standards will mean an opportunity to applify all kinds of content.  It's game-changing.

Misha Cornes

Who wouldn’t want to lay their head to rest on what’s on everyone else’s mind?

It’s the Google News Cushion, featuring the top 10 Google searches of the year stuffed with feather down. It’s bizarre; it’s brilliant, and its $120.

Buy it here.

Mitch Mitchell

There has been a huge amount of buzz regarding Google OpenSocial, the new social application platform for developing common APIs using relatively open standards that launched yesterday. With huge names in the social world jumping on the bandwagon (MySpace, Friendster, Bebo, etc) with an overall network of users that greatly outnumbers Facebook, it is understandable why everyone is so excited. This news promises decreased development costs, richer applications, wider marketing reach, social networks coming together, peace love and happiness in the cyberworld...

But pushing the hype aside, let’s take a closer look at who is OpenSocial good for?
(Answer after the fold...)

Whoa. I don't know what to think about this site from Agion, an ingredient-brand supplier of anti-microbial technology to products like GUM toothbrushes and Timberland shoes, as well as hospital equipment and industrial building supplies.  They hired Florence Henderson to do a series of humorous webisodes on the original Brady Bunch set.  You watch her new, multi-ethnic family spreading germs via sneezes, bloody meat, and animal droppings.  If you don't "catch all the germs", prepare yourself for the gross-out results outside the door of the family's shared bathroom.  I can almost guarantee this is your one chance to hear Mrs. Brady talk about "Montezuma's Revenge", "Praying to the Porcelain God," and "Odors that make grown men weep".

I can't help but compare this site to the wildly successful Shave Everywhere, which took another very personal topic and treated it in a much more conservative way.  Is That's Revolting breakout, in-your-face marketing, bold enough to propel an obscure brand into the mainstream?  Or is the kind of dumb frat-boy humor that is bound to turn off a core market of female heads of household who are used to gentler fare?

http://www.thatsrevolting.com

Misha Cornes

Wow, this is beautiful in delivery (interaction) and message (what it says without saying it). I love the fact that it is not sneaky in trying to get you to click so you get taken to a sales pitch. So go ahead and slide the button and mouse away. There are great little sounds and visuals that happen. http://layertennis.com/071102/index.php

Casey Riggleman

Ok this is just plain fun.  For anyone who has secretly longed to hurl a fistful of food at someone or has seen Animal House a dozen times can appreciate the fun to be had at thegoodfoodfight.com.

The site manages to capture the spontaneity, splatters and projectiles of a real food fight, and you even can "ambush" a friend.

This a playful and fresh way to introduce users to benefits of eating healthy. The best part is once you've hurled that plate of spaghetti at someone, you can get the recipe at www.eatbetteramerica.com and try it for real at home.

Angela Di Pietro

the site was created by General Mills, in partnership with Rodale, the health magazine publisher - Ed.

http://www.datenform.de/are-you-social-eng.html

How marked up would your shirt be? (bonus points for being early enough of an adopter to get your preferred username)

After toying around with the few OpenSocial APIs that are out already, I ran across this piece which really underscored how much we need a way to slide horizontally across net properties. Even spookier is how many additional sites of the same ilk I routinely use that didn't many the artist's cut. Our current approach of forcing users to freshly join each new community that pops up is not going to work for much longer.

OpenID has been a great start, but Google's recent moves look even more promising in terms of forming that common framework that web apps as a whole desperately need. I for one can't wait until more of the big networks, that have signed onto the program, start to show their hands a little, and this shirt can be culled down to a single checkbox.

James Vreeland

I love this whimsical site from Orange, one of Britain's largest mobile carriers. The new campaign for their unlimited texting option is "Good Things Should Never End".  This has been interpreted online in a clever way, with a website that (seems to?) scroll forever.  The illustrations are by Rex Crowle.  Beautiful work from our friend Asi Sharabi of No Man's Blog and Poke London.

http://unlimited.orange.co.uk

Misha Cornes

ING takes a step forward in creative advertising.

Checking is a low-interest category. It’s an intangible product. Fees are a nuisance. Balancing a checkbook is pretty mundane.  

Quite frankly, checking is as boring as going to the bathroom.

That got the folks at ING thinking. What if we took another everyday moment? What if we reminded people of its importance? What if we used that moment to say something about our new checking product?

The result: a great piece of creative advertising.
 
I found my (bathroom) visit surprising, entertaining, even engaging.

Even better, it sells a checking account. This is a great step forward.

http://i-needtogo.com/

Bryan Fuhr 

Hulu’s recent decision to reject 30-second pre-roll ads falls in line with the stance taken by YouTube back in August.  Both video platforms have opted for overlays, initiated by Videoegg and ScanScout, which they deem more conducive to satisfying user experiences.  However, for its long-form content (half and full hour programs), Hulu offers sponsor introductions starting at two minutes of pre-show ads for half hour programs.  

While Hulu and YouTube have chosen not to run pre-roll ads, a study released by the Online Publishing Association (OPA) in June  calls into questions whether pre-rolls should be rejected outright.  The study claims that consumers 30-second ads are more effective at driving brand awareness, likeability, and consideration than shorter ads.  

While it may not come as a shock that longer ads promote these brand attributes, the study does not measure the impact that these ads have on the user experience.  Google/YouTube fought back two months later, citing their research that suggested that abandonment rates were nearly 75% with 15-second ads while only 10% with the overlays.  They continued to note that click rates on the overlay ads were around 1-2% and that 75% of those watched the entire ad.   

So everyone was talking about the Google Phone.  Now everyone is talking about Android.  It’s not iPhone-level buzz.  Not yet anyway.  If you don’t know the details, well, Google “Open Handset Alliance”.  The short answer is it’s a bunch of wireless players (T-Mobile, Sprint, HTC, Samsung, Motorola and the like) getting together with Google around a new, open platform for wireless devices.

So what do the participants get out of it?

Google gets an opportunity to become a major part of the wireless landscape and to significantly extend its ad network.

The lagging carriers like Sprint and T-Mobile get a platform that, in theory, enables them to develop richer data applications more quickly and easily. It’s also probably the closest that they’ll get to countering the iPhone in the mid-term.  The brand association with Google probably doesn’t hurt either.

For manufacturers, Android will simply be added to the stable of platforms they use in developing new devices.  HTC, for example, is currently developing a new device using Android, but isn’t planning to abandon Windows Mobile 6 used in most of its current smart phones.  

So what about consumers?  I’ve seen very little talk about what the user gets out of this.  Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO said "The fundamental problem that most phones people have today is that they don't have fully powered Web browsers."  It is? I’d say one of the more fundamental problems they typical user would note is that the phones don’t perform as they expect them to.

I’m not going to elaborate on this site too much on this site. You’ve all heard the song! (if you haven’t you can listen to it here) Now you can buy the amazing cream that makes logos bigger! Not only that but you can get starburst dust, emotiontionator and many other gifts.. FREE!!

http://www.makemylogobiggercream.com/

Lau Ardelean

I just got an invitation to my first FATHOM event, a same-day nationwide theatrical screening of the first two Star Trek episodes ever aired (including the pilot in which Leonard Nimoy is the only original cast member).

Granted, I’m no Trekkie, but I do love American kitsch…and I love the FATHOM concept. It taps into the viral potential of the web by galvanizing temporary communities who meet in the physical world for a one-time “movie performance” in select theaters around the country. So not only do you come together to share your passion, you are doing it with thousands of other people on the same day around the country. Instant, fleeting Zeitgeist.

If only I had known about FATHOM last week when they down-linked my all-time favorite horror flick: Halloween (famous because its implied violence scared the bjeezuz out of audiences, yet nary a not a drop of blood is seen onscreen. And of course it starred Jamie Leigh Curtis whose mom, Janet Leigh, met her maker 18 years earlier in the unforgettable shower scene from the original Psycho. They are the queen and heir apparent of American horror flicks.). But I digress.

http://www.fathomevents.com/

Tim Armitage

I was reading the Best Week Ever blog which had a link to a video of Jon Stewart explaining the writers’ strike.  Not only did he explain why the writers were upset, he used his own show’s new website as an example -  basically, the networks claim that new media is still too new to structure a model for compensation.  As more money is being poured into internet advertising, the writers are still being compensated like it’s 1991.  

Being a huge fan of The Daily Show, this BWE spot sent me to www.thedailyshow.com – and I must say, it’s amazing!  You can search all episodes by keyword or by date and timeframe.  Want to re-live Indecision 2004?  See Jon tear Bill O’Reilly a new one?  Watch a marathon of Produce Pete or This Week in God?  It’s REALLY easy to find what you’re looking for.  And it also lets you rate/comment, embed, bookmark, and post to profiles like Facebook.  Very useful tools for Jon’s cult-like following.

Oh, and the advertising isn’t intrusive at all.  It comes after the clip.

Stacey Levine

The IT Room is launching November 11th…What’s that you ask? An Office knockoff? The American version of the British sitcom The IT Crowd? 

No, The IT Room is a slightly subversive attempt by Dell (and possibly other tech companies) to create their own commercials in the form of online TV mini-episodes that push their brand and show their products in action while conveying a story.

Though the site and episode are not quite ready for prime time, the concept has promise depending on the quality of the content and the heavy-handedness of the messaging. Except for a little Dell logo at the bottom of the screen when you watch the promo video there is nothing to give away that it is advertising.

A few in the blogosphere are arguing that the web show is independent and the episodes are merely sponsored by Dell. But watching it, my finely tuned ear for Dell marketing speak--I used to write Dell case studies--gives them away. Characters chanting “blades, blades, blades” and the narrator sermonizing on the constant battle between “IT complexity and simplicity” scream Dell messaging. So, while they might just be “sponsoring” the show as some contend, it seems they have at least some influence on the content.

Either way, while not entirely novel, anyone who has fond memories of their days at Initrode is sure to have a chuckle, and the messaging seems just subtle enough, at least in the promo.

Benjamin Vigil

Here's an elegant and fun application from SimpleBits that lets you manage who you owe a beer to and vice versa. It uses Twitter as its delivery / distribution mechanism. 

I was debating sharing this as Rube Goldberg machines are not even close to original anymore.  This one however, is fantastical in a different sort of way.
 
The same director of the Sony Bravia “balls” commercial, Nicolai Fuglsig, now brings you the latest Guinness ad.
 
It’s amazing that with the completion of such a simple idea he can bring out that much joyous emotion at the end of it all.  With everyone cheering, people following and strange gawking looks, every piece of this is well done.
 
Philip Garwood

You may have heard there's a writers strike.  That's why The Daily Show, Colbert Report, SNL, and a host of others are now or are soon to be in reruns indefinitely.  It is an article of faith on both sides of the strike that digital distribution of content is going to one day replace television as the way you consume your entertainment. 

The biggest issue of the confrontation is how to split the money pie when that happens.  If the strike goes on for even a few months, that day may come quicker than anyone thought.  Remember how hard it was for baseball to get its audience back after their last strike?  Well, there was no new sport to replace baseball in fan's lives.  There is already such a vibrant digital content universe that TV has been steadily losing audience.  Now it may fall off a cliff, but the soft landing for viewers is everything they can be entertained by online. 

Is the strike bad for the companies?  The guild?  The viewers?  Maybe for all of them in the short term.  But while the future, as The Clash said, is unwritten, good entertainment is not.  In the long term an economic model will develop that allows the creators, the stars, and the producers of the programming you will watch through infrastructure that used to be called "cable television" to get back to business.

Matthew Rosenberg

An interesting way to showcase a range of products and break through the usual pablum of a straight up ecommerce catalogue.

http://producten.hema.nl/

Shane Ginsberg

http://www.hobbycity.com

Try adding a lightweight item to your cart (under 100g). You get the message:
 
‘Hey, don't waste money on postage!
Your total postage weight is 45grams see below to find out how much you have left in that weight category!

International Air Mail ($65 Limit) 0 - 100gr $3.09 55g left.’

A new list of items comes up that are light enough to add to your order without bumping up the shipping rate. The first thing you think is ‘I could buy more now and save on shipping!’. It puts the catalog in front of the user again, and goes for the impulse buy reflex. Deadly.
 
I planned on buying one motor. Now I’m thinking of grabbing a battery and some wire connectors too. ARRGGH. 
 
Adam Sullovey

AT&T has had a few commercials running that highlight individuals who work, live and play in multiple cities. They now allow consumers to play along, create their made up location and purchase items (T-shirts, mugs, bags and stickers) with their unique slogans.  It’s an interesting way to allow consumers to be unique and promote AT&T at the same time.

http://www.attwheredoyoulive.com/

Bonnie Hoag

http://www.songza.com/
 
Beautiful simplicity from interface designer Aza Raskin.  Read more about Raskin's design philosophy at humanized.com/weblog.

Charlie Zicari 

I remember seeing this effect a long time ago on someone’s Flash demo. The infinite zoom is being used quite nicely here.

http://www.scifi.com/tinman/oz/

Todd Fraser

Interesting story from the BBC about a Dutch teenager arrested for stealing "virtual furniture".
 
When asked about the major challenges we face in the near future in this month's anniversary issue of Rolling Stone, noted sci-fi author William Gibson replied:
 
"...One of the things our grandchildren will find quaintest about us is that we distinguish the digital from the real, the virtual from the real."

It's obvious that this future has already arrived for some. 
 
Jim Bachalo

While not being able to access a particular web page is never an exceptional experience, the way a company asks you to wait can be.

I was recently trying to get to Macys.com, and the page was taking quite a while to load. Not being the most patient person in the world, I kept refreshing to no avail. But, lo and behold, rather than getting a “timed out” error or something of the like, I got a nice message from Macy’s.
 
I think the tone of the message is great, and the fact that they’ll keep trying to refresh the site for you, rather than asking you to come back later, is a nice touch.
 
Ann Freccero

This week Shane Ginsberg and I spoke at Organic's HR offsite in beautiful Sonoma County.  The interactive industry is once again experiencing a major hiring crunch, and we talked about ways to use social media to reach great candidates. Blogs in particular are a great way to reach those who are not actively looking for a job.  The short version: if you're reading this, we probably want to talk to you.  You can see the full presentation below.

Misha Cornes

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A few months ago I posted about "Web 2.0...The Machine is Us/ing Us", a treatise on community and collaboration by Michael Wesch.

As fantastic as that video was, I was delighted to discover more video's of similar subject matter.  I initially thought the original video was a one-time thing.  Nope.  Turn's out Dr. Wesch and his students have produced a goldmine of fantastic thought provoking content.

I highly recommend visiting this site.  If nothing else watch the video's under "Explorations" and "YouTube Project".  

I'm not quite Rodney Dangerfield in Back to School, but watching & reading this content makes me wish I was an anthropology undergrad @KSU.

http://mediatedcultures.net/ksudigg/

Patrick Dunphy

Even though the ecommerce shopping day is slated for Cyber Monday, here is a great site to track all the Black Friday ads/promotions.  This is a great way of the community helping itself out as there isn’t one company that is sponsoring this.  Black Friday may become the new Cyber Monday before we know it for online shopping and sales!  At least it could guide the users store visits and how they determine where to start/finish their day.

http://bfads.net/

Rick Corteville

Today Amazon announced their long awaited (and worst kept secret) digital book reader, called Kindle. It's a different approach than other digital book readers offerings from Sony and other manufacturers because it represents a different approach to content delivery and management

Taking a page from Apple's playbook, Amazon concentrated on an experience of seamless content organization, purchasing and delivery. With a built in high-speed data modem, Kindle owners can have their content choice delivered over the air within minutes of purchasing. There is no computer to device sync required which eliminates compatibility and user frustration issues.

The content offering may be more limited than physical offerings, but it's a start. You can also subscribe to daily newspapers and blogs. While everything has a purchase or monthly subscription fee, there are no monthly service or wiress usage fees.

The $399 price tag may be a bit high, but its a fresh approach to an industry that has seen more failures than successes.

Chad Stoller

A few days ago I was flipping through the channels when I came across what I thought to be a documentary on VH1 Classic, the Rock Band Band Story.
 
Little did I know it was a mockumentary and branded entertainment piece for the Rock Band video game being released by MTV Games and EA.
 
The gist of the branded entertainment piece was a faux Behind the Music and music video hosted by former MTV News editor-in-chief, Kurt Loder.  Loaded with cameo interviews with multiple past and modern artists, the mockumentary focused on how the fictitious band broke it big while playing on plastic instruments.   Running in connection with the program were commercials and “crawls” promoting the release of the game.

Maybe not the most unique branded entertainment idea it still brought home the brand message of the game, and probably will drive people to investigate online and eventually purchase the game.
 
It supports what we see the future bringing, more entertainment content and programming that blurs the line between advertising and product.
 
Chris Chavkin

Throughout the years countless businesses and artists have relied on bar napkins to create business plans or scribble down their thoughts…
 
Well, now you can actually buy a napkin notepad.
 
EuroRSCG has built a promotional web site around this concept that's fairly entertaining, which I found via an unbranded print ad in Ad Age.  You can “watch” how others have created their sketches or create your own and add it to the gallery. On the Buy link, it says they are exclusively sold through MoMA, but I couldn’t find it on the site. I’m really not sure if this is a unique take on advertising for an advertising agency or if this is a real product they are marketing. Maybe a little of both?  Also, take a peek at the “Credits” link at the bottom of the page. Simple and clean way of promoting the developers without needing a whole Contact Us page.  photocredit: digihuman
 
http://www.napkinnotebook.com/
 
Bonnie Hoag

Sherry Leung sent me a link a very interesting site this week. Free Rice is a charity site that engages the user with a progressively more challenging vocabulary quiz.  For each correct answer, the site's sponsors will donate 10 grains of rice to the United Nations.  When you combine feeding your brain with a wholesome distraction and the warm feeling of watching your rice bowl fill up, it's pretty addictive.  And it's hard work!

This got me thinking more generally about the power of the "human computer" to accomplish other tasks, and I rediscovered Luis von Ahn, an Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon.  He was obsessed with all the human computational time "wasted" playing Solitaire, etc., and suggested that image recognition and tagging could be done by humans if it was placed in the context of a competitive game. This was the inspiration for the ESP Game, later licensed by Google Image Labeler.

The CAPTCHA technology was another von Ahn innovation (he's a MacArthur Fellow).  That's the maddening distorted text challenge boxes used to defeat spam bots.  He decided that this too was wasted human energy, and recently introduced reCAPTCHA.  Instead of serving up random letters, your challenge phrases are now snippets of text from a project to digitize old books.  You are providing the human intelligence where OCR has failed. 

I think there is some kind of metaphor here in terms of other experiences we create for consumers.  We are so scared of making the customer do any work- everything is supposed to be seamless and easy.  But sometimes, as the adage goes, hard work is its own reward.  Especially when you can create something of value for the customer.

Misha Cornes

I finally just got access to hulu.com.  For those of you who don’t know, hulu is a joint venture between News Corp. and NBC Universal to bring their content onto the internet.  I spend a lot of time watching TV on my laptop so I have used Joost, ABC.com, NBC.com, CBS.com, and The Daily Show.  So far my experience with hulu has been much better then any of the others. 

For starters the content is obviously superior.  With two major networks (WB also rumored to be joining) there are all my favorite shows from The Office, Family Guy, and even when I was bored the other day I watched the pilot to Doogie Howser MD.  They also have a select number of older movies like Weekend at Bernie's.  You can create a profile, add videos to your playlist, and even look at your viewing history so I know what episodes I have already seen.

When watching the video in its normal format the picture quality is fantastic.  Lots of different options are available to you including: sharing the clip, embedding the clip, getting details on the episode, etc.  You can also pop out the video to view in a separate window or make it full screen.  However in full screen mode I will say the full screen resolution is not nearly as good as ABC's.  There are usually 3-7 commercial interruptions (depending on length) and whoever the advertiser is they also get a small banner above the video, but when viewing full screen they are not seen at all.
 
So far I have really enjoyed watching my usual shows on here as well as catching up on some classics.  I encourage anyone who hasn’t already to put your name in to try and get a version as well.

St. John Oneil-Dunne

The old adage is that the best way to learn is by doing. Well that’s my excuse for spending my weekend on a sad obsessive task – Creating a Facebook Application.

Let me start by saying that I am not a technologist. I can find my way around a blogging platform, sling a bit of HTML but I am not a developer. I am a marketing-type (i.e. I have limited marketable skills).

A while back I created a map for my main sad obsession, running a blog on sailing, Messing About in Sailboats. The map called Great Places to Sail used Platial. This is a nice, simple social mapping service for creating maps about a particular interest and getting other like-minded people to add to it. They use Google Maps as their platform.

This weekend I turned this map into a Facebook app. It was labor-intensive but surprisingly easy. First I turned the map into a widget using Widgetbox. Then I turned the widget into a Facebook app. Presto Digito – Great Places to Sail is now on Facebook as an application!

I give Widgetbox great kudos. They do a brilliant job of stepping you through the process. It felt like doing your taxes with Intuit. Really well-designed, easy-to-use, with lots of context-sensitive help and simple checklists to ensure that you have completed the long list of tasks correctly.

The fascinating thing is the way all these tools work together as a system. Platial develops its service on Google Maps. They use Widgetbox to allow users to turn their maps into distributable widgets. Widgetbox integrates with Facebook to turn widgets into applications. The content gets distributed on Facebook as an application. By the way, Widgetbox runs an ad network that sends money into your Paypal account if people click on ad next to you app. Ultimately, Google benefits from all this as their mapping platform reaches a wider audience, increasing its share of users.

All these services are built on readily available open platform tools. This makes it easy for companies to create products and services that integrate seamlessly, each one playing a distinct role that builds and feeds on each other. They put the user in control, give them the tools to go create and potentially profit from their creativity. Like an organic ecosystem, the services can adapt as new opportunities arise or the market moves in a different direction.

Now all I need is a few million Facebook users to start using my application and I can retire on all the money I am going to make through Paypal.

Adam Turinas

A great roundup in today's New York Times about the current effort to inject more emotional resonance into the CPG category via social networks.  The latest addition is Pepperidge Farm's "Connecting Through Cookies" at ArtoftheCookie.com, which joins site for non-Gen Y brands like Goldfish, Pantene, Clorox's Food Division, Fiskars Scissors, and of course Dove.

Behind this trend is a common thread - women.  Specifically, the kind of women we used to call homemakers, now Chief Family Officers, etc.  Housewives were the original social networkers, and I think the rise of brand-driven niche social networking is a sign that women (with children) may eventually come to dominate social spaces in the way that they dominate online gaming.  And in the same way that traditional game developers continue to miss the boat by targeting a younger demo (with the exception of the Wii, which is still not marketed specifically to women), I think big social networks are under-serving the lucrative Mom demo as they chase youth with dating apps, sheep attacks, and other juvenilia.

Misha Cornes

Smashing Magazine offers this nice round-up of next generation user experience technologies (e.g. ReacTable, Photosynth, BumpTop).  There's a prescient comment about the Wii controller's possible influence in tweaking the interaction paradigm.  The multi-touch HCIs are featured in the free TED conference podcast series.

Jay Bain

The ’08 presidential campaign is in full swing and the web is front and center.  Already there have been debates on YouTube, Rudolph Giuliani has suffered the slings and arrows of Facebook, where his daughter signed up for an Obama Supporters Group; Bill Richardson and Mike Huckabee are getting generally good notices for funny viral ads; Mitt Romney’s use of ad networks led to his ads appearing on Gay.com (and it was the folks at Gay.com who asked that they be removed); Ron Paul had an incredibly successful online fundraising event organized by an individual supporter; Clinton has fared poorly on the authenticity meter with over-scripted web content… and we’ve got a good solid year to go.
 
Most of the candidates’ online campaigns, though, are pretty old school.  They post their tv spots on YouTube and alongside the usual glossy brochures and scare-mailers they post their positions on campaign websites.  Where digital has come into play most forcefully is in spreading the now-generic “Macaca moment”.  You can fake all the flag-waving, your-pain-feeling sincerity you want, but you wouldn’t fake a mistake, so the mistakes are where we see candidates at their most authentic. 
 
In an effort to put the gotcha cameras on its rivals, the Democratic National Committee has launched a new site: www.democrats.org/flippertv.  Here, you can download hours and hours of video the DNC shoots of Republican candidates as part of their opposition strategy, and edit it into your own campaign propaganda.  I’m assuming that supporters of GOP candidates can use the video to put halos over their candidates' heads just as easily as Dems can demonize them, so it probably winds up being a relatively non-partisan effort even given its origins and intent. 

This is one of the first efforts I’ve seen that really acknowledges how politics has (so far) played online.  Official candidate sites are preaching largely to the converted… no one knows whether a candidate who has more Facebook friends gets more votes… online dirty tricks tend to be unmasked and embarrass the handlers (if not the candidates) who use them.  It acknowledges that the “Macaca” who gave George Allen his moment was a “tracker” – a supported of Allen’s Democratic opponent who had been sent to get potentially damaging video of Allen at campaign events.  It’s too much to think that the trackers themselves will again become the story, and equally easy to think that knowing of this effort will inspire rival camps and freelance haters to try and create gaffes, but what really bears watching is whether any of the videos that users create out of these raw materials has an effect on an election.
 
Matt Rosenberg

I am sure everyone has read the numerous blogs and article posting but Google has launched a beta version of its Google Maps Mobile that now includes your location whether or not you have GPS enabled on your phone.  I downloaded the latest version to my blackberry and when I now open up Google Maps there is a flashing blue dot with my location.  If the phone is GPS enabled then the location will be accurate and if you don’t it uses Cell Phone towers in your area to give you a best guess with a circle around that shows approximately where you are. My blackberry is not GPS enabled and when I used it inside the NYC office is has me on 37th street between Broadway and 6th  ave which is pretty darn close (the office is on 37th and Broadway).

St.John Oneil-Dunne

By now, I’m sure almost everybody has heard of the “Chocolate Rain” song which catapulted Tay Zonday to Internet "stardom" (if you haven’t seen/heard it, check it out here).
 
Well, Dr. Pepper has jumped on his the notoriety of Tay’s song, using him in a music video shoot of “Cherry Chocolate Rain” to promote their new Cherry Chocolate flavour.  An awesome and hilarious idea.

Daryl Brewer

Firebrand, a NY-based Media company, has launched an advertising program which airs (in the U.S.) on the ION Channel. The companion site, www.firebrand.com, runs selected spots from the TV show.

And even though the site is in Beta it looks destined to be a hit in the ad community. The video quality is very good and the spots load quickly in an embedded Flash environment. Users can send commercials to friends, download to desktop or send spots directly to their personal blog.

Best of all is the interface and user experience. Users choose spots from a selection of brands like Nike, the Gap and Vodafone. Each of the brand sections is well stocked, (Nike has over 30 commercials to view from all
over the world), so users can quickly and easily compare campaigns.

The TV show I gather is a little different. Commercial jockeys introduce the spots and provide quick analysis.

"Firebrand takes the traditional method of programming television commercials and turns it on its head," says Firebrand co-founder Román Viñoly. "We program TV spots like a DJ spins music in a club. There is a rhythm and flow to it."

Being from Canada, I can't see the show. Which is just as well - the site does a great job without the talking heads. Note: Thanks to Parkdale Pictures for the tip.

Dave Sylvestre

If you are in New York doing your holiday shopping, Bank of America wants to make life a little easier for you. They have launched a lounge for tired shoppers called the “Gift on Fifth”.  It’s a place to chill, have some hot chocolate, get some gift-wrapping and avail yourself of their restrooms – not a minor issue in NYC.
 
The program supports the launch of BankAmericard and it’s a smart way to get the brand and the product of people when they need it most.
 
This was beautifully executed by Concentric Communications, who specialize in creating spectacular experiential marketing programs.  More photos after the jump.
 
Adam Turinas

Is Google trying to steal a bit of Digg’s thunder? Or is this yet another move towards user personalization of Google's results?

The web community is trying to guess what Google could be up to, after Googlified revealed that "Google Experimental is currently running an experiment that allows some selected users to “influence [the] search experience by adding, moving, and removing search results.”

To me, this is just yet another indication of the move towards a trend of personalization of the web. The idea would be that Google's smart algorithms work together with mass user behavior, but that the final search results are run through the "context of ME". With this new development from Google, the "context of ME" would no longer have to be based on user history alone (what sites I’ve visited, stuff I’ve bought, etc), but also what the user explicitly says that they are interested in or not, what is valuable and what isn’t. I think this is a great development towards a more complete and thus valuable idea of personalization, one that shows a balance between the user's conscious and unconscious behavior.

Marta Strickland