Three Minds On Digital Marketing @ Organic

An Experiment in Relationship Visualization

2008-07-04T20:01:49Z

As we all know in interactive, data is everywhere - everything we do is or can be tracked. The question is are we looking in the right place.

This is a very interesting visualization of information from a somewhat different angle. This organic visualization, "code swarm" by Michael Ogawa from UC Davis is history of commits to a software project (a commit happens when a developer makes changes to the code or documents and transfers them into the central project repository). However, instead of focusing on the actual code, the focus is on the relationships between developers and their code.

Other than this being a great way to look at a universe of information based on relationships, time and events, I think there could be a real opportunity for us as digital marketers to use models like this from an analytics perspective to find new ways of targeting messages to customers.

Imagine doing a similar exercise for a client. Would there be patterns that we have not seen before and how could we leverage those patterns from a marketing and experience perspective?

See more videos at

http://vis.cs.ucdavis.edu/~ogawa/codeswarm/

Baron Conway

An Oral History of the Internet

2008-07-03T19:58:27Z

The crazy, messy story of the birth and nurturing of the internet.

"This year marks the 50th anniversary of an extraordinary moment. In 1958 the United States government set up a special unit, the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), to help jump-start new efforts in science and technology. This was the agency that would nurture the Internet."

http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2008/07/internet200807

Sandy Marsh

Nike PhotoiD

2008-07-03T19:49:51Z

This is a fantastic example of some outside the box thinking on connecting the offline, mobile, and online experience with customized products. By now I am sure you are all familiar with the NIKEiD program. The next evolution is using MMS on your cell phone to help you pick and match your outfit. The technology behind this isn't too complicated, but the experience design is interesting: see something that catches your eye, snap a picture, Nike sends you the matching shoes overlaid on your picture, and of course linking over to ordering online too! This technology and experience could apply to all kinds of clothing and retail products with strong color choices and a relatively minimal infrastructure.

Masterminded by AKQA, London, NIKE PHOTOiD is a brand new mobile application which allows users to customize their own set of sneakers according to their physical surroundings. You simply take a picture of something on your camera phone (it could be anything from a piece of graffiti to an ice cream sundae) and then send this pic off to a shortcode via MMS. The NIKEiD website then picks out the two strongest colours from your image and uses them to colour your custom sneakers. Within a minute, you are sent a link with your design superimposed over the original source of pantone inspiration.

You can then save this image as wallpaper for your mobile, send it to a mate or, by entering the unique DESIGNiD at NIKEiD.com, link directly to your design to complete and actually purchase the sneakers. As one particularly over-excited sneaker-freak in our office inquired with a faint hint of dribble at the corner of his mouth: 'So I could take a picture of a grassy meadow and then it would text me a link to buy my very own Nike Grassy Meadows?' Yeap chap - that's about the long and short of it...

Via Contagious.

Dean McRobie

Help destroy the Carhatt website

2008-07-02T20:56:44Z

Apparently the Carhartt website has undergone a redesign and they are enlisting their users to help destroy the old site. The implementation of this could have been a little stronger, with more tools to use, but I like the concept of having some fun with the old website to introduce the new one. Once you destroy the old homepage, you get to see the new one.

http://www.carhartt.com/

Steve Conroy

Subaru is Sexy

2008-07-02T08:56:21Z

This is a very smart and engaging site created for Subaru Canada. Works on many levels. The sumo wrestler injects the Japanese - read quality - aspect. It is synergistic with the broadcast. Leverages the reality shows like America's Next Top Model and also sells the vehicle in an engaging manner. It provides the same walk around navigation of most auto sites, but truly puts the consumer in control. You even get to look at your proofs and send them off to friends or a contest they sponsor.

While a half naked sumo may not be what I would consider sexy, the site certainly delivers on make a relatively non-descript vehicle, look..well hot...

http://www.sexysubaru.ca

Vito Greto

C U L8R, Alcopops

2008-07-01T21:32:23Z

A little-noticed story from Anheuser-Busch last week given the focus on the presumptive InBev takeover: last week A-B announced that it will stop selling alcoholic energy drinks.

Relenting to pressure from anti-underage drinking activists and state attorneys general, they are pulling the plug on the tiny Bud Extra and Tilt brands (shortly after I got married, I used to see this ad every day on my commute). Several brewers are accused of designing and marketing "alcopops" specifically for the under-21 market, and ultimately it seems A-B has decided that the controversy was not worth the minimal gains.

While it will have little effect on A-B's business, it's a big deal for category leader Miller and their Sparks brand. I've tried Sparks and last year I reviewed Sparks.com, which seemed to give an insight into their product strategy:

"Navigating the site definitely feels like stepping into the mind of a teenage boy - air guitar contests, skateboards, doodles - but in a bold move, no shots of attractive girls. Is it specifically targeted at underage drinkers?"

If the Center for Science in the Public Interest and New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo's case against SAB Miller goes forward, we will soon have our answer.

Misha Cornes

Qik It, Qik It Good!

2008-07-01T20:02:00Z

Last night I got a firsthand glimpse of a very cool video streaming app from startup Qik.

Qik is a mobile streaming video service with a social angle that is currently available for Nokia and windows mobile phones (see their site FAQ). However, they are developing the service for use with iPhones and what I saw last night was that alpha in development.

On the iPhone, the app is activated from an icon link and from there you hold your phone like a camera while recording video that is stored on the qik.com site for you or other users to view. When we tested it last night, our stream happened to load up on their front page as a currently running stream - so we were watching our stream in real time (about a 3 second delay) - very cool!

Using the iPhone 1.0's lens optics and processor, the video quality was good but not great (about 5-7 fps, quality dependent on ambient lighting); however the audio was surprisingly good (kudos to the iPhone mic?). Besides seeing ourselves on the qik.com homepage, we were also immediately able to access the file created from a directory of videos just created. Making and viewing a video was a seamless, instant user experience.

From a content distribution POV, this service is even easier to use than YouTube and like the site says, will have a million uses. Like YouTube, there is already a global user base (check out the integrated geotagging for videos). Already on the site are quite a few known 'lifecasters' and podcasters, ranging from pro to (extremely) amateur. Another great feature is live chat. It's the most elegant implementation of "video+phone" I've seen yet. I'm not sure if their iPhone app will be as robust for viewing as for video creation (e.g., the YouTube app on the iPhone) but we will see.

Color me very, very impressed with this service, its implementation so far and its potential impact on our media culture that is rapidly changing to bottom-up and many-to-many. This is going to be big!

http://www.qik.com

Jay Bain

Blog Visualization

2008-06-30T07:16:34Z

I can't say that I am avid reader of Vanity Fair or many of the blogs they track but I thought this was a clever piece of visual design

http://www.vfdaily.com/culture/2008/blogopticon/index.html

I am a sucker for a quadrant chart and this one combines categorization, mapping based on content type, attitude AND navigation to the actual blog. It also told me something about my own tastes - I tend to like earnest opinion-oriented blogs and have little time for the scurrilous. That would officially make me boring to invite any party!

Adam Turinas

Is Search Behavior Indicative Of Community Values?

2008-06-27T17:04:28Z

Google Trends has been all over the blogs recently. They recently launched Google Trends for Websites, a service which has been getting some slack from bloggers. The argument goes that they aren't really providing useful enough data for smaller websites and blogs, which would be a big portion of the interested audience. Then, of course, the upcoming election has people wondering how accurate of a predictive tool Google Trends could be. It's certainly more representative of mass opinion than sites such as Politweets, which because of their bias towards early tech adopters swayed heavily towards Ron Paul in the early primary process. But, the most interesting story about Google Trends that I have read recently was a piece in the New York Times about Google Trends being used in a pornography trial in Florida. The argument goes something like this:

"In a novel approach, the defense in an obscenity trial in Florida plans to use publicly accessible Google search data to try to persuade jurors that their neighbors have broader interests than they might have thought. "In the trial of a pornographic Web site operator, the defense plans to show that residents of Pensacola are more likely to use Google to search for terms like 'orgy' than for 'apple pie' or 'watermelon.' The publicly accessible data is vague in that it does not specify how many people are searching for the terms, just their relative popularity over time. But the defense lawyer, Lawrence Walters, is arguing that the evidence is sufficient to demonstrate that interest in the sexual subjects exceeds that of more mainstream topics -- and that by extension, the sexual material distributed by his client is not outside the norm . . . "The search data he is using is available through a service called Google Trends. It allows users to compare search trends in a given area, showing, for instance, that residents of Pensacola are more likely to search for sexual terms than some more wholesome ones."

The article then goes on to prove that when matched search for search against words like "surfing" and "Nintendo", however, the defense's argument completely backfires. I can't even think of a scenario that I would commonly search for the term "watermelon" on the internet, unless I was looking for an online retailer to sell me seeds for a garden. Still, it's an interesting argument. Obscenity trials in the past have used items such as pornographic magazines and videos available at local stores as a judge for what the community considers decent versus indecent. In modern trials, defense attorneys have been trying to make the move to the availability of web content, and now to search behavior. So far, it hasn't worked to their advantage, but as more and more detailed analytic tools become available, it will be interesting to see if that changes. Sure, in this recent case about "apple pie" versus "orgy", the connection to actual human behavior and intent is somewhat laughable... but just think about it. Once you start adding social graphs and common language search into the equation, couldn't search behavior patterns and trends start to be a lot more connected to the actual values and interests of a "community"? We even have FriendFeed and their micromeme suggesting a sort of Google Trends for groups of friends. Just another example of power to put in the "scary Google" category. Thanks to Bridget McKinley for sharing this article with me. Marta Strickland

An Exceptional Hotel Room

2008-06-27T16:17:58Z

This has to be the ultimate hotel room in Paris. "The room can be booked for one night only, the mini-bar is fully stocked and included in the price, breakfast is delivered to the door and a record collection stands at ones disposal". Originally conceived as an art piece by the Swiss artists L/B, the pod has been literally dropped in a few dramatic locations around Europe and currently sits on top of the Palais de Tokyo. New meaning to portable architecture.

More at http://www.everland.ch/en/home/

Conor Brady

The Great Office Nerf War!

2008-06-27T10:56:11Z

This is not an exceptional experience in the usual sense of the word... However it is very funny and clever... Not sure if this is a viral campaign - I think it has to be.. However this is how I want to spend my Friday afternoons ;-) Also for those of us who have ever worked client side the sales versus IT theme is very relevant. Enjoy....

http://gizmodo.com/5018272/the-great-nerf-office-war

Baron Conway

Simple But Beautiful

2008-06-26T13:58:55Z

Sometimes you find absolute beauty in the simple and ordinary. If Rey Fenwick had told me he was going to do a series of paintings of friendship bracelets, I would have questioned the use of his time. What impressed me most about these was the flawless execution and consideration that was put into their creation. They are simple, but the attention to detail is what makes them addictive. The choice of color, positioning and execution make me want to buy them all. I think we can learn a lot from this approach. Whilst technology can be a great inspiration for experiences and campaigns, I think we get so wrapped up in it, that we forget about our craft as designers. The push to launch and to be first doesn't always allow us to do this, but I think it is going to be a differentiator going forward now that everyone "gets digital".

See more of Rey's paintings at
http://www.flickr.com/photos/rayfenwick/sets/72157604576020105/

Conor Brady

Big Ideas (don't get any)- Sound Experiment

2008-06-26T07:07:48Z

Student James Houston of Glasgow School of Art's visual communication department used his final project to answer the band Radiohead's challenge to remix their new single "Nude." Though the project did not make the deadline, the end product was well outside the box and a great example of true creativity being fully executed in craft and concept.

http://www.vimeo.com/1109226

Mike Glowacki

Animoto- Bring Your Photography to Life!

2008-06-25T10:59:54Z

Animoto is in beta but it's very very cool.. Essentially you upload a bunch of static images, choose a song of your choice (or upload your own) and Animoto produces a video based on what you've uploaded.. The images have some very nice motion effects and is all synced very nicely with the soundtrack you selected or uploaded...

I read about this site from one of my newsletter subscriptions and so I took 5 minutes and played with it. Very easy to use. My only negative is the wait time while it puts your video together for you - but i'ts hardly a valid complaint as it's worth the wait. The site allows you to watch videos/movie trailers while your waiting for your final result.. With that said - I'll definitely be back.

I only created a small (< 30 secs) version but you have the option to create full length video's as well.

My first animoto can be found here.

Enjoy!

Patrick Dunphy

p.s. Pardon the cheesiness.. Yours truly is getting married this summer. ;)

A Billboard for Gadgets

2008-06-24T10:50:40Z

There are a lot of blogs about gadget out there, however this one is a bit different - more than a blog, it is a real-time updated billboard of gadgets and stuff.

If you are a fan of gadgets, design and other stuff check it out.

http://www.oobject.com/

Baron Conway