Some might have seen this. The One Show Interactive is up, so you can now browse the fantastic entries – and see what was hot in 2004 in interactive advertising.
Most applauded was all the stuff Crispin Porter + Bogusky, Miami did – mainly for Burger King, of course. Burger King was also named the client of the year. Well, with the amount of interactive stuff they were putting their money to, the above agency must have been one of the best to work for last year…
Evan and Gareth are sent on a mission by Axe: They need to find out the best way to pick up chicks, tagline: „play or be played“. They have a playbook with different ways to approach and pick up a girl and are now testing all the moves. More or less successfully, but funny nevertheless.
The site has all the ingredients you would expect: a journal (a blog so to say), little 48 sec clips of all sorts of events during their tour of the US, photos, Bios, and a forum.
Not sure for how long this has been online, but the forum isn’t very exciting yet, which let’s one assume that the site hasn’t really gone viral yet, as AdLand also states. They have some more background information on this, so go read it there, too.
Main message: Unilever is now focusing more on the web for it’s Axe advertising. Reason being clear: the target group zaps TV ads and has a short attention span anyway. That explains why no clip I found was longer then 48 secs. This seems to be the MTV-influenced maximum length of content people can pay attention to these days. Oh my. Considering that attention span, this post is getting way too long already…
This seems to be a good idea: Vidsense. A program working similar to Googles Adsense. Only difference: the context-sensitive input are little video clips. They are, of course, preceded by short adverts – 15-30 secs long. The clips are about 45 secs to 90 secs long. And the videos don’t start to play, unless a user initiates them.
This can be, of course be much more effective than Googles Adsense, as there is more than just text, but it’s (hopefully) not as intrusive as banners or rich media ads. And its relevant to the content your reading.
And you can also choose, if you don’t want X-rated clips, but only G-rated ones. (Other than that, you don’t have a choice).
Nice thing: you also earn money by a user’s click. Difference being: the click you need here is the one of the user starting the movie. And since the user doesn’t think the tool will take him off the current site (as it would be with Adsense), a click is much more likely…
NY Times has an interesting Article about The phenomenon of Gawker Media run by Nick Denton. It reveals a little on how it works (and how they – the bloggers – work), plus a little unofficial information on the finances behind it.
The Guess-the-Google is fantastic. We all know the Google feature of searching for visuals by entering a certain search term. Now this site turns it around. It shows 20 images and you have to guess, which search term produced these images. I had an easy start. All 20 images showed maps. So I entered map and voila. But the rest of the game was in parts rather difficult.
And, turned around again – you can enter a term, and the google montage tool gives you a nice collage of images relating to whatever you entered:
Wo ich sonst so bin...