How Music Almighty are you?
Great Interaction, great music, great showcase site for the Nokia music range.
Upload your own photo, record your own song and turn yourself into a 3D popper!
Red Issue
Creative freedom is yours when navigating throughout this site–
Question: Is Drawing more fun than clicking?
Answer: Indeed
My Sour Sally
A site which you can’t help but explore – super navigation coupled with fun and enticing animation.
Mini: Parking Periscope
A clean and simple ad, offering an in-banner search function. Eye-catching and engaging.
Monday saw the launch of Rock The Vote – a new non-government organisation that is allowing US Xbox 360 owners to register to vote in the upcoming US presidential elections. The organisation has been brought together with the specific aim to to encourage youth participation in politics. In partnership with Microsoft, Rock The Vote enables users to register to vote, take part in polls and voice their opinions to candidates via online forums. If there was any doubt that the gaming industry was an integral part of modern society, those ideas have been definitely been dispelled.
‘Xbox is a natural partner to help us reach out to youth voters,’ said Heather Smith, executive director, Rock the Vote. ‘To realize our goal of registering 2 million young Americans by this fall, we need to go where young Americans are, and there’s no doubt in our minds that many are on Xbox 360 and Xbox LIVE.’
The success of the service will been seen in the upcoming months, but the really interesting stuff will be the potential implications for politics and future presidential campaigns.
Google’s latest addition to its already extensive list of SaaS is a hosted ad serving and management service for publishers. Ad Manager is designed to make it easier to prepare inventory for sales, schedule ad executions, deliver the ads and report and measure their various metrics. If you’re already an AdSense user, you can integrate Ad Manager with your existing account and use it to optimize any unsold site inventory.
Ad Manager offers:
Support for 32 languages and international currencies
Ad network management. Most third-party ad networks are supported
Automatic macro insertion, whereby Ad Manager auto-detects and inserts macros from major third-party vendors
Previews of how a site will look before the ad campaign is executed
Date/time, geo-, bandwidth, browser, language, OS, domain and custom-targeting
There is also a great level of versatility, with Ad Manager supporting text, display and video formats.
EA Sports recently released their newest version of the Tiger Woods golf game. One particular fan posted a video showing an apparent glitch in the game, where Tiger is seen to take a shot while hovering over a lake.
In responding, EA Sports felt it would be easier to let Mr. Woods do it himself. This is either a fantastic online viral campaign that started with the ‘fan’ video, or it’s a genius personalised response to a real fan. Either way, this is brilliant stuff and clear proof about how seriously UGC is taken by the major companies.
It’s a very rare occasion that we give two spots on a Friday to a single company, but Coca-Cola definitely deserves this special exemption. Check out two extremely well-done sites for Coca-Cola Light (Tastes of the World) and Coke Zero (Trust Your Buds).
Sensi Soft
A global services and software company specialising in classified advertising solutions and with an extravagant company website!
Trust Your Buds
Great loader! Great 3D animation! Overall a really fun, engaging and interactive site.
Scorched TV
Scorched TV is a new Australian online show which asks the user to interact by participating in idea forums and conservation strategies. The show is done as news reports about water shortages and the associated problems.
According to a report released last week by Hitwise, UK internet users are leaving generic internet searches such as “cheap flights” or “broadband”, and instead choosing the names of popular brands.
Hitwise identified that searching via branded keywords now accounted for 88% of all internet searches – a 20% increase from 2005. The report also revealed that websites and blogs were cashing in on the online equity of big brands. According to the report, 8.7% of all searches for the top 100 online UK brands resulted in users visiting websites that are not directly owned by the actually brand. Meanwhile 1.4% of searches go to a social networking site, and traffic to blogs from branded search had increased by 185% since the start of this year.
All of this, of course, has implications in light of Google’s recent trademark change. For advertisers looking to cash in on non-brand traffic, Hitwise’s findings sound like a Godsend, but could we be facing a similar rebound experienced in the US in 2004? Four years ago, the same trademark change happened Stateside for the first time. And, although the market became initially hyper-competitive, rising CPCs and dismal ROI – due to poor quality score and relevancy – drove the market back to a relative status quo after four months.
Certainly for our Irish Clients, we’re not seeing the huge push for trademarks we expected. In the financial and travel sectors, cost increases on brand have been marginal.
Is this a similar experience for other Irish search marketers?
Facebook, the social network site that promised to deliver a new way of thinking, appears to be content with modifying traditional methods in a new environment. Facebook now offers video ads on the right-hand side of its homepage, but with the added feature of enabling users to leave comments directly beneath them and review other comments left by friends. All comments left will appear in Facebook news feeds.
Video ads, combined with user interaction, puts Facebook in a position to create engagement-building ad units for online video with the ability to target viewers by age, sex, marital status, interest and even profession. Earlier this year, BusinessWeek cited marketers claiming that Facebook’s ad click-through rate of 4 per 10,000 impressions is about one-fifth the Web norm. From our experience, a much lower than average CTR across all social networks (Bebo, MySpace and Facebook) should always be expected. Hopefully, video ads and user interaction can start to correct this worrying trend.
Describing itself as ‘the easiest way to tell the stories of people and topics you care about’, Dipity is essentially an interactive wiki timeline which can be used by multiple editors at a time. The possibilities are almost endless, with users using Dipity as a tool to share information of topics as diverse as missing persons information, historical events, party planning and social networking updates.
Of all the entries on Dipity, one of our favourites is BK G’s Timeline of Internet Memes. A resource of videos, mash-ups and animations, this is a great interactive view of all memes that have come and gone through cyberspace.
Christof Echard
Professional & personal portfolio of French photographer, Christof Echard.
Beautiful ebb and flow of a portfolio of photographs.
Rio 40degrees
Axe (Lynx) brings us another great microsite, full of interactivity, rich video and funny content. You may not speak Portuguese, but you’ll figure it out if you want to get the girl.
Sciroco Cube
Presenting the new Volkswagen Scirocco. A cube which can be freely rotated in space serves as the stage for the new Scirocco and its navigation element.
Citroen C-Crosser
Smart ad format, showing the off-road capabilities of Citroen’s first 4×4.
It’s simply a game of chess against the computer, but terrifying to play as you can actually watch the computer’s thoughts!
Thinking Machine 4 explores the invisible, elusive nature of thought. The artwork is an artificial intelligence program, ready to play chess with the viewer. When the viewer confronts the program, the computer’s thought process is sketched on screen as it plays. A map is created from the traces of literally thousands of possible futures as the program tries to decide its best move. Those traces become a key to the invisible lines of force in the game, as well as a window into the spirit of a thinking machine.
Next week: the terrifying reality of how your iPod selects your cheesiest 80′s pop song when trying to impress with ‘random shuffle’ at a party.
