The Ulster Bank 16th Man GAA Portal recently relaunched with a host of new features. In addition to a blog, enhanced user customisation and exclusive video content, the site relaunched with a 7-a-side online Gaelic Football Challenge game. The game gives two options, allowing both a free play mode for once off challenges between two counties of your choice, and a Championship mode that gives you the chance to play as your favourite county and compete through the Championship season and lead them to an all Ireland victory.
We have seen huge rates of play in its first weeks but in a huge hat-tip to all the guys who worked on the game and site, it was picked up and featured in last Sunday’s Guardian article on ‘‘The greatest internet sports games of all time’. Featured at the top of the list, this is a huge honour for us and great recognition of the time and energy spent in creating something truely unique and entertaining.
Without doubt, New York City is one of Cybercom’s favourite cities for inspiration. No matter how many times you go to New York, there’s always a different experience to be had. Our newest Cybercom recruit Claire Hyland, joining us fresh from NYC, says “New York is its neighbourhoods – and not just Manhattan ‘hoods. Brooklyn and Queens are a must see, to really discover the true New York.”
So, with many of you planning a trip Stateside this summer, we thought we’d share some our favourite haunts – restaurants, bars, shops, museums etc. – to help you get the most out of your trip.
The Cybercom Guide to Discovering NYC also highlights our belief as an agency that providing people with content and tools that are of real use to them is the way to gain long-term customer loyalty – so, enjoy our guide and please share it with your friends!
Call it difficult financial times or ever-increasing competition, it has become more than essential for agencies and clients to meet success in all online advertising efforts. To help, DoubleClick & Dynamic Logic released a report on the brand value of rich media and video ads in June 2009.
The report is aimed at advertisers and agencies, who want to make informed choices regarding the best available ad formats to use for their branding campaigns. It explores the impact of ad formats on brand metrics and presents a cheat sheet that compares ad formats against branding goals.
The report studied five branding goals: purchase intent, brand favorability, aided brand awareness, message association, and online ad awareness. Below, key learnings from the report are listed.
To help drive purchase intent, run more rich media with video units and fewer simple Flash units.
Similarly, to help drive brand favorability, consider rich media with video units. The study showed the average effect of rich media with video ads is over 15 times greater than simple Flash.
First impressions count. Try delivering a rich media with video ad as the first ad exposure to your online audience.
When on a tight budget, switch to simple Flash or JPG/GIF formats at higher frequencies.
Don’t let arbitary ad serving budget allocations prevent you from running the most effective ad formats.
Try adding static messaging elements to your interactive and animated creatives to improve their ability to drive message association.
Make sure your simple Flash animation communicates rather than annoys.
Keep the message up front. Don’t require users to interact with the ad in order to get to the main campaign message.
Overall, the report takes online display campaign management to a new level, one that is marked with more variety and flexibility for advertisers. Take a read here.
Waterlife http://waterlife.nfb.ca/
Waterlife – the story of the last great supply of fresh drinking water on earth. Have you ever wonder about water surrounding you? This site takes you on an interesting and dynamic tour full of information about a core element of our existence.
Cartelle – Interactive Studio http://www.cartelle.nl/
This is a great example of a site that shows how to combine work and fun. Amsterdam based Cartelle, provides a site with a fantastic work portfolio and some cool mini games (toys) that you can play.
Freedom + Partners http://www.freedomandpartners.com/
You could say – space is a limit. Brooklyn NY Interactive Design Agency Freedom + Partners use a 3D sphere to let visitors navigate through their site. Just click and grab any element and move it around the 3D environment. Sounds difficult? Try it! Piece of cake.
Virgin Media’s latest television campaign sees the company take to the smallscreen to promote it’s mobile product for the first time since 2007.
Prior to it’s merger with NTL ads featured celebrities such as Christina Aguiliera, Kate Moss and Busta Rhymes.
This new campaign however, drops the celebrities and showcases the power of the internet on the Mobile phone. It depicts a man boarding a train and when he pulls his mobile out he is whisked away to be with friends and loved ones and he is immersed in a world of music, film and gaming.
Virgin hopes that this campaign will engage people at an emotional level and highlight just how much the mobile internet can bring to them, from social media and music to film clips and games – all without breaking the bank.
The 60 second ad will air from June 24 and run for five weeks and is part of a multi-million pound media campaign for Virgin Media, which includes TV, print, outdoor and online.
In an effort to educate advertising agencies on all things digital, Google has developed an online education portal for ad shops known as Agencyland.
The AgencyLand platform now in beta with select agencies, houses a ton of Google-centric content created for agency staff.
With it’s primary focus on digital topics there are:
Webinars,
A searchable library with more than 200 marketing case studies
Short on-demand video segments featuring Google leaders such as Chief Economist Hal Varian.
Google’s array of ad tools, such as a media-planning tool that connects advertisers and publishers and a website optimizer, which helps measure user behavior on web pages.
AgencyLand is tailored to each agency, co-branded with each company’s logo, and dotted with pictures of agency heads and customized content. Agency management tracks individual employees’ progress, and quizzes are offered at the end of each course.
Usage of the portal is free. Google believes that the timing of the platform’s release is ideal, because it enables agencies to continue boosting their digital know-how even at a time when most are cash-strapped.
The computer game industry has come a long way in the last decade. Microsoft and Sony have both become the key industry drivers and have in many ways revolutionised not just game technology but the whole realm of digital experience. Perhaps the biggest influencer in this was, surprisingly, not even software based, it was all about hardware. Even stranger perhaps is that the hardware in question isn’t processors, graphics cards or memory. The hardware we’re talking about is the user interface device – the controller.
This became most apparent to us, here in Cybercom, when we set about preparing a client document on ‘The Future of Digital’ at the beginning of the month. While the Xbox 360, PS3 and Wii have all brought controllers away from the console and freed them with wireless connectivity, the question remained, what next?. The most interesting developments look like they won’t even involve any handheld devices! Check this out…
At 5.01 AM last Saturday, June 13th, Facebook allowed user to pick and chose their own URLs. So, instead of being a meaningless ID number, http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=432123451, users have the option to personalise their account with a URL something like http://www.facebook.com/ihaveagreaturl, making it much easier for others to find their profile pages.
While Facebook reserves the rights to “remove and/or reclaim any username at any time for any reason,” and will work with intellectual property rights holders to prevent users from claiming trademarked terms as their usernames, the service is already proving very popular – within seven minutes 345,000 users grabbed one. Within 15 minutes, over a half million had.
The fact that Facebook URLs are now available is interesting on a number of levels:
The Pursuit of A Single Social Online Identity: There is a reason why vanity URLs have the word vanity in them. Online, we are our identities. If you’re not connected and can’t be easily found online, you’re no one. While people have long used MySpace URLs as their online identity, Twitter has, more recently, started to become the online identity provider of choice. Time will tell whether Facebook becomes the de facto user online identity.
Online Identities As Business Tools: Google ranks facebook.com very highly in search results, so choosing a clever profile name – facebook.com/marketingman or facebook.com/dublinphotographer – could result in a high ranking in Google results. By setting your profile public, web searchers can get a short bio about your business and an invitation to “friend me to discuss your requirements” – making a great social tool a great business tool.
So, if you haven’t already grabbed yours, think carefully before you choose. Word is, once choosen, you won’t be able to make changes.
Kari Traa – Inspiration http://www.karitraa.com
If you’ve heard of Joshua Davis and Erik Natzke then you’ll be familiar with Flash ‘generative art’, and if you haven’t then here’s a perfect opportunity to familiarize yourself. The latest website from Kari Traa…get inspired by the Gallery, try your own hand at design and you could even affect the outcome of her next summer collection.
Banana Cafe http://www.bananacafe.com.br
Take a trip to Carnaby Street to see the winter collection of Banana Cafe, careful not to knock out the headphones.
Sprint – Now network http://now.sprint.com/nownetwork
The Internet is Now. It’s happening as you read this. See for yourself what Now looks like.
Impossible made possible http://www.possible.cokezero.com
Go behind the scenes of the Coke Zero headquarters to see if you have what it takes to become part of the CCZ team.
For years, street art was graffiti waiting to be cleaned up. Not so, anymore. With the likes of Banksy, Shepard Fairey, Faile and Swoon now gallery successes, street art’s popularity continues to grow.
While Dublin has its own street art blogs, the most notable, Irish Street Art, New York written, The Wooster Collective, is the favoured global online community for news, views and inspiration. With images and videos celebrating street art from as far back as 2001, this is a site designed for playful discovery.
As for us digital marketers, what insights from street art can inspire our work?
1. Location, Location, Location: Where creative is placed matters as much as what it is. If creative is locked on a website its impact is stunted. Creative must be free to flow through the digital network.
2. Surprise & Delight: Making people smile has been underrated for far too long now. Online, the viral successes are those magical video clips that enable you to momentarily escape to a better place, and release an overwhelming desire to share.
3. Having Something To Say: If you want to connect with others, you need a viewpoint that captures the imagination and hearts of others. Online, if you don’t stand for something, you stand for nothing.
4. Dedication: Perseverance breeds brilliance. The best websites, applications, banner ads, games etc. take time and effort and it shows.
5. Personal and Intimate: If you don’t connect on a human-level, then you’re not connecting. Intimacy breeds relationships and relationships breed loyalty – every marketer’s dream come true.
So, here’s to the street artists out there – long may you continue to inspire and delight us.
