Adventures In Digital Marketing

Poke launched their much publicised Orange Balloonacy campaign yesterday.

Today it looks like their servers have crashed with the site simply reporting a bad gateway error or, as is now happening, a very nasty looking PHP report.

Sometimes, too much is a bad thing.  I have to say though, they must have done a cracking job of getting the word out there if it’s hammering their systems so much.  That’s a positive right?

Am sure it’ll be back up soon.  Stick some more RAM in - that always seems to work.

H

Just found this nice little site whilst reading some RSS feeds this morning.  Wordle.net can take a list of words you input manually, or alternatively can take your Del.icio.us tags and turn them into really nice looking word art.  Well worth a five mins some time during your day today.

Howard

Osmo Wiio is a Finnish researcher of human communication. His laws of communication, Wiio’s laws, are funny and insightful.

• If communication can fail, it will.
• If a message can be understood in different ways, it will be understood in just that way which does the most harm.
• There is always somebody who knows better than you what you meant by your message.
• The more communication there is, the more difficult it is for communication to succeed.

And I particularly like his observation that any time there are two people conversing, there are actually six people in the conversation:

1. Who you think you are
2. Who you think the other person is
3. Who you think the other person thinks you are
4. Who the other person thinks he/she is
5. Who the other person thinks you are
6. Who the other person thinks you think he/she is

If you find this interesting, you can read more about Osmo and his theories on communication.

Wiios 7 laws of communication:

1 Communication usually fails, except by accident.
1.1 If communication can fail, it will
1.2 If communication cannot fail, it still most usually fails
1.3 If communication seems to succeed in the intended way, there’s a misunderstanding
1.4 If you are content with your message, communication certainly fails
2 If a message can be interpreted in several ways, it will be interpreted in a manner that maximizes the damage
3 There is always someone who knows better than you what you meant with your message
4 The more we communicate, the worse communication succeeds
4.1 The more we communicate, the faster misunderstandings propagate
5 In mass communication, the important thing is not how things are but how they seem to be
6 The importance of a news item is inversely proportional to the square of the distance
7 The more important the situation is, the more probably you forget an essential thing that you remembered a moment ago

Korpela’s First Corollary: If nobody barks at you, your message did not get through
Korpela’s Second Corollary: Search for information fails, except by accident
The Pedagogic Corollary: Give the student a chance to realize he misunderstood it all

Professor Osmo A. Wiio (born 1928) is a famous Finnish researcher of human communication. He has studied, among other things, readability of texts, organizations and communication within them, and the general theory of communication. In addition to his academic career, he has authored books, articles, and radio and TV programs on technology, the future, society, and politics. He formulated “Wiio’s laws” when he was a member of parliament (1975–79) and published them in Wiion lait - ja vähän muidenkin (Wiio’s laws - and some others’; in Finnish). (Weilin+Göös, 1978, Espoo; ISBN 951-35-1657-1).

Jonathan

Yet another lovely online promotional execution from the people over at Poke for Orange. Over at playballoonacy.com they’ve launched the World’s First Internet Balloon Race.

By placing a small piece of Javascript widget code into your blog or social networking page (you can see mine at the bottom right of this page) you can take part for a chance to win daily prizes and the grand prize of a week in a Luxury Villa in Ibiza.

Hats off to Poke - they continue to produce fantastic Digital promotion work for orange what with this and my old favourite Spot The Bull.

Howard

I’ve been meaning to blog about outdoor digital advertising for some time now. It’s something I find very interesting, and over the past year or so as I’ve been walking to and from work here in London I’ve seen more and more screens popping up in public places.

I’ve been inspired to finally put some words down in a post from an article in the NYTimes which talks about a new form of digital billboard that’s popping up which features a built in camera for facial recognition. Apparently two companies are actively playing in this space, which they refer to as audience measurement systems, Quividi, a French company, and TruMedia, based in Israel and Holland. By placing small cameras into digital billboards (quite small ones judging by the image I saw about the size of a 32″ TV embedded into a larger billboard area) they both claim to be able to view the faces of people directly looking at the ad itself, and then using facial recognition, work out the sex, age and so forth of the audience. They don’t take a photo, apparently, just using it in real-time to work out what they want and then ditching the image.

It doesn’t take much to work out that this has got a lot of privacy people worked up, and in these cases I often sit very firmly on the fence as I am obviously both a professional in the digital space and a normal run of the mill consumer.

That aside, digital screens are beginning to pop up all over the place in London - and I can’t believe it’s not the same in other large urban spaces around the UK, Europe and the World.

The tube is the best example so far of digital advertising screens - there are simply hundreds of them appearing all the time (TFL claim they are in the process of installing 2000). Large runs of screens on escalators, to large poster sized screens at pretty much platform level. These screens feature animation, video and still images - often with multiple screens working together in some way.

But there are much larger screens appearing outside. Right by the London IMAX there is a really good example. A huge billboard is situated on the left of the Waterloo Bridge as you approach the IMAX. Unlike the tube screens, these large format outdoor screens are still image only. This is apparently because there still isn’t any research to prove that you won’t crash your car when an ad comes on.

There are even screens appearing on the stands that the Evening Standard newspaper sellers use - with what look like 32″ TV screens positioned clearly on the top of the stand.

Not to mention the sheer volume already of in-store digital screens that exist in the captive retail environment.

In the US there’s already an industry/trade body setup to work alongside providers of this new and rapidly growing area of digital marketing. I’m not yet aware of one in the UK, perhaps it falls under the domain of someone like BIMA or the IAB?

Often a concern about these screens is that they take energy where a poster would not - but I wonder what the comparison is between digital distributing a poster/video/animation to 2000 screens over the internet, versus printing off 2000 large format posters, driving them around london and then pasting them up in place?  Aside from the saving for advertisers themselves, and the benefit of being able to digital and centrally manage campaigns on huge scales, there’s got to be something in not having to cut down any more trees?

Like I said above, I’m not sure about the audience tracking part being right or wrong, but it’s obvious that digital is gradually starting to take over all of the areas that traditional marketing has had it’s foot on for all this time.  TV’s slowly going to the dark side, the likes of iPlayer and the soon to arrive “project Kangaroo” are making sure of that, and now posters and outdoor begin to make the move as well.  Is nothing safe from our grubby binary hands?

Howard

image by James Cridland and found on Flickr

As much as I love the MS Surface - even though they claim to be too busy with more important people than me to let me see it and work on a project for it - this video also makes me laugh.

Take that Apple!