Michael Jackson Thriller (mini) flash mob

I was out and about being a tourist this weekend in San Francisco when I caught this (mini) flash mob at the cable car turnaround doing a tribute to Michael Jackson - wicked!

39% of the way to the moon

I use a service called Dopplr to track my journies and share them with friends and colleagues, the idea being that my travels might overlap with those folks and we can make contact.

In 18 months this has never happened!

However, what is very cool is the bi-annual personal travel report that they send you showing where you have been and how long for.

My headlines for the first half of 2009 are:

• 100 days at home / 81 days on the road
• 16 trips, most common being South Africa
• Travelled 39% of the distance to the moon!

I apparently didn't switch on the carbon feature and so it wasn't calculated, but I am guessing it's the size of a Yeti! Sorry environment.

A very bad day at Phorm HQ as BT cancel trials

For a technology company days don't get much worse than those Monday's where your main route to market decides not to work with you any more! BT (British Telecom) has decided not to continue its work with Phorm, thus starving Phorm of its major route to the UK market.

I have been very vocal about Phorm, an ad network still to get up and running, but one that showed so much promise. The basic idea behind their technology is to monitor anonymous Internet packet traffic at the ISP level giving them sight of all your behaviour, thus being able to serve you the most relevant ads.

Targeting exists within advertising whether consumers know it or not, and Phorm actually stores less data than a regular ad-server.

However, amongst what I personally think is a catalogue of errors, Phorm did not address the balance between consumer reward (for opting in) against its own revenue potential. Consumers are smart and know a bad deal when they see it - downloading some free anti-virus/firewall type stuff is not a good deal in exchange for the millions Phorm will make from their own behaviours.

In the NY Times article that reported the news, BT claim they are not doing this because of privacy, but instead it has become a lower priority.

Whichever one of these you believe it comes down to that fact that BT don't think the potential return from this model is worth all the hassle, which may or may not include dealing with angry consumer groups.

The person who sent me the article originally used the subject line of "wah wah, buh bye phorm" and I wonder if this is such a major blow that they will indeed disappear. A 40% stock reduction signifies that they will have to evolve their story and fast in order to survive the media targeting world.

Good conference call entertainment

Not really a game player, but when it's this addictive... Click to become an addict and to pass time during long conference calls.

Brilliant video on client / vendor relationships

We've got the measure of this campaign

I had the pleasure last night of seeing my first major league ball game, the Red Sox at Fenway Park. They have been on a huge winning streak and have had 500 home game sellouts in a row.

The marketers of the Red Sox sponsors have of course noticed and there were at least 5 or 6 giveaways of anything from pizza tokens to discount gasoline cards. Our area of the stadium lucked out (?) and got 200 Stanley 'Fat Max' measuring tapes (!!).

These photos are the result, the effect was amazing. Within seconds someone had the idea of winding it out and waving it about, and 199 people followed suit.

I have no idea if Stanley planned this, but it certainly created a spontaneous spectacle.

The organisers certainly didn't consider it though, and spent the next 30 minutes telling us off, and eventually called the police up to our section to stare menacingly at us.

It just goes to show that if you work with your fans and give them the tools, it is often them who will come up with the coolest things to do with them. Now, we just need to work out how we would measure its success ;-)

Will you look after my box?

Before moving to San Francisco a few months ago I asked a friend to look after a box of stuff for me; kids birth certificates, mortgage papers, premium bonds, payslips etc, stuff I wouldn't need in the US for a while. I even sealed up the storage box with tape to make it easier for him to keep safe, not wanting to be a burden.

I came back to Brighton for a few days this week and was in the pub with said friend, who happened to mention he was a bit narked I left him a load of stuff to deal with. He said he didn't mind too much as I had left him my TV to look after, but it would have been nice if I had asked.

Confused, I asked what stuff...

"All the rubbish in the box, and the BT modem, I wasn't expecting to have to dispose of your trash"

!!

"Where's the box????"

"The box is fine, its at my flat"

"Where's the stuff that was in the box????"

"I threw it all out for you, didn't look important. The box is fine though, do you want it back?"

!!!!

!!!!

There is a very well protected storage box in my friend's flat. It is in great condition. Immaculate even. Can not fault his ability to look after a box in the proper way that such a nice box should be looked after. It is clean and dry, free from harm or fear and has even had all that tape carefully removed from it. 10 out of 10 for box-looking-after-skills.

My stuff however is on the local dump somewhere.

---

There are so many lessons that could be taken from this I guess. A business consultant could probably spin this into a message of how a misunderstanding is the fault of the person making the request for not being specific, or some such rubbish.

But I think the key lesson is simply not to trust said friend with the contents of your box. The box yes, the contents no.

He bought a round of drinks before going to the toilet - when he came back to an empty glass I explained that I thought he just wanted me to look after the glass, not the beer....

I want a "walk in fridge"

Find more videos like this on AdGabber

Courtney of AdGabber comes this beauty from TBWA\Neboko for Heineken. For those of you who are lucky enough to have grown up in the UK with the world of the Two Ronnies, you will see comedic similarities to their infamous 'fork handles' sketch. See the 1976 classic sketch in all its beauty here. The best way to spend 6 minutes of your day!

Hello from 35,000 feet

On board my first Virgin America flight as I write this flying from San Francisco to Los Angeles for a few days of work. They are one of the first airlines to offer WiFi (courtesy of GoGo) during the flight.

Virgin America have embraced digital in a big way, including a very active Twitter account - @virginamerica - where they encourage on board tweets and messages - and I'm sure for more reasons than you have to pay $9.95 for the connection ;-)

Gadget lovers will enjoy the VA experience. The screens work before and during take-off which is a huge plus point for me. I watched the news as we trundled down the runway. Also, there are buttons on the touch screen for ordering your food and other items. When you have decided, simply swipe your credit card and they bring it to your seat, It means that apart from the complimentary beverage service, they don't keep disturbing you by walking up and down the aisle.

Gone is the no smoking sign on the ceiling too - it is replaced by a much more relevant "turn off electronic devices" sign instead. Even the safety video makes reference to 99.9% of people already know how to fasten a seat belt, nice.

What really surprised me was that the window blinds were closed when we boarded and 90% of people left them closed for take-off, even though it's a day flight. The cabin is bathed in a very pleasant blue colour and so it seems people preferred this to daylight.

VA are certainly setting standards that others will need to follow. Those fellow passengers today who normally have the misfortune to fly the regular US national carriers appear somewhat stunned by this experience.

Time to sign off, we are landing in LA soon...

Bionic Man DIY Project

Somebody has to be first right?

This guy has embedded an RFID radio identification chip into his hand so he can unlock his gun cabinet without using keys or waving his RFID keychain at it. What's more, he used a damn big needle and got a friend to do it for him!

Hmm. More than a few questionable parts to this story (and having recently been to see Dan Hoyle's new play, "Right?", I now have an American stereotype in my head of why a gun owner might be the first to try this).

But the ease at which this was done, and the marginally useful function it provides, is an interesting insight into where this could go. These things are cheap to make and also cheap to add to the product you want to interact with and so every manufacturer is going to consider this at some point - so perhaps the smart money is on making the first "Personal Identifier" so that you have just one in your body and can give the details to anyone you want.

We could all be walking into car showrooms in a few years time and instead of picking up the keys, be telling the sales person our RFID number so the car will recognise us?

Interesting to read some of the comments on YouTube and different people's tolerances to the privacy and personal security issues this brings. In the UK we still have a backlash against ID cards because of privacy concerns and so I cant imagine my fellow Brits embracing this in the near future. But tolerances have a habit of changing once something stops being a novelty opening up a lot of new possibilities.

Virgin America streams live show

I wonder if the word stunt will become permanently associated with the name Virgin?

Today's latest activity involves a live video stream and twitter feed from the inaugural flight of Virgin America to Orange County. In one effort they are promoting the airline, their twitter name (@virginamerica), the new route to the OC and that they have live Internet connection in the air. Brilliant!

If you see this post in time then click here to view the live feed, or checkout the tweets.

Phorm fights back

Phorm - the controversial ad network, tired of being tarred as evil by privacy consumers, has decided to hit back with a new site designed to correct consumer's misconceptions StopPhoulPlay.com

On paper Phorm is a tremendous idea, and they have the potential to be the smartest form of targeting available to us marketers. As I have stated previously, Phorm is also not evil in what it is trying to do! In fact, they store less data than a standard 3rd party ad server.

In essence what Phorm do is to sit inside your ISP and wait for certain events to happen that qualify that ISP customer as someone who a certain advert should be shown to. Before the likes of Phorm came about, no single Ad Network or Media Exchange had total sight of your online activities, Google can not see the searches you are performing on Yahoo! for instance, and Advertising.com can't follow all your banner impressions on the DoubleClick network. And whilst many networks now claim to have 90% audience reach, it will always be missing gaps.

But with Phorm I can build very specific targeting criteria based on all the data.

For instance, if I was promoting a hotel in San Francisco I might want to specify that searches for "hotel", "san francisco" and "bay area" took place, that the person has visited the local sports team site  and that they have read dining out information for the area too. With such targeting knowledge I can then "buy" that person and place an ad that offers discounts during baseball weekends.

See the Phorm Flash demo of how it works here.

So what went wrong with Phorm that means before it has even served its first campaign it is being torn apart?

In short, it was positioning and marketing.

The value proposition for the ISP is great; for the first time they can take their slice of the advertising dollars flowing online by charging Phorm a fee to place their servers in their hosting environments.

And for Phorm it's simple too; they get to sell advertising campaigns to marketers at a premium because of their inherent knowledge of the consumer.

But what about the consumer? Now this technology has been brought to their attention, they want in on the action, they feel they deserve a slice of the pie because it's their data that Phorm is making money from.

Personally I come back to the argument that the consumer's reward is the content they consumer online, mostly free and therefore funded by the advertising associated with it. If advertiser's are going to make it more relevant by targeting with technology such as Phorm then great.

But different consumers have different attitudes to the reward model and therefore Phorm found itself in the situation of having to give back. How they chose to do this was sadly disappointing and I believe contributed to the problems they now face - the 'gift' was free software to protect the consumer online. An old and tired proposition, and one associated with spam and annoying banners saying your PC is infected!

Will Phorm get off the ground and be successful? I hope so, but it is going to take an ongoing charm offensive to the 'people' and a way to silence those of the privacy activists who are sending out factually incorrect information.

Phorm is launching in  the UK first and they want to tie-in with BT, Virgin and Talk Talk and if they can accomplish this they have more than 80% of the UK ISP traffic flow. There were reports that Virgin had pulled out of this deal, but these turned out to be false and possibly another example of how Phorm is being smeared?

I do wonder whether Phorm's answer now is to create a free model with an ISP partner such as BT and fund that though it's advertising revenues. Doesn't everyone win then?

Previous posts on Phorm:

Well Phorm'ed Campaigns are Not Evil (and neither are cookies)

July 5th 2008

Can of worms?

July 30th 2008

Phorm gets UK go-ahead

September 18th 2008

What is going on at Phorm?

December 1st 2008

Phorm to respond to consumer demands?

January 9th 2009

Making the most of Twitter

Twitter - surely the biggest buzz word in digital marketing today, thankfully stepping up to the plate to lower the mentions of the last buzz term, "widgets".

Like widgets, Twitter is often misunderstood, but brands are starting to experiment and like many things that are new, the reactions are mixed and strong. Just look at the response to Skittles move to turn their homepage into a Twitter search results feed. (Read Alisa Leonard-Hansen's feedback to Silicon Alley Insider, or Antony Mayfield's thoughts for New Media Age here).

Antony raises a valid point which is openness undoubtedly creates increased risk, which may be a particular problem by children's brands. Skittles are certainly being brave to make this step, but are not doing it alone. Brands such as Lego understood early on that being 'in' social media means letting go, provide the building blocks and the audience will create the content. A quick search on YouTube for Lego brings up what might be the single most funny thing on the Internet - Eddie Izzard's sketch about Darth Vader trying to order Penne All'Arrabiata for his lunch, recreated in Lego stop-frame animation. View it here over and over again.

Econsultancy, a London and New York based publisher, trainer and community for the digital marketing world have thrown themselves into the Twitter space and have published a great article about the "the 13 types of tweet to take notice of".

@ryanaironline abusing other airlines

Whilst you can go Here to read Phil Buxton's assessment of the Ryanair / Bloggergate incident on the iCrossing site, you can stay here and admire the fine work of a fake Twitterer who is pretending to be Ryanair... and with much humour.

My personal favourite is the abuse targeted at other airlines...

@SouthwestAir Do you guys think you are cool because you are on twitter?

You brought it on yourselves Ryanair. This type of culture comes from the top, and given that the CEO claimed that sexual acts are included with all long haul flights during a press conference, perhaps its no surprise that other employees felt it OK to say what they did on the original Bloggergate posting.

(Read the original story here on Wired, or click to view the blogger comments that have created such fuss here).

Remember those annoying fish on the wall? I'm Loving It

New ad for McDonalds, I'm Loving It

Nice "you must be registered" message

Nice 'error' message from Media Bistro - "Hi there, we still love you!".

We can't get away from many sites needing or wanting login details, but we can learn a lesson from the friendly and humorous way MB have gone about it.

Something original in traditional media

I was very happy to see a new campaign from Lastminute.com land in my inbox a few minutes ago. It is a series of 3 sixty-second TV ads running one after another, but across 3 channels. The idea is you begin on ITV at 9:50, jump to Channel 4 at 9:51 and end up on Five at 9:52.

Working for a digital agency I spend 90% of my time working on digital budgets, and whilst this often involves planning integration with offline, I don't often get chance to plan traditional campaigns these days.

This is a nice reminder that originality is alive and well in all channels, and, oh look... an offline TV campaign is generating online buzz right here. Hmm.

Nice campaign idea, best of luck LM, hope it works.

Now if I was Channel Five I would be giving this away for not a lot of money given that success for LM means an audience will have been 'dragged' from ITV, through Channel 4 and left to settle at 5. I would imagine a smart sales person at ITV asking for a countdown of 5,4,3 rather than the opposite of 3,4,5 !

How did I piss off China??

I was playing around with various tests (as pointed out by SEO by the Sea) and decided to see if my blog was being blocked by the Great Firewall of China... it is!

Test to see if the Chinese don't like you either here.

Record ad spend for Super Bowl

Somewhat surprised to read today that NBC generated $206m in ad revenue from this year's Super Bowl (sorry Arizona office, you got wupped by the Steelers!). Although at $85,000 a second, and advertisers like Doritos (Eric Heimbold), Kellog (Leo Burnett, Chicago). 9 ads for Anheuser-Busch (DDB, Chicago) and Toyota (Burrell Communications, Chicago / Saatchi & Saatchi, Los Angeles), there is clearly still huge interest in this prestige advertising opportunity.

My personal favorite out of the 49 was for CareerBuilder (Wieden & Kennedy) - click here to view or view all the ads here.

Snow on the (on)line

Woke up this morning to a 6-inch thick blanket of snow in Brighton and Hove (actually). Have some friends with me who need to get to London to catch a train to Edinburgh and so need good travel details.

The TV and Radio have been surprisingly useless and typically are deferring people to the web. Very frustratingly, the web is buggered this morning - National Rail, South West Trains and the local BBC radio service are all down. Come on people, we need to be able to cope with some snow better than this!

Personally I have been down to the sea front to take some photos and have a snowball fight with random people, before settling in to do some work.

Thought last year's posting about the snow was still very valid... click here to Rediscover The Soul of the Internet

Discounted Britney

Last week I had the pleasure of attending the annual Client Summit for iCrossing, the digital agency I work for. One of our guest speakers was Google who had some very interesting stats to share.

Britney Spears has been the most popular search term on Google for the last 8 years, but was replaced in 2008 by the term 'coupons'. This is either another sign that the credit crunch is having wide-ranging effects or consumers have become savvy to the way they are shopping online. Will Britney start offering discounts as a result??

Other interesting facts from Google:

• YouTube is now the 2nd largest search engine in North America
  
• 54% of online ads are shown on 4 sites (Google, Yahoo, MSN and AOL), but the same sites only account for 24% of page views. What was particularly interesting for my display group was that Yahoo had a high percentage of that traffic, a sign that their network may be more targeted.
• According to an Inquirer study, consumers are twice as likely to click on an ad on a niche site rather than on a portal. This wasn't a surprise to me as we have seen great uplift in click through rates by targeting niche sites using the principals of social marketing and looking for groupings around the topics most relevant to our clients.
• There were over 300 tweaks to the Google algorithm in 2008
• There are over 800m users of Open Social

Gadget lovers take note!

I love my gadgets and gizmo's. Was shopping for a suit for my mum's upcoming wedding and saw these in the sale for £2.50. Just beautiful design, utter simplicity for a product. I probably will never need emergency cuff links, but now looking forward to the day I do! And what a bargain.

Click here to see the full range from Touch of Ginger which include an ice scraper and, slightly randomly, a wallet sized set for picking locks.

Your (e)shadow is following you

I read a great post on Antony Mayfield's blog called "Let he who is without a web shadow cast the first stone", and I have wanted a reason to re-post or discuss since. Antony discusses how applicants for Obama's team are being scrutinised online to ensure they have nothing that may embarrass their new leader.

Antony then references an earlier post "Web shadows: Looking after ourselves online" in which he talks about how just like a shadow always follows you, so can your actions online.

We need to not only be aware of what our web shadows are, but how we affect them through all of our everyday actions. Sometimes when people want to know more about you, the shadow is all they will see.

Very true. I then came across an article today on Sky News about a truly stupid move by a young Conservative who posted a message on his Facebook page saying he was looking for a Madeleine McCann costume, read the full article here. Apart from being highly insensitive, it was also a remarkably ignorant thing to do. His online shadow has come crashing into his real life and has cost him his dreams of becoming a Conservative MP.

An Antony discusses, the life skills that people must learn and know for success now include the management of your online persona to avoid such incidents.

Be aware, I have searched for every job applicant online that has sat in front of me, checked their Facebook pages, LinkedIn, Classmates.com, FriendsReunited etc. In one incident I had a young graduate say he was done with travelling and was ready to pursue a career full-time, whereas his FriendsReunited page said he was back for 6 months to earn some decent money and was then going to f*** off again to Oz.

I was sacrificed for a burger !! [UPDATED]

You think you know who your friends are, and then one day something happens that makes you realise that perhaps they aren't what you thought.

Today I was sacrificed for a Whopper Burger *sob*. Neil Cains, I name and shame you!

The program works by installing a Facebook application and then selecting 10 friends to be deleted. If you do so, and if you are US-based, you get a voucher for a free Whopper.

With so many Facebook applications being produced, it is extremely difficult to get attention. Burger King have achieved it with something totally different, the Whopper Sacrifice, and at the time of writing, the number of friends sacrificed has just passed the 52,000 mark.

Burger King have a good record of viral campaigns with the Subservient Chicken and the more recent (and questionable) Whopper Virgins.

So now I have found some good viral campaigns, perhaps I should go find some good friends *sob*.

[UPDATED]

Facebook has now disabled the application. Reasons cited say that FB put restrictions on Burger King as to how the application can and can't work. The company felt that it would compromise what they were trying to achieve and decided to conclude the campaign instead. Perhaps a very smart move as the story of it being disabled is making it into mainstream news sites.

The site has a message saying it's been disabled and that almost 234,000 friends were sacrificed in total.

Phorm to respond to 'consumer' demands?

New Media Age magazine reports that Phorm may consider offering financial incentives to encourage user sign-up. Certainly Phorm must try something as it appears that their deadlines have slipped again, possibly due to tests of consumer registration on BT.

When I wrote about Phorm previously, a debate was started on BadPhorm, and one of the points discussed was around ISP customers getting a share in the money Phorm make. I personally don't feel that it would be ethically or morally necessary for Phorm to do this as they are simply providing a revenue stream for the ISPs, organisations who are facing tough questions around magnetisation in a bandwidth-heavy world. I more share the view of Tony Evans from Phorm rival NebuAd, as quoted in the NMA article, who feels that ISPs should be trialling this without incentives first.

Surely this is a perception and marketing issue?

If the ISPs start down the road of incentives could we not be seeing free-for-consumers ISPs?

Watch this space.

Previous posts on Phorm:
Well Phormed Campaigns are Not Evil (July 25th 2008)
What is going on at Phorm? (December 1st 2008)