A modified YouTube player interface builds up a network of associated videos as you hover it. 'Nodes' expand out to reveal more video that you might be interested in.
...
Now I'm falling through the air
I wonder where I am going to land
He nicked my Iron-Bru
And let go of my hand
...
lol
(...and used on Bebo now that they have chosen to licence the FB platform. As Antony Mayfield said in a session today, this will setup an interesting battle going into 2008 between Google Open Social and Facebook who seem hell bent on trying to 'out open' each other).
Beacon ads capture personal activities, such as purchases on Amazon, and then tell the world about this on your FB news feed. Controversy came with launch because FB took the decision to make this opt-out and not opt-in. Commercially, and for the short term, it's clear to see why they would do this as it could give their ad sales figures a boost and help them live up to their paper value, but the consumer didn't like it at all. Following protests on FB itself, FB backed down and re-launched as opt-in.
This isn't the first time FB have had negative publicity of this type and I doubt the storm is quite gone in this case either as there are now legal questions being asked about marrying up all this personal data.
So why will Beacon Ads still be a viable option for advertisers?
Well, most clients think they want a viral campaign at some stage but viral is often oversold, over considered and over hyped with disappointing results. and viral campaigns that you been involved and ask yourself what % have been truly successful, and I mean successful on a worthwhile scale. (Think Diet Coke/Mentos, Wonderbra Gorilla, Spank the Monkey etc)
Most aren't successful because they lack initial audience to cross the point of no return and generate some momentum. Also, most have a clunky viral mechanism such as an old school refer-a-friend form.
Beacon Ads overcome these problems; the audience already exists and they have the mechanism. Perfect.
Bold statement, and so allow me to elaborate.
Marketers poured money into online advertising opportunities initially because it was this great new channel that allowed interaction and was actually accountable. No more would they not know which 50% of their spend was wasted because they could report on ROI. Roll forward several years and the model and opportunity continues to evolve with the smartest marketers realising online isn't a 'channel'; essentially there are smart opportunities to have engagement.
Media planners treated online as a channel in those early days and most continue to do so, and in fact, most of the large media agencies are too large for their own good to evolve quickly enough even if they can see it.
This leaves us with a methodology designed in offline and not properly evolved for the online opportunities.
These problems are:
- Lack of consideration of other marketing activities especially search
- Based primarily on geographic, demographic and socio-economic audience data
- Planner has preferred partners, publishers and ad networks
- Wasted budget on big brand tier A websites
- Limited research and therefore weaker strategy
- Client is not treated as a partner in the strategy
- Creative is not aligned with conversation
- Multiple points of contact and report formats
These problems can be overcome by embracing data and have a formal research methodology that calls for every site on a plan to justify its addition, and also to start by analysing the network that your client's site exists within and then backwards-matching against audience profile.
More to come, but this space is hot.
:~Dax~:
Social media is one of THE topics of the moment, and if done right will change the way you view all types of media and online interaction / engagement.
A colleague, Antony Mayfield, has authored a book on this very topic that you can download for free here (PDF).
:~Dax~:
Last week I blogged about Microsoft Photosynth and how it should be seen as an application layer that develops emergent outputs from dispersed data in social networks. In the context of the travel industry, I also argued that it was a stepping stone to virtual environments and potentially a whole new way of searching for digital data.
Without wanting to sound like a Microsoft fan club, I was introduced today to Microsoft Surface which you can learn about here.
Remember the Minority Report with Tom Cruise? This technology is the reality of the ultra cool touch-screen interfaces that the move used so well.
Now, combine these interfaces with something like Photosynth...
:~Dax~:
:~Dax~:
This is the new Virgin Atlantic on-board safety video. It works because it is different to most stale safety videos and presentations. And this should be remembered in the advertising we do. Originality grabs attention, but its not only originality in the content but also the originality of the type of content in an unexpected enviroment.
Back in February 2006 Microsoft acquired Seadragon giving them access to their proprietary technology that will ‘change the way we use screens’ and provides a smooth browsing platform for visual information.
Roll forward almost 2 years and I am out in Tenerife at the ABTA Travel Convention talking to Graham Donoghue, New Media Director at TUI Travel Plc. He had just given a press briefing and in answer to a question about how travel would look in 10 years time had talked about holo-decks and experiencing your chosen destination in a 3D environment before booking your holiday.
I can’t imagine everyone in the audience will believe that this will happen, but even the sceptics would be foolish to not understand the sentiment that technology is moving incredibly fast, and don’t forget that nearly everything that has happened online has happened in the last 10 years.
And who is to say he is not right anyway.
The very next day at the same convention, Mel Carson from Microsoft speaks and includes a video promo of Microsoft’s Photosynth. I wonder how many people in the audience who also attended Graham’s press briefing realised that they were looking at one execution of Graham’s predicted future world.
I urge you to take a few minutes of your life to watch the video and then download the pre-beta software to experience it in full. I was as amazed as I was the first time I downloaded Google Earth; you realise that you are interacting with something that will change user behaviour forever.
Roll forward almost 2 years and I am out in Tenerife at the ABTA Travel Convention talking to Graham Donoghue, New Media Director at TUI Travel Plc. He had just given a press briefing and in answer to a question about how travel would look in 10 years time had talked about holo-decks and experiencing your chosen destination in a 3D environment before booking your holiday.
I can’t imagine everyone in the audience will believe that this will happen, but even the sceptics would be foolish to not understand the sentiment that technology is moving incredibly fast, and don’t forget that nearly everything that has happened online has happened in the last 10 years.
And who is to say he is not right anyway.
The very next day at the same convention, Mel Carson from Microsoft speaks and includes a video promo of Microsoft’s Photosynth. I wonder how many people in the audience who also attended Graham’s press briefing realised that they were looking at one execution of Graham’s predicted future world.
I urge you to take a few minutes of your life to watch the video and then download the pre-beta software to experience it in full. I was as amazed as I was the first time I downloaded Google Earth; you realise that you are interacting with something that will change user behaviour forever.
So what’s so special about it?
It contains an incredible amount of technical geekiness that builds up databases of images based on their content. For instance, take a picture of Notre Dame Cathedral and allow the software to find other visual resources of the same subject automatically, including other photographs, posters and even whole books. The software will stitch them together with your original photo and allow you to move through space viewing the same subject from multiple positions. Annotate your picture and everyone’s pictures become digitally annotated with the same information.
This is a whole new interface for searching and discovering information.
What is also of interest to me is that it is an emergent output from social media content. Social media is high on my agenda currently; we have dedicated programs to understand it and learn how to interact with it as a brand over at iCrossing, and its principals have also become central to a new methodology of media planning.
In biology, Emergence is the concept that complex environments and societies can emerge out of the behaviour of simple organisms; think of ants and ant colonies or people and cities. In each case the sum of the parts is more intelligent than the individual components could ever be.
What Microsoft have done with project Seadragon is to create an intelligent and complex software application that allows hugely complex 3D, dynamic environments to be created automatically from a set of simple rules. The Notre Dame example used in the video above was created by searching for images of Notre Dame on Flickr, a Yahoo-owned photo site with over 2 billion images uploaded by individual users.
Social media has changed the way users interact and communicate with each other, tools such as Photosynth are taking this to a whole new level, and add a layer of applications that generate solutions from simple components.
My prediction for the future is that we will create applications that produce outputs so complex that we stop understanding how they actually work, but marvel in their abilities.
:~Dax~:
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