Sunday, June 29, 2008

Where's Adam these days?













Well, I'm not blogging here on Admagination.com as much as I used to (duh).

I'm trying out some new things, experimenting in the social media space a bit.

You can check me out on Twitter...

You can also check me out on Tumblr. This is an absolutely great blogging/social media/bookmarking/audio/video site.


And there's my pics on Smugmug.


See ya there,

-aB

Friday, March 14, 2008

Alltop is on top...



Was reading Guy Kawasaki's blog today and he mentioned Alltop, a new project he's been working on.

It's an RSS aggregator without the aggregation. The Alltop guys have put together about 40 different topical "aggregations" on everything from cars to gadgets to education to celebrities.

Really neat. There are literally hundreds of a-list blogs and other info sites listed in these categories. One of those "why didn't I think of this" ideas.


-aB

Wednesday, July 19, 2006

Great Interview of EA VP Jeff Brown



I really liked this interview of Electronic Arts' VP of Corporate Communications Jeff Brown that appears on Eurogamer.net.

The story gives some keen insight on the gaming business and EA's philosophies. I actually learned a lot and Jeff's thoughts got me thinking about some ideas I had never thought about. Here's an interesting snippet:

If you start with the consideration that when new platforms launch, the first five million 360s, the first five million PS3s, for that matter even the first five million Wiis are going to be purchased by the hardest of the hardcore fans. They don't like James Bond, and most of them don't like Harry Potter and things like that. There are huge audiences for those games, but typically not within the universe of people who buy the first five million units of a new piece of technology.

What they like is this really freaky game IP which is weird and twitchy and really is made for people who grew up on games, and don't need to approach a game from a motion picture mentality or a book mentality. They love game IP, and they understand it. Now is the time to introduce that, when these people are coming to these systems.


Never really thought about it that way - that the first games that a developer designs for a new platform are for the hardcore fans, not the more general gaming consumer.

Another interesting snippet regarding the big differences in gaming and movie sequels:

With iterations and sequels in videogames, there's a huge loyal audience that really likes it, and one of the reasons that they come to like a franchise is because typically, there's a lot of innovation within each one of these iterations. So I dispute the idea that Dead or Alive 3 or Halo 3 or something like that are inherently not as good as the originals; that's motion picture thinking, that's not videogame thinking.


Good interview. Read the entire article here on Eurogamer.net.

-aB

Monday, July 17, 2006

When Bad Ideas Go Bad...



Wal-Mart has launched "The Hub," a very fake, very dorky MySpace wannabe social networking site. Kind of...

AdAge.com says it best:

It's a quasi-social-networking site for teens designed to allow them to "express their individuality," yet it screens all content, tells parents their kids have joined and forbids users to e-mail one another. Oh, and it calls users "hubsters" - a twist on hipsters that proves just how painfully uncool it is to try to be cool. The Hub is where teens can go and register to become 'Hubsters' - Wal-Mart's ideal of a hipster.

Desperate to appeal to teens with something other than pencils and backpacks during the crucial back-to-school season, Wal-Mart is launching a highly sanitized, controlled and rather unhip site at walmart.com/schoolyourway.


Oh, it's bad. Really bad. Take a look. Who on earth approved this concept? Who on earth thought that this would be viewed as "cool" by the target audience? How does this sell school supplies or clothes?

Read the full story here.

-aB

Absolutely. Stunning.



Here is a link to some information about the new Porsche 911 Targa.

I don't know what it is about the new lines on this car, but this is the most beautiful Porsche I have seen in a very long time. And I'm not even a Porsche fan...

The new glass roof looks incredible. It's impressive how big the opening gets when the roof is fully retracted.

Thanks to Digg.com for the link to AutoMotoPortal.com.

-aB

Sunday, July 16, 2006

First Ever Web Banner Ad



I thought it appropriate since I finally got around to starting up Google AdSense on my blog that I show you the world's first Ad Banner.

It's for AT&T and, according to Clientwell Online Marketing, appeared on Hotwired.com in 1994.

Thanks to Digg.com for the link to Clientwell.com.

-aB

Monday, June 26, 2006

Digg 3.0 Alive & Well



Digg.com is one of my favorite sites. It's the pioneer of the “democratic editorial control” model. While sites like Google News and Yahoo! use algorithms to determine which news stories are most popular and should be placed on the home page, Digg.com empowers readers to vote and “digg” on which stories receive top placement. Digg calls this user powered content. How nice.

Digg.com is very popular with the technology community. (You can see that influence in the content that’s on the home page. Remember it’s the readers that selected it.) Digg.com’s traffic stats rival that of more traditional sites like NYTimes.com, with over 800,000 unique visitors a day and 9 million plus page views.

This (Monday) morning, Digg.com 3.0 launched. The new Digg continues to showcase users’ editorial selections in technology but will now include “containers” for broader subject categories as well – including entertainment, world & business, gaming, science and online video. Digg’s going mainstream and looking to take a chunk out of YouTube.com at the same time.

With site traffic to Digg doubling every two months, expect to see more – much more - of Digg and also expect to see more news aggregator sites embrace the “user editorial control” model.

What does this mean for PR? It means we must ensure we are diligent in the online communities, getting key influencers to show preference for our stories. In the democratic editorial control model, stories that get “voted off the island” by the influencers will never reach the larger audiences.

Check out Digg.com v.3.0 here.

-aB

Interesting, Albeit Inaccurate Web Site Demographic Tool



Want to know who Microsoft THINKS is looking at a particular Web site? This tool, part of Microsoft’s AdLabs project, tries to tell you. I’m not sure how exactly it works, but it was pretty close for some of my client projects.

Of course, it’s way off on others. Try seeing who Microsoft thinks is using Google. Click the URL button then type in www.google.com.

Interesting. Check it out here.

Thanks to Digg.com for the link.

-aB

Friday, May 26, 2006

The BBC Production Assistant Grabbed the Wrong Guy...



So your name is Guy Keyney (pictured above on the left), and you are sitting in reception of the BBC about to go on air to talk about the Apple Computer/Apple (The Beatles’ publishing company) lawsuit.

You are nervous, because you are slated to go on air at 10:30 and it’s 10:29 and you’re still sitting in the lobby. The receptionist assures you everything is ok.

Then, at 10:30 as you are watching the live feed of the broadcast via the television in the lobby, you see the show host introduce you. The camera then cuts to someone in the guest chair who is certainly not you (the Guy pictured above on the right).

Here's a snippet from Guy Keyney's blog post:

There were several surprising things about my interview. We'll ignore the fact that I wasn't giving it, and had not given it. We'll even gloss over the fact that, judging by my performance, English wasn't my first language, and that I didn't seem to know much about Apple Computer, online music, or the Beatles. People have accused me of all those things, at various stages of my career...


Seems as though there were TWO people named Guy in the lobby that morning. One was a taxi driver named Guy Goma who was there for a job interview, the other one was Guy Keyney, a well-known journalist and respected technology law expert in the UK. The production assistant grabbed the wrong Guy, whisked him to the studio, sat him down and put a mic on him.

Watch the video here.

Read Guy Keyney’s take of the incident here. Read more about it here and here (PR Opinions). Thanks to PR Opionions for the link.

To his credit, the “other Guy” tried his best to answer the questions. I’m sure he thought this was one hell of an interview process!

-aB

Sunday, May 21, 2006

TiVo Required For New GE Ads



So, what do you do when you're an advertising agency and the TiVo and DVR are preventing people from watching your commercials? You develop commercials that can only be seen with a Tivo or DVR, of course!

This is pretty neat stuff. GE is unveiling their "One Second Theatre" during commercials that will play this month.

Read about it in this New York Times story here.

Basically, the GE commercials will now include a one-second "flip book" like slide show at the end. It's a mini-commercial sandwiched into one second. To watch this last second, you'll need to watch it frame-by-frame, something you can only do with a TiVo.

Very interesting idea. For some reason, this reminds me of playing old record albums backward when I was a kid to hear the "secret message." Anyone remember the Queen song Another One Bites the Dust and it's secret message?

Visit GE's One Second Theatre micro-site here.

UPDATE: It seems as though Sprite is jumping on the "DVR Ready" commercial bandwagon, too. New commercials from hot ad agency Crispin, Porter & Bogusky (that's the Subservient Chicken agency, by the way) call it "SubLYMONal" advertising, bringing back the old Lymon marketing idea for Sprite. Look through the commercials frame-by-frame and there are supposed to be plenty of goodies...

-aB

Monday, May 08, 2006

Which Midget Is Taller?



The median age of the CNN and FOX News viewer is over 60. Ouch.

MSNBC and Headline News aren't much better, with the median viewer 57 and 59, respectively. This is according to Brian Lowry's column posted on Variety last night.

For a business where the 18-49 demo is so critically important, this is a tough pill to swallow. And the networks don't talk about this a lot - leading Brian Lowry to make the following observation:

The cable nets' older profiles have also yielded absurd exchanges about demographic superiority, such as the boast that more young adults view MSNBC's Keith Olbermann than CNN's Paula Zahn. Whichever midget is taller, the truth remains that the vast majority of young adults have no interest in either.


Interesting, eye-opening article. Read it here.

-aB

Tuesday, May 02, 2006

Mass Confusion At Best Buy



A "prankster group" called Improv Everywhere got 50 people dressed up in Best Buy-like regalia (blue shirt, khakis) and raided the local store.

According to the story, there was mass confusion. Snippet from Gizmodo.com:

Customers were confused, some sales staff were supportive while others got upset, and predictably both management and security went apoplectic.


More pictures here in Flickr and the full story here on Gizmodo.com.

-aB

Thursday, April 20, 2006

Was It Viral Coolness Or Was It A Coder Easter Egg?



One of the top stories on Digg.com over the past 21 hours has been about a scene from the television show Family Guy appearing on the JetBlue.com Web site.

It seems as though if you viewed the route map (located here) and typed in "pbj" (think peanut butter and jelly), the route map would be replaced from a scene from the animated FOX television show.

Now, Digg.com is becoming the new Slashdot in terms of identifying what is "geek cool" and this story has received 2,162 diggs (votes) in less than a day. So, this story is very geek cool.

The offending code is now gone. Going to http://www.jetblue.com/travelinfo/routemap.asp now only provides a nice route map. Typing in "pbj" does nothing, other than show you that you have to pretty much fly thru JFK to get anywhere on an otherwise awesome airline.

My question is whether this was intentional (my vote - no). Did Jet Blue "do the right thing" and take the code down ASAP (my vote - maybe, maybe not)? Other than getting a "cease and desist" letter from the folks at FOX, what bad could come of this?

This story had some traction in viral-land. It was moments away from "jumping the shark" into mainstream, via company IT guys sending it around to people in their office (and then those people to others...) This is the type of viral phenomenon that could have been even bigger and beneficial, with just a little thought. What if they kept the "Easter Egg" up and replaced The Family Guy scene with another one, one that had been approved by the company? What if the new scene included a code for 10% off a purchase in their ShopBlue store? What if there was a hat in the ShopBlue store that included the Jet Blue logo and the letters "pbj" next to it?

Now that would be a way to capitalize on viral marketing...

Aside: This reminds me of some company (I can't remember which one) that had an option on their 800 phone customer support system with all of the typical choices (for English, press 1; for technical support, press 2; for questions on a bill, press 3) but also had another choice (to hear a duck quack, press 9). Funny.

-aB

UK Hand Spray Found To Kill Bird Flu Bug



Snippet from DailyRecord.co.uk:

An ordinary handwash costing just £2.99 can kill the bird flu virus in 30 seconds, tests have found. No-Germs, a simple hand spray, has been on sale over the counter for two years. But when the H5N1 avian flu outbreak gathered pace among birds, No-Germs owners decided to test it against the virus.

The results, revealed yesterday, were remarkable - the handwash was more tha 99.8 per cent efficient in killing H5N1. The discovery has been heralded as a "major breakthrough" - particularly if the virus ever mutates into a human form.


So, how soon until we see "Kills the Bird Flu Bug" tagline on every cleaning product here in America? This is the new "Anti-bacterial" starburst that began to appear on everything (from soap to detergent to mousepads to ink pens) a few years back.

Read the entire article here.

Gaming Women Outnumber Men



Yep, in the important 24-35 age group, the number of women gamers outnumbers men. Don't believe me? Snippet:

A new study from the Consumer Electronics Association indicates that there are many more women gamers in the 25-34 demographic than males, largely because of the popularity of the casual games market, with card games like solitaire and puzzle games like Tetris.


We already know that male pre-teen and teens are spending more time playing video games than watching television or DVDs. Note that these gamers are more likely to play console games on their Playstation or XBOX.

Casual gamers are playing a different type of game - less competitive, less violent and usually less expensive games like solitare, Tetris or other puzzle games.

The opportunity for marketing sponsorships in these casual games is actually higher than with the traditional console game. Right now, the main sponsorship option in console games is product/branding placement, such as passing a McDonald's restaurant in a racing game or passing a cologne outdoor board in a skiing race game.

Then there's Burger King who went all-out with their sponsorship in EA Sport's Fight Night Round 3. The game starts out with traditional sponsorship like logos in the boxing ring and on-screen graphics. But then, you actually get to fight the King! (with his funny, albeit creepy King-head).

With casual games, the brand can be more woven into the game itself. Budgets for development/licensing are a lot smaller, too. And these are the games that are more likely to have mobile implications - such as a download game for a mobile phone. Think if you could "weave in" proximity into these games, a la GeoCaching...

The full story from GameDaily appears here. This should likely change marketers perceptions of this yet untapped medium for reaching consumers.

-aB

Wednesday, April 05, 2006

Citysearch.com Traffic up 185% Over Last Year. Huh?



There is an interesting story on WashingtonPost.com today about where Internet traffic is growing and slowing.

No surprise - traffic to blogging and social networking sites has skyrocketed. Blogger.com traffic is up 528% year over year and traffic to MySpace.com is up 318%. Guess Rupert's $580 million gamble might be paying off...

Other interesting tidbits include traffic increases to Wikipedia.org (up 275%). I'll be interested to see if wiki traffic begins to cannibalize blog traffic and/or if we'll see a traffic plateau in the entire social networking arena. (I wrote about this topic on the PersonalizedMediaBlog.com last week.)

Google saw 21% growth, but Yahoo, MSN and AOL all saw relatively flat growth, under 5% each. eBay actually saw a 3% traffic drop. Interesting. Guess all those people doing auctions are now blogging and chatting up on MySpace.com... (Not really, remember that eBay still gets millions of visits a day.)

The most interesting part of the story for me was the Citysearch number. Most local Internet sites closed their doors during the Internet bubble bust. Citysearch was on life support. But there seems to be growth in local-oriented online content. Perhaps this has something to do with the emergence of local news video online (accessible in part because the majority of online Americans now have broadband). Perhaps there is a renewed focus on real community content (to complement online communities). I'll tell you - this is a very interesting stat. It will be interesting to see if this is just an anomoly, if it's just a Citysearch thing, or if we'll see more growth in local-oriented online content. If so, it will prove the point that the online communities are becoming an integral part of our entire culture and that the distinction between online and "live" is narrowing.

Check the story out here. ComScore actually provides some pretty detailed data.

-aB

Monday, January 30, 2006

ABC Sends the NFL Out With A Bang



Sunday's big game is ABC's last NFL production for many years to come. NBC now has the NFL for six years, thanks to the $600 million it paid for the rights to one game a week (the Monday Night Football game). But it won't be showing the game Monday night - it will be on Sunday night prime time.

Anyway, back to the Super Bowl. ABC is going all-out with some neato gizmos and high-def goodies to make sure you don't forget this game. TVTechnology.com talks about the wireless high-def, new Canon lenses and other goodies here. Here's a snippet about the "rigs," or those big eighteen wheelers that park outside with all of the cables going into them:

"Sports is always at the cutting edge of hi-tech on television," said George Hoover, senior vice president of engineering at NEP Supershooters, the mobile division of NEP Broadcasting in Pittsburgh that will bring three trucks to Super Bowl XL. "Since the first super slo-mo cameras five years ago, the NFL is generally a driving force for new TV technology." NEP is bringing Supershooter 26, the HDTV rig used to shoot Monday Night Football on ABC for the past three seasons, to the event. NEP also is bringing in Supershooter 20, the HDTV truck used to shoot Sunday Night Football for ESPN.

The three-and-a-half hour pre-game show and the shorter post-game show will be shot in HD using Supershooter 18.


Yep. Three rigs. Two more than most events. Each of these rigs has millions of dollars of equipment in it. Each one. In other words, a good portion of the high-def equipment in the US will all be situated next to Ford Field in Detroit this week.

Cool stuff. Gonna love it in HD...

Via Gizmodo.

-aB

Thursday, January 19, 2006

Amazon's New Podcasts That Aren't



Amazon is getting some heat in the blogosphere for not allowing their new weekly original programming "Amazon Fishbowl with Bill Maher" to be available for download.

Personally, I like the idea of this program (from a marketing standpoint). And I bet it will convert to sales.

When you're a site like Amazon that has several million visitors stopping by the site every hour, anything that can keep consumers on the site 3-4 minutes longer (and listen to product pitches) is a windfall. And with Maher, they have (in my opinion) the right mix of entertainment/pitchman to make it work.

And I can understand why Amazon doesn't want it to be a podcast. (Yet.) They know from research that the buyer's attention span is pretty short. Every second that goes buy where you don't click the "BUY NOW" button, you're that many times more likely not to buy. If you're not in front of the BUY NOW button at Amazon.com when you're listening, they've lost their "call to action" and sales conversion opportunity.

They want you there - on the site - buying stuff - while you're listening. It's not that much different than those time share places in Florida where you get the free gift certificate for the lobster dinner if you go and listen to the real estate sales spiel. Same thing here - if you want the free entertainment (the lobster or Maher, your pick), you'd better be sitting in front of our Web site at the time.

Jeff does bring up a very good point - the idea that the volume of listeners would increase exponentially if they opened it up for download. My guess is that they want to see if the show can put "seats in the pews" first before allowing you to listen to the sermon from home.

-aB

Spy On Yourself. For Profit?

Seth Goldstein wants you to be able to sell your Web stats. He wants to create a new software category, called "myware" that can allow all of your Web tracking, cookies, time spent online, favorites, etc. to be sold to the highest bidder. Snippet from a CNNMoney.com story:

"Everybody else is spying on me," he says, "so I want to spy on myself."

But Goldstein wants a better copy of his online behavior than anyone else has, and he wants to have complete control over who gets to see it. Instead of spyware, he calls the software that will let him do this "myware."


I thought Nielsen MediaMetrics was already doing this, albeit for their small selection of online Nielsen families.

Interesting idea, but scary. I agree with the story that the "return" we as cosumers get from cookies and other tracking mechanisms isn't worth the invasion. (As a Web developer however, the data is quite valuable to making Web sites and user experiences better.)

Via Slashdot and CNNMoney.com.

-aB

Tuesday, January 17, 2006

SEE ROCK CITY. Now v.2.0.



Growing up in the South, it was almost impossible to go down an interstate or highway without seeing a barn roof with the words "SEE ROCK CITY" painted on them.

As the Web site Two-Lane.com shares:

It all began in the 1920's, when Garnet and Frieda Carter developed a garden walkway on their estate atop Lookout Mountain, in northern Georgia, overlooking Chattanooga. America was in the Great Depression when the Carters opened their gardens to the public in 1932. In what would become one of the most unique advertising gimmicks ever, Carter hired Clark Byers to paint "See Rock City" on hundreds of barns located along highways leading to Chattanooga.

Clark Byers died February 19, 2004 at age 89. From 1937 until his retirement in 1969, Byers painted over 900 barns in 19 southern states.


Seems as though roof advertising is coming back in vogue, although in a slightly different fashion thanks to Google Maps. Got a big, flat roof? Free advertising thanks to the Google "eyes in the sky!"

Via Gizmodo, TheInquirer.net and Adverlab.

-aB