Below is a press release outlining a new venture for FMC and a synergy with my role as Head of Interactive at United Agents.
As how we are entertained and what formats entertain us, be they games, social gaming, websiodes or ripped movies, so we must engage the digital native audience and that ain’t slapping a banner ad on the side of a page and hoping they’ll click-thru. New monetisation models need to be defined and advertisers/brands are key to that development. We want our content for free.
‘Social media widget’, it sounds like something you might need even though you’re not sure why, ain’t words great like that.
Great to see Coke innovating in this space, appvertising writ large with a view to looking kindly upon a can of the brown fizzy treacle next time you pass the store.
Brands swift to innovate in the widget/application space display an understanding of the evolving ad markets and the needs of so called Millenials.
(via Read/Write) Coca-Cola quietly launched one of their first social media applications last weekend, a bookmarking widget for Facebook called CokeTag. (Coke Singapore also has a Facebook application out, promoting a tie-in with UEFA EURO 2008.) Read the rest of this entry »
We’ve been officialized by a lady called Martha at Apple. We are iPhone developers, we are prohibited from developing anything porn/iPhone related, we are excited about the 3G iPhone with true GPS, we are touting our iPhone developer credentials to any enlightened brand who wants to get with the ‘kool kidz’ and sponsor applications that enhance the content crunching mobile lives of iPhone zealots. Myself included. We are touching screens a lot and saying ‘oooh’, such is life in the fattest interactive agency.
Brands are you listenning? I got some one line pitches I want to throw your way:
Burger King/Dominos Pizza etc - App that tells you where the nearest retail outlet is and provides you with a coupon to get money off, hell it could even encourage you to jog there!
Heineken/Guiness/Bud etc - App that tells you where to get a bottle of fizzy distilled hops and meet other App users to talk sport and Britney Spears.
Match.com - App that allows you to set a colour or mood reflective of how receptive you are to approaches from App using strangers who come into your area. (except iPhone users are mostly men who play Grand Theft in suit jackets and jeans)
So fine tune your Google Alerts ask the post boy to Twitter search your brand and let’s drink green tea in nice boardrooms where I can steal stationary from.
It’s been practically a whole dotcom cycle since I last talked about the term I made-up ‘appvertising‘ and remarked upon it’s gentle passage around the web.
Now at a staggering 67 entries on Google. A new entrant caught my Fat eye, Binge Eating.
I clicked on the link which took me to some generic weight loss website.
What can this mean though? That people are now actually eating advertising to such an extent as to term their sedentary munching, a binge! Zut alors!
People please eat all the banner ads and pop-ups you can see, in fact eat most of any Conde Nasty website which seems to have a plague of pop-ups.
‘ooh look I accidentally clicked on that pop-up for Louis Vuitton prosthetic travel arm… no I don’t want one, I’d seek it out and click on it if I did!’
Such ads just patronise the audience, trying to trick people into clicking on your add only serves the people selling the space on CPM’s, it’s a false economy.
But appvertising, ah sweet notion that you are. Branded applications provide the user with relevance, ie this app entertains/informs me with warm, comfy brand association, ‘thank you dear Heineken for sponsoring my iPhone bar guide to Europe, thank you from the bottom of my cold barrel of yummy Heineken and for the lady sitting opposite me who when I had not drunk any of your sparkling hops I did not find attractive, but now, post-hops intend to woo with my unique dance routine.’
‘There’s a hypothesis in robotics known as the Uncanny Valley. If you imagine a graph with the degree of realism a robot attains running across the bottom and with the amount of positive empathy it can generate climbing vertically then, generally, you see a positive correlation between the two, and an upward sloping graph. A the robot gets more human, we like it more. However, the Uncanny Valley hypothesis suggests that there’s a point where this breaks down; that there comes a moment where the increasing realism in something that’s still obviously a robot doesn’t create feelings of empathy and connection, it freaks us out. That’s one side of the valley. The hypothesis further suggests that as robots get yet more realistic then this effect diminishes, we effectively forget that it’s a robot and empathy returns. That’s the other side. Except no-one knows this because no-one’s ever built a robot that good.
Brian uses words like ‘bumfuzzle’ and ‘jot & tittle’ which sounds a lot like something my wife thinks I might say but I never have. Certainly not when talking about branded social networks which is causing Brian to froth about ‘banana moonpie’ and ‘vapid booterism’.
His post is worth a read, though I disagree with his conclusions and think there is still a lot brands can do in the social network space, if only they’d start thinking more about their ‘metric assload’.
I’m getting into Twitter and thus regularly answering the question ‘What are you doing?’ and then broadcasting the answer to all and sundry. For those of you immune to Twitter’s childish allure it’s like Facebook status on ketamine… which given the general disquiet about the Facesoft Beacon advertising system is a somewhat apt analogy. Ketamine will either put the mighty stallion to sleep or send it down the discotheque to dance it’s jaw off.
I should clarify ‘getting into’. I’ve logged on, left the account dormant for 3 months, wondered why a lady (who turned out to be a man) called Trish Hussey was sending me text messages late on Friday nights and which I had to explain to my wife: Read the rest of this entry »
8 months ago Cynthia Holmes uploaded a lo-fi video to You Tube. The video featured two otters holding hands (it’s paws I think Cynthia unless Otters have developed opposable thumbs).
In that time it’s racked up a staggering 8.5 million views. It’s 1 minute 40 seconds long and the second most recent comment is ‘just imagine what they do when the kids leave the zoo?’. Wonder at their opposable thumbs one supposes. Read the rest of this entry »
Last week was all about Google’s Open Social announcement, grouping together MySpace, LinkedIn and other social networking sites to create a common developer environment and put the virtual squeeze on Facesoft to join the party and create a true widegetocracy.
Ah, heaven, develop a killer widget, no need to develop on various disparate platforms, just a one size fits all wrapper enabling people to share the goodness of the widget with everyone, who… well… anyone who is on a social network and with the launch of a silver surfers network by Saga (them of the Club 55-80 holidays) that includes your Bad Uncle Bobby and his new wife Patty with the implants.
Now all we need is some real innovation in the widget sphere, like a widgetzine, filtered content from around the web.
SocialAds, that’s what they’re calling it in advance of Facebook’s announcement about it’s own social ad network on the 6th.
What does it mean? Basically Facesoft will serve ads based on your social stream, even use that information to serve ads on third party sites within the Microsoft ad network.
If internet privacy is not already a concern of yours then this is probably akin to having your wallet stolen, unsettling, but not life threatening, I mean they could have stolen an organ or a limb or something. If internet privacy is a concern then things just got a bit armageddon on yo ass. Read the rest of this entry »
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Below is a press release outlining a new venture for FMC and a synergy with my role as Head of Interactive at United Agents. 
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