Archive for the 'marketing' Category
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Designed by Dieter Rams in 1960-62, Vitsœ’s shelves and chairs were conceived to be timeless. You can add a single shelf to a system bought 40 years ago and then take it with you when you move.
This is porn. I should know, I’ve seen some porn in my time, and this is definitely porn. Lovely lovely lovely.
I guess you mention Berocca… you get free stuff.
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Bruno Giussani is a writer, the European Director of the TED Conferences, the producer of the Forum des 100, and a frequent public speaker.
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shockwave and processing experiments
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handy image of digital identy mapping
OK so the topic of whether or not to move away from micro-sites is a perennial one, and I’ve just been asked to comment on the topic, so here you go. They are often viewed as being expensive, a pain to manage, transient and sometimes a waste of money. To an extent these points can be true, however micro-sites still have their place and value.
Anonymity
Building buzz around something can require a degree of anonymity. Take the Film and TV industries for example. Films and TV shows are frequently launched with extended teaser campaigns, sometimes along with a complex ‘game’ to reinforce the mystery or history surrounding the concept. The TV Series Lost launched with a plethora of web sites, OceanicAir, The DHARAMA Initiative, The Hanso Foundation as well as the official web site hosted on ABC.com. The point is, placing all these websites on ABC.com would have watered down the experience. Secondly, placing these ‘out there’ on the Internet can even re-inforce the anonymity. If the site is entirely unbranded, one way to find out if it ‘belongs to anyone’ is to do a simple ‘Who Is’ look-up of the domain name and hey presto you have to owner… ABC.com. But if the site is hosted on a URL who’s DNS entry is registered anonymously, the mystery can be retained. This you cant do if it’s sat on the parent companies web server.
Unconstrained Creativity
Agree with this or not, micro-sites hosted outside the confines of a core web site can allow for greater freedom of expression of the brand. Why? Simple, most major web sites these days are hosted of templated content management systems. Frequently, these don’t offer blank canvas that is required to deliver a highly interactive, immersive experience. Yes, this can be done to a degree within a templated site, but not to the same degree as outside. There is an argument to say that the kind of experience as offered via micro-sites should be constrained within a core or master site, but more often than not the freedom simply isn’t there.
Segment Specific
Campaigns, of which micro-sites are generally a manifestation, tend to be targeted at very specific customer segments. Engaging with these segments can be far easier, and less tonally awkward, outside the confines of a ‘master branded’ web site. Even though a brand may have a large teen audience for example, the master brand as reflected on the core web site, may not talk to the audience on their ground. A micro-site therefore may be the best place to do this, where the tone can be altered, without making the bran look like your Dad at a rave.
Another approach, as best demonstrated by Nike, is to make your entire ‘web site’ a collection of what are essentially micro sites: Nike Golf, Football, Nike+, Woman, NikeLab and so on. The master site simply becomes a pointer to a series of highly segment specific, targeted product sites. And lets face it, very few people say Nike.com is a bad thing…
Why not pack in as many links to random Orange stuff as you can!
Kevin Ham, the $300 million master of Web domains - June 1, 2007: “Trained as a family doctor, he put off medicine after discovering the riches of the Web. Since 2000 he has quietly cobbled together a portfolio of some 300,000 domains that, combined with several other ventures, generate an estimated $70 million a year in revenue.” [via cnn money]
A tweet from a former colleague asked: “Wondering when the social networking bubble will burst. Any predictions?” As to an answer, I have no idea, but it does raise an valid point about the terminology we use to discuss such things. Not all social networking sites, as we refer to them generally, are social networking sites. Linkedin for example is not a social networking site, it’s a business networking site obvious I know, but the distinction is not often made.
So partly to answer the question: My prediction would be that networks that have no perceived value other than status building or friend making will struggle harder than those that have more of a niche purpose as the opportunities to generate revenue are more focussed when dealing with a niche or focussed audience, even if they are simply paying for the service…. who would actually pay to be a member of MySpace? (Ok I am a grumpy 36 year old father). Lets face it, some of the more blatant social networking sites can and only ever will generate revenue from advertising dollars rather than signed up members. What these sites may however succeed is if they are able to really analyse the networks created within their systems to offer ultra targeted opportunities to the advertisers…
So on to Eigenvector centrality: “…is a measure of the importance of a node in a network. It assigns relative scores to all nodes in the network based on the principle that connections to nodes having a high score contribute more to the score of the node in question.” Then we have issues such as clustering coefficients to worry about! Is anyone measuring these and using them? I hope they are, we’d like to talk to you. These are the network ‘operators’ that will survive, or generate some cash at least.
Anyway back to terminology, when we say social networks are we talking all networks i.e. ’social’ and ‘business’? If we are, then maybe ‘Peer Networks’ is a more all encompassing term?
BBC NEWS | Business | YouTubers to get ad money share YouTube founder Chad Hurley confirmed to the BBC that his team was working on a revenue-sharing mechanism that would “reward creativity”.
Uhhh, Natalie ordered some stuff from iwantoneofthose.com. You can see from the picture that the actual contents on the floor (photo wall hanger and a box of gonks or something) didn’t warrant the box or the packing material inside it (about 20ft of inflated polythene pockets). This has happened before. Not good.
Reuters opens in-game news bureau in Second Life - Joystiq
“Reuters is launching its Second Life doppelganger this week joining the corporate race to reach new audiences by way of the game. Second Life currently boasts 900,000 registered users that spend an average of $13 million a year on digital goods and services. When money talks, corporations listen.”
OCT112006 043, originally uploaded by silaslevi.
OK so I’m plugging an ex-client from a previous agency here, but anyway…
1. They have Chewbacca on their web site
2. They want you to eat Fugu
3. They have grannies in cars on their web site.
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