Uba Kontrovasie

Fruity drinks and lunchtime dreams

2010-09-05T15:07:10Z

I was sitting slouched when this ad first came on and the people around me immediately started laughing at the jingle/strap-line. Its at that point that you know a campaign is going to have some talk-ability.

I often sigh when I’m asked to “go and check if people are talking about our TV ads”, because nine times out ten nobody cares, but when a creative is truly spot on and culturally relevant it does create conversations.

Google Realtime instantly provides a nice snapshot of updates related to specific campaigns:

I did the same searches for campaigns that are being picked up by the Visible Measures AdAge chart and I started to track updates about the Old Spice and Gillette campaigns also. One could argue could that most of these updates do come from people that work within the media bubble, but with some extensive research and filtering we can start to group and categorise tracked updates.

The context of the updates, and the profiles of the people that they come from, can help us to identify the types of people that are being engaged by advertising and time patterns in response. Its all very interesting stuff and I plan to do more work to investigate the relationships and patterns between advertising campaigns and social media.

Communicatons are becoming more integrated and we’re starting to see lots of great work—which isn’t dogmatically trying to wear a social media label. As this trend grows we can start to confidently include talk-ability metrics into more than just PR and pure-play social media campaigns, and if you look closely it’s the integrated campaigns that seem to create the most talk-ability. Just saying.

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links for 2010-08-30

2010-08-31T04:03:38Z

Long-form journalism starts a new chapter | Media | The Guardian

More on niche journalism here. I've been reading N+1 for the last six months and I'm really enjoying their long articles and the biannual print journals.
Official Google Blog: Google Realtime Search: a new home with new tools

Google have single handedly wiped many of the free social search apps off the map with this single tool. I think development is important as it changes the reputation and buzz monitoring landscape dramatically.

Now that Google are finally addressing realtime search, analysis agencies can now focus their services on larger research pieces, which map contexts and the personas that sit behind comments.

(tags: buzz monitoring)
Official Google Blog: A joint policy proposal for an open Internet

(tags: openinternet google)
Official Google Blog: The 2010 Google Faculty Summit

(tags: internet-of-things)
Internet of Things – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

(tags: future hardware ideas inspiration internet networking tagging semantic-web research rfid technology things ambientintelligence internet-of-things)
Official Google Blog: You can count the number of books in the world on 25,972,976 hands

After they finished counting them, they probably started indexing them

(tags: blogs books google)
Media Companies Must Divide To Conquer – The Steve Rubel Stream

Interesting points here. My personal media consumption mirrors some of Steve's comments. I read and subscribe to a handful of niche publications and I typically use two news providers (Guardian and Channel 4 news) in order to stay connected to broader world news.

i'm just getting back into RSS, after a long time off, but I have a specific work-related purpose for it now. My previous attempts of using it drove me insane as I often felt like I wasn't staying on top of incoming updates. Many people at the time were sharing similar sentiments and "information overload" was frequently mentioned in pub chats.

(tags: media future)
Hot or Not: E-mail Marketing vs. Social-Media Marketing – The Steve Rubel Stream

Email marketing has developed a negative image due to many brands misusing it. Some of the most effective marketeers are still not fully utilising email as they're still mindlessly spamming me! Now I'm not an email marketing expert, like @miketeasdale, but I think email now needs to do same as other marketing methods and actually deliver value.

I think it's a strange situation. Broadcast media keeps evolving and stays creative, but email, a relatively new communication media, has reached an effectiveness plateau. Some of us spend a lot of our working days in email and for this reason I'd like to see creatives and digital thinkers use it more creatively.

(tags: marketing email)
Twitter Blog: Pushing Our (Tweet) Button

A reminder to add this and the Facebook like button to all the blogs that I regularly contribute towards.

(tags: todo twitter tweetbutton)

Random Posts

PM vs UX vs Marketing

2010-08-20T17:10:47Z

Not quite sure how I stumbled upon this deck, but it’s given me quite a lot to think about. As some people do or don’t know I’ve moved to pastures new and I’m having to take many of the things above into account.

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Once Hardware now Software

2010-08-19T14:19:30Z

This clip reminded of how we’re seeing many hardware interfaces turn into software interfaces and interactive platforms. Hardware is becoming smaller and more simple and software is now replacing many hardware components and applications.

In 1998 I had a Pioneer and Cambridge Audio Hi-Fi separates console and now it sits in my garage, like a relic, as iTunes and two tiny Bose speakers have replaced it all. This trend of software replacing hardware is growing and as result of this the importance of specialized interaction design increases. Interaction designers, up until now, have designed for two broad mediums: desktop software and websites. As the adoption of touch screens and gestural interfaces increases, interaction designers will need to specialize and focus on specific applications, for specific communities and groups of people.

I’m pretty excited by all of this

Video via @agilemediaware

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Information Design Debate

2010-08-18T12:58:46Z

Banking this for now. Comments to follow soon.

Random Posts

links for 2010-08-15

2010-08-16T04:04:28Z

What deux yeux have teux deux teuxday?

Not sure how I feel about this app. It's designed well but it encourages people to write lists, which have been shown to hinder creativity in comparison to mind mapping or drawing tools. Ideally the tool should allow people to build stories and visuals around the tasks they're trying to complete.

(tags: tools calendar web2.0 webapp design online)
Patrick Cramsie's top 10 graphic design books | Books | guardian.co.uk

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(tags: design books art guardian graphics book typography graphic graphicdesign)

Random Posts

links for 2010-08-09

2010-08-10T04:04:16Z

Meta-Mirror Concept Application by Notion » Yanko Design

I like how this concept designer has utilised the iPad to provide a complimentary user experience of what's on a main screen. It reminds me of how you could use your PSP as rear view mirror for the driving games on the PS3. I can imagine using the iPad as a huge interactive control centre for my programming: split screen views during sports games, live tweets to compliment the news and homeplayer functionality on game shows.

(tags: ipad tablet)

Random Posts

2010-08-10T08:35:19Z

We work as consultants, which means we work with a lot of different companies, in a lot of different fields. But really, our common interest is in understanding people and what their needs are.

Dan Formosa – Smart Design

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Helvetica

2010-08-10T08:34:45Z

Yes…I saw the film about the font.

Up until now I’ve been oblivious to the ubiquity of Helvetica. Having only noticed it in its pure and bold appearances, the film does a great job of passively displaying the use of Helvetica in our everyday surroundings. Bold, regular and Italic it often goes unnoticed because I think we’re becoming immune to it and its seamless way of blending into branding and communications.

I’ve recently been trying to find my own visual communication style, a style for my brand, brand Dhiren: A typeface and layout style that can become consistently recognised as my own.

Perhaps I’ll go for a serif, but will that exclude certain groups of people? The next presentation I do will be replicated be with a different typeface and layout style. The people will decide — whether it matters to me or not may well be a different story.

Will keep you posted.

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links for 2010-08-05

2010-08-06T04:04:04Z

BBC News – Google drops Wave because of lack of users

This was inevitable. Google have various conflicting social/collaboration products, which include Google Buzz and GMail. Many of the features in Wave could have been incorporated into GMail and this would have delivered a larger testing community.

Inevitably, Google will now compete with Live (Microsoft) and Mobile Me (Apple) services. Their proactive attitude towards HTML 5, Android, Chrome and Chrome OS indicates that they will develop a hub service that seamlessly integrates user accounts and services across all operating systems.

Fun times ahead!

(tags: google, wave, technology)