Honda pays hommage to the brave pilots who every year overcome their fears at the starting line of the Enduropale du Touquet. Wonderful photography and super epic. You can talk about "virals" or you can talk about representing brands in a stunning way using web videos. Well done, Honda. Well done DDB France.

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Post tags: Automotive, Brands, Cool, Creativity, Film, Honda, video, visual, We like

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Post tags: Design, history, typography, video, World

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Edward Boches has created the following deck. A deck that tries to distinguish three types of idea. I think it’s dangerous to just talk about advertising ideas these days. But I think his split in big (platform) idea and campaign idea is right, simply because they, all too often, are considered as synonymous.

And I wholeheartedly agree with Edward when he writes:

The higher up the idea food chain you get, the more you can see the contribution of the strategist, or at the very least the strategic side of the creative team.
Ideas like “Day One” don’t happen without a pretty deep understanding of the user.

How does she use technology? When does she access content? What role does her community play? How does context affect her willingness to engage? What kind of value and utility does she expect from a brand? What inspires her to share? Can you turn her into an advocate?

Read more: http://edwardboches.com/#ixzz2RZylfZPP

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Post tags: context, Creativity, Day One, Future, Ideas, Internet, Presentation, Strategy, Trends

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That’s why Synthesio was totally right to put the struggle of social listening solutions into a nice little infographic. Nobody said it would be easy. And I bet your agency/organisation is in the first third…

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Post tags: Adoption, Analytics, Diagram, Industry, Insights, Listening, presentations, Social Influence Marketing, Strategy, Tools, Trends, Truth

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I was not very interested in the Boston manhunt. But there was something intriguing behind the concept of a crowdsourced investigation. And as there were not many evidences which allowed identification of the terror suspects, it sounded quite realistic that a community like reddit might do the job instead.

I am a long time redditor and I am very convinced of the creative, intellectual and also humanistic potential behind reddit. Nowhere else can you find as much spontaneous energy to fix something, help someone, or collaborate for a joint cause than here. Reddit is a good community.

Reddit? Of course. No other community could do this. Where else would you find enough geeks, interested to check thousands of photos from the Boston Marathon, look out for patterns in tweets, photos and Youtube videos, to eventually identify the bad guy in the background of a pic…the guy who takes off his backpack and runs away. 

But then something happened. 

Redditors founded a group, called r/FindBostonBombers, in which hundreds of Redditors pointed their collective finger at several unknown people it considered suspicious based on their appearances and backpacks. 4Chan did the same.

The result was terrifying: 10 marathon attendees were defined as bombing suspects: normal people that were just victims like anybody else. People whose privacy was harmed by two overenthusiastic communities playing part-time police. And that’s dangerous. One suspected terrorist – Sunil Tripathi – is missing for a couple of days. It became obvious that he must be a terrorist, after a bunch of hobby detectives “identified” him as one of the people on the pictures and found out his current location is unknown. The fact that Sunil hasn’t yet returned even though he definitely is no terrorist is another story.

That’s sad. Plus: the actual terrorists were not among the suspects defined by both communities.

I t00 was excited about the idea that a crowdsourced, collaborative investigation might be more successful than the classic way to do police things: with the help of professionals. This example just showed one thing: overexcited groups lacking professional knowledge about something as sensible as identifiying a terror suspect should not be trusted. 

reddit was rightfully criticized in blaming the wrong men and the platform apologized. And yes, sometimes we make mistakes. And no, I should not have retweeted that reddit may have identified one of the suspects. Without knowing it, I supported something that has gotten completely out of hand. I should have known better.

It’s obvious: I – as many others – liked the idea that the collective power of the web wins one more fight against traditional ways to do things. Redditors collaborate to win the race against time. In the end it was just a collective of people intruding into other people’s lifes. 

Not cool. But we learn. And that’s a good thing.

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Post tags: boston, Boston Marathon, Gerald, paranoia, Politics, privacy, Reddit, Sunil Tripathi, terror, wold

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One of the more powerful algorithms is Facebook’s Edgerank aka Newsfeed algorithm. What it essentially does is to define which of your 769 friend’s content you see and what you don’t see. Sounds simple? No, it isn’t. Check out the infographic below to learn how Pagerank works. And if you have a bit of time, check out this fantastic TED talk on algorithms. Thanks to allfacebook for the link.

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Post tags: Algorithms, Content, data, edgerank, Facebook, Facebook Edgerank, infographics, simple, Social Influence Marketing, Social Networks, Tech, TED

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In this case it is one of my favorite German ad campaigns ever: “Dahinter steckt immer ein kluger Kopf” (“you can always find a smarthead behind it”)  for Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, one of Germany’s most important newspapers. Oh, and conincidentally it is the client and the campaign of my employer Scholz & Friends. But that hasn’t got anything to do with this post (no, really!!!)

The FAZ campaign is well known amongst Germans. Usually the campaign hides intellectuals, celebrities, economists or politicians behind an issue of FAZ in an environment that’s typical for this person. Germany’s first astronaut Ulf Merbold read his FAZ in front of the Ariane launch pad. Germany’s former chancellor Helmut Schmidt (a passionate smoker) could be found behind a plume of cigarette smoke.

As you can imagine it is not easy to find the right person for such a campaign. But indeed: my colleagues did it again. The team here and FAZ collaborated with Matt Groening to get one of the youngest and most beloved intellectual capacities worldwide on board. This month’s smarthead is Lisa Simpson. Great work, great idea for the latest motive.

See some of the Klugen Köpfe here…

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Post tags: Ads, Creativity, FAZ, Germany, Lisa Simpson, Media, Print, Scholz & Friends, Simpsons, We like

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Oh…and more good news from the mobile side of Planet Facebook: Mobile Targeting works extremely well. About a year ago Techcrunch titled: ”They Work! Facebook Mobile Ads Are Clicked 13X More, Earn 11X More Money Than Its Desktop Ads“. From what I have personally seen, I can wholeheartedly agree: Facebook ads perform well. They are still comparably complicated to book. But pretty much any mobile targeted campaign performs better than its desktop counterpart. At least if you target well…

And here starts the problem.

Because, in fact, I have to think back a long time to remember a point in which I was spammed by as many irrelevant ad messages as now. Paid media offers? Stock options, high-protein food additives…you name it. It really feels like the web in early 2000s. In fact the only thing that’s missing is hot girls in your area.

Is that a problem? Yes, I am afraid it is.

Actually I am quite convinced of Facebook’s advertising products. Targeting is a much more intelligent version of what we know as paid media. In an ideal world (the one without privacy breaches) it makes use of your social connections, your likes, demographics, and your location, to offer products and services that you would like to buy. I know, it may sound idealistic. But I am convinced that we need well targeted advertising messages. People who like to eat fish may want to know about a great fish restaurant in their area. As simple as that.

Unfortunately what we see right now is not well targeted. It is spam. 

I (and many others) have no connection whatsoever to buying stock options or protein additives. So why do I see them? Why do they target me?

The problem is twofold.

• They target me even though I have given them no reason to believe I am interested in their products. But I am part of their target group. I am 37, i am male – possibly that’s already enough. In other words: their targeting criteria is as week as the targeting that’s being used on TV right now.
• The other problem is: mobile ads are still quite cheap and comparably complicated to book. An invitation for spammers who are ahead of the curve paid-media-wise.

The result is a product which loses credibility among the target group even before it takes off. Facebook should really hurry up to make it easy for marketers worldwide to book their mobile products and to target customers properly. If they don’t: their young mobile advertising product will fall victim to spammers and will eventually lose credibility among the 700 million users that actually like to use Facebook mobile.

Guys, you better hurry up.

Thanks to Louis Volant for the picture.

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Post tags: Advertising, Facebook, Media, Online Advertising, products, target group, users

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All of us know they are terribly important. All of us know we have to have strong passwords because very nutjob can crack them nowadays…but at the same time they technically feel out of date, and don’t usually contribute to great UX. And to be honest: there could be a more secure solution than “12345″.

Good to find out that Mozilla is indeed working on a technical alternative.

Mozilla Persona is an open authentication system that lets you implement sign-in similar to logging in via OpenID or OAuth. But with one big difference: Persona provides support for any domain to become a Persona enabled identity provider and allow address verification without sending email.

Today, Persona Beta 2 was released, including this feature called “Identity Bridging” – a very promising new approach to one of the more annoying problems on the web…

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Post tags: Beta, Identity Bridging, Mozilla, Mozilla Persona, Passwords, Persona Beta, Personalisation, Tech, Tools, UX

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Thanks to my colleague Kirill for sharing this matrix. By the way: subscribe to his blog.

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Post tags: Diagram, matrix, Planning, Strategy

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