Relevance Matters

My View of Marketing from the Lens of Purchasing a Motorcycle

Jason Greene — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 14:26:15 +0000

After working in advertising for 12 years and riding motorcycles for 5, I cannot believe how helpful the latter has been in grasping the former. For starters, one of the hardest things to learn when riding a motorcycle is handling the gears with grace.

When a bike enthusiast decides to take the plunge and purchase a new bike, he or she will always consider the entire experience: the brand, the style, the handling, the “red line”, the legacy and - above all - the self-image related to the bike’s entire parcel of minute details.

I believe riding a motorcycle is more personal in many ways than driving a car. Yet it’s the finer details, like ‘shift feel,’ which are often overlooked by an inexperienced rider due to fewer marketing specifics regarding these points.

My initial draw to the "cafe racer" bike style originated through a combination of overdramatized and fantastical film, music and fashion spots. Marry the powerful black and white image of coolly riding down urban thoroughfares with slyly mentioning “shifts like butter,” and a motorcycle brand not only lands the shopper’s riding fantasy with a practical justification, but they also demonstrate to the consumer that the brand cares about the quality of the make down to the nuts and bolts without making it boring.

Spec sheets are Greek to me and many others.

I took a chance when I purchased my Triumph Thruxton in Brooklyn, having ridden a Kawasaki ER-5 for four years in Tel Aviv from 2000-2004. Bit of a wild west out there in the Middle East; desert roads, slightly less traffic control and a sense of complete freedom albeit with an equal sense of poor vehicular regulation. Two minor trips to the hospital mostly due to others’ illegal U-turns, which ultimately landed me a date with the young lady who helped me into the ambulance, and I knew that my next bike would have to handle like dream, particularly considering that I now have a wife (no, not the same girl).

Ultimately, what I learned from this experience is that advertisers have an incredible opportunity to market the less sexy details of a bike. For me, I would have been more inclined to move faster with making my bike purchase if Triumph managed to hone in on the details that none of the other brands tend to - namely the boring stuff.

And today, when friends and any biker ask me whether Triumph, and specifically the Thruxton, is a bike they should consider, I do my best to paint the picture of pure joy. What really lights up their eyes is when I mention that she ‘shifts like butter,’ that everything is placed perfectly, and the seating position - although initially tough on the wrists - becomes one of the most addictive elements of the experience. Fantasy + Practicality = Word of Mouth + Brand Ambassador = Superior Marketing. It’s the perfect equation.

Jason Greene is Director of Business Development at Vibrant Media.

marketing

Triumph Thruxton

branding

James Bond viewability will make the sky fall on banner blindness

Tom Pepper — Mon, 11 Feb 2013 15:05:15 +0000

This article was also published on eConsultancy.

Even Q’s most ridiculous gadgets of the past Bond films never went so far as presenting 007 with any sort of mind control device. Perhaps such ideas, whilst hot topics in the late-50s and early-60s, were deemed too absurd for a series that has featured a laser watch, a cigarette that fires a rocket and, of course, an invisible car.

As the Bond franchise marks its 50th anniversary with the film Skyfall, another 50th anniversary – the debunking of subliminal advertising – would no doubt get missed.

In 1962 market researcher James Vicary finally revealed in an Ad Age interview that his 1957 experiments in subliminal advertising were a sham. Vicary originally claimed that a series of brand related images introduced for fractions of a second into the content of a movie reel significantly increased sales of Coca-Cola and popcorn among cinema goers.

At the time this excited marketers but the unprecedented levels of control over consumers were too frightening for policy makers, so the US Government promptly banned the practice. Even after Vicary revealed that the test was a gimmick, psychologists have continued working on the theory, but research suggests there is no productive marketing application for the techniques.

For an ad to have application it needs to be persuasive, and the fast flashes of subliminal ads don’t appear long enough to have a measurably influential effect on the viewer.

The debunking of such marketing methods must be borne in mind when assessing the value of half an ad being seen by a real person for one second, the minimum metric the US Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) has suggested to establish an online ad as being “viewed”.

The industry body has partnered with the Media Rating Council (MRC) in a new initiative called Making Measurement Make Sense (3MS) to tackle the issue of ‘viewability’.

The project has considerable importance, as even the MRC’s best performers in its tests only achieved 78.6% viewability, while the worst case viewability score was just 7.8%.

It’s a worrying statistic, hinting that it’s probably a hell of a lot more than half an online advertiser’s budget that’s being wasted. However, much like a subliminal ad, half an ad being seen for one second doesn’t have the time to be persuasive enough for the ad to have any meaningful effect.

What advertisers should be chasing are not merely glances, but quality ad views.

Users are now more in control of how they interact with brands than they’ve ever been. They’re used to mentally blocking out standard ad formats, having quickly trained themselves in the earliest days of the web to focus on what they really want to consume, the content.

Whether it’s the latest Bond movie, their favourite TV show or a news update on their most checked websites, they’re now used to ignoring the ads around the content. People intentionally skip trailers when they go to the cinema and use devices like Tivo and Sky+ to fast forward through ad breaks on their TV’s.
The online ad industry itself has had its messages ignored as billions of ad campaigns around content have been blighted by banner blindness.

To compensate for consumers’ increasing focus on the content they really want, marketers are moving to “embedded marketing”, placing their brands within the content audiences want to consume.

The most common of these in-content marketing techniques is product placement, so apparent in Skyfall. Such methods maximise viewability because they position brands and products within the content people want to consume, rather than around it.

Dutch beer brand Heineken paid a whopping £28 million to replace the vodka martini as the secret agent’s preferred tipple. The huge budgets committed to such marketing methods demonstrate the importance brands place on viewability of their brands in the offline content consumers desire.

Online marketers need to adapt their digital strategies to take account of the effectiveness of in-content marketing, not just to improve the viewability of their ads, but to tackle the “distractive” nature of most online ad formats.
By using techniques that place marketing messages within content, marketers can ensure that almost all the ads they serve in a campaign will be seen by real people. By devising ads that are technically and creatively engaging they’ll achieve more than a brief flash up on a screen.

We regard the eyeballs cast over online ads as just a part of maximising viewability, even though the ad formats we work with far exceed the current 3MS definition. All of the ad formats we work with are integrated within online content in both technical and contextual respects, whether the content’s text, images or video.

One of the reasons the brand experiences communicated within the Bond movies are successful is that consumers literally had to “buy-in” to the experience, through purchasing a ticket. Likewise to maximise viewability of ads in online content, “buy-in” techniques need to be applied.

Digital advertisers need to adapt their strategies and use new formats within contextually relevant content, just like the marketers that placed their brands in Bond. Not only will they achieve levels of brand viewability never before achieved online, they’ll benefit from appropriate associations with complementary online content and their brands will be viewed as enhancements to consumers’ online experience.

Tom Pepper is Sales Director at Vibrant Media's London Office.

Fast Friday Five - A Super Bowl Recap

Jinny deCarlos — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 15:13:13 +0000

February 8, 2013 - Every Friday Relevance Matters rounds up five interesting articles from the week, and this week, it's all about the Super Bowl ads! Here is our quick list of this week's top industry news:

How Oreo Culture-Jacked The Super Bowl (The Wall Street Journal)
Amazon wins broad patent to create marketplace for used digital content (paidContent)
Don’t like television? Then you’re not going to like the future of Twitter very much (GigaOM)
6 Brands That Moved Fast During Super Bowl Blackout (DigiDay)
Marketing Firms Plan to Expand Their Digital Budget in 2013 (ClickZ)

Jinny deCarlos is Communications Coordinator at Vibrant Media.

The Wall Street Journal

PaidContent

Twitter

Publishers need to directly monetise content to sustain editorial

Fiona Salmon — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 09:00:40 +0000

This article was also published on Media Week.

Just as the TV industry has developed to directly monetise content through interactive services, product placement and sponsored programmes, online publishers need to explore innovations that use more than just the space around the content.

As more media titles develop their online publishing business and sacrifice their price-per-copy and subscription models, concern must be afforded to what might be considered the "soft costs" of going "free". As advertising revenue becomes the sole source of a media title's income, the editorial team can feel undervalued, considered as a cost of business, as simply the vehicle to get consumers to see adverts, rather than as the life blood of the business.

Journalists got into the media game to inform, investigate, entertain, educate, but their job can now seem to be just about attracting eyeballs for ads, with little regard being paid to the quality of the content that they produce. As the focus of the media title seems to shift, tensions that may already exist between the editorial and commercial team can intensify. If editorial teams become disenchanted, the editorial itself will suffer and consumers will visit another media title if they don't feel the content they're accessing is worth their time. This will impact the effectiveness of ad campaigns, compromising the revenue stream and making the publishing business unsustainable.

Core to this problem is that, for the most part, the editorial content of free online media is not monetised – only the space around it is. This means that the physical focus of value within the publishing business is directed away from the editorial, even though the content is what consumers really want and quality content is imperative to run effective ad campaigns. Such an ad placement strategy stems from the constraints of the media industry's print heritage, where the only space available was that around the content. Yet online publishing offers a freedom to innovate that must be capitalised upon, particularly as the vast amount of time and money spent on evaluating the user experience means we know the interactive wants and needs of consumers, so we have to adapt our ad-placement strategy.

As most online formats are placed around the content, the clicks and impressions that are used to measure the performance of ad campaigns largely overlook the consumers’ interaction with the actual editorial. If anything, such clicks may well be a measure of how quickly a consumer can be distracted from the site, rather than how much the internet user is compelled to consume the content. What's worse is that when a campaign that's run across a media title doesn't work for a brand, the quality of the editorial can be blamed. No wonder there are tensions between the ad and editorial departments.

Journalists need systems that demonstrate the worth of their work more directly. When consuming online content, internet users hover, click, drag and select editorial. Each mouse movement indicates that the user is engaged. Statistical reports of these mouse actions are gold dust to editorial teams that want to prove the effectiveness of the content they've produced. Yet new metrics which show publishers how engaging the editorial is to site visitors fills just one part of the puzzle. Publishers have to be concerned with the money – not least because it pays everyone's wages. That means editorial teams need to negotiate with their publishers to establish ways that more readily prove their content’s contribution to monthly revenues.

In an ad-supported media business, this means deploying revenue-generation systems that value editorial, rather than just the space around it. A simple and effective way to deliver both editorial engagement metrics and revenue, is to place revenue generating hyperlinks within the content using a system like Vibrant Media’s. When a user engages with relevant hyperlinked keywords within an article, it's because that user is engaged with the content, not distracted by an ad. Rather than let the ad department get all the glory for the media business’s success, editorial teams need to insist on ad systems that more relevantly reflect the value of their work. Doing so will maintain the rightful regard for the importance of editorial standards and quality content.

Fiona Salmon is Publisher Solutions Director at Vibrant Media's London office.

Tech Tuesday: How Do You Measure Relevance?

Ken Williams — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 15:09:56 +0000

How do you measure relevance? It's an important question given the nature of the work we do here at Vibrant - not to mention the theme of our blog. Determining the strength of relevance, if any, between two documents or web pages is difficult enough for humans to do and agree on. Getting computers to perform the task accurately, on a large scale, and across a wide range of subject areas has been the focus of many years of research - with only limited degrees of success.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines the word “relevant” as "bearing upon, connected with, pertinent to, the matter in hand". Relevance in the online advertising world implies ads served on pages where they will have the maximum impact on users who are most likely to find the products engaging. So identifying web pages relevant to an advertiser’s campaigns is crucial to success.

Digital ads are textual (written word), verbal (spoken word), visual (pictures, video), aural (music) or many times some combination of these elements. Touch, taste and smell have not permeated the Internet as of yet, but they can be expected at some stage in the future and advertisers can be expected to want to exploit their potential accordingly. When that happens, determining which tastes and aromas are relevant for an ad will be an intriguing challenge. With interesting multi-sensory campaigns like this potato campaign in the UK from McCain, some progress has led the way in this front.

For now, let’s confine our thoughts to dealing with text. So the question is: how do you measure relevance between two bodies of text?

If we say the key words and phrases of an advertising campaign form one body of text, and a given webpage form another body of text, then there are algorithms we can measure the degree of relevancy a particular web page has with a particular campaign.

One of the most popular algorithms is Term-Frequency, Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF), which measures the degree of similarity between a corpus of documents and another document, query or set of campaign words. The TF-IDF calculation basically says, "Terms which appear in the Campaign Set but do not appear in many of the corpus documents should therefore have an important weight". In other words, the more times a term appears in a document the more representative it is of the document - BUT the more documents it appears in the less discriminating value it has.

TF-IDF has proved extremely useful in many text-processing applications such as text search,information and document retrieval, document classification, document clustering, document tagging systems, recommender systems, ontology building (automatically identifying people, places and things from text) and text-based Q&A systems. It has also been encoded into many publicly available natural language processing (NLP) systems such as GATE and Mahout.

However, TF-IDF has a number of limitations: it does not address problems of polysemy (a word which has multiple meanings), synonyms (multiple words with similar or identical meaning), idiomatic expressions (figures of speech), or other linguistic forms. TF-IDF also does not address problems of semantic concepts and relations which require “real world” knowledge.

There are recent efforts made to address these problems. These include:

• Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) which attempts to address the synonym problem
• Sentiment Analysis used to determine opinion on many social networking sites
• The Page-Rank algorithm for text search and retrieval developed at Google
• The Freebase entity-graph of ”real world” knowledge
• Semantic Networks which represent and manipulate knowledge using graphs,
• SPARQL: a language for querying and reasoning about data stored in RDF (Resource Description Framework) formatsOWL-2 which is an ontology language used in the attempt to bring semantic structure to the unstructured data on the internet

Most modern text-processing applications use a combination of these approaches in order to measure the degree of relevancy between two bodies of text.

Ken Williams is Java Developer at Vibrant Media's London Office

One Year Anniversary: A Visibly Strong Acquisition

Kevin Tung Raymond Chan Jun Seok Yoon — Mon, 04 Feb 2013 14:30:48 +0000

Wow, time flies. It has been one year since Image Space Media (ISM), the company we co-founded together, has been acquired by Vibrant Media. As we come upon a momentous one-year anniversary, we wanted to recap our amazing journey. Since our close knit start-up team has joined a larger family, the last 365 days have been very exciting for the ISM team.

After going through a rigorous integration process -- both technically and operationally -- we are now fully assimilated into Vibrant. By coming together, this acquisition bolstered our shared vision of serving the industry as the largest platform of in-content advertising solutions.

When we started on this journey almost 5 years ago as a team of three determined entrepreneurs in a small office in the West Village, the vision was to create a marketplace where we could allow brands to connect with people through the power of images. Because we started from scratch, creating this new marketplace took time.

At the onset, the question we would get asked first was how to tackle our very own “chicken and egg” problem: publishers or brands. Our core strategy to focus on publishers was by design because they had a clear problem that needed to be solved. As traffic increased in photo galleries, publishers wanted to offset photo serving and licensing costs.

Our first product was a publisher solution designed to help publishers slice and dice their image content. These pictures were programmatically tagged into over 550 categories and topics, and over 1 million entities such as people, places, and products. These tagged images can then be packaged and sold to relevant marketers as media. Each image now had revenue generating potential.

As our business grew, so did the sophistication of how we approached targeting, ad serving and analytics. Internally, we developed a next generation end-to-end ad platform powered by real-time bidding, big data analytics and machine learning centered around how people looked at images.

Today, our product can provide insights - like how many times an image about the Super Bowl was viewed. Our products also provide insights on what types of ads served on those images were most effective by the click rate, engagement rate or dwell time.

The number of users viewing images online today is staggering. As demonstrated by Facebook’s recent announcement, only 8% of the 240 billion photos it stores account for 82% of Facebook’s traffic. On our network, we have seen some publishers get an impressive 50% of their traffic going to the photo gallery sections.

The visual-centric web is only beginning. The adoption of mobile devices, like tablets and touchscreen phones, make images much more powerful to the user experience. Contextually relevant image ads are crucial to advertising in this new medium. We can’t wait for what lies ahead.

Kevin Tung is VP, Business Development at Vibrant Media.
Raymond Chan is Senior Director of Product at Vibrant Media.
Jun Seok Yoon is Director of Engineering at Vibrant Media.

Fast Friday Five - Industry News Worth Noting

Jinny deCarlos — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 14:52:39 +0000

February 1, 2013 - Every Friday Relevance Matters rounds up five interesting articles from the week. Here is our quick list of this week's top industry news:

The Most Underrated Digital Marketing Tactics (DigiDay)
Context Is Not King or Queen; It's Just Necessary (ClickZ)
Milestones: Facebook is a mobile company now. Are you? (GigaOm)
The Tablet Takeover (The Next Web)
Losing Game: Super Bowl Ads and the Mute Button (AdWeek)

Jinny deCarlos is Communications Coordinator at Vibrant Media.

Hoping for a Landscape that’s better, not just bigger

Matt Mager — Wed, 30 Jan 2013 14:55:20 +0000

Like many in ad technology, every year late into January I’m still waiting. The gifts are unwrapped, holiday parties over (embarrassing photos posted) and even some Q4 numbers reconciled. But we tap our feet each day in the office until it appears. We are, of course, waiting for a new LUMA partners Display LUMAscape. Eager to see the progress of our industry, perhaps a new category to appear, and some of us secretly hoping that our business and partners will be more prominently featured—or show up at all. It’s the last week of the month and the wait for the 2013 LUMAscape is killing me.

Okay, maybe not everyone is excited about it as I am. I’m a bit of an infographic junkie and have spent an embarrassing number of hours poring over the LUMAscape in the past. But I’d be surprised if I was the only one. It’s everywhere: our PowerPoints, every industry event, in sales offices around the globe — some even copy the layout for completely different industries. The LUMAscape is ubiquitous and though it’s not perfect it’s certainly one of the best references around to illustrate the complexity of the display ad technology space.

Just like ad tech, the LUMAscape has seen some interesting changes recently, growing by more than 60 companies and adding at least 4 new boxes since 2009. The expanded scope, as well as the addition of the mobile, social, and video LUMAscapes, emphasizes enormous potential. But more than that, functionally, the addition of the hash marks around purchased companies is of significant note. When it shows ‘who is owned’ while keeping them in their respective boxes, LUMA partners, an investment bank shows what they value most. When you look at the scape from that angle, iIt’s apparent that this is a tool for LUMA’s clients, making it easier for them to see which companies are where and which available for purchase or merger.

The reason for the scape is that investors don’t need to understand every intricate detail of an industry to invest, just like we don’t need to understand how the meat in a gyro is made. Investors rely on their consultants to know and help make decisions – just like when in a New York diner we tell the waiter what we’re looking for and they help us navigate a menu. Enter LUMA partners who are, without question, the expert consultants in our industry. They truly know us. But the LUMAscape is best thought of as a diner menu: an overview what’s basically on sale and the general categories under which they fall. Through size and location, there is an assignment of emphasis and prominence, but at its core the illustration lends simple understanding of who the power players are within any subset of the industry and who is available. As for those with the hash marks, ‘we’re outta that’.

The LUMAscape emerges as the perfect answer to a very specific question: who can be bought? Well, okay: there is one more use, and it almost goes without saying: the LUMAscape is also a great quick-reference if you can’t remember what a company does or need to steal a logo for a slide (come on, we’ve all done it). Questions the scape doesn’t answer are who is the best partner when I need an SSP, or what does a DMP do? Or, in our case what does ‘Performance Network’ mean?

While I’m glad we have this quick-look for the positions of the various players, I’m also a firm believer that things can always be better. The ‘owned companies’ hash marks were a great step, but there is at least one thing that could be a major game changer for us. The major shortcoming of the LUMAscape at this point is its inability to actually plot out how the industry works. If you show it to anyone who doesn’t already know the ins and outs of what we do, they couldn’t possibly glean that from the graphic.

This wasn’t always the case. If you look at the ad tech industry circa 08/09, the LUMAscape was more accurate; the arrows gave an understanding of who fed info to whom and ultimately where advertisements traveled along the way. Today, those arrows are, at best, confusing and at worst a disservice to the information that is well illustrated in the scape.

The way I see it, the scape could be improved either by the wholesale removal of the arrows (replicating the exact look of other LUMAscapes), or a layout and structure that allows for arrows to actually show how the major sub-industries work with each other. The scape, without arrows, visually accomplishes its most valuable goal: a company-rich, generalized overview of the various parts along the path of an advertisement from brand to page. The added room from the deletion of those arrows could be used to give those tiny logos in the network boxes some breathing room.

But there is a need unfilled by the LUMAscape or any other graphic of our industry. There is no simple visual representation of which systems interact and how. An example of the effect of this void is that at every event, people casually throw around the acronym RTB as a problem, explanation, or solution for nearly every facet of the display advertising universe. Yet unless you understand the relationships between DSPs, DMPs, SSPs and RTB exchanges, you may never really understand why all of those could be right: RTB can be a problem or solution for publishers as well as advertisers depending on its use.

Truthfully, many people don’t understand how a DMP interacts with DSPs/exchanges, or why an SSP, not a DSP is the necessary technology for a publisher wishing to enter the RTB space. There are few resources generally available for people to learn this ecosystem and certainly no quick-reference guide like the LUMAscape could be with an improved layout. For example, last year Forrester reviewed all of the DSPs and SSPs—two amazingly helpful guides. The problem was they weren’t quick visuals and they cost quite a bit for analysis that was destined to be obsolete within a year.

My hope is for a layout that could give a full explanation of the interactions within the industry. Even while it’s useful to see the various companies listed in the categories they have identified, LUMA partners was on to something with the first diagram: showing the relationships of the industry segments is beyond valuable. If there was a guide, perhaps even without the army of logos, that visualized our industry and how it converges on exchange, many more people would understand the opportunities that exist within that space, as well as how to better meet some of the challenges it presents.

The visualization should be the easy part. We are, after all, the industry that created the real time bidding exchange—a brilliant and elegant system the likes of which warrants an equally brilliant and elegant visual outline. And every year in January, I’m sure I’m not the only one waiting and hoping that LUMA partners will give our industry a more elegant and brilliant portrait, not just a bigger one.

Matt Mager is Product Marketing Manager at Vibrant Media.

LUMAscape

infographics

Tech Tuesday: Time to Draw with HTML Canvas

Jim Smith — Mon, 28 Jan 2013 21:54:41 +0000

This edition of Tech Tuesday is all about the HTML canvas element, a handy piece of HTML that is used to draw graphics and gives developers complete freedom. First off, the beauty of HTML Canvas is that it can replace proprietary plugins like Flash and work on iOS. Canvas offers developers control over a rectangle of the screen. Since each pixel is addressed separately using JavaScript, developers can create animations. And the only limitation is how fast you can get the screen to update.

Most HTML elements have some base functionality that is defined by HTML itself. JavaScript also adds functionality such as changing the source of an image. On the other hand, with a canvas element, you can only add content using JavaScript.

Better yet, let’s take a look at some code, which should give you an idea about how this actually works. You can find the full canvas code here.

The first step is adding a canvas element to the page. This will typically be a markup inserted into the HTML of the page.

Note the width and height parameters. If you’re a good CSS developer, you’ll be sizing things in CSS and won’t have any attributes like this in your code. Canvas requires width and height: they tell the browser to allocate the required number of pixels. Just to make life slightly more complicated, a canvas pixel doesn’t actually have to be the same as a browser pixel. Let's add a piece of CSS.

The canvas element will be twice the size of the number which is defined in the tags. Each pixel will be two physical pixels square.

At this moment, you won’t be able to see very much because the Canvas will be invisible as it inherits the background. It’s a block element and it will just push the elements around it out of the way... Let’s put something in it.

In order to talk to the Canvas element we need to get a context. A context tells the browser what kind of drawing we’re going to do in the element we’ve created. There are currently two available contexts on most browsers: 2d and WebGL. 2D is, obviously, a simple flat space. WebGL is 3D and beyond the scope of this post (to be honest, I did spend some time tinkering with it, but after a week of dealing with frustums, textures and lighting, my brain needs a break.)

So onward, here’s more about adding a 2d context:

Javascript

var my_context = document.getElementById(“my_canvas”).getContext(“2d”);
Now we need to draw something to prove that we’re talking to the right thing.

Javascript

my_context.rect(10, 10, 50, 50);
my_context.stroke();

That puts a square 50px wide 10px from the top left of the canvas element.

Of course, that’s not terribly exciting, but it does demonstrate a key feature of the canvas API - you have to explicitly tell it to do something to a shape to make it appear. The shape is defined by the rect() line, and then we draw around the outside using stroke(). If we want a filled shape, we’d have to call fill().

These are a bit of a mouthful, so canvas provides convenience functions that draw a stroked (outline) box and a filled box, respectively: strokeRect() and fillRect().

Sadly, that’s about as friendly as the API gets. There are simple functions (primitives) that let you draw curves, lines, rectangles and text onto the screen. Anything more complicated (such as circles!) has to be built up from those primitives.

There’s no explicit animation API either. If you want movement, you have to define how you want the screen to update with each frame. Let me show you an example. Let’s move the filled rectangle from 10px left to 200px left.

Javascript

var left_position = 10;

var my_intvl = setInterval(function() {
my_context.fillRect(left_position, 10, 50, 50);
left_position++;
if (left_position > 200) {
clearInterval(my_intvl);
}
}, 1000/50);

Since that’s a bit complicated,let’s review line by line. First, we create a variable to hold the left position. Then we ask the browser to repeat a function indefinitely (we have to stop it manually). The fillRect() line of code just tells our canvas to draw a filled rectangle at the coordinates of left_position across and 10 pixels down, and make it 50x50 again.

We then add one to left_position and check to see if it’s bigger than 200. If it is, we kill the interval. The last line divides a second (1000 milliseconds) by 50, which gives us 50 frames a second, or one update every 20ms. A word to the wise - browsers aren’t that accurate. This will probably wobble around at the 19-21ms mark.

If you run this code, it’ll generate a thick horizontal black line that slowly fills in from left to right. But, hey – wait a minute. We wanted a square that appeared to float! The problem is that when left to its own devices, canvas just adds to the drawing surface. If we want to create the illusion of motion, we’ll have to reset the stage with each frame.

Our solution is to add a clearing rectangle to our loop so it looks like this:

var my_intvl = setInterval(function() {
my_context.clearRect(0, 0, 200, 200);
my_context.fillRect(left_position, 10, 50, 50);
left_position++;
if (left_position > 200) {
clearInterval(my_intvl);
}
}, 1000/50);

clearRect(), as you might guess, just erases anything inside itself. Now when we run the script our black square marches proudly from left to right!

But, what if we have a more complex background? We might want to restore the image to something else that is not transparent. Stay tuned for my next Tech Tuesday post.

Jim Smith is Senior Javascript Engineer at Vibrant Media's London office.

HTML

Canvas

JavaScript

Tales from the Auto Show

Christoph Babka — Mon, 28 Jan 2013 16:03:03 +0000

I’m not much of a car guy. Ask most people what they drive and they’ll tell you the year, make, model and horsepower. I’ll tell you the car’s color.

When I entered the stunning North American International Auto Show last week, I was blown away by the production value that went into showcasing these impressive works of art. I toured the convention hall as if it were a futuristic museum. While industry experts measured the length from the floor to the transmission, I Instagrammed a close-cropped shot of the grill that looked like a silver theater with reflecting points of dancing blue light.

Like I said, I’m not a car guy.

But, I am a media guy, so here are the three most fascinating elements I discovered from the 2013 Auto Show:

In-Car Communications:

Ford Showcases Their Prototype for a Biometric Seat
For the Gear Head: Jeff Greenberg, senior technical leader of Ford Research and Innovation states, “Vehicle control inputs, sensors, road conditions and biometric information such as a driver’s pulse and breathing can all be used to create a driver workload estimation that can then help manage certain functions in demanding situations.”

For the Media Guy: Imagine a car that features a seatbelt imbedded with a chip that monitors your breathing rate, a steering wheel that measures your heart rate and seats that determine your body temperature. All so the car can assess the level of driver stress and make adjustments such as limiting the car’s speed, warning to the driver about conditions, even block incoming calls. Sounds a lot like Kit from Knight Rider.

Style & Luxury:

Lincoln’s Immaculate Design Aesthetic
For the Gear Head: Lincoln’s MKC crossover concept features such as push-button transmission engagement, programmable ride control, unique and diverse power-trains and personalized lighting. A suite of unique customizable functions will be provided for each client as the vehicle instantly recognizes the operator and creates a personalized welcoming sequence.

For the Media Guy: The Lincoln booth at NAIAS featured soft lighting enveloping a beige minimalist décor. Their spokes models were reanimated direct from the pages of Vogue. It felt like a Japanese spa in Sweden or a scene from GATTICA. Lincoln is hoping to redefine luxury, competing with the established players: Cadillac, Lexus, Mercedes and BMW. But will the auto company succeed in shifting perception for the next generation of lux auto intenders?

Reimagining a Classic:

Corvette? You bet!
For the Gear Head: The Corvette sports 450 horsepower and carbon fiber based weight reductions, and the base model hits 100 kilometers an hour (60 miles per hour) in four seconds flat. This model features Magnetic Ride Control, brake improvements and 19-inch wheels.

For the Media Guy: The aptly named Stingray has been styled after the iconic 1960s Corvette and looks like a not-too-distant cousin to the Ferrari. Long gone is the Corvette of AMERICAN GRAFFITI-esque 60s nostalgia. This new seventh generation is in a class by itself, feeling more Fast & Furious than its predecessors.

Whether a gear head or a media guy, or some combination thereof, the elements of technology and design are sure to impress. Thanks to a focus on both the user experience in the digital world as well as cultural perceptions, auto manufacturers are shifting the way people drive to better emulate the way they live. And they look great doing it.

Christoph Babka is a Strategic Accounts Manager at Vibrant Media.

North American International Auto Show

NAIAS