Tag Archives: Advertising & Marketing

Friday Links: Whiskey advertisers knew the future?

• Men who plan beyond tomorrow: How 1940s whiskey ads predicted the cell phone, the 3D movie, videoconferencing, and sports bars…and a bunch of stuff that hasn’t happened yet.
• 13 Simpsons’ jokes that actually came true.
• 10 New Year’s resolutions for designers.
• Why marketers love QR codes and consumers do not. They forgot to mention that perhaps we consumers don’t want to be marketed to every waking moment of our entire lives.
• “Inspired” by Apple, a tumblr blog.
• Read the 1958 memo Leo Burnett sent to his agency. In case you need a refresher, Burnett is the man who, “had a hand in creating, amongst many other things, the Jolly Green Giant, Tony the Tiger, and Marlboro Man.”
• Batman meets Dr. Seuss.
• Remember Douchey Account Guy? Well now there’s a response: F—ing Creatives. (If you find the f— word offensive and/or distasteful, you might not want to visit that link. If you find it hilarious, visit away).
• How one startup got 100,000 users in two days.

Friday Links: Bold statements, N00bs, and another advertising documentary

• 20 Killer iPhone Game Designs: I can vouch for the beauty of Sheep Abduction.
• In case you need some tips, How to effectively communicate with developers.
• 100 Artworks From the Top Digital Artists in the USA & Canada
• If this comic comparing Aldous Huxley and George Orwell doesn’t kind make you a little sad and afraid, it might already be too late for you.
• I like bold statements, especially ones like this: The most creative & skillful corporate web designs of all time (also, is it just me or does Silverback’s gorilla mascot look kinda busty for a gorilla?).
• Every 1337 parent fears the day their daughter brings home a n00b, this is a good one lifted from @the_nerdery’s twitter stream.
• And one more before the weekend begins, another trailer for an advertising documentary. This one’s called Lemonade and it’s about what people did after they got laid off.

Friday Links: Rules for Highly Evolved Humans and stuff marketing people like

• How to Behave: New Rules for Highly Evolved Humans — My favorite part of this piece in Wired is the Rules Torrent at the bottom which includes gems like, CCing your boss after hours doesn’t impress him and never end an email with “take it sleazy.”
• In case you missed this yesterday, Comic Themes for iGoogle. I’m currently rocking the Superman.
• Want to be fashionable at the next Wolf Shirt Friday, try the Three Keyboard Cat Moon shirt from Threadless.
• This ought to be good for some conversation. Do as they say not as they do which starts out with this: “Q. As a general rule, what industry (as a whole) has the worst web sites? A. Ad Agencies.”
• 15 creepiest vintage ads of all time. The French suicide sausage one cracks me up.
• Are you smarter than an ad student?
• Things Marketing People Love like Stuff White People Like, but not.
• Not Sure If You’re Too Drunk to Drive? There’s an App for That.
• Is Twitter a marketing echo chamber? Most days I think yes, yes it is.

Friday Links: How Michael Jackson’s death broke the Internet & Why all your favorite movies are really the same

• Dramatic Ad Uses Eye-Tracking to Change Content – PSFK.com: A new ad installation has gone up in Hamburg, Germany that uses eye-tracking technology to change the content. The ad for Amesty International exposes the problem of domestic violence with the tagline “It Happens When Nobody is Watching”
• Hold On, I've Seen This Before: How Star Wars, Star Trek, The Matrix, and Harry Potter are Actually the Same Movie | Spiteful Critic
• Internet groans under weight of Michael Jackson traffic – Ars Technica: The news of pop icon Michael Jackson's collapse and subsequent death sent ripples across the Web on Thursday afternoon, affecting numerous services and sparking yet another spam campaign. Twitter, Google, Facebook, various news sites, and even iTunes were practically crushed under the weight of the sudden spike in Internet traffic. The phenomenon may not be new on an individual level, but combined across services, it was truly one of the most significant in recent memory.
• Need Something? Talk To My Right Ear: We humans prefer to be addressed in our right ear and are more likely to perform a task when we receive the request in our right ear rather than our left.
• Transformers Rule iPhone Paid Book Apps – mediabistro.com: GalleyCat: "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" steamrolls the box office this weekend, iPhone readers are lining up to buy .99-cent digital comics in the Apple iPhone store. Transformer tie-ins now occupy the #2, #4, #6, #7, and #11-14 slots on the "Top Paid Apps" in the books category of the App Store.
• Understanding Credit Card Debt & Credit Card Late Fees | Mint.com Blog | Personal Finance News & Advice | Mint.com Blog | Personal Finance News & Advice: I’m linking to this more for the rad infographic than for the actual information, though that's good too!
• Productivity vs Activity in the Digital Workplace: Productivity is seriously different than activity. I would argue that on any given day there's a good chance that I'm simply being active. Really, really, really active. I know those really active days from the really productive days because I have little to show in terms of results from active days. When I reflect on those active days, I realize that while I was busy, I wasn't purposeful.
• Funkadelic Advertising: Top 10 Augmented Reality Adveritising Campaigns… so far
• Art Direction for David Foster Wallace’s Books » Lone Gunman
• 50+ New and Beautiful Free WordPress Themes | CrazyLeaf Design Blog
• Old Coupons – a set on Flickr

iPhone Users Never Forget

ReadWriteWeb has some interesting analysis on a report from eMarketer about ad recall rates for iPhones versus other mobile devices and other platforms in general. Impressively, their data shows that 59% of iPhone users recall ads they’d seen on their devices.

I’m a Twitterific user on my iPhone and while I seemingly only ever find time to check out my feed on my drives to and from work, I do admit that the Deck ads that they show do get my attention (at times probably more than the surrounding traffic).  It might be the placement amongst other bite-sized info, or it may be the relatively small screensize of the device and their resulting prominence but it works on me and evidentaly on 59% of you all too.

Friday Links: Three stories you should be paying attention to

We’ve had so much going at The Nerdery we haven’t posted any Friday Links. We’re still pretty busy, but there have been a few stories popping up that really deserve your attention:

• If you have not been following the fall-out from Tropicana’s new packaging, you’re missing out. The new packaging is being blamed for 20% drop in Tropicana sales. It’s a study in consumer behavior and brand loyalty.
• Today’s Future Tense, talks about how the Internet has “shattered” advertising, by giving consumers a new way to gather information on goods and services. It’s a thought-provoking listen and well worth a couple of your minutes.
• And finally, it appears as though Google is in talks to buy Twitter. Wowee! There’s never a dull moment, is there?

Friday Links: Who likes to party? The Dark Side likes to party

• Business Card Etiquette In Japan – Boing Boing
• Fallon Planning: 6 Ways to Play Twitter – Winning Strategies for Brands On Twitter
• TV Shows That Cover Up Apple Logo on Mac Laptops and Desktop Computers
• 9 Common Usability Mistakes In Web Design | How-To | Smashing Magazine
• 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know – The Book [97 Things] : Near-Time
• How (Not) to Write like a Designer: 5 Tricks You Didn't Learn in Studio – Core77
• Opinion: Field of Widget Dreams: “There's a phenomenon whereby normally intelligent people at both digital and traditional agencies decide that people will embrace their new widget or app simply because they've built it. It's as if the Internet were a giant cornfield in Iowa and the mere presence of yet another branded widget or app is enough to get thousands of people clicking.”
• BrandFreak: '30 Rock' loves brands so much, it no longer wants their money: “Tina Fey actually says McDonald's didn't pay for the placement. But the Emmy-winning show generally revels in its over-the-top approach to brand integration. Fey has spouted a mini-infomercial for Verizon in the past, turning directly to the camera to ask "Can we have our money now?" after the pitch.”
• Fallon Planning: "Good Enuff" Production Values and the Death of Commercial Craftsmanship“"Good Enuff" isn't just for users, it enables us marketers to shoot more ideas fast(er), cheap(er) instead of rolling all our energies into a single overly produced "perfect" idea that just may fail. So fail fast(er). And fail cheap(er).
• Star Wars: Death Star Disco, Dark Side Inferno: “Who likes to party? The Dark Side likes to party.”
• 6 Tips for a Great Flex UX: Part 2
• 100 Free and Useful Open Courseware Classes for Web Workers – Learn-gasm
• Giulia Santopadre | Graphic Design | Nerd Glasses
• Does snark cast a shadow over online conversation?: The Social Path
• Connecting the Dots: Will Social Media Analytics Create a New Media Paparazzi?
• 6 Tips for a Great Flex UX
• Design: Create a Color Palette from a Single Image
• R/GA: Digital Agency of the Year 2008: “In a year when even digital agencies began to feel the pinch of a declining economy, R/GA plowed ahead, adding Hewlett-Packard, Mars and HBO as clients, and growing revenue by 20 percent to $126 million. As others scaled back, the Interpublic Group shop beefed up its London outpost to account for 10 percent of total revenue and opened in San Francisco in a bid to grab digital talent.For its financial performance and its continued success in proving the power of brand platforms rooted in utility, R/GA is Adweek's Digital Agency of the Year for 2008 — its fourth such honor in the past eight years.”
• The Advertising Age Timeline

Friday Links: The iPhone High School reunion is a must watch

• When Advertising Fails, Trust In Art – mediabistro.com: AgencySpy: “Trust In Art is a self-described stock market for cultural renewal. Ten artists have introduced their communities based art works to the online community.”
• MediaPost Publications Activating A Brand On Twitter 02/13/2009(via @balcomagency twitter)
• geeksugar: Robots as Home Decor
• Doomed: why Wikipedia will fail – Ars Technica: “A cyberlaw professor argues that Wikipedia is doomed. The online encyclopedia will need to choose between being "high quality" and "open," but both choices are fraught with risk.”
• Marketers: Don't Stop Innovating Because of Budget Cuts – Advertising Age – MediaWorks
• Requested Reading Recommendations — School of Visual Arts — MFA in Interaction Design: “Upon the request of readers, we asked faculty to recommend books for an interaction design reading list. These could be landmark texts, underdogs, or critical reads, or stepping stones to other fields. The following is what resulted from our request, comprising in part: a sneak preview of what will be assigned in courses; what some consider to be cornerstone interaction design texts; and what some consider important connections to other fields.”
• Going rogue inside a big company (a la Best Buy) – (37signals): “Words of wisdom there: “Listen, don’t be stupid and take care of each other.” Man, it’d be great to see more companies encourage employees to think that way.”
• Chip Kidd’s video tour of NYCC » Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog (via @caerickson)
• graphpaper.com – Are We Designing Interactions or Designing Software?: “One of the problems faced by designers trying to integrate their work with most software development processes, even (or possibly especially) with Agile development, is that the literature makes no distinction between software development and software design, or at least no distinction that makes any sense to dedicated user experience designers.”
• Flickr Celebrates Their 5th Anniversary + The Oldest Image On Flickr
• Wooster Collective: Was Shepard Fairey Arrested To Embarrass The Mayor Of Boston? – A First Hand Account
• 10 Harsh Truths About Corporate Websites | How-To | Smashing Magazine
• Clips: The iPhone Is That Guy at Your High School Reunion
• [ws] Color Scheme Designer
• 10 Web Typography Rules Every Designer Should Know | Webdesigner Depot
• Triple-Triple :: A blog for Scrabble nerds and word game geeks, featuring tips, strategies, hacks, links and much more
• adaptive path » blog » Henning Fischer » UX at Zappos: The Right People and the Right Mindset

Friday Links: What bad habits has programming given you?

• What real life bad habits has programming given you? – Stack Overflow: One of my favorites: "Fairly often when typing in normal conversation I will end my sentences with semicolons;"
• Nonprofit Conversation: Using Nerdy Powers for Good
• Pantone Kicks: One of the nerds here has one of those awesome Pantone coffee cups, these shoes are even cooler
• BrandFreak: Alpo will get dogs to the poker table if it's the last thing it does“Having just landed the Nestlé Purina pet-food portfolio, which includes the top-shelf Alpo brand, Fallon director of brand innovation John King said in a statement yesterday, "We've all seen the picture of the dogs playing poker. That was our brief." King went on to say: "That photo represents the Alpo brand and the Alpo dog. … Alpo is going to call a timeout and give permission for dogs to be dogs again." Kudos to King for at least freshening up the business wire with forthright talk and colorful imagery.”
• 10 things a web designer would never tell you : Boagworld web design podcast
• Design Observer: Paper, plastic or canvas? “Comparing a plastic bag to a paper bag it is easy to see why: the ultra thin plastic bag is a vastly superior design. It consumes 40 percent less energy, generates 80 percent less solid waste, produces 70 percent fewer atmospheric emissions, and releases up to 94 percent fewer waterborne wastes. A plastic bag costs roughly a quarter as much to produce as a paper bag and is substantially lighter so it takes a great less more fossil fuel to transport. Plastic bags are among the most highly reused items in the home and are just as recyclable as paper. The problem is that what is marvelous about an individual plastic bag becomes menacing when multiplied out to accommodate a rapidly growing global economy.”
• Using services to compensate for product weaknesses.
• Paul Buchheit: Communicating with code: “The first version of Gmail was literally written in a day. It wasn't very impressive — all I did was take the Google Groups (Usenet search) code (my previous project) and stuff my email into it — but it was live and people could use it (to search my mail…). From that day until launch, every new feature went live immediately, and most new ideas were implemented as soon as possible. This resulted in a lot of churn — we re-wrote the frontend about six times and the backend three times by launch — but it meant that we had direct experience with all of the features.” via Daring Fireball
• Free Quarter Pipe Plans: I think a few of the nerds are trying to start a petition to get permission to build a half-pipe in The Nerdery. We will keep you posted on how the negotiations go.
• How to film customer case study videos – (37signals)
• The New Lifestyle Marketing.
• 140 Characters » How Twitter Was Born

What if everyone turned into their avatar?

Coke’s latest commercial sort of answers that question. Is it weird to watch commercials on the Internet but fast forward through them when watching TV? Probably. But the signal to noise ratio is much better when watching them on the Internet.

Yes, I see advertising as entertainment, especially when it’s done well.

(found via Ad Freak)