Carl Hodler

How well do you know your friends?

The Motorola DEXT digital campaign from Orange asks audiences to connect their Twitter, Facebook or MySpace accounts to the Orange application which in turn deliver a surprisingly intelligent sequence of questions about their friends. What I really like about this application is that it provides a far more compelling and emotionally intelligent reason to re-connect with friends than the patronising messages that Facebook employs in an attempt to drive engagement. I’m sure some of the data they scrape is flawed such as birthdate (isn’t everybody born on the 1/1/1970?), but it’s still really compelling and fun to use.

Play theory in action

More evidence of how play based interactive can change default behaviour. This underground station in Sweden increased usage of the staircase that was adjacent to an escalator  by 66% though the installation of an interactive piano interface on the steps.

Assassins Creed 2: Eyes campaign

I really love the simplicity of these pre-rollers to promote Assassins Creed 2. I think dead eyes are more attention grabbing than living ones!

Twitter becomes more popular with Gen Y

So why are Gen Y finally turning to Twitter? Well apparently it’s because of celebrity micro bloggers rather than any desire to broadcast their thoughts to the world, which makes me think that perhaps Gen Y have been listening to Gen X’s advice on privacy all along.

Over the past two years Gen Y have had it hammered into them that they shouldn’t broadcast personal information on open networks, and then before their eyes the supposedly technically responsible Gen X start doing just that on Twitter. But Gen X never told Gen Y not to be voyeuristic, so anonymously consuming snackable content on Twitter actually makes a lot of sense.

It was also interesting to see the median ages of the users of other networks. I was surprised that the average Facebook member’s age had gone up in the past 12 months and that the average MySpace users age was as old as 26.

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Play nicely in virals

Infinity Ward the developer of Modern Warfare 2 have just pulled  their viral video promoting the title after a slew of criticism about their usage of the acronym F.AG.S. Most critics are in agreement that it was a pretty stupid and generally offensive thing to do, but also echo that the use of this language unfortunately reflects a proportion of the multiplayer gaming community Xbox live in particular attracts.

Infinity Ward either misjudged the wider communities reaction to the humor or followed the ‘age old adage’ that a successful viral needs to be overtly edgy and controversial to gain traction and any positive or negative noise it creates will ultimately attract more sales.

However, this style of campaign might not be around for much longer anyway as viral distribution sites are becoming more conservative as they chase ‘family focused advertising budgets’. Whilst this is generally a good thing (as it does raise the bar of digital marketing), I was dismayed to see our campaign for War of the Worlds knocked back from a couple of sites because it featured steam-punk aliens blowing the heads of Victorian gentlemen armed with elephant guns.

Modern Warfare 2 is ultimately going to be one of the biggest games of 2009 and hopefully this time next week when the game launches, conversation will be around the actual title rather than this pretty lame attempt at a viral.

Pre upgrade compatibility tester for Snow Leopard

I used to be an avid earlier adopter of Apple operating systems, but these days I’m just too busy to risk having to spend hours fixing fixing unforeseen problems that often occur after upgrading. Two of the benefits of waiting are firstly that most of the problems you might face will have already been fixed and well documented by the mac community and secondly that useful applications such as SnowChecker – a  Snow Leopard software compatibility tool get released.

Everything you need to know about Twitter lists

The new Twitter lists feature provides a way of grouping feeds, and the Mashable team have posted a pretty comprehensive guide on why you might want to use them and how to do it.

UGC on rails

User generated content is still the holy grail of digital engagement, but the reality is that the majority of people don’t really have the time or creative skills create anything exceptional. This is why UGC on rails is the only way to get people to effectively engage creativly with a brand. How does it work? Well you simply give your audience a set of really strong assets in a highly usable and flexible authoring environment and finally provide them with the ability to simply share or save their creative output.

We put www.pataponthegame.com together for SCEE and SCEA where players are rewarded with creative assets via a simple minigame that can be used to create a wallpaper at the end of play. This campaign produced some stunning dwell times and proved that people will devote time to this sort of engagement because they’ll instantly see they’ll get a professional result from the time the dedicate it.

Another site that does this really well is Grafik Armour’s snowboard design lab. Here users can put together some slick designs for bespoke board wraps using a really simple interface. The main trick these guys missed is letting users share their boards on social networks where they could use their own creative skills to evangelise about the site.

Fly posting vs Banner ads

Certainly a campaign from the darker side of marketing as German agency Jung von Matt attach tiny adverts to flys and release them into the convention center during the Frankfurt book fair.

Banners come of age

Ever since click through was dropped in favour of awareness as the favoured metric for measuring the success of banner campaigns, digital agencies have been getting more creative in order to combat banner blindness. However it’s questionable whether many of these creative executions are effectively communicating the primary objectives of the campaigns.

The next generation of banners are extending the amount of awareness they deliver by becoming simple and focussed portable microsites. It seems an obvious evolution of the format, and whilst it offers clear benefits to audiences and brands it still poses the same creative hurdles in encouraging audiences to interact with the content.

One way to engage a ‘cold’ audience is through providing them with a compelling narrative that attracts their attention and then offers a platform for personising that experience. This flow of gently increasing interactivity can eventually then lead them to share the outcome of the personalisation and seamlessly introduce them to a more focussed branded communication.

CAPTURE:
Attract the audiences attention

PERSONALISE:
Encourage the audience to interact with the brand through entertainment

SHARE:
Distribute the outcome through social networks

EXTEND & DEVELOP:
Explore the product by extending the flow of the interaction

With this in mind these next generation banner campaigns provide agencies with more scope for producing really creative interactive pieces and provide audiences with engaging and useful digital experiences.