RSS Feed

As the dust from the f8 summit settles it has become clear that multi media is definitely the way the future is heading. And if the supposed Google/Hulu acquisition – not to mention the changing Youtube channels – is anything to go by, then video content is the new layout of social media. Keep ahead of the game and pre-empt the next marketing movement with this helpful infographic. It contains such visual gems as detailing the demographics’ most and least likely to log on to video sharing sites, currently; the channels in which they are sharing this information; and the increase in habitual video sharers over the last four years. Very informative, thanks very much Wistia.

Samsung is trying its darndest to get a foot in the door in the tablet market, and try and pose some sort of rival threat to Apple’s iPad market dominance. But if this ad is anything to go by, then they do have a few tricks up their sleeves. The viral was picked up by Samsung purely for slate promotion purposes, but originally it was submitted, by the skilled youths in question, to a talent scouting competition run by Youtube. The rumor mill has been grinding that apparently it was recorded without any editing, making it a pretty impressive piece of video.

As we’ve recently seen from the f8 summit, social networks are embracing the marketing mantra of total integration and becoming fully fledged multi-media social platforms, where you don’t just chat with your online friends, you share video content, music, events and all the rest.

Watching the last few months play out has seen Facebook and Google competing with each other, trying to keep one step ahead in each move. The launch of Google+ as a social networking site rang alarm bells in the Zuckerberg camp, which – as it seems – prompted the updated Facebook features such as the timeline, (news-like alerts on your friends’ activities) and the ‘subscribe’ button (allowing you to group contacts into Google+ esque Circles).

But now it seems more changes are about to take shape that could imply the two companies will be working together.

So far some rumours have been brewing regarding Google’s supposed changes with Youtube since Facebook’s move into video and music streaming. It has been highlighted in blogs (such as tech site Simply Zesty) that Youtube may launch premium channels that house paid-for content created by networks. This ultimately is a complete role reversal from what Youtube was originally packaged as; content displayed and showcased by anyone. The syphoning off of the higher quality – and thereby network funded and motivated – content adds a bureaucratic agenda to the peoples’ channel.

But the implications of this change take on whole new turn when Facebook’s partnership with Hulu comes under light.

Hulu are currently signed up with Facebook as its video streaming partner in the States. But it has been up for sale since June, refusing offers that started at $1.4 billion. Reportedly though, Google have now raised the bar, bidding a far substantial $4bn for the company.

It’s hard to say whether this is an attractive enough offer for Facebook to consider letting Google into its camp, even in such a seemingly unobtrusive way. And these two separate clauses may not be mutually exclusive, although it seems as though Google are pulling out the big guns and investing a serious amount of energy in the future of video streaming. What this may indicate is that in this mutable social networking arena it’s sensible to keep your friends close, but your enemies in the same circle.

I don’t want to steal too much of the limelight away from all the Facebook saturated blogs right now – from descriptive to indignant in tone, and taking in the complaining to the exulting along the way – many of these angles are pretty much covered. But in the flurry of recent Zuckerberg stories you may have missed out on this; monkeys have actually typed up Shakespeare.

Millions of virtual monkeys have recently been programmed to test out this infamous conundrum, and have supposedly completed 99.99% of Shakespeare’s works, sources from the Telegraph have reported.

Jesse Anderson undertook the puzzle, aiming to test whether an infinite number of monkeys sitting at a typewriter would eventually complete the entire works by fluke. In setting up millions of computer programmes, by using Amazon’s SC2 cloud system, he encoded the virtual monkeys to type out random nine-letter sequences ad infinitum. If the nine characters match up with a passage in the Bard’s text then the relevant passage is checked off the list.

The science part? These cyber monkeys have only been at work since August 21, and have already completed more than five trillion of the possible 5.5 trillion nine-letter sequences. But they failed. This is all pretty hard to visualise and could give way to a few daily headaches, so to literally spell it out the monkeys have only landed on completing one whole work, the poem A Lover’s Complaint. Overlooking a huge flaw, experts say that Anderson’s Monkeys will save correct sections of the text while discarding future wrong guesses. In other words, his experiment still has finite resources.

One expert told even pointed out to the Telegraph that the cyber monkeys had probably completed most other books in the English language during this experiment countless times, purely because they were shorter than the entire works of Shakespeare.

Remaining positive, Anderson writes in his blog that “this is the largest work ever randomly reproduced. It is one small step for a monkey, one giant leap for virtual primates everywhere.” Still, I applaud him, it was a pretty crazy and courageous attempt to make the impossible possible.

There were a few red faces at the unveiling of BA’s new ad last Monday. After spending £20 million on a new campaign, tipped to be the first of its kind to launch initially through Facebook, BA discovered they had used a rival plane. The shot was advertising the company’s moto “to fly, to serve” in its new Aviator ad, and showed presumably three BA 747 boeings.

BA execs then ordered advertising agency BBH to fix the mistake just one day before its public launch. BBH photo shopped away the red logos in favour of the BA liveries, but failed to smooth over the unique serial number of the offensive Virgin plane. The serial code in question, G-VGAL, actually belonged to a Virgin aircraft based in Manchester.

Adding insult to injury, this blooper came after BA had lavished praise on the ad’s director, saying that “His attention to detail is second to none.” Luckily the 90 second mistake was rectified before going live online and on TV.

The most unfortunate factor in all this is that the ad looks great, professional and rich in detail and content, and draws on the bravery and courage of generations of BA pilots. But unfortunately one tiny mistake in post-production CGI has undercut this fervent tone, and leaves a farcical after taste. In all seriousness, judging by the already extensive press coverage, this error will really cost BA. Using a main competitors products and passing it off as your own is pretty unforgivable.

This cool infographic (courtesy of KissMetrics ) was created after questioning 600 B2B marketing professionals on statistics of their previous spend. It gives an interesting comparison when re-assessing budget allocation for the next year. Particularly note worthy is the disparity between the spend on traditional methods and digital marketing, considering that all respondents predicted that the eight out of the top ten most effective marketing channels would be in the digital space. The infographic also examines how they analysed ROI and some of the problems encountered when holding the purse strings to a marketing budget.

From the creative minds behind the flash-mob extravaganza comes the next inventive advertising campaign from the mobile network. This viral takes a simple universal truth (traffic wardens are the scourge of humanity) to unite its audience and unveil a few surprises. The idea is straightforward; traffic wardens hand out debatably unwarranted parking tickets across the UK. Cue onslaught of the raging, exasperated public. There’s a lot of screaming, swearing, crying (on reflection, is this good ethical practice?) but, remain resolute, because it ends happy.

Facebook has been making many changes in the past few months – rolling out rumoured services and testing out different features under warps – that it has generated substantial interest ahead of its f8 summit today, the remit they are coming under roughly translate to under the “read, watch and listen” banner. So, with reporters gnashing at the bit, here’s a run down of what we can expect Zuckerberg et al to unleash to the masses.

Ticking more prominent content

Murmurs made in the past by Facebook have focussed around making the news feed content more relevant to each user. Leaks have suggested that the screen will be split in two, with the right side of the screen being updated with notices specifically to the user. This development is veiled in mystery: Facebook have decline to inform the process by which they decide which content is relevant to which user. The internet has emitted plenty of loud voices of mixed response.

Personalised social plug-ins

The limits of the word ‘Like’ are keenly felt on the social networking site. It clearly isn’t a one-size fits all kind of term now that Facebook have introduced pages, not forgetting all the other features that deviate from the standard user profile. The buzz is that users can now customise these plug-ins. The options are limitless.

Facebook music dashboard

As we reported several weeks ago, Facebook is now stepping into the digital music industry. With official partnerships already in place with Spotify, Rdio, and MOG, Facebook are well placed to break into the mainstream and succeed where MySpace failed. Reportedly this new service will be added as a tab, next to the current tabs of Friends, Photos, Places, and allow groups to stream music from third-party partners and share it with friends via scrobbling. Other rumours hint that this new service will allow users to buy gig tickets through Facebook without the need of paper tickets.

In the last two consecutive days I’ve got myself lost on the way home from work. This is impressive, given the lengths it takes to get lost. I’ve managed this only because I’ve been cycling, which is the only feasible approach to losing your way. This experience is completely accessible on a bike partly due to the situation being easily and speedily rectified, and the vexation it causes trying to check my Blackberry while cycling. I think because of this there remains a real sense of adventure-seeking when cycling; you’re protected by a metal object that embodies the pinnacle of human grace and engineering. Which is why we need the bicycle now more than ever. We need to get lost in one area of our lives.

Google maps and GPS-deployed apps on smartphones have eradicated it from our walking lives in a way that the pocket-sized A to Z never could. Which is fantastic and I owe my punctuality to this. So it was relatively refreshing losing my way recently; the mind wanders, small pockets of quaint London rural-ness appear (mild anxiety only struck when I was scaling a very steep hill, there are surely only three hills in London, right?) And then when you discover your territory, a road that resonates with a feeling you had on a night bus three months ago, the adventure is over and you think “if my life was a page of Google search results, then you would be purple and underlined”.

Getting lost online is not this much of a self discovering journey, which is probably why we’ve managed to scale it right down. It’s frustrating and time consuming and means having to backtrack through past pages of spammy websites. SEO’s and cookie legislations have made this experience more manageable in exchange for storing reams of data.

All too often will we return to the same pages or sites or tweets that re-affirm what we already may hold as true or correct. Because of this encountering new experiences online has become much more of a rarity. Before I try and completely pulverise this blog-length metaphor, I’ll admit that I don’t know what the equivalent to a bicycle is when exploring online. But I recommend trying and getting lost, even if it means getting on a real bike.

Burberry has been labelled as the champion of digital innovation. The luxury designer brand has been heralded as reinventing itself, ensuring cultural relevance in a time where huge technological and media advancements mean that other, lesser brands will fail. Why has it done this? The term ‘cultural relevance’ is a hint in the right direction.

In the last few years Burberry had to do something drastic to reclaim its brand from a culture – a hooded, underground culture – that it felt was not synonymously relevant to its image. Digitally, then, posed the most effective answer for reaching out to millions of people instantly in an attempt to mould some of the more malleable minds. The social media audience is a far cry from the demographic we originally would imagine as a Burberry-wearer in the past. But in an act of empowerment, Burberry reclaimed this space and showed the youths how to engage with the brand. If you can’t beat em, …

How has Burberry created such a name for itself in the volatile, nebulous world of social marketing? This comes just after the premier of London Fashion Week’s first ever Tweetwalk, where @Burberry has been tweeting pictures to its 531,000 followers, of each item before its big reveal to the front row audience on the runway. The brand is also facilitated the live streaming the show for each one of its followers in HD, on their Facebook profile page. While we’re looking at Facebook, Burberry has risen up to be one of the sites most ‘liked’ brand (with 8 million of them). Fast Company tech blog has also pointed out that in the Millward Brown’s 2011 BrandZ list, Burberry saw an 86% brand value growth from 2010, and has climbed to seize fourth place in the fastest-growing brand list.

Christopher Bailey, the brands chief creative officer, is tapped as the brains behind transforming a brand with dubious cultural ambassadors, and modernising and glamorising it. The Tweetwalk show is proving to hold the combination of accessibility and elitism that works so well on Twitter. But chief marketing officer, Sarah Manley, undertook huge initiatives last year in really pushing Burberry to release its potential, globally and socially.

It was Manley who rolled out the website, Burberry World, in six different languages and some 45 different countries. And it was Manley who fronted the multimedia and interactive campaigns of 3D technology to create motion-responsive images and videos. The global infrastructure she put in place in order to “digitise” the brand has driven Burberry’s marketing and communications strategy in its four key regions around the globe.

The Tweetwalk show has been a success, and it’s exciting to see what other creative gems Burberry have in store. But the question remains; would Burberry hold the crown for most innovative digital brand if it was already engaging with the culturally relevant demographic it had wanted?