"There is no real life; you're either online, or AFK"- Ramzi Yakob
Posts tagged My Work
My first iPhone App
Dec 8th
I don’t often pimp out my own work. Much of it is behind the scenes stuff like PowerPoint documents, Information Architecture, and things that may or may not involve spending a lot of time on Facebook & Twitter (depending on if you’re reading this and are in fact my boss).
But today is different. Today I’m proud to announce something really tangible. Proof that my 4 years in digital marketing have not been completely spent on Facebook / watching the BBC iPlayer / playing Bejeweled on my phone (maybe).
Right now you can go here and download that proof.
It is an iPhone App (I can hear you all yawning already). But I’m exceptionally happy to say its not a waste of space / crappy game app which serves no purpose other than to fool people to ‘engage’ with my clients’ brands. It is in fact useful.
Research from MORE TH>N shows that a massive 38% of people who are involved in a road traffic incident do not have sufficient details of the incident when they phone up their insurance company to register a claim request. 38%?!! That’s a huge number of people paying premiums which they don’t benefit from because they don’t have the details they need to get money off of their insurance company. Crazy shit no?
MORE TH>N are a nice brand however. They want to do more… as it were, for their customers. So in response they briefed Hyper – “What can we do to make sure more people have the right details when making a claim?”
I had a think. We all had a think. Then I thought harder.
“How about a mobile phone app which makes it really easy to collect all the information needed by the insurance company and then sends it straight to the insurance company via e-mail, CCing you as well.”
And thus my first iPhone app idea was born – and I’m proud of it. Its only available in the UK – but people insured by ANY insurer can use it (although you will need to get some details like their phone number and any claims handling e-mail address to change the settings to ensure it is in fact your insurance company that you send the info to rather than to MORE TH>N who probably won’t be of much help).
I hope you decide to download it – hoping that you never need to use it.
-tobeconfirmed-
Faking ‘Viral’
May 18th
A while ago I was having a chat with someone from FlashTalking who are a company which like making online banner ads a bit exciting and sexy when at all possible as well as charging advertisers reasonable bandwidth costs for the pleasure of using their internet pipes to make the banners come to life in vivo. With glazed eyes, I spoke at length about how funny it would be if we could make an online banner ad that actually pulls in a YouTube video dynamically, so when people click on the ad/hover over it, it begins to play.
“So whut? I seen videos in banners before” - The key thing isn’t the video. Its the +1 count on YouTube that’s good – and also the fact that you don’t pay for Rich Media adserving as the bandwidth being used is YouTube’s (Snootch)
The trends on YouTube are subject to many factors ranging from genuine WOM generated by things like Britain’s Got Talent, to the ‘featured videos’ to simply watching what other people are watching. The ‘most viewed’ list being a bit of a holy grail for advertisers in the knowledge that if you manage to hit the top results on ‘most viewed’, that you’ve achieved the video equivalent of reaching positions 1 to 3 in Google (a.k.a you’re going to increase your site traffic/views a lot for the time that you can hold that position).
The effect of popular stuff getting more popular by being popular in the first place (concise no?) has been named by someone else more cleverer than me. It is called ‘Cumulative advantage’ and you can read more about it here (thanks Faris for the tip).
This type of ad format will no doubt only work a couple of times (if at all) as YouTube/Google reserve the right to cease certain services/charge for bandwidth costs if people send high amounts of traffic to their services for commercial reasons.
As video ads need to be rollover/click to initiate – we’re subject to digital banner interaction rates (approx 5%) for the success of the campaign. However if you buy a Yahoo! and MSN homepage takeover – you should get about 1 million video views (in a day) which should see your video firmly in the ‘most viewed’ list on YouTube for about a month which should in turn generate another couple of million ‘natural’ views. I’m not saying you should go out and buy homepage takeovers just to try this out – but if you ARE going to be buying them anyway, why not maximise your ROI in this age of ‘where the money at?’ by using this type of ad format?
This isn’t a replacement for creating genuinely good content which may in turn spread virally across the internets – its just a cheeky way of making bog standard video go nuts on YouTube for a while.
I Made This™
Grown Up Digital
Mar 31st
Back in November ’08, a lovely lady from Edinburgh Business School asked me to write a book review for the International Journal of Advertising. It was for a book called “Grown Up Digital”, written by Don Tapscott who also authored Growing Up Digital and Wikinomics amongst other nice books.
Having grown up digital myself, I thought it sounded like a good thing to do so I said yes. This month the review was published in the IJA – you can read it here. I hope you like it.
p.s. I wrote it before it became apparent that people who work at Google in fact don’t really like it all that much unless they are amongst the chosen few who work in the Mountain View paradise in California. Shame really – but something you learn to live with when you grow up digital… anything you write tends to become irrelevant, or simply bettered in a very short space of time.
p.p.s the p.s. won’t make sense unless you read the book review. So here it is again, just incase.
-tobeconfirmed-
