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This is interesting:
A group of audio historians have discovered what may be the oldest recording of the human voice.
Have a listen here.
Had to share this charming pic just received from my Mom.
Is it any wonder my grandmother (back left) looks so grave? Count the number of toy guns in the front row, and note the varied expressions. I'm guessing the little girl in the middle has concocted a plan for mischief, the boy on her left is the obedient muscle, the boy on the far right is having second thoughts about his role, and my dad (front row, far left) has just remembered that the back door of the monkey cage is usually unguarded.
According to David Verklin, it's the Crackle - no Rumble of Change.
To Bob Garfield, it's the sound of impending chaos.
But despite all the jargon, to GM and the agencies working on the GM business, it's the unsettling sound of billions of dollars shifting out of 'the usual' channels and into new ones.
Adage: GM Roars Forward Into Digital Ad Channels
The country's third-largest advertiser is getting ready to shift fully half of its $3 billion budget into digital and one-to-one marketing within the next three years.
I think most of us will agree that this doesn't mean the death of traditional channels, despite the warning of such in popular discourse (hee!):
It instead signifies a greater need for consideration of how each channel of communication feeds into one another, a greater need for planners with strong communications planning skills, and a much greater need for Agency business developers with strong stomachs, nimble minds, and the ability to quickly adapt to shifts in potential revenue.
A pattern is developing among automakers whereby TV and print are
deployed for launches in order to raise awareness, while more of the
continuous branding and sales activity shifts online -- as automakers
and many of their dealers accept that the purchase process increasingly
begins, and sometimes even effectively ends, on the internet. - Adage
Hyundai used the above strategy to launch last Fall's Think About It campaign (which was one of my favorites last year - both for their decision to focus on industry issues and the company vs. the car, and for their clear understanding of a car buyer's consideration cycle). Hyundai used awareness-driving channels such as TV and Print to raise a question/pique interest in consumers' minds about the car industry in general, and then directed them to the (lovely) site to come to their own conclusions (and consideration of Hyundai).
Their positioning reminds me of the highly successful positioning of the Saturn company so many years ago - 'different kind of company, different kind of car - addressing the reasons why people buy the cars that they do (see Toyota Prius), and their desire to know the companies/people behind them.
(Saturn is another one of my favorite case studies - read Culting of Brands for more).
I'll be curious to see how the Goodby campaign impacts brand perception and behavior (consideration, purchase), but until the results are in, I hope to see more auto ads that ask me to at least think about it.
Commitment:
Saving Lives:
what a lovely, simple way to get a point across:
Google users in the United Kingdom will notice today that we "turned the lights out" on the Google.co.uk homepage as a gesture to raise awareness of a worldwide energy conservation effort called Earth Hour.
Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.
-- Mark Twain
This is exciting - Yahoo! is testing a digg-like service in private Beta: Yahoo! Buzz, and according to the folks over at ReadWriteWeb (via Yahoo), the initial results are pretty impressive (see below):
Early Publisher Results – Yahoo! Buzz Beta (Feb 27, 2008 – Mar 10, 2008):
· Salon.com reached over 1 million uniques in one day for the first time in the company's 12-year history, after Yahoo.com linked to one of their highly "buzzed" stories (they issued this press release)
· US Magazine: In part due to a Yahoo.com link, February 27th was the second highest day in overall Usmagazine.com traffic since its launch in June 2006. Referral visits from the Yahoo! homepage accounted for 32% of total visits that day.
· When Yahoo.com linked to one of their stories, The Smoking Gun received approximately 1 million additional page views over their average traffic, with over 275,000 visitors coming from the Yahoo! homepage.
· Portfolio.com (part of Conde Net) received over half a million referral visits from a Yahoo.com “Buzzing Now” link.
· HuffingtonPost received over 800,000 unique visitors from Yahoo.com in one day.
· Dallas Morning News’ traffic spiked as a result of their Yahoo.com “Buzzing Now” link, making the featured story their most viewed single story on dallasnews.com that day.
· Imaginova: Space.com and LiveScience.com articles were featured and linked to directly from Yahoo!'s homepage and both sites saw significant increases in daily visitors and traffic after being featured for just 2 hours.
Yahoo!'s massive reach clearly gets traffic flowing, but it's the user-friendly design that will keep people coming back - clean and simple; easily understood purpose and navigation; generally fuss-free...
And this is precisely why they need to refuse a "shotgun marriage" with Microsoft.
I'll let the User Experience Design job descripts speak for themselves:
Yahoo!'s career page:
Creative dreamers! Artists! Scientists!
And... Microsoft's: 
balancing end-user expectations. implementation and ongoing operation. And my favorite: user engagement: 'is an
extremely new area with challenges which have not yet been solved.'
Oh my.
From cultures clashing to computers crashing in one potentially unfortunate merger.
:(
You know what's great about that last post? How easy it was for me to snag and share.
I found this presentation on David Armano's blog, loved it, wanted to share it, and with one simple click, had posted it to mine. I literally barely lifted a finger. Nice. Armano gets one more route into his Web site, and I get 10 minutes to reallocate to jetman.
I wish more content was this easy to share.
To elaborate:
I was catching up with an old friend from Chicago, and we both remarked on our surprise over the limited availability of free Wifi in the U.S., according to this map on page 42 of Wired's March issue:
Lovely and interesting enough to warrant a 15 minute discussion between me and one of my favorite people. :)
But why did I have to spend 10 minutes piecing together the PDF offered on the Web site just to post and share this image with more people here?
Why isn't the magazine - no wait, actually, the entire brand - doing more to facilitate conversation around and through the fascinating content it collects? Since content is so often what sparks conversations, wouldn't you want to make yours as portable and prevalent as possible?
Elaborating further:
I come into contact with WIred in dozens of places - the magazine, the podcasts, the web site, the social networks, and Chris Anderson's books and blog. That's right - I love Wired. But I'd like to find more reasons to love it, and have every opportunity to spread that love around.
So, a few small requests to Wired:
a) Give me more to love. I'm likely to be reading your article about the Cougar Ace in bed, with my laptop on and open in my lap. So if you have videos and photos that can show me Titanic in action - why not bring this to my attention on the printed page?
b) Let me spread my love around - If you do have interesting stuff to share, make it easy to do so. I can post this video to a social network, or email to a friend, but can't post it to my blog as with the Armano example mentioned above.
c) Let me know I'm not alone in my obsession. Perhaps take a cue from CNET's Buzz Out Loud (favorite podcast ever) - incorporating listeners' comments/questions in each podcast (which yours fail to do), and directing everyone to the online forums as the show closes. BOL behaves like a popular friend who just steps in and out of the circle on occasion - you still feel a bit distant and out of the loop.
d) Finally, watch out in the social networks - they're starting to feel like just another "broadcast" channel. Pulse for example, is a disappointment - it's not "an exclusive online community made up of people who are interested in how technology impacts every aspect of life," but is actually just a really loooong survey that rewards me for my 10 minutes of feedback with a redirect to the homepage. Unless I somehow missed the communing bit, I think I'd rather spend that 10 minutes with Jetman. <:)
I can't believe I've been following the Project Apollo story for 3 years now (geek), and that it's come to such an anti-climatic end:
Apollo Bites The Dust: Arbitron, Nielsen Pull Plug On Ambitious Single Source Initiative
Apollo was designed to measure the effects of exposure to multiple forms of advertising on actual behavior (purchase), which would have been a dramatic step-up from the standard measure of (stated) "purchase intent." After all, there are a lot of things I "intend" to do - getting back to my high school level of fitness for example - but my degree of "intent" doesn't account for all the barriers I might face on the way to achieving my goals: gym closure, London weather, traffic, kidnapping by space aliens (or persuasive, deviant friends), etc.
So I am very disappointed to be deprived of results from Project Apollo.
With so many data-hungry marketers participating in the pilot (Wal-Mart, Kraft, PepsiCo, Pfizer, Procter & Gamble, SC Johnson and Unilever), this certainly can't come down to disinterest in the numbers...
Perhaps the data was inconclusive? (or not conclusive enough to warrant the high cost) :(
Anyone on the other side of the pond have the scoop?
