Wednesday, May 29, 2013

Conference Links - Interact Congress 2013 in Barcelona


I go to quite a lot of conferences, so I'm now doing short writes ups of them, with links to interesting things.  This time - last week's Interact Congress 2013 in Barcelona.

The big highlight was the reveal of the results from the 2012 AdEx Benchmark Survey from IAB Europe, which showed online ad spend around Europe.

The headline figure was that online ad spend grew 11.5% to €24.3bn around Europe, with big growth in video & mobile advertising.

These were the Top 10 in terms of ad spend:

UK – €6.6bn
DE – €4.6bn
France – €2.8bn
Russia – €1.5bn
Italy – €1.4bn
NL – €1.2bn
ES – €0.9bn
Sweden – €0.8bn
Norway – €0.6bn
Denmark – €0.6bn

You can see that the UK and Germany combined make up more than 40% of the spend.  It's also interesting that Russia has overtaken Italy, and that there were only 6 countries with a spend of over one billion Euros in 2012.  Full press release is here

I moderated a session on display ad formats for brand campaigns, which included Karim Attia of Nugg Ad, Laura Chaibi of Yahoo, and Dean Donaldson, formerly of MediaMind.  It's potentially a pretty dry (read 'dull') subject, but I hope we managed to make people understand the importance of it.  Ad formats are the sizes of the spaces on websites that the ads fit into.  The IAB needs to get consensus over these, as advertisers need to be able to advertise on multiple sites easily, to get their messages to large numbers of people.

Of course we're only talking about the size of the spaces - we're not talking about what goes into them.  That's were the real creativity comes in.  Over the past few years ads have gradually been getting wider, as screen sizes have got wider, and now tablet and mobile screen sizes are making this more complicated again.  & then there are the real time bidding engines which allow automated ad buying, and need to fit ads into as many sites as possible.  As we approach the 20th anniversary of the first banner ad, we need to make sure that the format sizes move with the times.  I hope that this gets across how it's not such a 'dry' subject.  (& no, none of us support horrific formats like this or this or this).

Another session I really enjoyed was the presentation by Geoff Seeley of Unilever who showed examples of their recent engaging ads and content, including this from Lifebuoy:



In another session Geoff said that they always use paid support for content like this:

I thought that it was great to hear a client say this.  It's common knowledge in the industry how important it is to pay to support content like videos, and yet you still get articles like this one ("Here's why these 6 videos went viral"), that don't take that into account at all.

I also really liked research by Joe Hall at BBC Worldwide on the use of different devices to find out about the news - this one isn't online yet, I don't think, but will post it if it is.

& finally...  It wouldn't really capture this conference if I didn't mention that Harry Styles was staying at the hotel when we were there.  He happily signed autographs for people as he lay by the pool, and was by all accounts a nice guy.  If he creates that much excitement amongst 30- and 40-somethings at a 5 star hotel then I'd hate to think what happens if he ever tries to walk into a bar...  He must lead a strange life.  You can see some of the paparazzi pictures of him in the hotel here.

Sunday, May 12, 2013

Get a discount by tagging on Instagram

I love this simple discount mechanism used by the Sweden Calling pop-up shop in Spitalfields.


Just use their hashtag in a pic of you in their shop, and you get 5% off.

Here's an example of a photo using the tag:


It also shows, I think, the growing ubiquity of Instagram, especially among young women.

Thursday, May 09, 2013

VW plays with YouTube features

This is a follow up post to this one, a couple of weeks ago.

VW Brazil previously played with the form of YouTube by posting a short 5 second at that looked like a pre-roll, and faked 'skipping' on behalf of the user.

Now they've done a new one, using the YouTube hover feature to show off another feature.


What next..?

University campaign projects Facebook timeline into the future

A case study from a very good campaign for Ozu University in Istambul, both to recruit students, and to award scholarships.



I've never heard of anyone projecting the timeline into the future before, but I'm assuming that it really did happen.

Has anyone got any examples of the 'future' videos that were made?

Wednesday, May 08, 2013

Lowe's Top Tips on Vine

An exemplary use of Vine by DIY chain Lowes, who made a series of short 'top tips' films:
&
&
See them all here

They also used the hashtag #loewsfixinsix which was very clever.

Taco Bell on Shapchat


Last week Taco Bell joined Snapchat, alerting its Twitter followers, and then used it to send a pic of the Beefy Crunch Burrito to its friends, to tell them that it was being re-introduced to the restaurants.

It's a good use of it, because you get the message in the 10 seconds or so that you can see the picture.

This makes Taco Bell the first major brand to use the service, although smaller brands have also used it.  Let's see how they build on this.

Also - Beefy Crunch on Facebook, and on Twitter

More at Techcrunch

Spock Vs. Spock



An amazing ad from Audi:  It's not affiliated with the new Star Trek film, but *just happens* to come out the week of release, with two Spocks bantering & battling away.

It's very well done, with lots of in-jokes that I don't get (but the fans on the forums seem to love).  It also has a bit of the feel of Jerry Seinfeld's Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, and that's a good thing too.  I'm not sure why they put Leonard Nimoy in a Mercedes (it's an Audi ad, remember), but it's getting serious numbers of views and comments.  (According to the AdAge article below it's meant to be a comparison ad, comparing Audi to Mercedes, but this seems a bit odd to me).

In fact it's got nearly 30 times as many as the Damian Lewis Jaguar ad in less than 24 hours, which must say something.

More background at AdAge

Tuesday, May 07, 2013

Good Re-Targeting Example from easyJet

Last week I looked at prices of flights to Barcelona.  Today this add appeared as I was looking at The Onion on the same computer.  I like how it's quite knowing and chatty, although it's still a bit clunky.


I know people who would be quite freaked out by this, although I also know that people are getting to be more aware of how this works.  Over the weekend one of my friends was talking about how he clears his cookies after doing price comparison to get the best deals, for example.

Update - another one, on The Guardian.


(The flight was for the Interact Congress.  I'm still not sure if I'm going, but say hello if you see me there)
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