Archive for the ‘awesomeness’ Category
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Introducing the Cool Hunting iPad app, with Cadillac
1st April 10
Posted in awesomeness, design, technology
Author: John Sheldon, Director of Brand Dialogue, BBH New York
(This is an updated version of a post from 04.01.10)
There is nothing like working on a completely new platform to get everyone energized and excited.
Everyone here at BBH has been super excited about the opportunities that Apple’s new iPad will open up. We have just announced our first iPad application, the Cool Hunting app initially presented by our client, Cadillac, and developed in partnership between Cool Hunting, BBH and Front Ended.
Here it is. Well, a very static image of what it will look like.
Working with Josh and the team at Cool Hunting was really important in this project. We took their vast library of the latest in design, technology and culture and aligned – and spliced – it with a number of stories and facets about the vehicles.
It was a really interesting challenge from a design perspective. The “creative ambition” was to create a groundbreaking experience for consuming content on the iPad – one that becomes multidimensional with articles, photos, and videos in ways that were never possible before on the web or in the mobile space. We also wanted to propose a new advertising model for publications for the device – one that avoids slapping display advertising on everything and instead envelops the most appropriate and desired content for people. So we’re putting the brand in right place in providing great content to people rather than distracting them from it.
For the initial client/sponsor, Cadillac, this approach would allow the Cool Hunting team to curate and deliver specific content in new, more relevant, and more innovative ways. The muse for the curation is the very sexy new CTS Coupe and CTS-V Coupe vehicles that Cadillac is slated to release in mid-summer. Building excitement around these vehicles and garnering handraisers for additional information are key goals for the brand.
The design process took six weeks (late nights and every weekend included). Our team ranks this among the most challenging design they had ever taken on. The interesting aspect is that you have to design everything twice – both for the landscape and the vertical layout. And that doesn’t mean the layout changes visually, because we actually changed the experience based on how you were holding the device.
The goal was to incite users to interact with the design as opposed to just looking at it. For example, the default article view allows users to choose how they would most like to consume the content. So we enable more choices based on how people want to view or read the articles. This makes the interaction and visual design process incredibly more complex, but opens up a multitude of new opportunities.
The other part of the design and development challenge was putting together this app for a touch-based interaction in a platform that uses keyboard and mouse as the primary interfacing tools.
Working with the great guys at Front-ended to get it developed and App store approval-ready in short order was only possible through embracing a genuinely iterative and collaborative approach across all partners and client. Iterating between app designers, brand teams and developers daily made sure the final App met the needs of the sponsor, the technological benchmarks and the editorial approach of Cool Hunting.
Many of us are awaiting delivery of our iPads this weekend (our Director of Creative Technology, Richard Schatzberger, spent two hours on iPad release day refreshing his browser literally every second). And we can’t wait to see how other brands are going to find creative ways to take advantage of this new platform.
We know we have a whole bunch to learn about what’s possible, but weíre pleased our learning curve has been steep in the last few months. We like it that way.
In readiness for your iPad deliveries this Saturday, download the Cool Hunting app (here) and give it a look. We’d be interested to know what you think.
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The Joy of SXSW
26th March 10
Posted in awesomeness, interactive
This post is adapted from an article written for Campaign magazine (25.03.10), available online at campaignlive.co.uk next week.
SXSW banners outside Austin's conference centre (image by Ben Shaw)
South by Southwest, or SXSW as it likes to be referred to, has celebrated emerging film and music for over two decades, but 2010 was the year the Interactive component of the conference shifted up a gear and gained critical mass. Last week around 15,000 people descended on the city of Austin in Texas for 5 days of neck-deep immersion in progressive digital culture.
Despite its mind-blowing scale, a few key themes emerged for us from SXSWi’s smorgasbord of panels and presentations. Read full post
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Getting to know your Twitter followers & why that matters
8th March 10
Posted in awesomeness, data
Last week Aaron Richard (@ralphthemagi) contacted us at BBH Labs with something pretty cool, and we wanted to share it.
Aaron was most recently a digital strategist at Big Spaceship in Brooklyn. A while back Aaron created a map showing where @bigspaceship’s many thousands of followers lived (or claimed to live). I contacted Michael Lebowitz at BS and asked how they’d done it . . . a few days later Aaron wrote to us with our very own version of the data, mapped and analyzed. Brilliant.
Aaron goes into great detail on his site about how he did this, the problems he encountered, the choices he made in filtering, and so on. In short, he used the publicly accessible Twitter API combined with cURL software to play around with the data shared by our c.12,600 followers on Twitter.
After some fairly smart sounding parsing of the follower base to weed out spammers (or at least people who looked most like spammers) and non-actives (see his post for the detail) Aaron pulled down the following public data on each of the remaining followers.
- ID
- Name
- Username
- Location
- Profile Bio
- Profile Picture
- Web URL
- Privacy Settings
- # of Followers
- # of Friends (“following”)
- Account Creation Date
- # of Favorites
- UTC Offest
- Time Zone
- Per-tweet Geolocation Status
- Verified User Status
- # of Tweets
He then used one of Google’s Lab projects, Fusion Tables, to geo-code the massive amount of information he had in CSV form.
The result was two forms of map. First, a fully interactive Google map (launch it and take a look, click on the dots for detail), and second a heatmap showing concentration of followers by major cities. With the interactive map it’s possible to click on a follower and see the data that Twitter holds for them (which is a little scary, but I guess comes with the territory).
Aaron also looked at our follower data and pulled put out some insight about our followers, which we found fascinating.
- Average # of followers: 1,746 | Median: 163
- Average # of friends: 982 | Median: 206
- Average # of tweets: 987 | Median: 247
- 6% of followers keep their tweets private
- 9% have per-tweet geolocation enabled
- 12 followers are “verified”
As Aaron notes, one can see by the deltas between means and medians, all followers are not created equal.
So all this is fascinating to us (for example, to learn that @bigspaceship and @BBHLabs share the same two followers in Iceland . . . hi Islenka and Finnur). But I wanted to see what additional uses might be made of this kind of data and insight. For example, for brands, or for non-profits, or just for individuals. I pinged Aaron a few questions on this theme:
BBH LABS: So Aaron, thanks for this – this is fantastic. But thinking more broadly of potential uses of this kind of insight for marketers, brands and individuals, how do you think this might be used in a more applied way?
AARON: I think this kind of information can be used for setting better goals. Asking better questions and finding better answers. I think a lot of brand teams have this preconceived notion that they are using social media effectively if they have a lot of fans, followers, etc … I just don’t think that’s true.
BBH LABS: Give us some examples of what you mean.
AARON: The particular data set I pulled for BBH could be used in a number of ways. For example, say you wanted to give away something to a few Twitter followers with the goal of growing your network. Send them an iPod Shuffle, get them to tweet about it, drive a little positive PR. But how would you decide who to give stuff to if you wanted to maximize every give away? Well, with data like this you could easily find the top 20 people with the most followers and target them. Or look at the top 50 people with the most followers, then look at those with who have the least number of tweets (there’s something interesting about people with a lot of followers and few tweets, because when they do tweet their message tends to get retweeted a lot and cuts through the clutter).
BBH LABS: And for brands, can you give us an example of how they might make use of this? Maybe to make their stream more relevant? Maybe to get closer to their most valuable customers?
AARON: Sure. You can start to see how you might use this kind of information to challenge large incumbent brands. Imagine you wanted to take on Comcast as a small regional ISP. You could pull the data for everyone who follows Comcast Cares [on Twitter] then look at all the people in your region and start following them or sending them public messages. You could even target the people who are pissed off at Comcast and give them a special offer. Dell Outlet [on Twitter] has +1.5m followers. That’s 1.5m potential new customers for HP, if they provide the right incentive to get a customer to switch.
BBH LABS: This is only one particular series of API calls, as you point out. What else can you envisage coming out of the Twitter API?
AARON: Absolutely, this is really just one tiny piece of the data that’s available. I did this more for fun and to get a better idea of how to manage large API pulled data sets than I did to answer a specific question. Twitter has calls for search, tweets, retweets, lists, etc.. If, for example, you wanted to track something like brand mentions you could do that—and not just by using the regular old search.twitter.com or paying for something like radian6 (who’d never give you the raw data). You could look at all tweets by keyword, replies, retweets, etc., and then figure out who’s saying these things, where they live, and what (or who) they have in common.
I’m going to do a followup to this that talks about how to use API data in a more tactical way, using Facebook (and probably Coke) as an example to find the answer to things like, “What day of the week should I post something in order to maximize likes, comments, etc.?”
BBH LABS: Thanks again Aaron. Keep us in the loop. We’re keen to learn more as we go.
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If you have any questions for Aaron feel free to post them under this post, or on Aaron’s own blog.
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A Day in the Life of New York City, in miniature
27th February 10
Posted in awesomeness, online video
The Sandpit from Sam O’Hare on Vimeo.
This is a stunning piece of film, shot by Sam O’Hare in NYC, in miniature and using a shallow depth of field. Worth noting right at the outset that the tilt-shift effect was faked in post (but the overall effect is far from lessened because of this).
For best results hit HD and watch in full screen. And turn it up.
There’s a really great interview with O’Hare here, on the Aero Film site. Here’s a sample, in which O’Hare talks about the equipment he used in putting this together. It involved over 35,000 stills.
The music is perfectly matched. It was specially written by Rosi Golan and Alex Wong, and composed by Human.
If you watch carefully there are some priceless moments, usually involving tiny characters doing things that look other-worldly when viewed in this way (I particularly like the scene in which someone sneaks out on their roof – this is shot in the height of the hottest part of the summer of 09 – to have a quick cigarette). One of the slightly odder things about the film is that despite seeing hundreds of people across the five minute piece, we don’t see a single face. This adds to the surreal, almost fake quality of the film.
Thanks to @finnbarrw for the heads-up.
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Kraftwerk, just jamming, in a spellbinding film from 1973
15th December 09
Posted in awesomeness, music
We’re hopelessly devoted fans of Kraftwerk here at BBH Labs, almost certainly in a way that is slightly backward. Only last week we pledged to listen to nothing but Kraftwerk until the end of 2010 (much to the delight of those sitting near us).
This (below) is an incredible piece of film. It’s from 1973 and shows Ralf & Florian just noodling, in some cases with non-electronic instruments (shock, horror) such as flute. The homemade drum machine looks fairly lo-fi; quite a lot of tinfoil being used there too.
We also stumbled across a couple of other short films in the YouTube crates. First an amusing documentary clip about ‘Autobahn’ from 1975. “Next year Kraftwerk hope to eliminate the keyboards altogether and build jackets with electronic lapels that would be played by touch”.
And then this 10-minute clip from a 1973 French documentary.
Brilliantly evocative films from the birth of electronic music.
Thanks to Paul Matheson for sending the Tanzmusik piece.
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We love Google Goggles
14th December 09
Posted in awesomeness
Google Goggles is a new ‘visual search’ app for Android phones. Instead of using words, take a picture of an object with your camera phone: Google then attempt to recognize the object, and return relevant search results. Goggles also provides information about businesses near you by displaying their names directly in the camera preview.
As Google make clear, this is far from perfect yet, but it’s still getting us thinking about how we might use this kind of technology for clients.
Wonder when it will work with social networks? And wonder when it’s out on iPhone?
More detail on Goggles on Google’s site, here.(Full disclosure: Google is a client of BBH)
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Work we like – Nike’s ‘The Game is Never Over’
22nd September 09
Posted in awesomeness, creativity, online video
Wonderful lo-fi (yet somehow, strangely hi-fi) work from Nike for their new Patrice Evra football commercial, ‘The Game is Never Over’.
Everything about it is right. Awesome.
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Is LEGO the world’s coolest ever toy?
24th August 09
Posted in awesomeness, creativity, music
We’re major fans of LEGO here at BBH Labs. In fact, we spend far too much of every day actually playing with it.
This is great. 1500 hours of investment to deliver 3:49 worth of joy for LEGO lovers of all ages. Truly awesome.
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