Archive for the ‘interactive’ Category
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Global Internet Trends of 2012
10th December 12
Posted in advertising, data, interactive, mobile
Photo: Mary Meeker, KPCB
We at BBH Labs are big fans of Mary Meeker. Every year we like to republish her Internet Trends and this year is no exception. The report has changed throughout the years but the insight gets richer and more useful as time goes on. The report is just under 90 slides so for you slackers that don’t want to read the whole thing we have pulled out the information that we found most interesting for your data snacking pleasure:
- USA has the highest internet penetration with 78%, but that still means 22% of the population is not online
- In the US and UK, almost half of mobile subscribers are using smart phones at 48% and 45% respectively
- An impressive 29% of US adults own a tablet or eReader, up from 2% three years ago
- 48% of American kids want an iPad for Christmas this year, 36% want an iPad Mini
This year we wanted to highlight a few trends and view them through the lens of Advertising. Ask a few thought provoking questions and put our own spin on some. A few of these things are good for our industry and other things will be more challenging.
- In India, mobile internet usage has surpassed desktop internet usage. Mary Meeker’s team believes many countries will follow. As an industry we can acknowledge that desktop banner ads present a challenge to do great creative but when your space is limited to the size of mobile banner ads it becomes even more challenging.
- They see a movement from asset-heavy to asset-light lifestyles in space, time and money. As an industry this means that less products are being purchased but it should increase the quality of products brought to market. When the product is good, the advertising is even better.
- The average person spends 52 minutes per day in the car. As an industry we have relied on radio to reach this audience but as cars evolve in technology with touch screens, mobile and GPS navigation are we innovating to be be creative with this time and space? This medium seems ripe for innovation.
- The average person spends 3 hours per day in front of the television. As an industry we know that second screen adoption is growing at a tremendous rate, ad skipping is at an all time high, how do we change trends in advertising to combat other distractions to the ads we spend a majority of our time on?
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ASOS Urban Tour: An Experiment In Shopping Culture
16th September 11
Posted in Film, interactive
Author: Lucia Komljen, Strategist, BBH London
www.asos.com/urban-tour/
This week saw the launch of ASOS Urban Tour – a shoppable, cultural experience in the form of an interactive platform promoting ASOS A/W 2011 menswear collection. It invites the audience to watch some of the world’s most skilled urban musicians, dancers, designers and artist in action across the world and to explore what – and where – inspires their craft and their style. The centerpiece is a dynamic, shoppable video set in London which can be paused and explored at any point, presenting the user with more information on the dancers and enabling the purchase of their looks.
Overall, we hope Urban Tour is an example of what can be achieved when you push technology and design in an attempt to seamlessly combine entertainment and service for e-commerce brands. Furthermore, it’s another demonstration of just how powerful it can be when technology enables ambitious creativity throughout the customer journey.
Here’s the story behind the work so far, we’d love to hear what you think. Read full post
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Revenge of the Microsite
9th September 11
Posted in digital, interactive
Author: Calle Sjoenell, Deputy Chief Creative Officer, BBH NY
These are probably words that will haunt me forever, but I must write a tribute to the microsite, currently going through a Phoenix-like transformation known as the web app.
The microsite was originally created to capture a single minded idea in one destination. So sharp and elegant in its purpose, the concept spread and made everyone visit.
For me, it started with IKEA’s Dream Kitchen, one click and hold and I spun in a whirlwind of kitchen options. Minimal input, maximum output, the product at the dead center of the idea. And it sold truckloads if kitchens.
But as with all great ideas, there where thousands of bad executions, wasting clients’ money with little to show in scale or engagement as a result.
Then, of course, marketers had to make a rule about it. We can only build things where the audience is already hanging out. “Fish where the fish are,” and all that. This is in fact a worse sin: creating a blanket rule that microsites don’t work. It’s like saying investing in Internet companies doesn’t work.
This is why I’m musing over the next marketer and publisher obsession on the Internet: the web app. The functionality of HTML5 and its related technology brings us out of the tyranny of page to page style navigation on the web. We will probably laugh at our text and picture based catalogue websites in a few years, a world where each step took 10-15 seconds of mental processing to solve. The web app brings single minded functionality with new interactive capabilities. Just look at the web app versions of Tweetdeck, NY Times and Angry Birds and you see the potential. Eerily like a microsite.
But we can never forget the cardinal rule of communication that now rules all media channels, even TV.
If you make something great, they will come (or watch). Otherwise, they won’t.
Damn, did I just make a blanket rule?
Long live the microsite.
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Working Nights for Bragging Rights
20th July 11
Posted in interactive
Author: Priyanka Kanse, Strategist, BBH London
If you are under 11 you might be aware that Fruit Shoot launched something very cool last week. If you’re not, here is the story of Champion of the Playground:
http://www.vimeo.com/26663730The work we’ve been doing with skills for the last couple of years meant that the Fruit Shoot brand was in good health, but this wasn’t transferring to success at the checkout: our core target audience (8-10 year olds) were turned off by the younger kids coming into the brand and didn’t want to be seen drinking the product.
Our solution wasn’t a big ad campaign, but a branded gaming platform which merges the virtual world with the real world and recognises the importance of competition and challenge for 8-11 year olds.
One of the very first pieces of paper that the creative team wrote were the principles of Champion of the Playground (below). It’s really nice to sit down at the end of phase 1 and think that the site is still true those original principles.
What we’ve learnt
Much of the commentary about participation platforms seems like common sense, but how the hell do I implement it? We’re learning all the time and there is so much we could say about this project, but these are some of our most interesting findings:
User first:
Measure every decision you make against what your user will find compelling. I’m not always a massive fan of research for traditional advertising, but for Champion of the Playground it was essential. One, we’re not 9-year-olds and two, the project lives or dies by its ability to engage.
The first response by kids to the initial ideas was ‘but how do you stop other people from cheating?’, which meant without unique codes that encrypted the Skills Kit scores, the idea would be fundamentally undermined. We were told that we’d have to wait over a year to get kit with codes, which didn’t really fit with our delivery date, but our Creative Technology wizards worked directly with suppliers to program boards and test prototype equipment.
I also now have a favourite ever research moment: In user-testing with a site prototype one of the kids was asked if they would play the game. His response? “Yeah, but they have to advertise it on TV so I know about it” – so well trained!
Picking the right battles:
Not that we had lots of fights, but it’s really hard to pick what to invest development time, brainpower and cash into when all the features look so darn good. And sometimes the most important details are the ones that you can’t see. We bought a games designer in to fix the games and reward logic so that the game felt fair. Just writing that sentence makes it sound simple, but it’s such a delicate balance to achieve and so crucial to the playability.
Being able to win trophies, badges and cool stuff for your avatar is a reason to play even if you can’t be the overall winner
And finally
For us, Champion of the Playground is a great example of how a brief doesn’t have to be answered by traditional advertising solutions. Why do we expect our audience to spend time with us if we’re not entertaining? By creating a game which is inextricably tied up with kids’ personal progress, we are giving them something that they genuinely want to participate in.
When you create an idea that isn’t a campaign, you naturally earn the right to exist for a longer time and in different formats. The initial response to Champion of the Playground from kids has been enthusiastic, which means that we get to keep creating and keep evolving. So keep an eye on FruitShoot.com, because we have some exciting things planned.
Credits (names in bold might as well get COTP tattoos, such has been their dedication to the cause)
Clients: Nadia Moussa & Debbie Eddy
Creative team: Simon Pearse & Emmanuel Saint M’Leux
Creative directors: Rosie Bardales, Jeremy Ettinghausen
Digital producer: Susan Liu
Technical director: Jim Hunt
Head of Creative Technology: Jon Andrews
User Experience: Ricky Faria
Account team: Ngaio Pardon, Alex Monger, Anna Halliday
Strategist: Priyanka Kanse
Strategic Business Lead: Nina Rahmatallah
Production Company: Unit 9
Game consultant: James Sheahan, Metagames [http://metagames.co.uk/]
Below the line agency: The Marketing Store
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The future of connected TV (and why it may just revolutionise adland), Part II
17th June 11
Posted in interactive, technology
Don at work by abbey*christine, via Flickr
Author: Matthew Kershaw, Content Director, BBH London
I talked here yesterday about a near future in which TV advertising would become fully targetted, completely measurable and highly interactive.
So what are the implications of this prediction for agencies?
Without getting all Harold Camping on you, here are five things I believe agencies should do to craft the advertising of the future: Read full post
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The future of connected TV (and why it may just revolutionise adland), Part I
16th June 11
Posted in interactive, technology
TV stencil by USB, via Flickr
Author: Matthew Kershaw (@mattski2000), Content Director, BBH London
There is a frothy bubble of excitement growing around the future of Connected TV.
At CES back in January, it was announced that the connected TV category is forecast to ship over 123 million connected TVs a year by 2014. With overall ownership to reach 1 billion by 2015.
Just this month, Philips announced that they have 1 million active Net TV users.
And all the major players are piling in: Google are still behind Google TV, YouView are finally preparing to launch with the ultimate boss, Lord Sugar, Virgin have just launched their Tivo service, Sony made a commitment early and even Apple are still just about in the game with their AppleTV device. And then there’s Anthony Rose, the genius behind the BBC iPlayer and ex CTO of YouView, now championing two-screen interaction.
With all this hype and excitement, you’d think that us ad folk would be talking about nothing else, combining as it does ad land’s two big obsessions: the power of television and the interactivity of the internet.
So why are we holding back? Read full post
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The Power And Perils Of Participation
18th September 10
Posted in interactive, social media
This post was originally written for the Likeminds blog. More about them here, and check out their Creativity and Curation event down in Exeter, UK, 28/29th October.
Ulysses & The Sirens by Herbert Draper
Don’t get me wrong. We’ve argued long and hard here in favour of brands embracing new behaviours if they’re to drive real cultural and commercial impact. To invite participation; to get out there and allow their customers in. And in terms of audience appetite for this, we’ve even gone as far as to question whether Jakob Nielsen’s 90:9:1 rule – that states the vast majority of visitors to any website are only there to lurk – will hold water for much longer in this post last year.
We’re going to continue arguing the case for new behaviour, not against. Nonetheless, there have been a couple of instances that have given us pause for thought recently. Read full post
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A Radical Proposal to Save Advertising on the Web
8th September 10
Posted in creativity, interactive
Author: Calle Sjoenell, Executive Creative Director, BBH New York
(Follow Calle here: @callesjonell)
After reading Chris Anderson’s piece in Wired about the web being dead, long live the Internet, I got a really uneasy feeling. Banner advertising has always been the weird step child of advertising. Few creatives wants to do them, clients don’t know how to approach it and nobody clicks on the ads. I always argued that it’s the ultimate test of stripped-down creativity, with lots of constraints, just 40K to play with and super-restricted space. It’s like creating wonderful music out of an old synth; just a few dials, but turn the right ones at the right time and wonderful things happen. On occasion, that can happen with banners. But maybe we have all missed the real problem. The first trouble with display ads is that people don’t know how to look at them. I believe the reason for this is the creative and the instruction for interacting with the creative is all over the place.
Right now, internet display advertising is like driving through different towns where every town has invented their own traffic sign system. You need to look really carefully at every sign and interpret what they mean instead of brainstem reactions that would come with a unified signage system. Learn more, Click here, Fold There, plus signs, single arrows, >>, all in a box, or not. Underlined. Bold. !!!!
We are just not sure what to do. So, in over 99% of instances, we do absolutely nothing at all.
This is connected to a second problem with display advertising: that there is no clear way of knowing if you will leave the site or interact where you are. In the early days it made sense that you left the site you were on and went to the advertisers’ websites. That was how you used the web back then, hence the idea of ‘surfing’. Now people are on fewer and fewer sites and are reluctant to leave where they are. They’re also afraid of viruses and malware.
Is there a solution? I propose we separate creative from instruction.
I propose we create a clear set of universal instructions letting users know if they are staying on a site or leaving it. Or, to push it even further, what if every ad had two standard buttons at the same location, “Save for Later” (like Instapaper for display) and “Go to Website”. That way ads would behave more like we use the web today. A Universal System for display, in which everyone knows what to expect. A system that respects the user.
Few have got this right to date. Google come to mind, with their Adwords text ads (& look at the impact of a user-focused design approach on their revenues). With Google, the parameters are tight and everyone knows what to expect. Facebook is also on to this with their standardized format that provides a static picture and lots of text. These are fairly low on the creative side, but I think the creative part of a banner can be wonderfully executed through animation, API interaction or just a plain old static picture that says it all. Whatever it is, the instructions should be standard, simple and clear.
This is one reason why I have joined the IAB and their Rising Stars forum, to drive forward this question of standardization. It might point to the way forward for creative AND functional display ads on the web that users know how to interact with. But there are a lot of people who need to agree and compromise to make this happen.
So to save advertising on the web, who is willing to come to the table?
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Internet Trends 2010, by Morgan Stanley’s Mary Meeker
9th June 10
Posted in data, interactive, mobile
The thing we like most about Mary Meeker’s annual Internet Trends presentation is it’s just packed with data. The charts are sometimes *too* intense, in fact, carrying too much data. But it’s always revealing, and usually inspiring. Because it’s fact, not fiction.
Slide 7 is especially impactful. I was born on the left hand side of the chart, probably around when there were 5 million computing-capable units globally. On the right, just ten years from today, the forecast is for 10 billion+ units. Extraordinary.
View more presentations from CM Summit: Marketing in Real Time.Kindle -
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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Mel Exon
Jeremy Ettinghausen
Tim Nolan
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