Digital Marketing
Thursday, July 31st, 2008
I’m keen to know more about Manchester in Second Life. I have now visited three times since it was built last year and it has been fairly empty on each occasion. Apparently the aim of the project was to promote the Manchester brand and raise awareness of the city. I wonder if URBIS and the MDDA consider it to be a success.
There’s been a lot of talk about 3D virtual worlds being the future of the internet and I think there’s some truth in that although I’m not sure it’s quite that clear cut. Also, just because 3D virtual worlds are the future, I’m not convinced the virtual world in question is Second Life in its current state.
When I log in to Second Life I am always disappointed by the chunkiness of the experience, it’s frustrating at best and computer crashing at worst. I have been told I need a better computer to experience Second Life properly but my computer meets all the SL recommended system requirements and I have a healthy 8mb broadband connection so there must be plenty of people who have a similar experience to me. (more…)
Tags: 3d, 3d manchester, Advertising, digital, Digital Marketing, interactive, Interactive 3D, interactive media, July, manchester, second life, virtual, virtual environments, Virtual Worlds
Posted in Advertising, Digital Marketing, Interactive 3D, Virtual Worlds | No Comments »
Monday, July 28th, 2008
I was recently asked where I see advertising going in the future. The person asking me had just announced to the room that “absolutely ALL companies who work in advertising or an advertising related field are going to fail completely in the coming months because of massive cuts in advertising budgets”. I made a mental note to contact Saatchi & Saatchi and let them know. I’m sure they’ll be gutted that a Stockport-based life coach has such dire news for them.
He wasn’t completely wrong though, there have been reductions in advertising budgets on the whole. But while traditional media advertising budgets are shrinking, digital and Internet advertising budgets have remained steady.
So the message seems to be that, in times of economic uncertainty, companies want to know exactly where their money is going and what a campaign is achieving for them. They want value for money and digital provides that.
As consumers, we’re finding it easier and easier to ignore brand messages and many people are cynical about the perceived interruptions advertising represents.
The most successful advertising happens when the line between entertainment and advertising is blurred. Engaging our audience and providing an entertaining experience means consumers will not only participate in the media but will involve other members of their social group in it.
The Adidas - Impossible Story viral campaign by Glue is an excellent example of an entertaining brand experience that communicates the brand message through participation with its audience. It combines quirky visuals with nifty technical execution and the results speak for themselves. (more…)
Tags: 3d, Advertising, digital, flash, interactive, interactive media, July, online, viral, web
Posted in Advertising, Digital Marketing, Interactive 3D | No Comments »
Friday, July 4th, 2008
“By 2011, 80% of active internet users will have a virtual world account.”
Gartner Research, April 2007.
This quotation was identified by one of the presenters at HYPHEN on Wednesday evening. The event focussed on the opportunities new technologies bring with specific reference to Second Life and online gaming. There was quite a lot of discussion about the business opportunities these playful, often entertainment-focussed spaces deliver. Apparently BP identified virtual worlds as the “breakthrough technologies for 2008”.
I don’t think any of us need to be told about the serious business opportunity online gaming brings. The image to the left is Miniclip’s growth chart and although you might not be able to make out the text on the graph, all you really need to know is that the units on the horizontal axis are years and the units on the vertical axis are users (in increments of 5 million).
So what about Second Life’s business opportunities? A few years ago, any business which had a presence in Second Life was guaranteed some publicity out of it but these days that’s not the case. The last Second Life story I heard reported with any gusto was that of Ailin Graef, the Chinese businesswoman who built a business by buying and selling virtual land and made rather a lot of money in doing so. Perhaps that’s the business opportunity Second Life presents…but then, most of us don’t want to build a business in Second Life. We’re busy enough trying run the business we have created in our first lives. (more…)
Tags: interactive, Interactive 3D, interactive media, July, online, online gaming, second life, virtual, virtual environments, Virtual Worlds
Posted in Digital Marketing, Interactive 3D, Virtual Worlds | 2 Comments »
Sunday, June 15th, 2008
I was recently talking to a friend who’s a search marketing specialist and I mentioned that to get our site up and running quickly, I was considering throwing something together in Flash. His response was, “if you do that, I’ll have to kill you”.
Flash has been dividing opinion since I was learning about this new thing called Google back in ‘99. I once witnessed one of our Flash developers throwing a printer at a wall because of its so called “inconsistencies”.
That said, Flash has been providing web sites and 2D animation since 1996 and doesn’t show any signs of dissipating. Companies that consider themselves to be comprised of “creatives” often go wild with beautifully detailed animation and graphics and I have seen some truly remarkable work. So Flash has its place among the web design community, even if that’s not with my search marketing friend.
As you might imagine, something we’re particularly interested in is Flash for 3D. Until recently the only way to use Flash for 3D was to pre-render image sequences and use Flash to control them. This is often referred to as 2.5D because it looks like 3D but it’s actually 2D. Now that there are a few decent real-time 3D engines for Flash such as Papervision3d, FIVe3D, Away3D and Sandy, we can for the first time, create content in Flash that is truly 3D.
Of course there are many real-time 3D engines which have nothing to do with Flash, but the appeal with the 3D engines for Flash lies in the browser requirements and the file sizes. Real-time 3D engines for Flash provide content which can be viewed in browsers with Flash Player 8 or above installed and according to the Adobe Flash Player Version Penetration Statistics, in March 2008, 98% of users in the UK had at least Flash Player 8. The Flash based real-time 3D engines can also output relatively small files sizes considering the graphics-heavy nature of the content.
Currently, the main uses for the Flash based real-time 3D engines seem to be games and website navigation. The Neighbourhood’s website is a particularly good example of how Papervision3D can be used for site navigation and Carlos Ulloa (one of the Papervision3D development team) shows an application of the technology on his website in the form of a car which can travel into the distance as well as left and right. Another good example is the award winning LAB website which uses Mathieu Badimon’s FIVe3D. FIVe3D works slightly differently in that it’s entirely vector-based. Zeh Fernando explains more about the intricacies of FIVe3D compared to the other 3D engines on his blog.
In terms of commercial examples, I recently saw a banner ad which was almost identical to Ullosa’s car and I’m sure it won’t be long before advertisers come up with more snazzy ways to use the real-time 3D engines for Flash to attract and hold our attention.
One thing that’s certain is that the real-time 3D in Flash has a lot of potential and I’m really looking forward to seeing it develop in the coming years. All the Flash-based 3D engines I have come across so far are open source which will hopefully pave the way to experimentation and exploratory projects. I’ve encountered plenty of browser-crashing examples which seems to be a good indication we are right at the beginning of Flash 3D’s journey.
The other consideration is Flash Player which will have to develop considerably to meet the demands that 3D content brings. Adobe has outlined new features to be included in “Astro” (Flash Player 10) which will make the possibilities for delivering 3D content greater. Once there’s a Flash Player that can handle the complexities of 3D lighting and reflections, 3D Flash content could easily become as ubiquitous as Flash’s 2D content is currently.
Tags: 2.5d, 2d, 3d, adobe, away3d, carlos ulloa, five3d, flash, June, papervision3d, real-time, rendering, sandy, zeh fernando
Posted in 3D Design, Advertising, Digital Marketing, Interactive 3D | 1 Comment »
Friday, June 13th, 2008
I read an article on www.adage.com a while ago by the editor in chief of www.searchengineland.com, Danny Sullivan. He described a revolutionary change in the way Google treats video clips in search results. He said, Google video ads will not only appear in YouTube clips and on pages that carry Google AdSense units, but also in Google’s sacred search results as well.
Since I read that article, Google Adsense Video Units have been rolled out in the USA, the UK, France, Italy, Spain, Australia, Netherlands, Poland, New Zealand and Japan.
I haven’t actually come across one yet but as Adwords advertisers start to pick up on the opportunities video ads bring, I’ll be interested to see what impact this has on the way they communicate their message. Like Mr Sullivan rightly pointed out, “…AdWords advertisers have had to shoehorn their messages into a 70-character limit. Well, if a picture’s worth a 1,000 words, moving-picture ads will let advertisers blow through the haiku-like restriction.”
So perhaps, any day now, we’re going to be swamped by enquiries from companies who want their products brought to life with animation and swooshy graphics specifically for use in Google Adsense Video Units. Or perhaps there’ll be a surge in companies buying digital video cameras and cheap video editing software. One thing that’s certain is that some will be shockingly bad and some will be brilliantly slick, and we’ll enjoy them all.
Tags: Adsense, Advertising, Digital Marketing, Google, June, Units, Video, youtube
Posted in Advertising, Digital Marketing, Miscellany | No Comments »
