Have you ever wondered why some advergames look similar? Then Theoworlds could have the answer. From this dev shop you can buy game develop kits or licence prebuilt games to put your own touches on. Not everyone has huge marketing budgets and using these tools can be a shortcut to get something out to support your campaign, or please your customers. It’s the sort of thing that I think would be especially good for local companies that want to try things or somebody that wants to get something out quickly in response to something. The company has a Theoworld blog that gets updated occasionally with news and new products and they’re reaching out to bloggers like me as well to help talk about them.
They also have some fun toys to play with for free, including this decorate your own Birthday Cake. The same tools can also be licenced for your own ecards. Here’s my artistic efforts for the day!
Via Cake Group, who’ve got a pretty impressive collection of videos, it show’s how you can shoot and edit video on your phone now, this model being the Motorola Z10. No need to put it onto a computer, the tools are all there on the phone if you have the patience.
They’re also running a competition to make your own 90 second film, based on one of 4 scenarios (I like ‘You’re never too old for revenge - pensioner with a grudge). Make your film, load up to the DirectorMe YouTube page and wait for it to be judged. Twenty finalists win a phone and then have to make a new film with the phone to win the final prize of £10k. It’s a pretty good contest that look fun and there’s plenty of opportunity for you to win something as there’s not that many entries yet, but it is being pushed on the mobile blogs, so it may not be that way for long.
A really silly game from what you would think would be a serious company, Kiwibank are advertising themselves with this shooting game, Stop the Aussie Invasion. In reference to the large numbers of Australian banks in NW, defend the country by throwing pavlovas at landing AUS bankers. Make sure you have the sound turned up so you can hear the cried of ‘Crikey’ as you squash a banker. The biggest problem I had was that the gameplay area was not big enough, as I kept losing the mouse curser as I aimed.
A got a ’social media release’ in the mail for the launch of Pixsta, a new UK-based image search engine.
The Pitch
Although on the surface, it’s about a new search engine, in reality, the release spends most of its time talking about the ad model is has in place.
The advertising ecosystem is similar to Google’s adwords model, but based wholly on images rather than text. From a random starting point, users click on an image of an item of clothing, shoes or jewellery to return further images of items that are similar by colour, shape or texture. Clicking on any of the displayed items re-submits that item as the search term. When the user ‘discovers’ the item that they want to purchase, they click through not just to the retailer’s home page but directly to the product landing page to purchase their chosen item.
So it’s not really a ’search engine’ as an image and category-based shopping engine.
What I think about it
The email is tagged a social media release, which means that as well as the polished prose, it contains some quotes I can use, a link to a ‘social networking video‘ and links to some images - which are just screen shots of the site and services users, including browser bars.
To me, this email tells me that the sender (and I’m not sure if it is Both Barrels PR or WebBitPR who sent it for them) knows of Social Media Releases, believe they need to do them but does not yet understand them. There’s some links there, which is always good but linking to a YouTube video and calling it ’social networking’ rings a false note. The images they link to do not really add value, I can do them myself with a click - and I wouldn’t include all the browser chrome. If you are going to include images, send stuff that can’t be screen grabbed, that is different than what could be found browsing the service. Overall I’d say this is a C-
I love the exasperated look the guy gives when the car starts dancing. It’s been done by Strawberry Frog and is being distributed by The 7th Chamber (who seem very proud they’ve been tasked with distributing it). This looks like this is also a TV ad and not just a web video.
MSNBC are launching some new, interactive, interpretative news services, called Newsware. Lots of different ways to get news, different interfaces, some games or more serious stuff such as RSS feeds or IM alerts.
What I think of the Product
The first sentence says it all - I loved it. News can be pretty boring, but this presents it in a way that adds a little more interest and visual information than a straight list of headlines in your normal feeds. You can get it straight or engaging and fun
The first thing i went to was the Spectra Virtual Newsreader and my reaction was delight. At the heart of this is a straightforward RSS reader that pulls newsfeeds from your chosen topics, (all MSNBC feeds, can’t find a way of loading your own). The joy in it is how it displays the news.
A spiralling rainbow of stories. Click on it and you start to work your way through the feeds - although it does not appear that you can choose which stories from the colour cloud but that it does it in order. Being able to pick and choose, as an alternative reading way, would improve it. Another far more important improvement would be for it to remember my settings!
A wonderful little toy is the Colour Sensor. If you have a web cam, it assesses the main colour in view and shows you stories linked the colour. Pretty useless for actually browsing the news, but, my, it’s fun. The service has games to play as well, bringing the headlines to you, to catch your eye and let you stop to read when you want. I spent too much time playing them when I should be writing!
This is not a serious news reading interface, but as a way to engage people, to let them browse headlines it’s a great development. From a marketing viewpoint, I can absolutely guarantee that somewhere, on some site, you will get the same type of interface to give you product news, or entertainment news, or whatever is seen to be relevant to the brand. The colour recognition through the camera is also going to pop up somewhere.
What I thought of the pitch
Of the 2 dozen or so emails I have in the inbox at the moment, this is the best. Izzy, from 360i, had read the blog, calling comment on the fact I was so far behind in about stuff, sent me a email that intrigued me, something that was interesting and offered me more if I needed it. He did not send a ‘pitch’, not even a ‘personalised’ one. He gets an A
Race for Life is Cancer Research UK’s biggest event, an annual 5km women’s only race to raise money. It’s being going on since 1994 and I’ve even been known to partake occasionally; last year it raised 40m GBP
They’ve been pushing and promoting the event all year, with such events as handing out Oyster Card holders at stations.
They’ve now got a game for you to play and also promote the race, the Race for Life Warm-up. This is easy, just use your arrow keys to match the falling arrows. A great time fun timewaster. My highest score has been about 2000, whereas the leader boards are sitting at over 17k, so it’s possible to go for far longer than the 30 seconds I seem to be able to play for.
I’ve been getting quite a few emails from the people behind the site What Men Need to Know. They’ve published a few videos promoting the new site that goes live on May 21.
This is what they say about the site:
covering men’s lifestyle comprehensively but not taking it, or ourselves, too seriously Trust us, that will stand out. So, to wrap up, what do men need to know? You tell us.
A couple of things stand out about it:
Each email has an ‘unsubscribe link’, the site has a ’sign up for more details’ option. So somehow I’ve got onto their email database without ever subscribing, as I never use the b5media address for these things. The subscription opt-in reads “By submitting my e-mail address I agree to receive a weekly newsletter from whatmenneedtoknow.ca”. What this means is that some PR agency added me to the list without my permission. Now, don’t me wrong, I’m happy to hear about these things, but direct from the agency, not by being subscribed to the list.
The emails make assumptions. Don’t tell me “Hilarious youtube campaign cont’d”. You’re assuming I’ll find the video hilarious, all it could do is confirm to me that the site has a crap sense of humour. The 4 videos, the first one put up 3 weeks ago, have had 1608, 308, 166, and 76 views as of today. This tells me that not many other people think they are hilarious. Actually, it tells me something else - the firm behind this push on the videos does not really know what they are doing, so they do things like sign up people to mail lists The videos are mildly funny, they’re just not getting the promotion on YT. If this is how the pre-marketing is going, the site will need a lot of help.
The email says “Our site will be fully interactive.” WTF??? A single page with one video on it is ‘fully interactive’ with respect to the content. What do they mean by this? It’s a useless piece of information that means nothing and just serves to confuse.
Nothing is working well so far. I may have a look next week (when, no doubt, they’ll send me another email with the news that the ‘hilarious’ site is online) and see if it is really as bad as I think it may be.
JetBlue have launched a new campaign, with their ‘Are You A Jetter?’ over at Happy Jetting. They want to move the conversation away from the mundane flying, that has such bad connotations with poor service and security issues, to jetting, bringing back ideas of the jetset, when it was all so much more glamorous.
There’s some small changes to their main page but most of the action is over at the microsite, where you also get to see what I think would be the TV ad, to the tune of Mr Blue Skies. There’s a lot of print that drives to the site and I’m guessing there’s going to be banner ads out there based on that print.
The full flash promo site itself is OK, worth 5 minutes playing around but with little depth. They have a tongue in cheek timeline about the history of flying and how Jet Blue have saved the scene. Various points talk about the services the airline offer, including this one about their new terminal (do they really want to call it T5 after the Heathrow one?). Looking at the copy, I wonder if the writer is a fan of Blackadder?
There’s an little quiz, which you know will alays end up telling you that you are a Jetter, a link to a jet simulator that does not exist yet and some soduko you can download to do on the plane. Plus a little ‘pilot name’ genorator which is a lot more polite than the hooker names.
I like what was there, it was done really well but I was left with the feeling that I wanted more. The content that was there was great and fun and I enjoyed playing with it but it’s a little too shallow. I also can’t do anything with the content, I can’t take it and place it on my sites to show people I love the brand. The name generator was somethign that would have been perfect to take away. So end result is: Could Do Better
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