4 P's

* Personalization: The author here refers to customization of products and services through the use of the Internet. Early examples include Dell on-line and Amazon.com, but this concept is further extended with emerging social media and advanced algorithms. Emerging technologies will continue to push this idea forward.
* Participation: This is to allow customer to participate in what the brand should stand for; what should be the product directions and even which ads to run. This concept is laying the foundation for disruptive change through democratization of information.
* Peer-to-Peer‘: This refers to customer networks and communities where advocacy happens. The historical problem with marketing is that it is “interruptive” in nature, trying to impose a brand on the customer. This is most apparent in TV advertising. These “passive customer bases” will ultimately be replaced by the “active customer communities”. Brand engagement happens within those conversations. P2P is now being referred as Social Computing and will likely to be the most disruptive force in the future of marketing.
* Predictive modeling: This refers to neural network algorithms that are being successfully applied in marketing problems (both a regression as well as a classification problem).

My Mouse Has Gone

I've given up on my mouse in favour of a tablet.

1. It's a bit of variation


2. It's making me think about different interaction methods - namely touch

But it's actually amazingly intuative and eficient when you stop treating the pointer like a mouse and instead treat the rectangle of the tablet as your desktop. Navigating the whole area of the screen is amazingly fast.

Let's see how long this lasts.

Me 2.0

The number of RFP's arriving for work that essentially recreates and reformats exisiting applications is going through the roof. Everyone it seems wants their own YouTube or MySpace or Facebook. Why not leverage the power of those tools in themselves, play with the APIs, harnes their audience and try not to reinvent the wheel, it rarely suceeds and is almost always very expensive or under powered.

Most Contagious

The guys at Saatchi & Saatchi introduced me to this little gem. Contagious Magazine is a publication about the most innovative and interesting marketing strategies and campaigns currently going on. They produce an annual PDF retrospect and It's well worth a read. www.contagiousmagazine.com
http://www2.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif

Data Visualization

an excellent collection of data visualisation interactives.
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/08/02/data-visualization-modern-approaches/

Panic Sweeps Ad Land

Grey have recently hired an Exec CD who's actually got 'Digital' experience and it seems to have spread a wave across blogs questioning if the end is nigh for ad creatives without digital experience.

People: Don't panic, can't we just all live happily ever after? You don't need to know too much about digital really, just that you can put your TV ad on a special site and slap the URL on the end of the TV ad. Simple.

Here's the full story.

Problems and Solutions

I've just scrapped a post about the differences I've seen in interactive departments of ad agencies and interactive design and build agencies. My main point was going to be that at an ad agency you're more likely to be given a brief which outlines a problem or objective whereas at a design and build agency you're generally presented with a project your client has already conceived and just wants the agency to design and build.

It's pretty obvious when you think about it, it's just I hadn't thought about it long enough - clearly.