French Connection Challenge: Smart use of Chatroulette

Everyone from the mainstream media to celebrities is obsessing over Chatroulette, the website that randomly connects users through one-on-one videochat with strangers around the world.

This new “internet sensation”, is definitely an opportunity for advertising and the people at Poke London managed to do something really smart with it. They developed a promotion for French Connection. In essense you had to seduce a woman via Chatroulette then send evidence to French Connection for your chance to win $250.

Find out more about it on the French Connection Blog

Via BrandDNA

Best of Communication 2.0 in 2009

Best Online Planning Tools

Best Resources for Desk Research using online sites, tools and applications:

• Professional Insight - the big “traditional” resources that cost a *lot* of money

Mintel – Big, hefty market intelligence reports

TGI – Market Research surveys and analysis

Forrester – More editorial reports on specific pertinent topics

WARC – the bible of marketing and advertising specific insight

Datamonitor - business specific insight and intelligence

LexisNexis – news aggregation service

Nielsen – the mecca of insight. Tools, papers, resources, everything

eConsultancy – digital marketing specific insight

• If your agency does not have access to these expensive resources, you can access them via:

RoyalMail Infobank – A great resource in Holborn where you can use these resources for FREE

IPA Information Centre – the lovely people here can do searches for you if you are an IPA affiliated agency

• Industry Information - the “obvious” trade rags and blogs and their wealth of news, articles and commentary

BrandRepublic – Central news resource for advertising and media

AdAge – Global news resource

Creativity – creative led news and opinion

Adverblog – great aggregator of great ads

Adrants – more advertising stuff from around the World

This is an ad – blatant plug for mine and Toby’s “alternative” advertising aggregator

Planners Blogs – the Plannersphere wiki of all the planner’s blogs (not all are active anymore)

• Ideas Conferences - source of inspirational presentations

TED – the ultimate video resource of truly inspirational speakers

GEL Conference – more brilliant presentations from the Good Experience Live Conferences

Interesting – Tons of stuff from Russell’s Interesting conferences from around the world is online

• Business Insight - the kind of planning resource that makes you credible to the big cheeses

Economist – don’t underestimate the amount of cleverness hidden here. CEO’s and Marketing Directors adore it when planners quote economist articles.

• Digital Marketing Insight - for when you have to justify that increasing digital spend

IAB – Brilliant resource for internet stats and case studies

User Experience Insight - understanding the experience of your brand as well as the message

Boxes and Arrows – great Information Architecture insight

Good Experience – Mark Hurst’s brilliant user experience resources

• Marketing Trends - seeing where the market, consumer and brands are heading

Springwise – new business ideas from around the world

Trendwatching – consumer trends, with brilliant monthly trend briefings

PSFK – daily news, ideas and trends aggregator from the lovely Piers Fawkes

Contagious – Quarterly intelligence briefing

• Advertising resources - when you need to look at what the competitors are up to

Visit4info – quite cheap and thorough resource for ATL ads

Lurzer’s Archive – global ad resource

Nielsen AdRelevance – advertising aggregator and analyser

Xtreme Information - competitor media monitoring

• Web trends - getting a wider view of activity on the web

Google Trends – track any online trends you fancy and plot them on pretty graphs

Google Alerts – push delivery via email of every new piece of content around a specified keyword

Alexa – slightly flaky competitor website traffic monitoring

• Professional Buzz tracking - the essential paid-for tools for any social activity

Buzzmetrics – The daddy of buzz metrics tools from Neilsen

Onalytica – a tasty alternative

Integrasco – more “grown up” tracker

• Free Buzz tracking – the free but slightly dodgy suite of buzz trackers. Good for indicative measures.

Trendrr – comprehensive real-time buzz tracking tools

Serph – realtime buzz tracking

Omgili - Find out what people are saying

Trendpedia – buzz tracking powered by Attentio

How Sociable? – understanding how well a brand fares in social media

Addict-o-matic – brilliant visual social buzz aggregator, using an automated NetVibes-type interface

• Search Insight - researching keywords to see what people are searching for

Google AdWords – understand search terms around your product and brand

• Social Bookmarks research - see what people think is important content around a brand or product as opposed to an “engine”

Del.icio.us – The daddy of social bookmarks

StumbleUpon – recommendation driven bookmarking

Digg – news and content with a tech leaning

• Facebook analysis - Seeing how people act on Facebook

Adonomics – bespoke Facebook application tracking (see how crap most of them are)

• Blog research - for understanding what real people are saying specifically on their blogs

Technorati – the Google of Blogs

• Board Trackers - see what the topics for discussion on forums is around key words

BoardReader – Message Board and Forum reader

Board Tracker – and another one

Google Groups – searching groups with Google

• Twitter Research - getting under the skin of what’s happening on Twitter

Twitter Analyzer – A bunch of insightful ways to look at a Twitter account

Tweitgeist – Twitter Zeitgeist

#hashtags – real time monitoring and analysis of topics on Twitter

Twitt(url)y – tracking URLs inserted into Tweets

Twitrratr – automated Twitter analysis tool that sorts Tweets around a term into positive, negative and neutral

Twilert – Like Google Alerts, but for Twitter…

Tweetbeep – …as is this

Xefer – Pretty way to represent Twitter account usage stats

• Researching Video content - understanding what people are watching online

Truveo – online video content aggregator (with great top 10’s)

Viral Video Chart – keeping track of what’s hot, with great trend graphs and tools

Many thanks an please add this great (re)source to the list above!

Ogilvy’s Approach to Digital

Internal stuff stolen from this presentation:

Structure for social:

Via

Eyeblaster Magic

Click for execution

Features:

1. Heaviest banner ever in Romania served on .RO websites, from Eyeblaster. It is weighting a little over 26MB (compared to a standard banner in Romania which is 100Kb – or 200-300 Kb at most for video)

2. The first video interactive banner. By this interactivity it means that the user is questioned and he can answer directly in the banner. Depending on the answers, a different video will be shown.

3.Polling/ Voting- the banner has a polling function which allows the user to choose between different options.

4. Conversion-in-Banner; The first conversion in banner project, that can collect the users` data without taking them to the landing page/separate website. User are encouraged to type in their data directly into the banner, on any website. The data is then redircted to Client’s database.

5. Mouse Tracker;  in order to the users` attention the banner has a mouse tracker features which enables the characters to move after the mouse; generally speaking, the content of the banner is changed depending on the mouse position on the screeen.
The campaign data is monitored & analyzed in real time due to the state-of-the-art ad-serving technology from Eyeblaster. A complete set of actionable analytics tools, including 17 standard reports plus 5 other custom reports, will help optimize the performance and efficiency of the budget spending of the online media campaign.

Brand: Doamna Ghica Plaza

Client: Romfelt Real Estate

Online Creative Agency: Friends Advertising

Online Media Partner: thinkdigital

Ad Serving/ Campaign Monitoring:  eyeblaster

Via ThinkDigital

Best AR Project Seen So Far!

Golden Drum Interactive Winners 2009

Gold went to:

Deus – Link

Agency: Mccanndigital Israel
Group: Interactive
Award: Golden Drum

Volkswagen Web Special “Volkswagen 2028″ – Link

Agency: argonauten G2 GmbH – a member of Grey | G2 Group (City: Berlin, Germany)
Group: Interactive
Award: Golden Drum

And Silver:

4th april international day for mine awareness – Link

Agency: Draftfcbi Direktmarketing & Interactive Ges.m.b.H, Vienna
Group: Interactive
Award: Silver Drum

Messages – www.placeforyourmessage.sk

Agency: MUW Saatchi & Saatchi, Bratislava
Group: Interactive
Award: Silver Drum

New Grand Scenic and the Raving Rabbits Tests – Link

Agency: Publicis Net (Paris), Publicis Conseil (Paris)
Group: Interactive
Award: Silver Drum

Nokia sms race – Link

Agency: Mccanndigital Israel
Group: Interactive
Award: Silver Drum

Promosite Sovietsky boutique – www.sovbut.ru

Agency: Red Keds, Moscow
Group: Interactive
Award: Silver Drum

Volvo Ocean Race – Rush: An Interactve Adventure – Link

Agency: Euro RSCG 4D (Amsterdam)
Group: Interactive
Award: Silver Drum

Check-out all the Golden Drum 2009 Winners here

Recent work

www.orasulavon.ro

www.35plus.ro

www.profinete.ro

Paint me a song please

Another cool website found on The FWA:

Visit: LABUAT Website
Programming: BADABING
Idea and Art Direction: HERRAIZ&SOTO

Permission Marketing 10th Anniversary

Seth Godin today:

Short version: Don’t be selfish. You’re not in charge. Make promises and keep them. It’s like dating. It’s an asset, it’s expensive and it’s worth it.

Buy now

Via (the first marketing book i ever read too)