It was inevitable that it would happen eventually, the question is how long can it last?
Bopaboo is a new music download service that allows you to buy and SELL DRM-free music using a similar model to sites like Amazon and eBay.
http://www.bopaboo.com/
Global Beach has won the Best Use of Mobile Marketing, Promotion category for North America with the stunning Jaguar XF mobile campaign.
Creative Director, Matt Conn, came up with the overall creative and decided the best way to proceed was to work closely with specialists Incentivated who provided the underlying technology and speed to market.
To quote the MMA:
“This seriously heavy-weight mobile advertising campaign directed traffic to a purpose built mobile Internet site from where Jaguar enthusiasts could find out details of the new car, download video clips, wallpapers and the TV ad, as well as find their nearest dealer and order an email brochure to be sent to their PC (directing traffic to the even richer website).
The campaign hot all the right notes with the tech-savvy target audience, being fully optimized for all handsets, including Smartphones and iPhones, and was in keeping with the luxury identity of the Jaguar brand. With 55 million impressions booked (and some still to run) across a range of sites including MSN mobile, Yahoo! mobile and Cars.mobi, this is believed to be one of the world’s biggest mobile advertising campaigns to date.”
Praise indeed! See for yourself at www.jaguarxf.mobi
In the wonderful world of advertising no client in their right mind would run a major campaign without doing the ubiquitous research groups bit beforehand – the foundations.
It’s the same with websites – great looks and expensive design are all well and good but if the behind-the-scenes team didn’t lay the foundations first you might be in trouble.
It never fails to amaze me – why are some websites just so frustrating and difficult to use? And why, then, is website usability not higher up the agenda? If you are seriously considering a site redesign or upgrade, put aside a small but friendly sized part of the budget for User Experience testing – right through the IA, design and build phases.
There’s nothing worse than realising the foundations weren’t properly laid and expensive post-launch fixes could have been avoided.
We all know Google reigns supreme when it comes to search (7.6 billion queries per month), but guess what the second most popular search engine now is?
According to ComScore’s recent search engine rankings it’s YouTube. YouTube fetched over 2.6 billion search queries in the month of August, trumping Yahoo’s 2.4 billion. That’s a lot of people searching video and its popularity is set to further explode in the next few years.
Currently sites like YouTube and Hulu in the US account for 50% of all internet traffic and that’s predicated to rise to 80 percent by 2010,
AT&T’s VP Jim Cicconi raised serious concerns about the physical capacity of the internet at a recent Westerminister eForum “In three years’ time 20 typical households here in London will generate more traffic than the entire Internet did back in 1995.” Cicconi argued that the “unprecedented new wave of broadband traffic” currently flooding the tubes will increase to 50 times what it is now by 2015.
So who’s using all this bandwidth and what are they watching? Apparently 10% of people consume 80% of the available bandwidth, 0.5% swallow 40% of the bandwidth, and the rest of us, use less than 10%.
So when the other 90% of internet subscribers move away from their average daily 3.57 hours of television and discover youtube, what’s going to happen? Will we all be fighting for bandwidth to watch the content we want, when we want it or will we all agree to just watch what is popular? In the UK, with 60,375,106 views on YouTube that’s, Charlie bit my finger – again !, and the Leona Lewis – Bleeding Love video. L
I managed to get sight of a proposal from a competitor last week for a piece of development work that we eventually won and was suprised that they were advocating a waterfall style approach with a pretty comprehensive up-front requirements gathering and specification writing stage. Now whatever you may feel about the pros and cons of Agile, surely nobody really still believes that months of requirements gathering and specification writing is the most cost-effective way to build a web site?
The process of gathering requirements and system design is always thought of as a pretty linear process. The theory goes that as you gather more and more requirements you are better equipped to organise them and create the perfect system. Basically the relationship between understanding and time is one-to-one. A bit like the graph below.
Linear requirements process
If this was the case then it would make sense to spend the necessary time gaining a complete understanding of the system. Not only is each quanta of time (let’s say a day) worth the same, if you spend enough of them you will eventually get to a state of perfect understanding which will allow you to go off and employ a team of developers to build the perfect system without any further thought.
Now everybody knows that this doesn’t actually work in practice and however much effort you spend designing a system there will always be things that for whatever reason don’t quite work in the real world. Not everyone is quite so keen to admit that the theory is flawed so normally the blame is put on the implementation of the process:
“We really must make sure our design is more comprehensive next time.”
In reality the process of gathering requirements and system design is not linear. There’s normally a pretty steep curve at the beginning of the process as you get an idea of the core requirements and this tends to level off the more time that is spent. Arguably you never really get complete understanding and you can certainly never design the perfect system.
I think the curve looks a bit like this one:
Actual requirements process
So, there comes a point where it’s not really worth gathering any more requirements or spending any more effort designing the system as each day that is spent brings less and less extra knowledge.
Common sense tells you that you should stop trying to increase understanding at a point when the curve starts to level off and start building something.
When to start building
The trick is knowing how long it’s going to take to reach that point, recognising that you’ve got there and knowing what to do next…
Today I learnt that 5% of Mercedes drivers have 2 or more Tattoos. Well 5% of the 450 people in the UK they surveyed anyway.
How do I know this?
Lucky me, Mercedes have targeted me as a prospect. Which means I get a personalised piece of DM through the post aimed at getting me to visited http://site.iammercedes-benz.co.uk, a site that tells me facts about Mercedes drivers.
39% have blue eyes, so what…
Whilst there are some nice graphics and a few interesting ways of displaying survey data, I don’t get why this information is relevant to me as a prospect customer.
As well as displaying lifestyle data, the site does make an attempt to convey something about their cars, but unfortunately gets very dull by telling me about peoples average millage or preferred paint colour.
In my mind Mercedes have missed a trick. Firstly, this is still very much a one-way monologue from Mercedes. The site doesn’t encourage two-way dialogue, or try to establish anything about me the prospect.
Secondly, this would have been a great opportunity for Mercedes Drivers to express how they FEEL, not just what the ARE.
A great example of this is www.wefeelfine.org/
We Feel Fine automatically scans blog posts for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. It then presents the information back in really interesting and exciting ways, that make you want to explore the information and why people feel the way they do.
The other big advantage with this site is it updates automatically every ten minutes. It saves between 15,000 and 20,000 feelings per day rather than relying on static survey data that has a limited shelf life.
I guess the only problem with that approach is Mercedes being confident that their drivers FEEL good about driving a Mercedes.
“You don’t really know where you are, and are looking for a good place to eat. You pull out your laptop, fire up Firefox, and go to your favorite review site. It automatically deduces your location, and serves up some delicious suggestions a couple blocks away and plots directions there.”
Last week Mozilla Labs announced Geode, a geolocation add-on to Firefox 3.
Geode gives the ability for websites to gain access to your location without the use of GPS. Instead it uses Skyhook’s Loki technology, which uses WiFi to determine your location within a second and with an accuracy of about 10-20 meters. Whist this won’t work in remote areas, it does however have a big advantage over GPS. It works inside buildings! No longer do you have to be outside to get location based services.
The example at azarask.in/local/ found 522 Fulham road straight away without me doing anything, so clearly it works.
Whilst finding restaurants does have its uses, I’m sure we’ll start to see some better applications of the technology soon.
Let me know if you find any.
