chris dalrymple - blog

Another example of ad execs not looking very far for their next idea, the brilliant Flight of the Conchords seem to have been ripped off by Coors Beer.

bears more than a little resemblance to:

But sadly it's not exactly uncommon. See Sugar Puffs vs Mighty Boosh, Pot Noodle vs Lazy Sunday and Sony vs Kozyndan.

I admit, it's always going to be difficult to come up with something genuinely new (see Copyblogger's latest post), but despite the fact that there are still some stunning , effective ads around.

The easy route is of course to borrow something cool from the internets that will appeal to the yoof market. But I'd suggest though that the longevity of something truly original will be a lot longer than something nicked off YouTube.

Labels: advertising, marketing

So last week I popped down to the big smoke for Internet World, a online/media/marketing type trade show with seminars from a range of people from the BBC to Microsoft to Mozilla.

What was interesting was the general 'noob' vibe around the place (punter-wise at least). Not that I claim to be a veteran of online marketing, but there were huge crowds around the 'older' online seminars - Google University, basic SEO, PPC etc. Conversely, there seemed to be a lack of interest in the newer side - 'web 3.0' stuff like virtual worlds, in-game advertising etc.

Anyway, clientele aside, I took a few random (being the operative word - this is by no means a complete summary) snippets from the various seminars which I thought note-worthy.

> Mobile - Interesting talk from BBC Worldwide. Only 22% of UK mobile users have 3G. Google the most visited website through mobile in the UK, followed by the BBC and O2's mobile portal - simple, information driven content.

> Virtual Worlds - 80% of Internet users are expected to have virtual world self within the next 4 years (not sure of the source of that stat - slightly dubious myself). This being the way people will predominantly interact online in the future, including for ecommerce.

> Viral Marketing - Many commented on the difficulties of getting sufficient momentum for Viral. The key being the core proposition or product has to be rock solid and something the customer would ordinarily forward/talk about anyway (see the Dyson AirBlade). The value agencies then add is the delivery mechanism and 'packaging' of this idea to ensure it is passed along. 'Fun games' don't work any more and distribution costs need to be comparable to the creative costs to gain sufficient momentum.

> Presentation from Thomson.co.uk - currently the highest trafficked travel agent online. In general there is a 20% year-on-year movement from offline to online holiday transactions.

> They've made a huge investment in technology and agencies - WebCredible and FoolProof for Usability/User testing, IntelliTracker/Visual Sciences for Analytics. Lots of A/B and MultiVariate testing and a huge focus on removing obstacles to conversion. They use Tealeaf (http://tealeaf.com) for real time analysis of customer activity.

I realise this is a pretty random assortment of snippets - I might flesh it out a little more if I get chance. However the really interesting one for me was Virtual Worlds - Justin Bovington, from Rivers Run Red, Ed Bartlett from IGA and Phil Guest from Habbo Hotel did a great job of debating the ins and outs of virtual worlds, raising some interesting points along the way. I'll try to blog that fully over the next couple of weeks...

More complete write-ups can be found here and here.

Labels: internet, internet world, marketing

"Each of Mozilla's conference rooms is named after a deprecated HTML tag". Brilliant.

Labels: geeky, mozilla

Great blog post from Cabel.name about adverts in Japan using search suggestions instead of URLs to guide people to websites.

The main reason is seems is the difficulties of using the internet with both Japanese and Latin alphabets - searching in Google means not having to switch keyboards. It also makes life easier when so many Japanese use the web via mobile.

In fact, more people search for 'hotmail' in Google than search for 'DVD'.

The only problem is, once you've decided to publish a 'search for...' how do you make sure you always stay top?..

Labels: google, japan, search, seo

Well actually, it doesn't. It just records all the stupid things you do. Interesting article from the BBC about the perils of online paper trails, especially if you're just about to enter the big wide world of employment.

The inability to delete your emo-tastic MySpace profile aside (ever heard of privacy settings?), it's definitely something people should think more about - especially if you've spent your formative years as an online AOL 12 Y3AR OLD SCRIPT KIDEI LOLZ!.

On a few occasions before meetings or job interviews people have asked me about my blog (hello if you're doing pre-meeting research). Because of this I'm very aware of what I write which might incriminate me later, but to a certain extent I just have to live with it - I'm sure any determined Googler could find something untoward if they looked hard enough.

However so long as you're sensible with your privacy settings, use an alias if you want to spill salacious gossip about your colleagues on a public message board and be careful who tags photos of you dressed like a fairy on facebook, you should be fine.

Labels: bbc, facebook, google, myspace, privacy

Little chance for blogging at the moment due to a dizzyingly busy couple of weeks at work, however just enough time to say, this is almost stupidly pretty, however it is also stupidly expensive, and this place makes rather nice wine.

Labels: macbook, wine