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An attempt to collect daily thoughts, reviews, musings, and ideas. The thoughts and opinions on this blog are purely my own and do not reflect those of my employer.
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Theme by Heather Rivers
I’m a big fan of Vimeo right now so recently switched me family video sharing to them from YouTube. Just a cleaner site, better quality video and easier to use.
This is a video of my son Eli and I getting ready for bed when he was 5-6 months old.
Philips spot shot for cinema promoting new 21:9 LCD TV. Watch in full screen
Agency: Tribal DDB Amsterdam
Production: Stink Digital London
Director: Adam Berg
VFX: Redrum, Stockholm
Today’s my birthday. And 27 years ago when I was born this animation/video would have blown our collective minds. Doubtful that the Commodore 64, which came out in 1982, could have even handled these high-tech graphics.
Heck, hamster dance blew our minds and that came out in 1998. Look how far we’ve come…
Must read: Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable
Further reading: Rosen’s Flying Seminar In The Future of News
We’re all living in and moving through an increasingly dense data cloud — one that treats “news” in a rather undifferentiated fashion (e.g., breaking news about a plane crash gets juxtaposed with a friend’s Facebook update).
The media companies that survive will be the ones that help us find our way through that cloud.
I enjoyed reading what Freddie Laker had to write in today’s Digital Next. It reflected much of what I’ve been saying [to myself on this sorry excuse for a blog] over the past year here and here.
However I’m not sure I completely agree with everything he had to say about how this approach will influence the future of website strategy, information architecture, usability and design. From what I gathered he basically said this: it won’t.
“In a nutshell, I think the novelty will wear off for a lot of consumers.”
and
”[…]brands will keep in mind that consumers also like their sites to be nicely packaged. Moving forward, businesses will create sites with a far higher level of aesthetic value[…]”
In response to the “novelty wearing off” - it already has - the novelty of brand sites wore off years ago. Which is why you see brands like Modernista! and Skittles innovating and redefining what a brand site is. They took a step back and realized that a brand site doesn’t require an old-school agency controlling every aspect of the site from leading to color palette to trademarked fonts that require another agency to take it and make it web-friendly…
They realized, in contradiction to Freddie’s other assertion, that “consumers [don’t] like their sites to be nicely packaged,” and that they don’t care about, “higher level of aesthetic value.” They answered the question that every brand should start with and almost all ignore - what role does a website have in my brand’s broader marketing/communications strategy?
Most brands don’t stop to think about if they actually need a website or what it’s role should be - they assume they need a website (because you have to have a website!?!!) and then start dreaming about what it should look like or if it should have a widget. A bread widget. So people can get information on your 12 varieties of bread, on their desktop, all the time.
Awesome.
Lastly, they realized that it doesn’t and shouldn’t require millions of dollars to build a brand site for a sugar-coated sugar candy and millions more to get people to visit it… for 2 pageviews and 35 seconds of “brand engagement”. That it’s more valuable to go where people are already engaging with each other and join the conversation than to interrupt them by flailing your 30k Flash arms and begging click here, only to send them to your brand’s version of Walley World.
This site execution isn’t for every brand, that’s not what I’m suggesting. What I am suggesting is that every brand should adopt the strategic approach that Modernista! and Skittles applied to their sites. Every brand should take a good hard look at their brand, their marketing objectives/strategies, the people that use their product/service and ask themselves: What role does a website play in all of this? Why do we need a website?
The answer may surprise you and, more importantly, delight others.
This is the most elegant explanation, visual or otherwise, I’ve found that makes sense of our current global financial situation.
What’s just as, if not more, interesting than the Credit Crisis video is the thesis behind the project:
“The Crisis of Credit Visualized distills the economic crisis into a short and simple story by giving it form. It is also argues that designers have the ability to see a complex situation, then turn around and communicate it to others. By giving graphic form to the credit crisis, it becomes comprehensible. Not only do economic activities take shape, but new relationships can emerge between these shapes.”
We’ve started to see advertisers use this approach to the :30 spot, as brands try to communicate a lot of information in a simple, meaningful, memorable way. The most recent example of motion design that comes to mind:
What do Skittles candy and the ad agency Modernista! have in common? They’re both letting “the cloud” act as their website as opposed to creating their own site. Why do all the work when hundreds/thousands/millions are doing it for you?
—> Skittles
—> Modernista!
I wrote a love/hate post a while ago about Modernista!s approach, now about a year later Skittles has followed suit. Way to steal a good idea Skittles.
How would this look if some major media company took the same approach to reporting the news? I’d like to see that…
Note: I would defend this idea as ‘good’ regardless of the critics who will, and fairly, point out that they’ve opened themselves up to and may seem to be endorsing a lot of trash - like the post by scoutxxor on their YouTube channel. God help us if scoutxxor is really 23 years old.
