‘Made For Each Other’ by Frito-Lay
Check out the latest offering from the good folk at Goodby, Silverstein & Partners for Frito-Lay. A cute, beautifully illustrated environment where the user’s task is to play match-maker between the chips and dips - hence the campaign, ‘Made for each other‘.
I had a lot of fun hunting around, interacting with the various characters and playing some of the hidden games. Some elements were slow to load, but hey, blame Australian infrastructure for that.
The combination of 2D and 3D illustration is really well done and the characterisation pretty cool. Some of the ‘blobs’ even reminded me a little of the ‘Sensibles‘ campaign for Spring Valley.
A safe online network for sick kids
Finally, there’s a safe and fun online community dedicated to young people (aged over 10 and under 21 years) living with a serious illness, chronic condition or disability - Livewire (www.liverwire.org.au).
The media are touting it as a “Facebook and MySpace for sick kids” where sharing experiences takes place on an equal level. Here kids can talk about their situations in a comfortable, guarded community, safe from judgement and cyber bullying. In fact, the Federal Police have actually developed part of the program.
Livewire is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Starlight Children’s Foundation and is supported by funding from the Australian Government under the Clever Networks Program and in-kind contributions from Starlight and Livewire partners.
It’s been trialled and tested over the last few months with a staged roll-out and hopes to sign up 20 000 members this year.
Facebook crumbles in the face of people power
So Facebook has done a giant backflip. This isn’t the first time, but it comes on the back of a statement made by Mark Zuckerberg under a month ago saying people would just have to put up with the new regime: no more softly softly approach to the instigation of site-wide changes.
Well, Facebook overnight posted the following message above everyone’s feed:
If you haven’t been following, the story is pretty simple. Facebook changed it’s terms of service to state that they can use, modify or even sublicense all content you’ve ever uploaded to the site. The real killer however, is the fact that this remains the case even if you quit the network. You can read some more on this and some very interesting comments on The Consumerist.
This debate is one that’s not going to die quietly. It may not always be about Facebook, but the underlying copyright and usage issues will always be there. Check the fineprint, investigate things like Creative Commons licenses and be aware that what you put out there is in other people’s hands.
MySpace v Facebook - stats don’t lie, or do they?
It seems to be all over the digital press, so here’s a quick summary of what’s going on in the battle between MySpace and Facebook.
The January stats are in from the States (courtesy of compete.com via cnet) and show Facebook in the lead with about 68 million unique visitors, well ahead of MySpace on 58 million. Of interest, is the rise of Twitter, sitting pretty in third spot.
One of the founders of MySpace, Brett Brewer, revealed in an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald this week, that “MySpace would still grow strongly (this year) but not as fast as Facebook.” Figures from closer to home, support Brewer’s view, with Nielson Online reporting that MySpace users have declined by 400 000 users over the past year while Facebook have signed 2 million. This is a big turnaround from September 2007 when MySpace had double the number of Facebook users.
How do they monetise all these users… don’t ask Rupert Murdoch, he’s been out discussing (and looking for answers to) this very topic this week.
As for the way statistics are reported, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) has been vocal of late in it’s quest to develop a standard measurment system to avoid losing the confidence of advertisers. Paul Fisher, the CEO of IAB Australia, has called for an end to online metrics like ‘unique browsers’ and ‘unique visitors’ in place of a more accountable and truthful metric.
The IAB believe that vast inaccuracies occur with measurement when factors such as cookie deletion and multiple IP addresses are not dealt with accurately.
Digital bus stops - Cadbury goo the egg
Interactive bus shelter panels are nothing new - think bluetooth movie downloads, searchable maps and so on, but this game for Cadbury by Saatchi & Saatchi London takes it to the next level. What a great little branded time-waster. Surely there’ll be some great extensions to this idea in the future.
Ikea tries something different…
Checkout Ikea Sweden’s new storytelling site for their PS range of eco-friendly solutions (thanks to Adverblog for the heads-up). The site mixes, beautiful cutout-style animation with video and audio in a really successful manner.
Through a rather bizarre setting of flying objects, the user is encouraged to make a selection and watch a short video about the object through its designer’s eyes. Each of the settings is different and appropriate to the ’story’ being told.
Not being fluent in Swedish makes certain elements within the navigation difficult, but you do get the general gist of what’s going on. Upon a second viewing, I discovered the slide-up navigation on the bottom which stopped me from returning to the ‘weird flying objects’ scene each time - much easier!
Article - Ad Declines in Mass Media Seen as More Than Just Economic (Wall Street Journal)
Very interesting article on The Wall Street Journal this morning where the CEO’s of Disney and News agree that consumer behaviour is playing a large part in the downturn of ad revenue online and not just the economic woes we’re currently seeing. Advertising, as we know it is changing.
I challenge you not to click
I really don’t want to be the spoiler, so watch the clip and see how you go. For me, the temptation was too great.
If you are tempted, here’s the site.
The Christian Bale remix
If you’ve missed Christian Bale’s tirade on the set of Terminator Salavation, then you’ve been living in a hole. You’ve got to feel for the Director of Photography on this one. Anyway, there’s T-shirts, appreciation societies, petitions and so on, and YouTube is swamped with clips - none funnier than this, the ‘Bale Out Remix’:
Australia - the bit that broke off
Great little video done for Kea - a New Zealand-based talent community. Good example of some really simple (cheap) animation being carried by a clever idea, great copy and humour.