'Cross The Breeze

Ouch!

April 28, 2006 by Kris Hoet 1 Comment

A few days ago there was this article on "5 reasons to market movies online" on iMedia Connection. I had expected a bit more specific movie reasoning in there although I fully agree with the point that Brad is making there. We see them using the internet for a long time already, but that's most of the time limited to the official movie websites with synopsis, trailer, cast & some desktop downloads. Not a lot of them are using the online in a more creative way and as Brad points out: they should.

I remember research we did at Kinepolis when I was still working over there, that showed that 60% – 70% of all people visited Kinepolis actually used the Kinepolis website to get some information related to that visit. I always thought that was a pretty impressive number. And the best of it is that they probably used other online sources too. And as you can see on iMedia Connection, entertainment just is one of the top destinations online so this really all makes sense.

I do think it's changing already and with The Da Vinci Code for instance we actually see some more creative online stuff pop up. You're having the Quest that Columbia is running with Google, you have the Trail that Sony Ericsson is doing (makes sense to see Sony taking full advantages of the movie over it's business units) and I'm pretty sure that we'll see more of this in the coming weeks. Typically with a movie like this, everybody is eager to do something with it. Let's just hope that there's enough advertising in those deals and that it's not just about co-marketing deals. I've worked with distributors for quite a while and that would be my only reservation to all this. It's good that they start to discover the online more than they were before, but it doesn't work on free tickets alone.

I know what I'm going to do. Anybody knows if there's already like an AJAX sort of beta version of what Moviecritic.com used to be doing in the nineties? If not, I think I just might.

If you want to see the full presentation that Brad from iMedia Connection has pulled together on this, you can download it here.

advertising, internet, marketing, movies

Tetris

April 25, 2006 by Kris Hoet 2 Comments

Although I don't like Tetris at all, kudos to those who got this up and running. This really is 'big-screen' gaming!

[Via Joystiq]

electronics, games

No Comment

April 23, 2006 by Kris Hoet 1 Comment

[Via Gamerscore]

fun, games

Robot Chair

April 22, 2006 by Kris Hoet 0 Comments

Great! A robot chair that puts itself together whenever it falls apart. Who would want a chair that falls apart in the first place?!

fun, gadgets

Russell Beattie closes his notebook

April 22, 2006 by Kris Hoet 0 Comments

I just read what seems to be the last post on Russell's weblog. Russell works for the mobile team of Yahoo! and I always enjoyed reading his views on mainly mobile related topics. What I do wonder about is why he changed the design of his blog like only a week ago or so, but what the heck, enjoy the break. Good luck at Yahoo! and maybe we'll see you pop up with a new blog sometime in the future.

internet

Mac Matth

April 22, 2006 by Kris Hoet 0 Comments

Or would that be Mad Max? Let me introduce you quickly to Matth, who's one of the owners of Absoluut, the agency we're working with. And yes indeed, Matth is an Apple freak so this gets us into interesting and sometimes quite funny conversations about Apple/Microsoft differences. Now don't get me wrong, Matth does think we're doing great stuff and I also have two Apple computers at home so we recognize eachothers choices but still clearly stick to our own preferred platforms. This week I stumbled upon a post from David Weiss about the Mac Lab at Microsoft (was it Matth who sent it to me?): that's a lot of Macs. If will give us some new food for thought…

electronics, fun

Phil Holden in Brussels

April 21, 2006 by Kris Hoet 4 Comments

Yesterday we had Phil Holden & Kevin Briody from the Redmond team over in Brussels for a special meetup with some of the Belgian bloggers. I think about 15 bloggers were present at the meeting and for us this was a great experience. First of all it's good to have a face that go together with blogs you're reading, but next to that we had an interesting interaction going.

Phil sort of showed a mix of services that will be launched soon (some are already in beta) under the Windows Live brand and it we received some valuable feedback. Some of it proving we're on a good track, some feedback about improvements that we need to make to the services… but that's exactly the reason why we organised the session so that's perfect.

Here you can find some postings of people that were there, which might get an update over the next couple of days:

Coolz0r: Live Dot Com Road Show (crossposted at Inside Microsoft)
LVB: Microsoft presenteerde Windows Live aan bloggers (Dutch) (crossposted at Express.be)
Smetty: Microsoft en bloggers (Dutch) and Live link dump (Dutch)
Matuvu: Exclusive inside
Pietel: Windows Live Roadshow, Belgium (Dutch)
Shoob: Windows Live présenté aux bloggeurs belges (French)
Born On the Web: Windows Live with a feeling (update 22/04)
Kopje Koffie: Microsoft (update 22/04)
Bert: Windows Live Blogger demo (update 22/04)
Lichtgeraakt: Windows in real life (update 01/05)
Digimedia: Windows Live voor wie er niets meer van begrijpt (Dutch) (update 02/05)

The post of Inside Microsoft was also picked up by MSTechToday.

Thanks to all you for being there and keep your feedback coming. Thanks Miel for the pictures! And thanks Phil for basically living on a plane :-)

windows live

YouTube marketing

April 19, 2006 by Kris Hoet 0 Comments

There's an interesting article on USA Today about marketers starting to use YouTube to get there commercials in the community. Partnerships with YouTube like the Scary Movie 4 trailer are getting great results, as well as marketers that aren't officially working with YouTube but just uploading videos on their own like Warner did for its Superman movie. And they're doing the right thing, but whenever you intend to upload your commercial to YouTube, check if it's not on it already. A lot of users are doing the uploading for you. I'm looking forward to do some testing ourselves using YouTube, but with the IE7 commercial and the fake Microsoft iPod packaging video, we already saw some nice results.

[Via Micro Persuasion]

advertising, marketing, movies