Category Archives: blogging

The computer is personal again

Apart from what I think is a bit of a silly slogan, HP is doing some great work in online advertising lately. This last week, some new HP campaigns came to my attention, and I like them all.

The first one is the HP Personal Again main campaign. Expecially the movies with Pharrell (like Geert pointed out as well) or the one with Mark Cuban are really neat. At the end you can play around with Mark’s computer, make sure to check that out, Steve Rubel seems to like it as well.

hpcuban.JPG

The last one is a sort of extension to this campaign that was created around the World Cup: Fingerskilz.tv! Apparently HP did only put up their brand on this blog halfway through the campaign, but nobody seemed to have had a problem with that (as far as I know). To wrap it up, empty slogan, but some nice ads if you ask me.

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Spinal Tap of agencies?

I really like this remark Clo made on the Agency.com pitch for Subway :-) Thought that it was a good way to start this post. Mixed feelings, that’s the very least you could say. Some people like the way did something new, some think it’s the most stupid thing they’ve ever seen. I’m probably somewhere in the middle this time.

My biggest problem with the video and the blog is that it is indeed lame, like Rubel put it. Apart from the fact that they’ve uploaded it to YouTube and that there was a certain risk in doing that, the video itself shows nothing new at all. There’s no innovation shown in the video, it just shows a classical – boring – approach to a pitch, and that makes it indeed a bit like Spinal Tap. I was looking forward to what Bert (Agency.com Brussels) would say about it, and he says the same thing: the video should have been more fun, not taking themselves so seriously.

The least we can say is that it generated a big discussion, looking at the number of comments everywhere, but also on the latest edition of Across the Sound (ATS#47 – Celebrity Sethmatch) Seth Godin and Joseph Jaffe talked about it for a while. And it generated some spoofs as well, like this one from Coudal (pitching Arby’s for the moment, you’ll see why).

Keep Agency.com in the pitch? Geert would, but I’m not sure. They clearly are up for a viral stunt, but creativity was not top. Curious to see how this will evolve anyway.

Not enough drama?

Why do they do that? Isn’t there enough ‘drama’ in the image? This weekend bloggers found out about a photo that had been manipulated, faked by a Reuters’ photographer. In a really clumsy way, he added smoke to the image of Beirut to make it more dramatic i guess. Reuters pulled the image immediately and offered the corrected version soon after, question remains who really altered the image: the photographer or the editor?

Reuters fake:

beiroet-0.jpg

Reuters corrected (original):

beirut-real.jpg

Naked Conversations

About a week or 3 ago I finished reading Naked Conversations. I honestly had my reservations on the book. Although Scobleizer was amongst the first blogs that I subscribed to, and even is the blog that made me think about WordPress when Scoble switched to it… I hardly ever am really interested in the posts. But Tom gave me the book and told me it was quite interesting and I had to read it.

So I did, and I’m happy I did. I enjoyed reading it and I suggest that everyone interested in blogging should do as well. I don’t want to go rambling out which parts are good, which are less, quote some pieces here and there… just read it. And in a true blog-like way, I will now pass on my copy to Geert, I’m sure he’ll like reading it as well.

Meebo WordPress widget

Today a new widget got launched on WordPress.com. It’s a widget that integrates the new MeeboMe service that the people over at Meebo have created. It will allow people to chat with you – personally, no shoutbox – from your webpage whenever you’re logged into the service. I definitely want to test this out with my Windows Live account, but it sure looks good. You can see how it works on Andy Skelton’s blog, who posted the news on WordPress.com as well.

Ad Mashup blog

Yesterday, Advertising for Peanuts launched a new blog, the Ad Mashup blog. A must see. To know what it’s all about, read the blog’s guidelines:

Purpose:
Ad Mashup was created to give the ad community a place to explore, tweak and play around with the medium of advertising, without taking ourselves too seriously. This site is a place for us to experiment, discuss and be creative (while there are no clients watching).

Here’s how it works:
E-mail your best Ad Mashup along with the original ad in its unaltered state. If selected, your Ad Mashup will be posted along with your name and a web address linked back to the site of your choosing.

Ad Mashup guidelines:
We don’t want to see your portfolio work. We don’t want to see you completely redesign and re-write an existing ad. The best Ad Mashups will be the ones where you tweak the least but change the most.

There are already a few examples on the blog to give you an idea. I would love to see some great ad mashups so hopefully a lot of advertising people will respond to it. Hopefully the examples won’t only be from print ads so the mashups extend to other media as well.

Windows Live updates (4)

The fourth edition already of my Windows Live updates postings (number 3 was over a month ago). I got loads of news, links, stories, releases, … that I bookmarked since the last update so let’s hope I can make some sense out of this post, trying to put them all together.

The first big update is the most recent, namely the launch of Windows Live Spaces. It was announced quite a while ago, but here it is: spaces.live.com since a couple of hours ago. New Windows Live UI – of course – but also some new features like the possibility to upload 500 photos per month, friends of friends, RSS integration and gadgets for Spaces just like we know them from Live.com (not in all countries though).

Since my last update mid June, there have also been some updates on Live.com, mainly for Windows Live Search. The caching feature was added (finally) and together with the Messenger team, they added a search activity to Messenger that works really well (US only – screenshot below).

imsearch.jpg

Next up related to search are the Windows Live Toolbar and Windows Live Search Center, the new all in search solution for the desktop. The toolbar was launched in the US just a few days ago, and international releases can be expected soon. If you want to know more about the desktop solution, Darren wrote a post about it’s new UI.

toolbar.JPG

Other launches in the last few weeks: the Official US launch of Windows Live Expo and the start of the UK beta, the international launch of Windows Live Favorites and the beta launch of Windows Live Gallery, where you can get you gadgets, bots, activities, toolbar add-ins, … At experience.live.com you can a new way of presenting what Windows Live is all about.

Some cool Messenger stuff can be found at MSN Cartoon Creator from our Chinese colleagues. You can find a bit more info on how to do this (unless you speak Chinese) on Darren’s blog. The Xbox guys have made some changes as well to the Xbox tab in Messenger where you can now see your Xbox Live friends as well.

Finally, it ain’t over ’till it’s over, there is indeed a lot more to come. As you can read on Liveside, there’s more mobile on the way and Windows Live Drive maybe?

Blogger profiling fun

Mack Collier at the Viral Garden has a fun post on different types of bloggers. It’s a fun top 10 and whenever you’re reading some of the blogs that are out there, you most certainly recognize some people ;-)

Here’s 3 examples, but make sure you go read the full top 10 at The Viral Garden.

1 – The Godfather. He invented blogging, and then wrote the first book on the subject. One link from him will give your blog as much traffic as it gets in a month. Likewise, if you piss him off, he will flame you, which is the same as credibility-suicide. As a result, no one has the stones to tell him that he hasn’t made a lick of sense since at least 2003.

2 – The Conference Groupie. Attends each and every blogging conference, clapping furiously at every A-Lister’s speech and giving meticulous accounts of how he met every A-Lister that attended, although none of them will admit to meeting this blogging everyman on their own blogs.

3 – I call bullshit. The blogger that loves to hit every A-Listers’ blog, trying to knock them out of their ivory towers, and back down to earth. Calls them all windbag assholes, but secretly envies their superior links and traffic.

4 – …

Check it out.

WordPress in Live.com

Geert at Brandopia just wrote about this cool Live.com gadget for WordPress. I hand’t seen this before, but looks pretty cool. I installed the gadget on my Live.com page and played around a bit with the gadget. Although I don’t think I’m going to use it to blog with – way too small, no links… and I already have enough tools to blog from I guess – I like that I can have some stats from my blog on my Live.com page. I hope they ad some of the other available statistics as well, that would be great.