Flyfire. The next beautiful and probably extremely annoying Media Idea.

Februar 24th, 2010 • Comments Experimental
Tags: 3D, Cool, Creativity, Experimental, Firefly, Ideas, Media, MIT, Out of Home

If there is one thing I am pretty sure of then it’s a future stuffed with ads of all kinds at places you would not even think about nowadays. One aspect of it will be based on anything even losely connected to Augmented Reality. Stuff like Layar will finally enable us to wallpaper every freakin’ inch of this planet with virtual billboards. The second way to Open-Space-Advertising could be kicked of by this concept called Firefly. Firefly Flyfire. Flyfire makes little helicopter-like machines fly in formations which can be used to stage 3D information. Thank you M.I.T. for a future that might look great but might well be pretty annoying (via Bewegungsmelder).

Wired. Ready to go iPad.

Februar 17th, 2010 • Comments Media
Tags: Apple, Brands, Cool, Creativity, Experimental, iPad, Media, Print, Strategy, Tech, Trends

Wired Magazine has just launched its video preview for its iPad application. And yes it looks yummy! In fact it is very logical for Wired to be among the first to take this step. I think the iPad will be a piece of hardware to make print publisher’s wet dreams come true and offer a digital platform to buy and consume print media.

As a commenter explained: This visual demo is very likely an Adobe Air demo…which does not work on the iPad yet.

Apple iPad. Endorsed by Print Publishers Worldwide.

Januar 28th, 2010 • Comments Allgemein
Tags: Apple, Burda, Industry, iPad, Media, Murdoch, Print, publishers, Strategy, Tablets, Tech, Tools, Touch, Trend, World

What a week for Hubert Burda! The Grandsigneur of German Publishers, ‘Chairman of the Board and Publisher of Hubert Burda Media, President of the Association of German Magazine Publishers, and co-founder of the European Publishers Council’  must have had a great night last night.

Why? Because it seems to me that he, as one of the most conservative protagonists of paid content on the web, has finally won.  Earlier this week he had opened Burda’s annual digital conference DLD in Munich. A digital conference which looks like all the industry meetings you know from around the world…except that it was hosted by a brand which publicly asked to disappropriate google because of their online media market share. Sounds ridiculous? Well, it is.

Burda described Google as a “killer application” which delivered almost half of all traffic to local journalism Web sites and yet managed to keep almost one-third of all Internet advertising revenues in Germany for itself. “All of that without making any investment of its own in the expensive business of journalism,” Burda noted.

Burda called for amendments to copyright and even suggested that Google should pay for the use of news it had not produced itself. Of course, the search engine wanted nothing to do with this suggestion. (‘Der Spiegel‘, Sept 09)

Actually your failed business model is not my problem

Earlier, in summer 2009, Burda and other publishers had managed to channel their whining about antiquated business model into the Hamburg Declaration of European Publishers. It demanded a ‘fair share’ by search engines like google. Google reacted with an offer to deny robots the access to the publisher’s pages. The conflict went hot. The web manned the battle stations when Silicon Valley started fighting against Munich. Well, and of course it could get even more bizarre when Rupert Mordoch started to ‘threaten’ google to block them from his newspapers and rumors about a Murdoch pact with Bing versus google made the headlines.

Burdoch’s ‘new business model’ was the old one…translated into digital: Making readers pay for stuff they read online.

In the new business model, we will be charging consumers for the news we provide on our Internet sites. The critics say people won’t pay. I believe they will, but only if we give them something of good and useful value. Our customers are smart enough to know that you don’t get something for nothing.

Similar to the music industry publishers never condescended to think about alternative business models. While print advertising revenues worldwide dropped like they were hot, no alternative business model was even explored. The direction was clear: Save mainstream print media at all cost. No matter wether there simply is no need for so many general interest magazines anymore, we do print…with a digital touch to make it look cooler.

The web’s response was unambiguous: Twitter founder Biz Stone commented the Burdoch’s closed payment model will ‘fail fast’ and it would be impossible to ‘put the genie back into the bottle’. Others compared the old men’s inflexibility to the disaster of the music industry etc. In autumn 2009 both, Burda and Murdoch, demasked themselves as dinosaurs – powerful but inflexible, free from creative power and about to make the same mistakes so many others had done before.

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Awesomeness. Your Move BMW.

Januar 10th, 2010 • Comments Ads, Media, We like
Tags: Ads, Automotive, bmw, Cool, Creativity, Funny, Ideas, Media, mercedes, Out of Home, We like

Taken somewhere on the streets of Santa Monica. Adaptive Brand Marketing as we love it (via). Click the picture to see it fullsize.

Private Social Networks. A brief overview of the German situation.

November 24th, 2009 • Comments Social, Trends
Tags: Business, Future, Germany, Media, Predicitions, Social Influence Marketing, Social Networks, Strategy, Trends, World

This little overview about the status of Germany’s private social networks is a Point of View which me and Johannes Kleske were working on for our employer Neue Digitale / Razorfish. It is not an empirical study. It describes a rough status quo in a highly dynamic environment with just few reliable figures. Please understand it as a brief paper which tries to picture the current situation in the extremly unique and difficult market Germany. But it is also a paper which enables us to give a clear recommendation on which platforms are hot or not in our home country.

Germany was always tough terrain for social networks. According to a recent Forrester report on social network use in Europe, “Online Germans remain the hardest to engage with social media“. In terms of total membership, choice of service, international connectivity, etc Germany always lagged behind. There are several possible reasons for this effect: One of them may be a deep traditional concern about privacy issues. Germans tend to believe their personal data might be misused and are skeptical about institutions securing their data properly.  Language barriers (in comparison to UK, US) and a slight skepticism towards new, individualized technology may contribute to the current situation.

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Print Advertising. Yes, it is dead.

November 21st, 2009 • Comments Allgemein
Tags: Ads, Business, Diagram, Media, Print, Strategy, Trends, visual, World

One can argue that he slow death of traditional media is perfectly summarized in Rupert Murdoch’s bizarre war with google. The awl, instead, has just published this diagram which visualizes ad revenue vs newsstand and subscriber sales of major print media titles. It highlights the end of the print advertising era. While sales revenues rise or stay on the same level, ad revenues decline with rocket engines attached to it. I am not convinced, ignorance will restore the status quo (check out the Awl’s post here).

IKEA. Showrooms go Facebook.

November 19th, 2009 • Comments Ads, Experimental, Social
Tags: Brands, Case, Cool, Creativity, Facebook, Ideas, Lifestyle, Media, Presentation, Social Influence Marketing, Tags, We like

There are ideas in this world which are just a little bit better than others. This IKEA case is one of them. Forsman & Bodenfors was armed with just a small media budget and invented this simple campaign for the Swedish furniture store. Thanks Griffin and mab397 for the link.

Adaptation Marketing. Miracle Whip on the fast lane.

November 13th, 2009 • Comments Ads, Brands, Experimental, Ideas, Media, We like
Tags: Adaptation Marketing, Brands, Colbert, Cool, Creativity, Experimental, Fast, Funny, Ideas, Media, Miracle Whip, Real time, We like

About a week ago I reviewed Forrester’s concept of Adaptive Marketing – a framework in which brands react fast on a given context using the means of microstrategies. This week Miracle Whip showed how this might look like. Background: On October 15 Comedy Central’s notorious Stephen Colbert made fun of Miracle Whip’s new ad campaign which stages urban, young hipsters doing fancy stuff with Miracle Whip (you know what I mean).

As a traditional brand you would not react on it. But now comes Adaptive Marketing into play: Miracle Whip’s declaration of war to Stephen Colbert ran as full-page ad in various American newspapers only a couple of weeks later, striking back at Colbert (see the full size ad)… “On Thursday, November 12, we will dominate the airspace on your show. With every commercial break, your viewers will be exposed to hardcore Miracle Whip attitude and revelry. You will see our legion of (as you call them) “mayo nay-sayers” snarfing sandwiches topped with our one-of-a-kind flavor in a very cool and totally hip way. They will be in your face and massively dope. It goes without saying, they WILL NOT TONE IT DOWN.”

And

“We’re on a mission.

We’re taking no prisoners. We’re raising Hell, Man.”

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Mercedes. How Razorfish activated for the E Class.

November 4th, 2009 • Comments Allgemein
Tags: Activation, Ads, Agencies, Automotive, Banner, Brands, Cool, Media, Razorfish, visual

My employer Razorfish won the Mercedes USA account about a year ago. The agency had worked for Mercedes AMG for quite some time, but winning the mothership was something different. Now, after the first couple of projects they have created this video showcasing the ad campaign for the Mercedes E Class (via my colleague David Deal). To be honest: I would definitely have chosen a different tune for the presentation, but the banner concepts are really nice. I saw the first NY Times banner ad live in action – and it was pretty cool.

Mercedes-Benz – 2010 E-Class launch from peter knierim on Vimeo.

Online Advertising. Humans bow down to google.

Oktober 27th, 2009 • Comments Brands, Business, Media
Tags: Advertising, Brands, Business, Diagram, google, Media, Strategy, Trends, World

O….kay, google, way to go. (All figures in 1,000$)

Found on Silicon Alley Insider