Digitally Refreshing

I arrived in Vegas a few days before the MIX09 conference so I could revisit my birth country (my family and I left when I was 9) and take in a few of the sites.

Sunday was spent on an Adventure Photo Tour which was a great sightseeing opportunity but hardly a ‘Photo’ tour as the website suggests. Pitching up with my Canon 5D and tripod must have seemed odd to the camera-phone wielding group. I charming couple even asked me how to switch off the flash on their automatic so it wouldn’t startle the helicopter pilot.

Monday and Tuesday were really exploratory days. Me, with camera, on foot. The sun was out and it was hot, I mean really hot, so my bar stops were many and quite frequent. This obviously took it’s toll on me and I spent the rest of the week alcohol free. Probably a good thing as then I could focus on MIX09!

The conference

Watched a great opening presentation, setting the pace and excitement for the next three days. I especially liked Bill Buxton and all his energy. Stack Overflow (a bit like a Yahoo! answers for programmers) is technically great and a fab resource too. Netflix showed just how good Silverlight can be. And if you’re still not convinced take a look at the Rolling Stone back issues site (not live yet). Great design and love the way it feels.

See Expression Blend in action, from concept to production. Need too many words to explain, so just watch.

At the end of a long day I attended the launch party at TAO, where I met some great people – mostly Microsoft partners, all out to have a good time and talk about technology.

Friday was probably my favourite day. This was down to fascinating presentations by Luke Wrobleski (I even bought his book) – Web form design and Dan Roam – The way of the whiteboard.

Both sessions were packed full of great ideas and examples that I can bring back to PruHealth and PruProtect and implement on our sites.

Overall the conference was great, the venue fantastic and the people, both presenters and attendees friendly and interesting. I’ll definitely pester my boss for the budget to go again next year!

And finally, a big thanks to Conchango for inviting me!

Further reading and viewing:
A list of all speakers

Check out some photos taken at MIX09

I visited Information-Revolution.org with all the excitement of surfing in the nineties, only to be disappointed at the end result. At first glance I thought that some company had spent a great deal of cash creating a ‘revolutionary’ ad campaign (as seen on the television and all over the tubes) for the sake of pointing out that people use Google quite a lot.It’s an interesting idea, if web users request information through one source, that source could manipulate said information to their advantage. Interested, I read on.

After the propaganda style intro text (which you had to irritatingly scroll through within an iFrame) I was drawn the ‘alternate search engine’ area. Ask, Google, MSN and Yahoo were listed – in that order. Ask was selected by default – but I’ll get to that.

Through further research via semi-hidden links at the bottom of the page I found out that it is, in fact, Ask who is behind the site. Then it dawned on me, it’s not that they’re want an information revolution, rather they want a larger piece of the search engine market.

How saddened I was. Probably more irritated that I had allowed myself to be taken in by just another ad campaign.

I’m not going to review the effectiveness of the search engine here, you can look elsewhere for that. But I would like to say that this attempt at changing the way people use the web has got to be one of the most ineffective campaigns out there. I would love to peer over the shoulders of Ask’s marketing department to see the actual ROI of this exercise.

I know people who don’t even know they are using Google to visit websites, Through my experience with user testing I’ve seen many people actually type URLs into Google’s search field to visit sites. They are not even aware of the ‘address‘ bar in their browser. If Ask want people to use their search engine to find information they are going to have to move far, far away form the subversive marketing strategies they employ today.

For every statistic you could hope to get your hands on. NationMaster really does have it all, from coffee drinking to Linux web servers.

Make sure to check out the Internet section.

Pixel Juice will now be called Digitally Refreshing. The pixeljuice.co.za domain will still be alive for a while yet and will point to this website – but I felt it was time for a brand evolution.

Digitally Refreshing far better describes what we do here, which is building digitally refreshing websites!

Now comes the hard bit – the big redesign! I’ve decided to proceed in a way that I’ve never tried before. Why begin with an image typically created in Photoshop, why not just jump straight into the CSS and design from the code up?

Check back for my daily progress. And along the way I’ll make sure to share all the CSS secrets and unwritten rules I find…

The South African Breastmilk Reserve takes pride in "bringing milk to babies, safely"

Based in Gauteng the SABR collects, pasteurises and delivers breast milk to homes and orphanages in need of healthy milk.

With recent appearances on television and related websites, Stasa Kersevan is making strong headway in the fight to keep babies healthy. With the already high number of AIDS mothers’ growing daily, her work here in South Africa is critical.

We were challenged with the creation of a corporate identity for a brand which needed to grab the attention of potential mothers willing to donate milk. We felt that steering clear of conventional "baby" related imagery was a must. SABR needed to make an impact upon its potential donators often from the wall of a nursery or doctor’s room.

I’m all for free content, who wouldn’t be? But, when you can’t trust what you read what’s the point of reading it at all?

Change perspective, imagine you’re the contributor. What if you spend hours researching and writing a piece of content only to have it plagiarised, and what’s more, to have it copied incorrectly?

Last month the prestigious journal, Nature claimed that Wikipedia offered content that was, by far, more accurate than the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Their report was fundamentally flawed and quite frankly, I was horrified to the extent that Nature had lied about what they had published.

Read the original BCC news story. Read what Britannica and Nature had to say.

Now for the theft part of this clip: I’m (Matt) teaching myself how to play guitar. I use a number of sites for reference. One of which is Ultimate Guitar. It’s a great site, loads of music (tabs) and tutorials for free.

However, after trying for hours to get my guitar to make a noise similar to that of a Blood Hound Gang song, I learned that the tutorial I was reading had actually been plagiarised by the Ultimate Guitar’s contributor. It was stolen from another guitar website, Ape Guitar. When I went to the source of the tutorial, Ape Guitar, I was able to spot the mistake I had been making.

Now that publishing to the Internet is almost as cheap and restriction free as preaching in the middle of the town square we (readers and writers) have to keep an eye open to the pitfalls of free and contributed content.

When an ad agency decides to complement an advert with a soundtrack, how much thought do you think goes into the selection of the song or tune?

The most recent Hunter’s advert sports a great beat, Blinded By The Lights, originally performed by The Streets. The lyrics have been changed but the vocals still carry an English accent, and that’s my first question. Why is the new version not sung by a South African?

The chorus is still pretty much the same, sung by a female vocalist, these lyrics begin with “Lights are blinding my eyes…”. However in the ad “Lights are blinding my eyes…” refers to the lack of shade. In the original soundtrack this line refers to the lights within a night club.

Here are a few more lyrics:

Maybe I shouldn’t have done the second one; I feel all fidgety and warm…
(People pushin’ by, and walkin’ off into the night)
Whoa, everything in the room is spinning; I think I’m going to fall down,

Do you think that Hunter’s realise that the original song is about taking ecstasy? Or maybe they did know and felt that their quality beverage, Hunter’s, could help with this line:

“Gotta get rid of this pill taste…”

Coming soon from a friend near you… If ever the advertising industry decides to learn how to execute campaigns on the internet, they may want to start by looking at the success of viral campaigns.

Take The Hoff for instance, and the 22 immutable laws of branding. If The Hoff was a brand, the law of the category would apply (a leading brand should promote the category, not the brand). A category needed to be established to build an audience for viral campaigns of this kind. The category being dodgy 80’s TV stars. For me, the campaign culminated in me having my “I love the Hoff” t-shirt printed. Unfortunately the law of mortality also applies to the Hoff (No brand will live forever. Euthanasia is often the best solution).

Enter Chuck Norris. Chuck Norris can thank The Hoff for establishing the category but this time we see a new strain of viral activity. Where The Hoff viral epidemic spread with photos, Chuck Norris is all about roundhouse kicks. This campaign spread globally almost instantly where the Hoff took months to take off.

The only viral campaign type advertising I have ever seen for a South African company is an ad for Nando’s, who are known for their risky ad campaigns.

Where to go for Viral Campaigns

Internet marketing experts Quirk include a list of links to cool viral clips on their newsletter.

This week on bizcommunity.com I read news of the first viral campaign production company in South Africa opening its doors in Cape Town, I hope to see some of their work in my inbox somehow, soon.

Written by Katherine Gibbon