According to the Vegemite website, the inspiration behind the iSnack 2.0 name came from competition winner Dean Robbins two great loves in his life – ‘technology and Vegemite’. Given that Dean is a graphic and web designer I guess it’s lucky that he didn’t call it; ‘Adobe Creative Sweet 4‘ or ‘Mac OS X Snack Leopard’

Tom O’Donnell, from the Australian Institute of Sales Marketing and Management, has pointed out in the Herald Sun:

“… they couldn’t have bought the advertising space which the interest in this name has generated”.

It was either a very clever marketing ploy or or a “very stupid decision”.

What is beyond question though, is the unsavory taste the name has left in peoples mouths. Observing todays online chatter was like watching an unsuspecting tourist gag on their first mouthful of the original ‘Veg’. Luckily though, I have thought of a few other great products that could benefit from some nonsensical technical lexicon. Here are just a few fine examples -

• Semantic Speedos
• Holden Quicktime
• Libra Mac Minis
• Arnotts Macbook AirBiscuit

So what do you guys think? If you reckon you have a killer name up your sleeve, let us know. Best suggestion wins a ‘priceless’ igloo incubator book.

Rockwell from Jordan Clarke on Vimeo.

I’m in a game mode at the moment. Stumbled across a great website for Red Bull. Check out the Red Bull Soapbox Racer. Its an interactive racing game site that lets you customize your drivers, tracks and create your very own car out of a cardboard. Who says you can only have interactive fun with a wii – the 3D graphics on the site is amazing! It just makes you think the evolution of online flash games in the digital world has changed dramatically.

Zipcar is a rapidly growing car share idea in the US, that is making thousands of urbanites re-think the way they drive. With manufacturers like BMW, Honda and VW involved and major player like Ford and Hertz wanting a slice of the action, this could be the start of the next automotive revolution.

Some Banners in the Works

We’ve been spending a fair bit of time working on banners for a variety of our clients this week, and, as ever, this involves a lot of thinking about what constitutes a good banner ad. A strange thing is, this doesn’t necessarily mean a cool looking banner ad, or even something that works well in isolation, or on banner blog.   Successful banner advertising needs to be attention grabbing enough that you don’t just zone it out, which is easy to do online. Because the success of a banner’s being measured by clicks, it’s not enough for it to be attractive and mildly diverting like a print ad. But it also needs to catch the attention without being over the top or annoying. It’s a balancing act.

The are different ways to achieve this balance. One way is through being smart -like these ads, reported in Mashable this week for the Jay Leno show. They were basically just a countdown clock to the show beginning, timezone sensitive. Smarter still was this New Zealand campaign aimed at reducing texting while driving. By demonstrating, literally, how distracting receiving a text can be, the ads pack a huge punch.

Let’s Play Games

Games are another pretty common way of making banner creative engaging. And for all the annoying ‘Dunk the Kid” style pieces of creative that pop up, there some which really catch the eye. This Burger King banner, takes a really simple puzzle, but by mixing it with some attractive creative, and clever browser-shaking technology, makes it interesting and engaging. This Orange banner from the UK mines similar territory – a simple game backed by some attractive, fun execution. It’s really worth noting the simplicity – if a banner’s call to action requires people to think too much, they’ll get frustrated and move on to the next thing.

Windscreens as Monitors

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about how new augmented reality technologies have the potential to change our lives. It seems those changes are coming even sooner than we expected.  Lexus’s new hybrid, the HS, has just been released in the US.  The car has several pretty unique features (well explained here on it’s site), including radar, sonar and infrared, but the one that stuck out for me was the something they’re calling “Heads Up Display”. Basically, it’s all the information you usually look down for – audio, speed and GPS info. It all seems a bit distracting, but apparently the technology has been used by the military since the 1960′s. The site itself is also worth a look – rather than just listing the car’s features, there’s lot of quite well presented information about why they’ve decided to include them.

We came across a great bit of creative created by Spike for London’s Metropolitan Police. London’s been hit by a wave of knife crimes recently, and the interactive campaign, “Choose Your Own Ending” deals with a disturbing and complex issue in a way that’s clever, thought provoking and, except for the Chipmunk clip at the end, avoids “Just say no” cheesiness that plagues a lot of youth oriented creative. Top notch.

The News on News

As I’ve noted in the Dump a few times lately, cracks seem to be appearing in the “every free, all the time” world of content on the internet. In Australia, both Fairfax and News Ltd, the owners of all national dailies except the West Australian, are moving towards a subscriber model. International, the venerable New York Times is doing the same. The reasons for the problems they’re having are fairly obvious – because internet content is free, and newspapers aren’t, more people head online for news. As well, the online advertising model is vastly less profitable than the old newspaper one, readers having a far greater choice online, etc. All of it adds up to newspapers, worldwide, being under a lot of pressure to make a profit.

There have been some interesting reactions from within the industry. In the US, publishers have gone as far as ask Congress to help them develop a new business model.  In Australia, the reaction has been a bit more measured, but still more emotive than you’d expect from hard bitten journo types  – for instance, these comments by Crikey’s Eric Beecher about the “quality gap” the situation is producing.  It’s an interesting argument. It makes sense if viewed solely through the prism of the newspaper industry,  but it makes less sense when the you consider how much more content is now available overall. The other problems with the argument by Beecher and co is that they never quite explain why the “high quality” content will be the first to go when newspapers are suffering.

Regardless of the arguments, what’s clear is that the landscape for content is changing. Tewspaper is an interesting example of where the future might be headed. Basically, it’s an newspaper without writers – an algorithm instead searches social media sites for relevant, localised news content. Crowd sourcing of this kind isn’t new, but something taking on newspapers this directly is. In the end though, even if the content is being aggregated by bots, someone has to produce it, and they have to get a reward for doing so. Whether the end consumer of that content can continue to avoid paying for this reward is the big question.

Facebook lite is just alright

On the subject of companies adjusting to new digital landscapes, Facebook launched Facebook Lite. It’s pretty much what is says on the label – a simplified version of Facebook, which is easier to use, similar to the WAP page. In some quarters, it’s being seen as an attempt at “Twitterizing” Facebook, and while there’s an element of truth in this, there’s a bit more to it than that. In the developing world, broadband infrastructure is extremely limited, mobile phones are emerging as the dominant way for the internet to develop.  As Facebook moves towards saturation-level among it’s core audience (my breakdown of its demographic from a couple of months ago is here), a simpler, mobile friendly version will allow the site to continue to expand in new markets. Smart move.

Monopolising the real world

And to continue with the big business theme…….Before the kids spent their evenings on Facebook, they did useful things like playing Monopoly. The game’s owners, Monopoly, have teamed up with Tribal DDB London and Google to create Monopoly City Streets. A four month promotion, it allows players to purchase streets and construct buildings on any street in the world via Google Maps, and earn income by building schools, wind farms and so on. You can even sabotage your opponants by building prisons and sewage plants near their property, and then view your budding empire through Google Earth. Promoting a new version of Monopoly, you can also win the chance to play in the world Monopoly championships (who knew they existed?) if you become a billionaire. Clever.

Igloo is running a Digital Strategy Workshop at this years Digital Marketing and Media Summit.  The workshop will be a highly interactive session where participants will learn about the key ingredients in bringing a digital strategy to life, and understand how to get the most out of the digital economy.

Topics covered will include:

• A step by step guide to creating a digital strategy for your brand
• Understanding how to measure and implement your strategy
• Creating maximum R.O.I
• Top 5 Do’s/Don’ts

Places are strictly limited, so if interested please download the application from the following link – Application Form

Igloo is excited to welcome Cecilia Waters, our new Front End Developer to the team. Cecilia is an enterprising solutions guru packed with international experience in PHP/mySQL/XHTML/CSS/jQuery and WordPress/CMS plugin and theme developments. She has just recently returned to Australia from sunny Singapore and is ready to take on the challenge at igloo!

She’s also plugged in on all the latest Web 2.0 mashups and APIs like Twitter and Google Maps.

Follow Cecilia on Twitter here

Virtual Reality becomes, er, reality

The last few dumps have been pretty focussed largely on the day to day world of digital media, so this week, I thought I’d have a look at what’s happening at the outer frontiers.

Back in the mid-90′s, when the internet was first entering households on a mass scale and newspaper feature sections were still publishing lead articles about “cyberspace”, Virtual Reality was as hot a topic as Twitter is now.  While the talk of changing the way we live was very exciting, the reality in those days was largely dodgy flight simulators and dodgier science fiction plots.

But now, we have acrossair. Basically it’s a 3d augmented map of the New York and London Undergrounds, using the iphone’s video function. As they explain it:

“When you load the app, holding it flat, all 33 lines of the New York Subway are displayed in coloured arrows. By tilting the phone upwards, you will see the nearest stations: what direction they are in relation to your location, how many miles away they are and what lines they are on. If you continue to tilt the phone upwards, you will see stations further away, as stacked icons.”

While it’s really cool in and of itself, the remarkable thing is where it can lead. For business like restaurants and shops, the potential benefits are both obvious and enormous – imagine being able to view the menu, reviews and visitor’s comment on every restaurant on Brunswick street as you walked along it, for instance. But it can go even further.   This video from Japan is the best example I’ve seen of what the next level will look like. Called the Sekai Camera, it was developed by Japanese firm Tonchidot(their full YouTube channel is worth checking out, too). It’s basically a 3D, augmented reality social media device. It will allow users to leave comments in real spaces, making real environments live 3D social networks.

Dreaming Buildings

Urbanscreen, a collective of media artists and architects from Bremen in Germany, are behind this Bladerunner-esque ‘ buildings that dream’ concept. Basically, they project onto the facade of buildings, which gives the 2d surface depth, time and sound. The implications of technology like this for outdoor advertising are obviously huge, and Urbanscreen function as both an art collective and a media agency, so it can’t be far away from reaching the public sphere. How it’s used will be interesting-  it has the potential to be fantastic if used correctly, horribly oppressive if not.

Fine Fin Fun

Finally, Finland. Nissan Finland have produced a comp which stood out to me for a few reasons.  The concept is quite simple -upload a video or photo of your favourite bike route in Finland, for your chance to win. But the way the content is presented, embedded into a map, is quite cool. The map also features Nissan dealer sites, and locations of Nissan Sport adventure event locations.

The best thing about the com, though, is that it engages at a passion point. Fins love getting into the outdoors (on the four days a year there isn’t 50 feet of snow on the ground and 22 hours of dark, dark night) and cycling is huge over there. This means the content that is being generated for this comp has the potential to be interesting even to people who aren’t there for the prizes, or who aren’t ordinarily Nissan fans. Very well done.