attention

Hands-on with Second Screen: Bonus Blu-ray features on your iPad

While my iPad has become a second screen in many ways--as an e-reader, social-networking pane, video viewer, and more--a new series of apps from Disney is ready to take that into a whole new direction. Disney's Second Screen is a series of apps that take over your iPad and offer up a second screen of information during movie viewings, acting as a disembodied set of bonus features.

Second Screen is a feature that's currently offered on Disney's "Tron" and "Bambi" Blu-ray discs. Each movie has its own app in Apple's App Store. These apps are free, and hefty, too--the "Tron: Legacy" app clocked in at over 800MB, the "Bambi" app comes in at 498MB. However, you can't do anything with the app without activating a "Magic Code" found inside the Blu-ray disc's box. I made the mistake of downloading the app and leaving the Blu-ray box in the office, taking home the disc in a plastic sleeve. Unfortunately, the disc itself can't unlock the app, so I had to wait till the next day to Second Screen my home "Tron: Legacy"-viewing experience. Bottom line: don't lose that code.

The cleverest part of the whole Second Screen idea isn't its content: it's the app's ability to synchronize with the movie and play its related content alongside a time code of sorts that counts down in the upper part of the screen.… Read more

Goodness on Twitter: from attention-sharing to tweet fund drives to good mobs

Twitter’s “suggested users” list is a Who’s Who of Twitter celebrities, featuring the likes of Al Gore, Lance Armstrong, Ashton Kutcher, John McCain, Martha Stewart, and others with millions of followers. The New York Times claimed that a spot on the list would guarantee 500,000 additional followers and reported that social media guru Jason Calacanis had offered $250,000 to be listed.

Last Friday, Twitter did something remarkable. It added a number of well-known social entrepreneurs and innovators to this list, among them Social Edge, Skoll Foundation, Kiva, Matt Flannery (Kiva co-founder), Acumen Fund, Jacqueline Novogratz (Acumen … Read more

Is advertising dead? The third way of building brand equity

There seem to be three (non-mutually exclusive) models for marketers tasked with building brand equity: marketing scarcity, marketing artificial scarcity, or marketing relevance.

Scarcity seems to be at the core of all marketing: an exclusive, unique value that can be reproduced; an original idea replicated for many. That's how markets work, how marketing works. Branding is effective when it keeps the aura of an original idea intact despite its mechanical reproduction. Apple's original idea, for instance, could be described as "technology must be fun and human," and it has not lost an inch of its integrity. … Read more

Downstream solutions. Upstream problems.

By Nick de la Mare

I saw an interesting article in the New York Times this weekend titled "Put Ad on Web. Count Clicks. Revise." The premise of the article goes something like this: because the web provides functionality to test every variation of a banner ad for effectiveness, the next big thing is tailoring advertising in the moment, and leveraging findings from click-thru rates to construct more relevant offerings for consumers. If I had to construct a tag-line for the so-called "data practice" services cited in this article it would be "downstream solutions to … Read more

From Google economy to Twitter economy

I'm still processing the many great insights from the next09 conference in Hamburg, Germany, one of Europe's leading digital-creative-marketing forums. This year's theme was "Share Economy," and the 1,300 attendees consisted of European VCs and angel investors, Web 2.0 entrepreneurs, media, creative agencies, and executives from German corporations (from BMW and Deutsche Bank to Deutsche Telekom).

 

Jeff Jarvis: "The Great Restructuring"

The first day, the keynote day, was a little disappointing, maybe because expectations were so high. Jeff Jarvis warmed up the crowd with his trademark "What Would Google … Read more

A (short) history of brand management since 1940

Nice clip from the German ad agency Scholz & Friends. Nothing new but good ammunition for convincing the few who have yet to see the light...

Via Federated Media

Fake Times

It's a few weeks old but still worth pointing out as another recent example of "Disruptive Realism" - a clever twist on the slogan of the New York Times: 'All the news we hope to print:'

Good News! from Blake Whitman on Vimeo.

From the press release (linked to the Prankster group The Yes Men):

"Early this morning, commuters nationwide were delighted to find out that while they were sleeping, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had come to an end. If, that is, they happened to read a "special edition" of today's … Read more

Egonomics and the "Recognition Economy"

In May this year, frog design founder Hartmut Esslinger spoke at the German Trend Day in Hamburg. The Trend Day is an influential annual forum that gathers thought leaders from business, media, and academia to discuss emerging social and cultural trends. This year's theme was "Identity Management," and other speakers besides Hartmut included Richard Florida, Danny Choo, and David Bosshart.

The organizers have synthesized the research, interviews, and lectures of the two-day symposium into a manifesto that is worth reading:

http://www.slideshare.net/TrendBuero/identity-management-manifesto-presentation

The paper argues that today's "attention economy" will … Read more

What's in a (concocted) name?

I work for frog design, and frequently at conferences and parties, people ask me about the name: What does it mean? Where does it come from? While some suspect it symbolizes the agility of that animal species, the truth is that our German founder, Hartmut Esslinger, coined it as an acronym for "federal republic of germany" -- the lower case spelling of "frog" referencing the egalitarian tradition of Marxist semantics, back then in the 60s when frog was born.

Sam Birger, the founder of Nomenon, a renowned naming firm, whom I met in NY last week, … Read more