They’re giving away a 2 night break every 30 minutes for 24 hours, started 8.30 this morning, all you have to do is become a fan and be on the page on the hour or half past the hour to comment on the status question within 15 minutes and then they pick a winner before the next question.
The questions themselves build on peoples awareness of the brand: ‘How far away from the sea is Best Western Northfield Hotel in Minehead?’ and ‘Are pets welcome in our hotels?’
To see for yourself, try this link, or failing that search for Best Western of Facebook.
I managed to get myself over to the Kinetica art fair yesterday, a show curated from artists specialising in kinetic, electronic, robotic, light, sound and time-based works.
The exhibition was a visual extravaganza of electronic wizardry and macabre machines - confirmed by my 5 year old son Robin who for once didn’t moan that he was hungry throughout - although he did want the beer poured from a robotic waiter.
For me this piece, entitled Trace by Balint Bolygo was the stand out. The work consisted of a revolving plaster cast of a person’s head which was slowly deconstructed into a mathematical diagram.
This happened using a mechanical contraption that relayed the changing contours of the heads rotation to a pen connected via a series of metal arms, resulting in these impressive drawings:
A direct manipulation video player lets users drag items within the video frame to move forward and back instead of just via a scroll bar on the bottom of the video.
It’s an interesting technique that surfaced at the start of 2008 and this campaign for Wrangler, although admittedly simple in its complexity, is the first I’ve seen to harness its beauty.
Sport’s Illustrated have produced a nice little demo of the types of content and interfaces that we can expect from devices like the iPad:
In terms of general approach it’s not too far away from Bonnie’s prototype created by Berg.
Beyond the cleverness in interface and content, these devices present a real opportunity to take ad targeting to the next level.
Historical location based targeting has struggled to take off. It’s generally mobile based and plays out as follows: I’m passing Boots and get a Bluetooth coupon giving me 50% off toothpaste. 2 problems. 1. No targeting - it blanket sweeps all passers by. 2. Timing - I might want toothpaste, but I’m on my way elsewhere and don’t have time to stop.
So what’s needed is a system that a) learns what I buy and b) learns when I buy it, or more importantly when I’m thinking about buying it so I can plan for changes.
By using these 2 bits of info in combination brands can gain visibility to the right people at the point of decision, and not just when their physically near a point of sale.
I’ll bring in Dopplr’s rather snazzy diagram at this point to help explain things: (you can read their use of it here)
The bit where the 2 cones converge is the sweet spot. This is the present where the past and the future collide. Now we’ve highlighted that just getting into the present doesn’t necessarily work, it’s the decision making present we want to find. That’s when the What and the When need to be delivered.
And that’s where these devices play their part.
On the whole we’re all creatures of routine. We do the same things on the same days, buy the same brands with the same frequency and generally speaking, patterns emerge.
By interpreting these patterns and tying all these loose ends of learnings together for a single cause, we face the exciting prospect that these devices will enable brands to deliver their messages with maximum efficiency.
Photographer Brandon Voges came up with a simple and surprisingly novel idea: photograph portraits of people hanging upside down by their ankles. Then invite your closest friends to do the same. The resulting eerie series “Upside Downey Face” is a collection of unsettling, strange images of people flipped the wrong way up.
Very Slow Scan Television (VSSTV) by Gebhard Sengmüller is a new television format that we have developed building upon Slow Scan Television (SSTV), an image transmission system used by Ham Radio amateurs. VSSTV uses broadcasts from this historic public domain television system and regular bubble wrap to construct an analogous system: Just as a Cathode Ray Tube mixes the three primary colors to create various hues, VSSTV utilizes a plotter-like machine to fill the individual bubbles with one of the three primary CRT colors, turning them into pixels on the VSSTV “screen”. Large television images with a frame rate of one per day are the result, images that take the idea of slow scan to the extreme.
An image of the Holy Mother made of Easter eggs has gone on display at the St Sophia Cathedral in Kiev, Ukraine. About 15,000 hand-painted eggs were used by Ukrainian artist Oksana Mas to create the piece.
And some create playlists based on an artist you may be interested in. ie: if you really liked Keane and wanted to find similar music to them - these sites create playlists off the back of this artist: (Spotibot, Spotiseek).
There are a few more unusual ones - Spotify DJ (broadcasting DJ sets)
Topsify (creates playlists based on the charts, and historic number 1s)
Radiofy (essentially this site lets you pick your favourite radio stations, it then shows you what that station just played, and if you want to hear that song again or whatever you can just click on it and it opens in Spotify. To get past the opening screen and into the site click on ‘Stäng’. It’s in Swedish.)
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