Afternoon all,

A big week...

Superbowl XLVII: It costs $4M to have a 30” spot in the famed halftime show. But what would that buy you in digital? An eye-opening article from the clever people at Digiday.com

Netflix go FU to mainstream TV: House of Cards here is the original has been remade with Netflix pumping $100M in to it stealing it away from the Networks, and getting a 3 yr exclusive on it. The new House of Cards stars Kevin Spacey as Francis Urquhart and the setting has shifted to Congress.

In true Netflix style and as a real shakeup to the traditional broadcast drip feed, they will be releasing all episodes in the series at once, no doubt writing off many a w/e, mine included. Some of the ways this is a radical shift is that the program maker gets a full commitment to the show (a full 13 episode series is filmed before the first one is shown - Netflix assume the risk), less external pressure on creativity and freedom to go outside of the fixed program length constraints and of course, less need to waste screentime with recap sessions as viewers tend to watch episodes back-to-back or at the very least quicker than once a week.

"The goal, is to become HBO faster than HBO can become us." The seductive Netflix pitch to today's new breed of TV auteurs: a huge audience, real money, no meddlesome executives ("I'm not going to give David Fincher notes"), no pilots (television's great sucking hole of money and hope), and a full-season commitment. Full article, and very interesting in this month’s GQ

Google design philosophy: Since the early days Google with their iconic white homepage have been all about simple design. In more recent times though they passed through a phase were it all got a bit too busy. Yes the white homepage remained but the other products were a jumble. Remember the old YT?

Here is a nice report, with video, on what has happened since Paige took over and made a better design one of his core promises.

Connected design: Following the theme of design, a thank you Richard Hartell for putting this one in my stream. A video all about Connecting. From how interfaces will adapt, behaviours will evolve through to how society will interact. And any time you get to hear someone use a portmanteau such as “vibratactile” you know you are in a good place. And Blaise Aguera is always worth listening too (the guy who created the Photosynth technology amongst other mindboggling things).

Tokyo newspaper involves children in the reading ritual: Quite a cute way to get children more involved in the newspaper. Double bonus is that parents then get to spend more time with their children as they can read it together and explore the news.

And finally… Happy Birthday Mike Hartley (Tot Crt Rd if you want to see it for yourself).

Have a great w/e.

Oli.

Afternoon all,

Ganets Adventure School: In a happy coincidence with Stewart’s uplifting Yammer message here is a little write up from Paul about what they did:

The Squared group introduced their new charity event last Weekend, "The Net Works" aims to drive innovation for small charities with limited digital resources and provide them with their own makeshift ad agency for the day.

Teams were mainly made up of volunteers from agencies associated with Squared (including SMG) with Squared Alumni members running and coordinating each team. The charity they partnered with for the day were Ganet's Adventure School, a UK trust fund set up to support a school in Malawi. On the day different teams worked on their Branding, Social Strategy, Search and Analytics and developed new online fundraising strategies for them.

Some immediate results Squared created for the charity on the day included:
- Giving their YouTube channel a makeover and setting up their first campaign on it.
- Optimising their Adwords account to allow us to more precisely target the right audience, as well as splitting campaigns between mobile and non-mobile users to improve click through rates.
- Setting up a donate button on our Facebook page.
- Creating a Google Plus page for the school
- A handbook was also created for the charity, which included ideas and instructions on their Brand message and wire-frame, plus a list of digital-savvy volunteers from the day who have signed up to help the charity implement some of their bigger projects.

Overall a successful day which will be repeated again in the future, no set date on the next Net Works, but for more info speak to event organiser Paul Connor from our MNC team.

Internet financials: In other news, it’s been all about financial results. Google probably had the most successful quarter based on impact to shasre price (up 5%) whilst Apple, still making gazillions had a poorer reaction from investors as the mega sales and profits they posted weren’t as mega as people had hoped. In a nice stat to put Apple’s performance in perspective, since it first posted a profit in 2003 Amazon has made $5.1bn in accumulated profit. Apple made $13bn in the last quarter alone. Stories of their imminent demise are somewhat fantastical.

iPlayer has a huge year: Nearer to home the iPlayer posted their own set of results and it was a pretty impressive year for them. Last year they streamed 2.3bn on demand programs for viewers and listeners. The Olympics opening ceremony was the most popular single program with almost 3.5 million plays. It is noteworthy that more than a quarter of all the programs enjoyed came from a mobile or tablet device. And 2012 was the first year that viewing on PC’s fell below the 50% mark for program consumption.

For the full report

Meyer shares Y! vision: Over in Davos Y!’s CEO Marissa Meyer has been sharing her vision for the company.

For those that don’t want to watch the video key highlights are summarised in a good line from her “"I think that there's a real opportunity to help guide people's daily habits in terms of what content they read. That is something that we are really working on. All of these daily habits--news, sports, games, finance, search, mail, answers, groups--these are all things we have been underinvested in. A little love will go a long way."

Have a great w/e.

Oli.

Afternoon all,

Happy New Year and hopefully you are back in the working groove and enjoying the snow before the terror of the journey home.

The bulk of today’s note will be around CES, one week on what are the reactions, is it still a relevant event even?

But before that a quick congratulations that may have slipped through the gap about the great news from AOD and their Global first for cracking the code to enable us to target display advertising based on user search behaviour. A great leap forward and more info here

Well done to Marco and the team.

And now to Vegas. We have been fortunate to get the view from 3 figures who were there across the network and they have kindly put together a perspective for us all to share and experience.

Lisa Giacosa (formally of our London parish and now SVP Global Social Media Director based in Chicago)

I think CES has reverted to the traditional trade show. it seems that brands tend to have their own big wow launches year round without waiting for a big launch at CES. There was some impressive evolution but not the innovation we have come to expect. There was a time when even higher definition would have wooed us, I think its partly our expectations and partly a shift in what is happening at CES.

There were some great applications of technology in the health space (not new but evolved), from Polar, Garmin and fitbug. There was lots of hype around the fork that stops you from eating too fast which even got a CNET awards

Interesting to see Polaroid at CES having evolved their business to all intents and purposes to a printing service marketed as turning "your Favorite Photos into Art" - I think largely driven by the growth of instagram check out Polaroid fotobar

The hit for me - was not the show but the meetings that we had alongside the event, Publicis had a delegation of 650 people (including clients) from all over the world. The theme was "Bright Lights, Big Ideas" you can see detail here

The syfy session was really interesting showing true innovation and usefulness for consumers. A football that charges based on the kinetic energy when its kicked - good video here, my personal favorite was a camera ball that could be tossed into any situation to avoid putting humans in danger
and water graffiti that was cool but not sure what it would be used for except art!

Also worth a trawl of #bigideas on twitter.

Richard Hartell (Also a former Whitfield St alumni and now President, Human Experience Strategy based in New York).

What did i learn?

You can read about all the new stuff - Razer Edge, Ultra HDs, Samsung's 4K Easel TVs (nice), 4K OLED TV from Sony, Fitbit Flex, Pebble - so i won't go into them.

So themes:

It was not a great year. Nothing really stood out. Mainly just incremental rather than a big leap forward.

Mobile was all just incremental. Nothing really new there. Some bigger (little tablets) some smaller (smaller phones).

TV was mainly just sharper with lots of content flipping / second screen interaction being shown. social tv, cloud tv.

Samsung still showing smart fridges. Connected homes stuff still feels like a 1970's imagination realised rather than anything really interesting.

Cars. Cars feel like they are starting to get it. Lots of connected cars - Honda & Subaru doing deals with Aha, Ford with i-heartradio. lots of radio and internet services content feeding into. Lots of stuff on cars being connected - find my stolen car, cars that alert you when your son has driven it too far from the safe zone/too late at night. And driverless cars - Audi and Toyota. Cars have always felt like a bit of an untouched frontier in entertainment/information tech. seems like that's starting to change. when you put all the car stuff together you can start to imagine driverless cars that just become mobile offices/entertainment centres/family cinemas in the future / maybe contextual to where you are or where you are going. going on holiday - you get all the content related to where your are going on the way. coming back - you get to edit all your photos, facebook posts on the way back and post them out. change the way people work etc. cars could get interesting.

That's what i took out of it all.

Marco Bertozzi, Executive Managing Director/ EVP, EMEA, VivaKi Nerve Center

Was also there and has put a good post together which you can read in full on his blog

Below is the opening which gives a good summary:

CES never ceases to astound, not least because the sheer scale is incredible. Over 150,000 people gathered this year to see the onslaught of new gadgets and software, with over 20,000 new products being launched. However this year I was less surprised by the products being launched. Yes there were bigger TV’s, thinner TV’s, TV’s with the most incredible picture quality, more tablets, more phones, more games and even fridges that talk to you. Loads of great stuff. But not loads of surprises. The focus as far as I could see was in making all of these things talk, connect and share with each other.

It struck me at CES just how much technology enables a seamless, frictionless ecosystem for us and our consumption of content. There were some fascinating examples on the show floor that all point to the consumer being able to do exactly what they want to do, when they want to do it. I can guarantee that our children will be demanding a completely open proposition when it comes to media consumption. They will want and expect it in a non- linear fashion as well.

Have a great w/e.

Oli.

Afternoon all,

With people still buzzing, literally, from last night’s xmas party going to keep things very light today. If you are need of a mega pick-me-up then I whole heartedly recommend the sausage and scrambled egg sandwich from Loaf on Tot Crt Road (next to the premium Greggs).

Year in Reviews: It’s been a big year and as it moves into its final hurrah the reviews are all coming out. Facebook have taken a cool approach to it and put together what it thinks are your highlights of the year based on likes, comments, engagement etc with your friends on your newsfeed.

[Google have their annual zeitgeist review, but made into a nice video this year] (http://bit.ly/GoogleYIR2012), thanks to Shar for sending through.

And here is Twitter’s. If you click the bottom link on the list you get your highlights and find out who your Golden fan is. Thanks to Michael Vitello for this one.

Gestural interface: Thanks to Steve Ray for this one, . One of the guys behind the still futuristic looking, even though it is 10 years on, Minority Report grab interface. Well, rather than just dream it he went out and created a company to build it and they have some pretty impressive results. This is going to be a huge tip for the next couple of years. Already we have Microsoft’s Kinect putting it as ”ordinary” in the living room, Leap motion to be shipped in early 2013 and only $70 .

Future trends: Working with the IAB Future Trends group we have put together a look at some tech inspired KickStarter UK projects and given our views and what brands can learn from them

And finally... Best Christmas freebie so far is Amazon offering the complete Sherlock Holmes canon for Kindle, DL it here. Holmes for free isn’t new but this is nicely packaged together with all the works included.

Have a great w/e.

Oli.

Morning all,

A slightly delayed upload from Friday.

A defo must read view on the State of the Industry: Another set of wunderkinds have been released from the educational hothouse that is the Squared program run by Google and HyperIsland. Congratulations to Holly Jerreat, Joe Sullivan and Natasha Havelock for graduating from it. I would encourage you to read the State of the Industry report that they and their fellow Squares have put together, it is choc full of insightful info on areas such as the value of social actions, the role of technology and a host of other topical must reads.

#SMGTwitterTree: We have had some big winners this week, my personal favourite prize behind the door was the ½ case a cheeky Chateu Nuef du Pap. Loads more doors to be opened and today’s tag is #FFF. Get Tweeting, remember, the agency with the most tweets will win a £5k kitty for a party. We were doing brilliantly the first two days but Mindshare have been storming it of late. Get involved and we can claim it back.

Quid pro quo Clarice: You may have noticed, if you use the official Twitter app on your phone or the .com site that a few issues were occurring with Instagram photos. If you were wondering why, the reason is that in a turning the tables on what twitter did to 3rd party app developers earlier in the year Instagram (now owned by FB remember) has restricted Twitter’s access to its images. Why would it do such a thing? Well, last month Instagram created a .com site that could be accessed via computer, previously they were mobile only, so they are presumably keen to start gaining the page impressions themselves and pushing you back into FB owned territory.

As with Google and Apple 2013 looks like gearing in to the unshared web with the mega platforms stopping playing together so nicely and friction between them increasing.

The video platforms are also getting in each other’s faces: Netflix has done a deal direct with Disney to gain 1st window release access for their films. This is in direct response to their biggest weakness which is they are out of date with their film library. Personally I am a huge Netflix fan and genuinely see them as the near future of how we watch tv – there will always be live watching, but this is my paid for top up solution. So all you Starwars fans, the new Disney release should be on Netflix soon after cinema.

The really big loser in this is Starz. Starz took the fight to Netflix by cancelling their contract which included all the Disney access and now, they find themselves outmanouvered as Netflix went straight to the source and have taken the contract they used to have. Netflix now going head to head with major cable channels like HBO and others.

PONG History: Continuing our occasional meander down internet memory lane here is the game that spawned a $72bn industry. PONG is a seminal game and [here is the story behind how it came to be and the creation of the Arcade Games cabinet that were the forefathers of the modern day PS3 and Xbox] (http://bit.ly/PongHistory).

Take your pic: As the year draws to a close, it is time to reflect and celebrate the wonder that came before, a nice link to some of the best imagery of the year. A year that mobiles and their cameras showed they were good enough to grace the covers of magazines.

And finally... Wow, this is pretty cool. Using arduino and some cool sensor technology including a camera that senses facial expressions and picks up on sound, some students at Wellington Uni have created a live Pixar lamp. It is very cute indeed.

Have a great w/e.

Oli.

Afternoon all,

Did anyone sign up to play any of the games last week? Thanks to Shah for sharing the info on Google’s Ingress. I’m still awaiting my invite but looking forward to joining up on the side of the Enlightened.

A new player in the must see future digital arena: Mary Meeker has ruled the roost as the doyen of internet business knowledge and where the market is moving. Well Business Insider, one worth book marking, have thrown their hat in to the ring and it have done a great job. Well worth 10 minutes of your time to see what is what

And because it leads us to consider how big mobile really is, here is an interesting look at the top grossing apps on iPhone. Notice anything about the list? That’s right, the majority of them are free and then rely on upselling within the app to get revenue.

Jingle bells... Everyone always talks about the Coke ad being one of their markers for Christmas commencing, well I would add the seemingly annual Cartier YouTube visual feast to that too. Now in its 2nd year Cartier have again released an absolute beauty of a piece. Not as adventurous as last years and bonus making of which is even better but still a delight.

Worth noting that in its first week it is at almost a 1M views and last years was almost 17M. The power of creating something special, regardless of screen, still holds true. Arguably more so now when you are not constrained by the timeframe of an ad spot.

Santa’s Elves? The interviewer is pretty irritating but if you ever wondered how the packaging of Amazon works then wonder no more. I fear for them over the Christmas period.

The big man himself – Santa?: And here is Jeff Bezos in a recent interview on the Charlie Rose show (again, a great series to be aware of) talking about Amazon’s approach to business execution

What’s your favourite font? Everyone likes a good Font story. So here is one that tickled me that shows the inspiration for that which will be used for the Rio Olympics in 2016

And finally...*** **Got $500k spare? Want to go to Mars? Elon Musk, founder of PayPal and Tesla, has a lot of money. He also has pretty big plans and set up SpaceX a privately founded NASA rival type of thing. Anyway, he has detailed his plans to create the Mars colony. Before you think he is totally mad, he was here in London this week picking up an award from the Royal Aeronautical Society for his contribution to the commercialisation of space.

Or, ever wanted to live in Matrix time? This is just plain mad, but quite fun to see. An art installation has taken the person out of the real time and put them in a slowed down version

Have a great w/e.

Oli.

Congrats to Samsung and Harvey’s teams for getting Special Commendations at the Campaign Media Awards this week with some great work with Zeebox and creation of a great furniture choosing AR app respectively. Congrats to the L&D team for the stonking success at the Mumsnet awards.

Having had the MakeyMakey set in the Starcom reception and being able to control a Breakout game by pressing fruit I have decided to put a bit of a gaming theme. Not your standard “what’s out on xbox” approach, although Hitman 3 dropped on Weds if you are looking for an xmas present for that game in your life, but more of the new evolving world of games out there.

Curiosity game: Do you remember the Milo Xbox Kinect videos where the girl is talking with the virtual character? (if not). Well the guy behind it Peter Molyneux has launched something new. It is called Curiosity. This is a game where you load it up and are presented with a giant cube. If you tap on the cube a tile breaks away and you get a coin. So far so simple. In fact it is very simple. That’s what the game is. Crazy you think. Yes. Totally loco. But, and this is a big but you get sucked in. Because eventually someone is going to tap away the last tile and unlock the secret hidden in the cube.

Here’s a teaser for it

Players can use their coins to get more effective tapping tools that remove even more tiles at a time. Or you don’t have enough coins you can pay up to $80k to fast track and get the mega-rest of chisels straight away – can’t believe anyone will but who knows.

Some creative people are drawing intricate images as they tap their tiles away. Others are drawing the standard school boy humour type of things. A giant swastika was drawn quite disturbingly. Other players quickly tapped away tiles to remove it. The whole thing is being billed as an experiment and when I last logged on over 800k people were “playing” at the same time.

It’s iOS and Android if you want get involved. The one rule to the game is that the eventual winner who unlocks the secret is forbidden from using the secret for monetary gain, so no selling it to the highest bidder on ebay.

You are probably thinking this is mad. Like I said above, yes it is, but strangely compelling and delivers on the creator’s promise of emotional and effecting game development. I watch with interest as to what the secret is.

Alt-minds: Games imitating life are nothing new. Games infiltrating real life though are a growing trend. We saw the Google maps one a few weeks ago and now this one Alt-Minds looks interesting. It has been brewing for a while and here is a preview from a few months ago. But has gone live this week.

What separates this game is that it has been designed to be played across real-time social network interaction, clues in the media and location specific hunts. Surrender your phone number and email and you will receive texts and calls from characters in the game. Spot a scrap of paper in a video with a number scrawled on it? Call it, see who picks up. There is apparently also a part in the game that requires meeting a person at an airport.

It goes on for 8 weeks. If you want to get involved then time is running out but sign up here

In non-gaming news: This is an interesting article that shines a light on the battle of Google and Apple in a slightly different way focusing on the design vs web services both companies are hurtling down but from opposite ends.

And finally... Here is a 3 min vid from Microsoft’s Craig Mundie that is interesting. He is discussing future trends he is starting to see. Craig is Microsoft’s leading brain in this space, so worth listening to

Have a great w/e.

Oli.

Afternoon all,

Google Social web developments – by Joe Wood This week Google took another step forwards in its quest for a more 'social web'. This took the shape of a new feature on Google+ that allows users to share and install Android apps directly from the G+ newsfeed. Sending any app seamlessly to an Android phone or tablet without leaving the social network.

The significance of this?

Whilst it it appears a minor change to a social network not renowned for its massive user base, it's a move that works to blur the boundaries between Internet and app environments and also barriers between devices.

Simultaneously, Apple have announced a functionality that will allow users to buy app store properties from within other apps, encouraging deeper lock-in with iOS (obvs).

Two very different approaches to mobile and web ecosystems.

Here is the TechCrunch article that inspired Joe’s post

The battle for voice: As the social web develops and coinciding with some presentations I saw on future interfaces this week, I was struck by a very compelling article that investigates the voice activation battle ground and why Apple (Siri) and Google are going at it so hard. It really could be the keys to the future web It is fairly lengthy but well worth the investment. If you really can’t be bothered the gist of it is that through voice navigation we get fewer results which end up focusing more on intent. Intent is achieved by plugging in to apps the apps on your phone and having them communicate with each other to focus the understanding a to give the user a more human-esque response not just an algorithm one.

MSN Research: I felt a bit like Charlie Bucket yesterday as I had the pleasure of visiting Microsoft Research in Cambridge. A series of talks and demonstrations on a variety of subjects ranging from Machine Learning, Big Data, Natural user interfaces and the huge head spinner of Programming molecular cells.

One of my highlights of the day was looking at the ways that Kinect technology was being used to create new experiences, in particular this motion control device that works by feeling the movements of your tendons and then calculating where you are based on the feedback from the Kinect

iLikeTV search for a star: Everyone likes a good integrated FB campaign like Intel’s Museum of Me. Here is a fun(ish) one from a Italian company iLikeTV. Ignore the Italian, just click on the picture and allow it to play with your FB info. My favourite bit is the Minority Report style resizing of your photos.

Google geo game: The week before last we saw the geo-fenced Angry Birds game in China, this week we see Google are building on their amazing mapping data to create a next generation style geo-specific game. Thanks to Alistair Hill for this link - can’t wait to play it.

And finally... A choice for you today 1) How predictable are you. Watch this YT trick of sorts to find out or 2) Why MTV doesn’t play music videos anymore - warning, quite a few sweary words in this. But it does address the issue of erosion of value in the internet age.

Have a great w/e.

Oli.