There’s lots of chatter across the wires about the future of advertising or the future of digital advertising at the moment. I often crumple inwards and emit a grated moan after reading the same old I-do-no-delivery-but-I’m-great-at-evangelising  stories told in different ways. However, the deck above, by William Owen of Made-by-Many, nicely articulates some of the principles that I’ve been passionate about for while: UX, using to design to solve business problems and the application of network science.

Thanks to Charles for sharing.

A real strategist understands business and how communications, in all forms, work to drive acquisition and sales. Communications strategies are heavily influenced by corporate strategy and market landscapes.

I have started to read The Art of Strategy in order to revist corporate strategy and understand more complex modus operandi. The book has so far been a good guide to applications of game theory in business.

Its not the most visual book, however, searching for infographics that relate to the principles is turning into a rewarding task.

graphic via Saturday Morning Cereal

I was sitting slouched when this ad first came on and the people around me immediately started laughing at the jingle/strap-line. Its at that point that you know a campaign is going to have some talk-ability.

I often sigh when I’m asked to “go and check if people are talking about our TV ads”, because nine times out ten nobody cares, but when a creative is truly spot on and culturally relevant it does create conversations.

Google Realtime instantly provides a nice snapshot of updates related to specific campaigns:

I did the same searches for campaigns that are being picked up by the Visible Measures AdAge chart and I started to track updates about the Old Spice and Gillette campaigns also. One could argue could that most of these updates do come from people that work within the media bubble, but with some extensive research and filtering we can start to group and categorise tracked updates.

The context of the updates, and the profiles of the people that they come from, can help us to identify the types of people that are being engaged by advertising and time patterns in response. Its all very interesting stuff and I plan to do more work to investigate the relationships and patterns between advertising campaigns and social media.

Communicatons are becoming more integrated and we’re starting to see lots of great work—which isn’t dogmatically trying to wear a social media label. As this trend grows we can start to confidently include talk-ability metrics into more than just PR and pure-play social media campaigns, and if you look closely it’s the integrated campaigns that seem to create the most talk-ability. Just saying.

I started watching this video thinking it was something to do with sentiment monitoring, but it’s actually about leveraging the reputations of people within communities and correct use of voting mechanisms, in order to define reputation.

It’s rather long and key points are delivered after some tenuous examples, but it’s worth a watch as gives an insight into how “Like” culture may affect reputation and content.

What’s also interesting is how experience designers and UX specialists need to dutifully consider where and how voting systems are integrated into web applications. The addition of voting mechanisms to content platforms may get rejected if they’re surplus to requirements or change the purpose or culture of a platform.

After some digging I found Daisy Disk.

To my surprise the application is amazing! It visually navigates you through sections of your hard disk, helping you to find any perpetrators that may be devouring precious space.

My collection of Gil Scott-Heron albums take up 1GB. The porker!

Over 2009 Nicholas gave his friends, family and acquaintances forms to provide feedback on meetings with him. After collecting and processing all returned forms, Nicholas has produced a limited number of booklets to visualise the information:

Recently I’ve been working with lots of raw data, from multiple sources, making information design an integral part of my job. Taking data, turning it into information and making information universally comprehensible is one the most challenging tasks I’ve faced.

I’m learning practical things from the Feltron Report and other information designers such as David McCandless. I hope all of our reporting starts to resemble what Nicholas and David are doing because—in a industry full of crap and jargon—creative and concise communications help to build stronger relationships with clients.

(Guilty of using crap and jargon too )

Via Infomagination

Admittedly, I’ve always perceived Silverlight as the underdog—that bites at Flash—but its adoption has substantially increased due to Windows Vista, 7 and the latest versions of IE. According to RIAS, Sliverlight now has 62% adoption in the UK:

This high adoption rate cancels any doubts about the potential reach of Silverlight-based applications.

I really like the rich, asynchronous user experience that Sliverlight-based RIA’s deliver. Vimeo has great examples of applications that utilise Photosynth and Deep Zoom:

Things have been quiet here lately and it’s because I’ve been busy. Not just with work, but fun stuff too!

I’ve been thinking a lot about this space recently and what I should do with it. This blog started out as a workey thing: a place to scribe my marketing thoughts and learn the mechanics behind having a voice online.

Since I started to write lots of good things have happened and I’ve also become aware of some very, very, smart people. These guys write ace blogs about planning, marketing and digital stuff. It doesn’t just stop with those four blogs and as some of you know the planning community is huge.

With so many great planning blogs already around I’ve decided to make this blog less of a workey thing. This will mean you won’t always get posts about digital geekery—so if this is why you subscribe I’d unsubscribe now.

I’m going to carry on feeding my links through to here, but the rest of my posts will now be about how I’m “intelligently wasting time”.

You may think my move is an act of laziness, but it’s not. I’m actually redirecting my blogging time to reading and DOING more STUFF

Photo props to pegnsean.

Nothing new in this video, but he summaries things quite well. It’s also great to understand the data that we WILL have to play with soon.