• The Apartment: Season 1 Videos

    November 9, 2010 From: admin

    Daniel Benor

    Jackie Dodd

    Chase Domergue

    Samantha Weintraub

  • Innovate with Transparency

    October 14, 2010 From: admin

    What’s the opportunity when there are no corporate secrets? When industries can be exposed and dissected by consumers and smart entrepreneurs, how do you become a preferred, even loved, brand? Embracing transparency as the driver of innovation can change your business and open up new levels of consumer involvement and brand love. The following five steps will help brands embrace a new way of thinking — and doing.

    The first step is acknowledging that in today’s digitally connected world, secrets are hard to keep. Last week, the Gates Foundation acknowledged what many already knew. They admitted the world’s largest charitable foundation is too secretive and hard to work with. New CEO Jeff Raikes published a critical report giving the foundation bad marks for communicating its goals and strategies, and for confusing people with its convoluted grant-making process. Many already knew this but openly embracing this reality has opened the doors to a new collaborative spirit for the foundation and its partners.

    The second step requires rethinking how a brand creates opportunities and exposes inefficiencies. One way to look at this is what author Rachel Botsman calls “idling capacity,” or the waste that exists in the things we own but hardly use. Botsman claims “almost 80 percent of the items people own are used less than once a month,” yet they sit idle right in front of us.

    Whipcar, for example, connects consumers to other consumers who share their cars when they are not in use. The “magic” is the connection — the delight in realizing that, of course, cars sit around all day. Why not recognize and leverage this obvious fact? This is a great example of studying the obvious and finding a collaborative solution. Can brands spot these opportunities hiding in plain site? Sometimes they might not be obvious brand extensions or services, but every industry can find new dots to connect.

    The third step is to get out of the way and make information visible and fuel consumer control. First Direct Bank in the UK is HSBC’s only digital bank. The First Direct Web site is a model of transparency, as it connects consumers to other consumers (unheard of for a bank, by the way) and openly solicits feedback and product advice in a public forum on the home page and via a mobile interface, not buried in a company blog.

    New companies are rushing to make consumer control a business by itself. Bynamite, a new San Francisco start-up tracks consumers search, e-commerce and ad network behavior — but as a service, to the consumer. The software organizes a consumer’s digital footprint via a dashboard and actually lets the consumer control their online profile on a daily or weekly basis. With this kind of transparency consumers can visually see how companies are tracking, targeting and manipulating their personal information. If you are asking yourself “How will my brand operate in this environment? How will I add value, engage consumers and, most of all, build an emotional connection?” you are asking the right questions.

    The fourth step is to understand the implications and resulting opportunities from unlimited bandwidth. According to The New York Times, this September the FCC. will most likely approve the biggest expansion yet of unlicensed airwaves, opening the door to Wi-Fi networks that will eliminate the need to find wireless hot spots. This will create the foundations for new services and platforms. First will come coverage over entire companies, universities and events. Next will come always-on super speed access to rural areas allowing for “smart electric grids, remote health monitoring and, for consumers, wireless Internet without dead zones.”

    This leads to the last and final step: admitting a brand does not have all the answers and committing to “shared values” with consumers. Marketers are schooled to offer lofty claims and promises but in today’s social web these are easily exposed. If there are no secrets; if untapped opportunities are right before our eyes; if the consumer is in control, like it or not; then we must commit organizations to understanding and practicing “shared values” to build brand equity going forward.

    In fact, recent industry research conducted by health provider Kaiser Permanente discovered consumers were actively turned off by brands that claimed to “have the answer.” Consumers knew brands didn’t have the answer. Instead, consumers wanted straight talk about how brands were “trying to find the answer” and were striving to be better. Their research showed consumers wanted to join in emotionally and materially to strive with the company as long as the trust implicit in shared values was maintained.

    And this gets to the real day-to-day issue facing every brand today — managing the struggle between holding back and protecting versus letting go and embracing the dialog. Brands are scared to death of being exposed or releasing a “secret.” But the reality — yes, the reality — is that there are no more secrets. Worried about making a mistake in the social space? Mistakes are made every day anyway, just ask Tylenol and BP. Embracing a dialogue will give you the perfect forum for addressing the mistakes companies have and always will make. Remember, it’s not the mistake, it’s how you deal with it that everyone remembers.

    Harnessing the power of “shared values” requires a new kind of commitment and discipline. It requires asking hard questions about where your brand should be and what it should do. Does the consumer really expect to see you on social networking sites? Is that where your brand will be built? What kind of discovery contracts can we build with consumers? The answers will lead to a platform of shared values and deepened and trusting consumer relationships.

  • LG launches augmented reality drive in Thailand for Infinia TV

    July 20, 2010 From: admin

    BANGKOK – To introduce its latest full LED TV Infinia, LG has launched an augmented reality (AR) drive to promote the distinctiveness of its slim TV line. Developed by MRM Worldwide Thailand, the augmented reality medium was chosen to allow consumers to enjoy the visual experience of watching an LG Infinia on their computer screens.

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  • Social Media ‘Like’ Is Beautiful? Jonathan Kish

    July 11, 2010 From: admin

    05.20.10, 11:45 AM EDT

    Marketers should take pause before embracing Facebook’s ”Like” button. Jonathan Kish With Facebook approaching 500 million users worldwide, a virtual battle of giants is brewing between Facebook and Google–a battle over users, and more important, over data. Facebook’s revenue is still dwarfed by Google’s, but it appears Facebook is slowly gaining the upper hand in terms of valuable user data. Thanks to recent developments, the site might collect user information that no other company, even Google ( GOOG – news – people ), has been able to collect so far.

    Forbes-JonathanKish

  • Online & Mix Analytics: Current Practices, Opportunities and Challenges

    From: admin

    Vipin_Mayar_Keynote_OMMA_OnlineandMixAnalytics_2009

  • Think Technology Will Bring You Closer to the Consumer? Think Again

    From: admin

    Intuitively, it makes sense to believe that we all live in a post-digital age, and that we’re all fully matured, “digital” consumers. We now assume that technology is an abundance instead of a scarcity, and that the computing grid will be there for us wherever and whenever we want it — just as we expect the light to turn on when we flip the switch.

    http://adage.com/digitalnext/post?article_id=144463

  • Mobile Marketing Mishaps: Overestimating Your Customers’ Smartphone Smarts

    July 1, 2010 From: admin

    Last week eBay acquired RedLaser, a mobile application that lets customers scan bar codes in order to list items faster on the auction site or just compare prices. It is easy to see why eBay acquired the application – goods sold through mobile applications will more than double, to $1.5 billion of eBay’s revenue this year, from $600 million in 2009, BusinessWeek reported. In general, mobile commerce is estimated to reach $119 billion in sales by 2015, from $18.3 billion in 2009, according to ABI Research. The RedLaser deal, eBay clearly hopes, will help the site ride this trend.

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  • Study: Consumers Creeped Out by Some Big, Targeted Ads

    From: admin

    NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — Ads targeted at a particular context — car ads on automotive sites, for example — are a staple of online advertising. It’s presumed that the more closely an ad matches a person’s interest, the more likely that person is to to click and buy. And it couldn’t hurt if the ad is big.

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  • Transporter: Helping you catch the bus

    From: admin

    We’re excited to have Ljuba Miljkovic join Adaptive Path in just a couple weeks. Ljuba is a recent grad of the UC Berkeley School of Information (I School). His master’s thesis was the design and development of an iPhone app for public transit riders which won an award for outstanding achievement by the university.

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