The Culture Hoover

Collecting interesting things to make you think...

[culturehoover]

Think about what we know at that moment: we know what they're going to watch, we know what they just Googled, we know where they are, we know what device they are watching on, heck, we know they can skip the ad. All of this information is an opportunity to customize a message that respects the viewer and the platform. We need to stop repurposing content designed for other channels and start taking advantage of the amazing abilities YouTube is throwing at us. It's like we're NASA and we're only using the Hubble Telescope to look at our neighbor's boobs.

- Nail on creating YouTube pre-roll that's all but unskippable, AdWeek

[culturehoover]

Advertising by women, for women. Great job, Reth?nk Breast Cancer!

[culturehoover]

The whole science of marketing is based on finding the most relevant message and delivering it to the most probable buyer

- The Ad Contrarian

[culturehoover]

You are more likely to be a character. Or a location. Or a plot device. Or maybe a chapter. But the real protagonist (the person we care most about in any story) is likely to be the person you’ve spent years describing as your audience. And there’s the problem – the person we’re working so hard to tell the story to, is actually the person we should be telling the story about.

- Barrie Seppings, 'Your Brand Is Not The Story. Your Brand is IN The Story'

Interesting, realistic perspective of brand story-telling. ...Plus, I'm a sucker for pseudo-academic articles that reference Kurt Vonnegut. Enjoy!

[culturehoover]

The State of Social Media 2013 - Infographic Promotion

I had no idea "Images with multiple dominant colours have 3.25 times more repins than single dominant colour images". Interesting!

[culturehoover]

My Leap Motion is here! So excited! Brb, heading to the future.

[culturehoover]

Greenheart Games' latest release is called Game Dev Tycoon. In it, players take on the role of a game developer, dealing with sales, marketing, piracy etc.

With video game piracy being pretty widespread at the moment (over 90% if you believe Ubisoft), the guys at Greenheart were aware that a cracked version of their game would likely appear on file sharing sites very quickly. So, to combat this, they uploaded a version themselves, before anyone else would have a chance. It played exactly the same way as the genuine version, except for one thing -- no matter what the player did, the games they developed would always suffer hugely from piracy, to the extent that over time it would become impossible to turn a profit.

Kotaku.com posted this amazingly ironic screenshot of a pirate complaining about the piracy problem they kept having:

Which is pretty funny.

Patrick Klug, one of the two brothers who founded Greenheart, wrote about their approach on Greenheart's blog and posted this pie chart showing their usage stats one day after release

Which is really not so funny as it shows 93% of users haven't paid for the game. 

"We are not wealthy and it’s unlikely that we will be any time soon, so stop pretending like we don’t need your 8 dollars! We are just two guys working our butts off, trying to start our own game studio to create games which are fun to play."

- Patrick Klug, Greenheart Games blog, April 2013

  On the brighter side, there's a good few sites that have picked up this story so Greenheart should benefit from the extra PR. It's great to see people taking a different approach to solving common problems, so I hope Greenheart see their sales pick up because of it.

[culturehoover]

AdRoll announces self-serve FBX newsfeed ads

"Because of our status as a FBX Qualified Company, we were able to bring retargeting to the News Feed, the most premium location on Facebook. Today, I’m thrilled to announce that we’re opening up this powerful new feature to all existing AdRoll customers"

Does this change everything? AdRoll seem to reckon so...

"We’ve run campaigns for over 40 advertisers in our initial launch, and are seeing impressive results. We’re finding CTRs to be in the single digit percentages vs fractions of a percent – orders of magnitude larger than standard FBX ads"

[culturehoover]

Music is a thing you pull towards you when you're in the mood. As soon as it's pushed towards you it loses all its charm.

- David Hepworth, 'Everybody likes recommending. Nobody likes being recommended to.', 19th April 2013

[culturehoover]

My philosophy has been if you’re not serving the customer with what you put online you’re going to end up in a bad place. Most [banners] aren’t serving value. They’re in the business of interrupting what you’re doing. There’s a limited creativity that’s been applied with what you can do with that space and the space itself is very limiting. On cellphones, it’s worse. Today these retargeting ads are creepy to me. I get it, but to do the equivalent of tracking a guy out of a shopping mall to his car and jumping on top of his car is what we’re doing on the Web now. Online is not a medium built on intrusion. It has to work in the context of what people are trying to accomplish.

- G.M. O’Connell, founder of Modem Media, the agency that created the first banners

(via digiday)

[culturehoover]

While we need to target the loyalty of key fans who make multiple purchases through the year, Weigel stated that these consumers can help to generate publicity, not revenue. The vast majority of sales volume comes from the one time buyer, who has very little knowledge of your brand and what it stands for. We should focus our attentions on these consumers.

- Serena Peddle, 'How To (Not) Fail – IPA 44 Club', Lean Mean Fighting Machine

[culturehoover]

"It's the biggest news involving the compact disc in years: Amazon is expected to reward CD buyers by automatically storing the songs in their digital lockers free of charge, sources tell CNET -- and it may do the same for past CD purchases"

READ more on CNet

.

Nice idea! I'd be interested to know at what quality these ripped files would be though. Also, if they're accessible through Amazon's Cloud service does that mean you can only stream the tracks through a specific player or that you need to be using a browser to do so? If the tracks are stream-only then that doesn't really feel relevant to those using iPods / iPhones / iTunes to play their music...

[culturehoover]

Jam with Chrome

Just got served this as a skippable ad on YouTube and watched all 60 seconds of it.

Well done Google, you win at internet.

http://www.jamwithchrome.com/

[typeworship]

[culturehoover]

Sony Music Timeline Celebrating 125 years of musical history and covering almost 150 square meters of wall space, London based designer, Alex Fawkes, has produced this awesome typographic wall for Sony’s Derry Street headquarters in London.

Comprised of 54, two meter tall panels of vinyl lettering, it features almost 1000 of the label’s artists from 1887 to the present day. From ACDC to Wham!

It fills a mezzanine walkway and is visible from the cafeteria beneath, reminding me of the CBS typographic wall (See ‘Gastrotypographicalassemblage’) by Lou Dorfsman and Herb Lubalin in the 1960s.

[culturehoover]

"He didn’t use research for a final decision, he used it for creative development."

- Dave Trott, 'Imagine If Ads That Won Awards Actually Worked', csttg blog, 29th Oct 2012

[culturehoover]

When you write the ad, you don’t tell people why they need a car “Cars are better than public transport. You don’t have to queue, cars are more private, you can go exactly where you want, and cars can carry more. You should get yourself a car. ” That wouldn't make sense because people have an almost infinite variety of cars to choose from other than yours. You don’t own the car category, so you don’t go for market growth. You’re talking to people who are already interested in buying a car. So you tell them why your car is a better deal “Low mileage, beautiful condition, one careful owner, new tyres, full service history, taxed and MOT.” [...] Some brands who aren’t market leaders copy the market leader, and then wonder why their advertising doesn’t work. The reason is, they didn’t ask the question, market-growth or market-share.

-  Dave Trott, 'We Knew More Before We Knew Anything', csttg blog, 31st Oct 2012

[theeveofthewar-blog]

BE PREPARED and spread the word…

We’ve created this poster to help spread the word. #TheEveOfTheWar is coming and everyone needs to know…

[culturehoover]

I rarely reblog work stuff, but this poster (and the others that are coming soon) is totally beautiful.

Hello Charlie are creating some stunning visuals for the campaign leading up to the release of the New Generation recording of Jeff Wayne's Musical Version of The War of The Worlds on November 26th. Have a look at http://TheEveOfTheWar.tumblr.com for the rest of the awesomeness they're creating.