Funny but true

Become a DoGooder

I've been thinking a lot about green initiatives lately for one of our clients. So you can imagine how excited I was when stumbled across the DoGooder.

It's an ingenious plug-in that enables you to support green initiatives and charities simply by surfing the web.

How's it work? Glad you asked.

Once installed the DoGooder replaces the banner ads you're supposed to see with green, charity or cheeky DoGooder messages like those shown in the NY Times above.

Pretty clever huh?

According to the DoGooder website their plugin doesn't actually block the original banner ads. And any click related revenue agreement is unaffected.

To learn more about this very clever idea click here.

Where are the good banners?

I am a regular visitor to Bannerblog. Even the not so good banner ads they post there have some merit.

Which is more than I can say for most of the banners I see each and every time I go online.

I never see any decent banner ads.

In fact I can't remember the last time I saw a banner ad that made me think "I wish I'd done that".

I wonder why?

As a medium online offers unparalleled opportunities.

Yet most of the ads are shit.

It's been like that since forever.

Surely it'll have to turn the corner someday. Won't it?

Did you know?

He's right you know

Experts unlimited

I first got involved with digital media around the time that Rupert Murdoch first spoke about the Information Superhighway.

As you can imagine a lot has changed since then. In fact a lot has changed since as recently as last year if truth be told.

It really is a great time to be in the advertising/comms business with a new possibility created almost every week.

Mobile apps are a great example.

The Apple App Store is only about 18 months old. Yet apps have become so commonplace that AdAge are now promoting app workshops.

I wonder if they ran television advertising workshops back in the day? Doubt it.

Which for me highlights one of the problems with the contemporary ad biz. Snake oil salesmen.

Internet Evangelists. Social Media Gurus. SEO Specialists. And now App Experts.

For every new technology or innovation there will always be people looking to make a fast buck.

Sadly it's not from the technology itself but from their self proclaimed proficiency with it.

Stale Tic Tacs

Just read about the iPhone app developed by digital agency Webling for Tic Tacs.

Being the curious type of course I downloaded it.

It's uses the iPhone accelerometer to allow you to shake your virtual Tic Tacs. You also get to hear the sound of the Tic Tacs being shaken.

And that's pretty much it. I think.

No real reward that I can see. So I showed it to my teenage daughter.

"That's so lame'" she said.

Anti social media

Last week I went to a conference call The Digital Tipping Point.

I learnt about the conference on Twitter. Clicked on the link in a tweet and signed up.

Can't complain, because the conference was free, but...

Billed as 'The future of branding and social media' I expected it to be about that very topic. It wasn't.

The first couple of presenters focussed mainly on advertising and advertising units.

They showed vox pop videos of idiots talking about how much they loved the ads that appeared on their Facebook. Ads like these.

So I decided to share my displeasure with my friends and followers on Twitter.

Minutes later I recieved a tweet from one of the conference speakers asking me where I was!

When she got up to speak she acknowledged me by name and stated that she wouldn't be talking about advertising.

Had I inadvertantly invented virtual heckling?

Probably not, but I did prove my theory that social media has to feature voices of dissent as well as support.

Stop typing for a minute

I spent yesterday afternoon at the Digital Tipping Conference.

One thing that caught my attention during the conference was the number of people who were sitting in the audience typing away on their laptops.

Not to mention the people awkwardly hammering away on the keypads of Blackberries and iPhones.

It seems live blogging and twittering are obviously now an accepted part of conferences.

Which is probably the conference equivalent of people taking mobile phone photos at concerts.

Thankfully I don't go to as many conferences as I do concerts.

But I can't help thinking that these people are not getting the most out of their conference experience because they're too focused on commenting on or recording what they're seeing.