A deep dive into digital marketing

Shake it up baby

Posted by Chris under Advertising, Flash

A good friend of mine just sent this advert for Wii that’s running on YouTube. Check it out. And more here on Adrants blog.

First blush, wow how the heck did they do this. Second look, ahh it’s one big flash file.

Next thought, very cool they made it look like a YouTube page, I wonder if it all works. Drat it doesn’t. So points for keeping the traditional functionality look but a ding for not actually making it work.

Still kudos for the work and to Google/YouTube for letting them do it.

You’ll see it first on Hulu.

Posted by Chris under Broadband, Flash, TV

As first reported (or first I saw it) by TechCrunch and also on the Hulu blog, you’ll be able to see many of the fall premier shows first on Hulu. As the announced today, Tuesday that its Fall Premiere Lineup, which over the next seven weeks, will be the place to find season premieres of Prison Break, Bones, House, Heroes, The Office and 30 Rock.

To further build hype for Hulu (and the new shows), Hulu  will have the season debuts of Knight Rider, Lipstick Jungle, Chuck, Life and 30 Rock a full week before they’re broadcast on TV.

In what I see as a very smart move the networks have decided to take a plunge into changing their business model a bit and embrace the online space a bit more.

And if you are really Jonesing for your fall TV, get a full lineup of Hulu coverage over the next seven weeks, head over to its Fall Premiere Lineup page.

Today’s time waster and great online advertising

Posted by Chris under Advertising, Flash, I wish I'd thought of that

How can you resist yearbook yourself. Check it out here but as you are playing note that hey this is also advertising. The links go to actual stores in an actual mall. Seeming done by Taubman a property investment/mgmt. company, not only is this super fun to play with but what a great way to get the word out about your stores.

Kudos!

i Heart Wordle

Posted by Chris under Adobe, Flash, Social Networking, Technology

Have you played with Wordle, please please do so. It’s a great toy site that generates word clouds from either text you provide, RSS feed or site you direct it it. When Wordle bring in the text to create the cloud it gives greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text.

Once created you can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. Once created you can save them “forever” in the Wordle gallery to share, print or screenshot like I did on the left.

Flash Files can now be indexed

Posted by Chris under Adobe, Browsers, Firefox, Flash, Google, Search Engines, Yahoo

Thanks Russ and Adam for notes (via email and twitter) on adobe’s recent announcement regarding technology for search engines to index flash. Interestingly it’s an application for the search engines that acts like a virtual user going through each application/website and actually goes through the runtime of each flash application.

Hmmm, no comment from me yet on what impact lots of spiders hitting flash sites may have, that and I’m wondering how it will show up in search logs. As in “wow our site traffic is way up,” “no that’s just the adobe virtual flash user indexing our site.”

However this is an exciting announcement given how much of Element79’s client work (and own site) is flash, that and helping promote an even better reason to build in Flex/Flash.

I’m speaking at Google’s Chicago office today so I’ll have to ask Jim Lecinski what he thinks about this as well as Aaron Goldman (resolution media) who will be there as well.

Bring on SEO for flash!