A Few Good Ads

Deep down in places I don't want to talk about at parties I just want the creatives to frickin' listen to my strategy and use it. Just once? Kidding. There are a FEW good creatives out there...

Righty or Lefty?

I recently received an interesting "test" from my friend that I just had to share. It's an animation of a dancer's silhouette doing a turn. What's so great about that? Well, depending on whether you are primarily a left-brained or right-brained thinker, it turns a certain way. That's right, depending on the way you THINK it turns different ways. Try it here.

Some people can't get it to switch directions (I saw it turning clockwise immediately and it took me a little while to see it turning the other way), but if you can, I'm betting that you can't just leave it alone and just need to keep trying to make it switch directions.

Why do I mention it? I just think it's great viral fun. Ok, ok, if I had to pull an interactive "lesson" from this, it's that as the web gets more and more complex, one thing remains consistent, it's that good content, not necessarily the latest bells-and-whistles, always triumphs over mere good execution.

Eye Wonder Why

Keeping on top of online marketing trends means going on a lot of sites that talk about such things. The ads that consistently impress me on these sites are the EyeWonder self-promotion ads, like this one. They are so good to me because they utilize EyeWonder's "instant play video" technology better than anyone else I've seen (which is probably why they did it -- frustrated with their clients not utilizing their technology to its potential, they decided to do it themselves). They not only load extremely quickly and self-play, intriguing users to look at them and play them, they also offer videos in addition to the first one to play with.

What keeps me wondering is why they haven't been touted a little bit more for their effective use of their product in their ads. Such a slam dunk, in my opinion.

Sprint's Waitless.org

Waitless.org is a really fun site by Sprint which uses video to show users ways to save time. The examples they have are fun, quick and addictive. That’s the good part.

Criticisms are that there really isn’t that much to tie it into the brand and their message (what is the tie-in anyway?) and once a user is done looking at all the time-savers, there’s little more for the user to get involved with. The logic seems to be to roll the time-savers out, but with their cool little concept to start, I think a better idea in today’s online social media landscape would’ve been to open it up to people more – allow them to comment on each shortcut, allow them to submit their own shortcuts for immediate broadcast (instead of submitting them for curating), and allow people to respond through video to the campaign (like YouTube does). Sure, it’s riskier, but given the money that they probably threw at this campaign and this website anyway, isn’t it riskier to leave it as is – a fun experience that you visit once and never come back to?