Archive for the "Industry Goings On" Category
Tuesday, November 10th, 2009
Tags: Award winning agency, Effectiveness Award, IPA, IPA Awards 2009, IPA Effectiveness Awards, linkedin
Posted in Industry Goings On, Online Advertising, Online Marketing, Serious Achievements, Social Media | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, October 21st, 2009
I’ve been playing around with various 2D barcode formats over the last few days as something of an experiment.
QR code with logo
Microsoft Tag (custom)
While QR codes so far seem to be more established (at least in Japan) designing them to be visually interesting is a bit more of a challenge, while you can exploit the error correction to insert imagery into the code this isn’t the best way to do it, after all viewers may need the error correction in place when they scan it! All this said there are some great examples of well designed codes out there, Set Japan have created some very interesting adverts incorporating the code.
Next up is Microsoft’s Tag, another 2D code but this time developed and owned by Microsoft, there is certainly the infrastructure there to support this and although still in Beta it is shaping up as a contender. Tag uses colours along with geometric patters of various shapes which makes it visually customisable and interesting – I had a quick attempt at customising one.
The use of colour does mean that it will stand out and allows you to get away from a uniform looking pattern but it does make them less recognisable as a 2D barcode. This format is also up against an already established QR code in Japan and as a propriety design from Microsoft will it be as willingly adopted?
Tags: designing QR codes, Microsoft Tag, Qr codes
Posted in Industry Goings On, Online Marketing | 1 Comment »
Friday, October 16th, 2009
QR codes (or Quick Response Codes) are making more of an appearance and appear to offer quite a few neat features to those who can read them (directing someone to a mobile or website, displaying a message, providing contact information or sending an SMS message).
Scan me!
With smart phone uptake predicted to climb during the next year along with barcode scanning applications becoming increasingly popular on the various mobile application stores, QR Codes are becoming more and more accessible.
The concept has proved very successful in Japan, with 90% of mobile users recognising these codes as something they scan with their mobile and over 50% of this making use of the feature, this has been helped by the adoption of QR readers into mobile handsets as pre-installed software. If the trend for mobile scanning in the UK is to increase then it may not be long before the majority of handsets support QR codes out of the box.
Combining codes into print work adds a level of user interaction to otherwise flat media and provides useful feedback for those managing the campaign, it is possible for instance to track your volume of viewers from location or from the media type you featured the code. Great news if you want to find out where your advertising is best suited, plus for us lot who are scanning we can quickly access or bookmark information to view on the move or when we get back to the office/home – much easier than trying to type a web address into your phone!
There are quite a few QR readers available and the number of mobiles supported is growing each day, a few examples of readers we tried are:
Kaywa Reader
Nokia Reader
i-nigma Reader
Tags: cross media advertising, mobile advertising, Qr codes, scanning
Posted in Industry Goings On | No Comments »
Monday, September 7th, 2009
Serious were pleased to be invited to Google’s Agency Day on Thursday at their London offices. With talks from their Industry Head of Local Markets and the New Business Development Team we had a tour of how we can better offer our services to improve our clients search and advertising campaigns.
Alongside this we now have access to a broad range of new tools and services Google offer to further strengthen our media planning and campaign preparation.
An interesting point we picked out from the talk was 10% of internet traffic is generated through Youtube, considering Youtube as a search engine the volume of searches would place it as the 2nd most popular just behind Google.
Advertising in a large content network like this can be daunting but with careful planning and management of your targeted ads you can make your budget work for you and reach a truly massive audience.
For a limited time too we can offer to double your daily spend on an ad campaign up to £1000*.
Unfortunately with everything going on I forgot to take some photos….next time!
*Until December 2009.
Tags: Agency Day, Google, Online Advertising, Online Marketing
Posted in Industry Goings On, Online Advertising, Online Marketing | No Comments »
Wednesday, July 29th, 2009
The IPA Effectiveness Awards have released the names of the creative agencies vying for the 2009 awards and we are one of them! We entered a 3,000 word case study on a campaign we did with London Business School based around social online marketing and advertising.
Anyway if you want to see more look up Perpetual Marketing Model on this website to see how you do it.
The shortlist for the awards gets announced in September, so fingers crossed.
Scott
Posted in Industry Goings On, Serious PR | No Comments »
