In a commercial break on a Czech Music TV channel I saw these two ads (KFC ad is the original Czech one, Centrum ad is a similar US version). Did the cholesterol pills ad buyer just get lucky? Does the ad controller at the station have a sense of humour? I guess we’ll never know….
QR codes (2D barcodes) have been front of mind for me recently, partly for the wrong reasons: Malicious QR Codes, QR Codes that might unleash some malware on your phone, parroted by many outlets, including this piece by TechCrunch while EConsultancy wonders whether the link with malware could damage perceptions of QR Codes amongst consumers,…
Whilst researching the relative costs and market share of UK price comparison websites for a client I used Google Trends for Websites (log in to your Google account to get actual numbers on the Y axis) to compare some of the big players. The graph below tells a sorry tale. Even before March’s first Panda update,…
Quit messing with the user experience and go after Google already! Seriously, is this the best you’ve got? You hold your annual conference, just a day or so after Google throws open the doors on Google+, aimed square at you, and all you fire back with are some changes to the news feed, a Twitter…
In February Nokia’s CEO sent out the infamous burning platform memo. In that he states the fact that Nokia’s current offerings, based on Meego and Symbian are not good enough when compared to Apple’s iPhone or the various iterations of Android phones on the market. The biggest point he makes is that the competitors have…
Negative keywords can be used to prevent your ads displaying when those keywords are contained in the user’s search query (or contained in the content, if your ads are showing on the content network). Why would you want to do this? Avoid useless traffic Avoid embarrassment Improve your click-thru ratio and conversion rate You can…
Last weekend, with beautiful blue skies overhead, I went to the Prague Food Festival held in the gardens below the castle. It seems I mistimed my visit however. The Festival’s version of crowd control was to close the gates for up to 2 hours at a time. They’d used this tactic before, last year, too….
If you’ve noticed recently that the vast majority of the ads you’re seeing on sites that use Google’s Adsense programme for their advertising slots are for the same company? You’re probably being ‘retargeted‘ (remarketed in Google’s parlance) to. What is retargeting? Say you go to a website, in my case, Mydomain.com. You look around, but…
I like ads. Always have done. Good ones that is. As a teenager my walls were decorated with framed mini-proofs of poster campaigns that my dad worked on. There are some very effective TV and cinema campaigns that I enjoy watching, where each ad is part of a serial and I look forward to the…
This story has a bit of everything for anyone with an eye on contemporary advertising practice: crowdsourcing, cultural in-jokes and a parody ad. Labour invited supporters to submit ideas for poster ads, and the winner was: For the uninitiated (non-Brits) out there, that’s David Cameron, leader of the Conservative Party (Her Majesty’s Opposition Party) atop…
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