Kizmo

AdAge’s Small Agency Diary has a good article up on how ad agencies have been dealing with widespread expansion into the interactive advertising world.  We’ve worked with several agencies over the last year or so, who ranged from shops for whom interactive content is a new service, to agencies who’d started strictly as interactive shops.  Guess who’s easier to work with?

The best interactive shops, in my opinion, are those who understand that, unlike print design, producing great interactive ad work is a combination of the traditional model and the process of software development.  And understanding the technology is key for any company that will be producing. Johnson’s three qualities of good interactive companies is a great list. We’re all about #2, of course.  And #3 is about improving process, which is basically my point about understanding, at least to some extent, software development.

With all the dogmatism of brevity, here are 38 things Ogilvy & Mather have learned about advertising.

Me wearing silly 3D glasses.

Last week I saw the new U2 in 3D movie at an IMAX Theater. Wow, what a rush. Sitting in the seats, I felt as if I was just a few feet a way from Bono and the Guys. I wanted to reach out and touch them. So, cool. Just when you were getting tired of the camera zooming around the stage, they would integrate the interesting big screen images into the 3D format, so that at times words and letters were flying through the air at you.

I couldn’t help but wonder how this new 3D movie experience will change movies in the future? Will Brad Pitt be two feet a way from you in his next big film? What about sex and violence in movies how will that change? But it also made me think about interactive video projection. What would they look like? How about Camille Utterback’s Text Rain. What would it be like to have a 3D version of Text Rain? Way Cool.

This video is a must-see for anyone working on interface or information design.

There seems to be a lot of discussion lately on the first run experience. Maybe I’m noticing more after having just completed a FRE project for everybody’s favorite mega-corp but I always felt that the topic never garnered the attention it deserves.

As Mac OS critic John Gruber points out, the first run experience is merely a small part of the user’s overall experience with a product, thus many companies choose to let it fall to the wayside, assuming that since it is such a small piece of the user experience, there are more important things to focus on. However, as we all know, first impressions go a long way. That first run experience is critical to the user’s introduction to your product. If it doesn’t go smoothly, or is downright confusing, that bad experience will tarnish the user’s impression—even driving them away from your product.

As Gruber states, it’s clear that Apple understands the importance of the FRE. The first time a user turns on his brand new iMac, he is greeted with an animated introduction that walks him through the five-minute-process of setting up his computer, communicating the brand message of elegance and simplicity.

I see the first run experience as a growing trend in software and technology as the industry recognizes that evoking an emotional response to the brand begins the second the customer opens the box, clicks the link or dials the phone number.

Dorothy Campbell is a woman after mine own heart.

Wesc - short for We Are The Superlative Conspiracy. A provocative company name with a website to go a long with it. The main navigation is straight forward, its the sub-navigation and the display of products is innovative. The content page navigation is moved through with the arrow keys, where the user is moving through the list of thumbnails. This stands out from the traditional product display. The view can see all the items and the clean white design allows the clothing to stand out.

I give them credit for trying something different but the implementation left me wondering why did they bother? The movement of the products across the screen is smooth but when switching rows can be jarring. Once the all images are loaded, the system is fast to move through. And this is my main complaint with the site. The constant loading. Every page I visited I had to wait for things to load, I couldn’t explore about, until all the elements(upwards of 100) where there. There must be a to load things in the background or load small images quicker so that the user is not sitting around waiting.

Its a beautiful site, the design of the activists section is great. Obviously some people spent a good deal of time working out the interactions and hard work went into development of the site. But I think they went a bit too far in making people wait for loading of elements.

Nordstrom shoppers might desire a more sophisticated marketing approach.

While the effect may be simple to achieve in Photoshop, 44-year-old Dutch artist Desiree Palmen forgoes the digital and creates the effect the old fashioned way. Meticulously painting cotton suits to match an environment and than photographing the result.

Peter Merholz has a good post up about how advertising should give some idea of the experience of using the product, and cites Polaroid and the recent iPhone campaign as good examples.

The other side of this approach is brand-centric advertising that’s all about capturing how a product will make you “feel” or how you should identify it (and by extension, yourself?). Soft drink commercials typically go this way, for example. However, in the case of some products, introducing potential customers to your experience via an ad is an amazing opportunity. Besides the examples Merholz mentions, one of my favourites is the campaign that introduced the Wii. A little over the top, but you understood right away what makes the Wii different by watching people playing it (not watching what they were playing).