10 Years of Digital Advertising

With it's 10th birthday on the way, Cybercom (The Digital Marketing People) have put together their "10 key digital events that have been instrumental in shaping a decade of advertising and have left a lasting effect, which will continue to influence the next decade of advertising."

This is a fantastic collection of all those digital moments that have shaped the world wide web as we know it now. Difficult job though trying to chose 10 things out of 10 years. I can definitely think of one or two that I think should have made it - YouTube (in it's entirity), Blogging, Socila Media in general etc. Drop a comment on the blog and let them know what else they missed!

Lenovo Ad

Immature, perhaps. Childish, almost certainly. Funny, absolutely. This had me in stiches. Unfortunately the sad truth is that this is one of the most unlikely situations I think an advertising agency has ever come up with. I feel safe saying that it could never happen. Ah well.

Google Maps Street View

One of the funniest things on the net is Google Street View. I love the amount of people who have been caught, seemingly unaware, while in the middle of some activity that is either unlawful or out-and-out embarrassing!

I'm not entirely sure what's happening at '8 sampsonia way, pittsburgh, allegheny, pennsylvania 15212' but something tells me these guys don't have a lot of friends.

The Goatee Saver

I found this over on Only Dead Fish (thanks Neil). This is flippin' hilarious. I thought the first guy was CGI - doesn't he look odd?

Email Data Visualisation

I'm a geek. I freely admit it. I'm also really into Social Media in all its forms - Blogging, Social Networking, Micro-blogging etc. etc. I also have a professional interest in the convergance of data, and how the meaning of data is rapidly becoming more accessible to AI systems (admittedly simple AI systems such as webbots and spiders).

So when I saw this, I loved it!
Christopher Baker analysed over 60,000 emails sent and received since 1998 to understand the "social network" created by his correspondance. Further to this, he decided the best way to represent the dats was visually:


"Like many people, I have archived all of my email with the hope of someday revisiting my past. I am interested in revealing the innumerable relationships between me, my schoolmates, work-mates, friends and family. This could not readily be accomplished by reading each of my 60,000 emails one-by-one. Instead, I created My Map, a relational map and alternative self portrait. My Map is a piece of custom designed software capable of rendering the relationships between myself and individuals in my address book by examining the TO:, FROM:, and CC: fields of every email in my email archive. The intensity of the relationship is determined by the intensity of the line. My Map allows me to explore different relational groupings and periods of time, revealing the temporal ebbs and flows in various relationships. In this way, My Map is a veritable self-portrait, a reflection of my associations and a way to locate myself."

- Christopher Baker