Monday, October 19, 2009

Cadbury’s Make-A-Wish


Cadbury’s have just launched a new microsite for the UK and Ireland to support their sponsorship of the Make-A-Wish Foundation. The site, which has been developed for Cadbury’s by Weapon7, introduces ‘The Wish Workshop’. ‘The Wish Workshop’ is the home of five unnamed, quirky characters who have a strange language all of their own.

The site offers five different films, all produced in a really cool old-school stop-frame animation. They show the five characters making and launching new wishes. The wishes which are represented by stars, will be added to the sky everytime new real-life wishes happen. The site also features a live stream to the homepage of all donations. Essentially visitors can see donations as they happen in real-time, including any donation that they make themselves.

Promotion of the site and campaign will be done on the 16million plus selection boxes that Cadbury's will sell over the Christmas period.

Sunday, October 18, 2009

Augmented Reality: Cereal Box

To promote Luc Besson's new movie Arthur and the revenge of Maltazard, the clever folk at Dassault Systemes have developed a seriously cool augmented reality cereal box. Dassault Systemes have created a 3D game experience based on their multi-support 3DVIA Virtools platform. Check out the following video of the creative...

Saturday, October 17, 2009

Dublin Zoo Announces The Names Of Its Two Sumatran Tiger Cubs


Every now and then I see something that I think is worth sharing, and while it may not be anything to do with Digital Marketing or Marketing at all, I figure why not! Last May two Sumatran Tiger cubs were born at Dublin Zoo. Finally, following a nationwide competition that drew hundreds of entries, the cubs again find themselves in the spotlight with the announcement of their names. “Emas”, which is Indonesian for “Gold”, is the name that has been chosen for the male cub and “Wanita”, meaning “Woman”, for the female.

Gerry Creighton from Dublin Zoo said, ”Emas is a typical male. He’s boisterous and playful and loves to explore. We’ve got to know his manner now and we all agreed that “Gold” is perfect for him. He has a beautiful, vibrant rich gold coat with dark stripes contrasting it and he really is a winner in our eyes.”

Gerry continued; “We love the name Wanita and think it suits her down to the ground While Emas is a very strong male character, Wanita displays truly typical female traits. She has a really sweet nature, and is far more relaxed then her brother. She is really close to her mother and has shown classic feminine characteristics.”

Interestingly the cubs father, Kepala, has taken an active role in the cub’s upbringing which is quite unusual as male Sumatran Tigers are traditionally solitary creatures. In another unusual twist, the family enjoy sleeping together at night alongside each other.

Sumatran tigers are a critically endangered species with fewer than 400 alive in the wild. Dublin Zoo plays a significant role in the international breeding programme which is designed to ensure the survival of tigers in their natural habitat. As well as contributing to this breeding programme visitors to Dublin Zoo have the opportunity to support these critically endangered species by purchasing a Tiger adoption pack at Dublin Zoo gift shop.

The following video is an interview done by Darragh Doyle back in July with one of Dublin Zoo's keepers, Anita, about the cubs.

Friday, October 16, 2009

Channel 4 on YouTube


Channel 4 have confirmed that they are in the final stages of signing a deal with YouTube to allow YouTube to host most of the channel 4's content in full. An initial deal has already seen Channel 4 securing the right to sell the advertising that appears around its content, in a profit=share arrangement with YouTube. Channel 4's chairman, Luke Johnson, spoke at last week's Association of Online Publishers Digital Publishing Summit saying that traditional broadcasters needed to 'seize opportunities' to profit from online video.

To date Channel 4 has attracted 25,500 subscribers and a total of 700,000 views to its main YouTube channel, but it also has several other channels including E4, T4 and Hollyoaks. It recent months however, Channel 4 has also been populating its website with a back catalogue of programmes, all of which have utilised pre-roll ads from Nina Ricci's Ricci Ricci and Nokia among others.

Channel 4 sources have indicated that their internal planning believes that the market is approaching a 'tipping point', and a greater number of people will watch its programming online than on TV. This is in direct correlation to a recent survey carried out in Ireland.

Thursday, October 15, 2009

Gary's Social Media Counter

A friend in work, Stephen, pointed me towards this post from Gary Hayes. Gary has used a series of industry stats (see below) to create a "real-time" Social Media counter. OK, we can all agree that this is based on statistics and obviously not an actual counter, but none the less I would say that if anything it's only getting less accurate by under-estimating figures as Social Media adoption grows.



Gary used the following data sources for the counter:
  • 20 hours of uploaded every minute onto YouTube (source YouTube blog Aug 09)
  • Facebook 600k new members per day, and photos, videos per , 700mill & 4 mill respectively (source Inside Facebook Feb 09)
  • Twitter 18 million new users per year & 4 million tweets sent daily (source TechCrunch Apr 09)
  • iPolicy UK – SMS messaging has a bright future (Aug 09)
  • 900 000 blogs posts put up every day (source Technorati State of the Blogosphere 2008)
  • YouTube daily, 96 million videos watched, $1mill bandwidth costs (source Comscore Jul 06 !)
  • UPDATE: YouTube 1Billion watched per day SMH (2009)- counter updated!
  • Second Life 250k virtual goods made daily, text messages 1250 per second (source Linden Lab release Sep 09)
  • Money – $5.5 billion on virtual goods (casual & ) even Facebooks gifts make $70 million annually (source Viximo Aug 09)
  • Flickr has 73 million visitors a who upload 700 million photos (source Yahoo Mar 09)
  • Mobile social network subscribers – 92.5 million at the end of 2008, by end of 2013 rising to between 641.6-873.1 million or 132 mill annually (source Informa PDF)
  • SMS – Over 2.3 trillion messages will be sent across major markets worldwide in 2008 (source Everysingleoneofus sms statistics)


He has also created two downloadable version of the counter (righ click and save as):


Gary can be found at the following places: