Thursday, April 26, 2007

Google Personalised Homepage Wiped!

Help! About two hours ago I lost all of the content settings on my Google personalised homepage. & while I've tried putting a few back, it keeps suddenly reverting back to the most basic settings.

I know this isn't me, because I've searched and found other bloggers that this has happened to.

It's just so frustrating - about a year's worth of useful rss feeds (on two different tabs) gone - and I can't remember the addresses of some of them.

Come on Google - can you wind the tape back (or whatever) and restore them? Please? Pretty please?

Update - as of this morning it's back, so thanks Google. Made me aware of how reliant I am on this though, and how I need a backup. Netvibes anyone?

Monday, April 23, 2007

Gu Puds

People always mention Innocent smoothies when they talk about modern brands that they love, but I prefer Gu Puds.

I've probably been eating these delicious little puddings for about 3 years, and they are just wonderful. Premium, but not too much so, and pretty much guaranteed to wow your guests. & now I've found that thyy've started making ice cream.

Check out their site here - and have a go at their 'decadent weekend'competition.

Unfortunately they don't allow deep linking to their site (boo to Gu!), but if you can find it have a look at the recycling section. I've never done anything that creative with the ramekins, but it's a nice feature to display.

Thursday, April 19, 2007

Shrek and Kellogg's


Stretching the limit of what is a digital example here, but this shot shows the on-pack promotion that for Shrek (free kids ticket) that can be found on Kellogs Rice Crispies and Frosties at the moment in the UK.

Wednesday, April 18, 2007

Harvey Goldsmith Vs. Big L

I really enjoyed last night's edition of Getting Your Act Together with Harvey Goldsmith on Channel 4.

Essentially the format is very similar to Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares - concert promoter Harvey Goldsmith tries to sort out an entertainer or act desparately in need of help.

This week it was slightly different, as he was trying to help commercial local radio station called Big L, based in Frinton.

While the programme is clearly edited to make Harvey Goldsmith look good (it's produced by Bob Geldof's company), the team at Big L did come across as hopeless.

They've set up a station in Frinton, a tiny seaside town, with an AM frequency, and also listening facilities on Sky Digital and online, making them technically not a local radio station. They've then staffed it with refugees from the BBC in the 1970s (Mike Read, Dave 'Diddy' Hamilton), who clearly don't realise that time has moved on. For me it really emphasised how much the media landscape had changed in the last few years.

1 - Focus groups are not bad, but they can be used badly. In their aim to set up an old fashioned radio station they had deliberately done no research, and had no musical policy apart from allowing the DJs to play what they wanted. Fine if you've got John Peel, less fine with their DJs.

2 - No one owes you a living. They had no concept of where the revenue was coming from, and no concept of why people in Frinton should listen. Their backers were not worried by the losses - stated in the show to be £50k per month - as they saw it as a start up. I've worked for companies that made no money, and they went bust, but I always prided myself on delivering more revenue than I cost. The DJs were bleating on about how hard they were working (18 hour days!) but what was the output?

3 - Marketing ideas are cheap, and you need to get the whole team behind them. Harvey's catchphrase of 'Growing Old Disgracefully' was pretty lame, as was his idea of the competition to join the mile high club. They should have brainstormed these together, rather than just had them imposed from him. (Not as bad as his idea for Saxon last week - an attempt to break the world air guitar record that went spectacularly wrong)

4 - Don't make a TV ad unless you've got lots of money. Big L seemed to waste lots of time shooting a TV ad - but how were they going to affor do get it shown? It's not even on YouTube.

5 - Don't appear on a reality show - especially not on the first series of a reality show. It was unclear who had called Harvey in, but they seemed to be under the misapprehension that he was just going to help them with some marketing ideas.

6 - Sort your website out. Their website has a listen again feature that works well, but why have the adsense ads at the top? I double they even make a fiver a week, and it just makes the enterprise look cheap.

7 - I'm Alan Partridge gets better with age. Several of the characters at the station seemed to be living their own Partridge lives, subsidised by the people bankrolling the operation. The set up at Big L would make a great sitcom.

Very entertaining show though - catch it on Channel 4's online service 4OD

Wednesday, April 11, 2007

iPhone Theme for Sony Ericsson M600i

This is very enterprising - and very cheeky!

Update - this is nothing to do with me - if you want one of these then get in touch with the YouTuber directly!

Update - Click on the video to get through to the YouTube movie, then look for a link to the YouTuber's site. Or Google it - but stop posting comments to me!

See also - Bobba - like a mobile Habbo

Tuesday, April 10, 2007

The Future of Online Advertising show

Update - all the tickets have now gone - thanks to all the people who entered. The answers were:

Past - AT&T
Present - Nokia
Future - 14%

I've got my hands on five tickets to The Future of Online Advertising in New York, and
I'd like to give them away to you, my readers (sorry - flights & hotels not included!). If you're interested, please email me answering the simple 'Past, Present & Future' questions below.

Past - Which telecoms client featured in the first ever banner ad in 1994?

Present - Which mobile handset manufacturer launched a new advertising service in March?

Future - According to a report from eMarketer, what % of US online ad spend will Automotive comprise in 2007 - 7%, 14% or 21%?

Five winners will be selected at random on April 18th. Please note that you must be able to travel to New York to win.


Here's the info on the event:

http://www.futureofonlineadvertising.com
June 7-8, NYC

Topics:
* How to guarantee the success of your online ads
* Tips for packaging your inventory and maximizing ad revenue
* Online Advertising Basics - Everything you wanted to know but were afraid
to ask
* Advertising in RSS feeds - the next big thing?
* Marketing Beyond Google, Yahoo, AOL & MSN with Scale, Quality and Safety
* It's all in the creative - how to create successful online ads
* Targeted Ad Networks - Cost Per Influence Vs. Cost Per Thousand
* Ads in Online Video - the future of interactive advertising?

Speakers:
* Erick Schonfeld (Business 2.0)
* Henry Copeland (Blog Ads)
* Jim Coudal (Coudal Partners)
* Mike Hudack (blip.tv)
* Jay Adelson (digg/revision3)
* Darren Rowse (ProBlogger.net)
* Greg Stuart (IAB)
* Carla Hendra (Ogilvy)
* Matt Freeman (Tribal DDB)
* Jeremy Allaire (Brightcove)
* Chas Edwards (Federated Media)
* Steve Rubel (Edelman)
* Andrew Goodman (Page Zero)
* Michael Walrath (Right Media)
* Steve Olechowski (FeedBurner)
* Alyson Racer (New York Times)

Prime Time video shop in Berwick Street closes

I was in Soho at the weekend, and saw that the Prime Time video shop in Berwick Street had closed.

When I first moved to London I joined, and was really pleased to finally have found a video shop that stocked lots of interesting tapes, had a decent back catalogue, and even filed its videos by director (Scorsese, Hitchcock, Allen). Even cooler, David Thewlis was also member.

But now it's gone, driven out of business by a combination of

- Cheap DVDs in other stores like HMV - several listed at £3 to buy in this weekend's papers
- Free DVDs in newspapers (although this seems to be declining)
- Pirate DVDs on sale openly - 4 DVDs for £10 off Brick Lane this weekend
- Online/postal film clubs like LoveFilm.

Personally I prefer to buy DVDs these days rather than rent, and then swap them with friends. This beats rental for me because at the end of it you've got a pile of DVDs to show for your money, and I seem to get pretty little time to watch DVDs at the moment anyway.

The other thing is that Blockbuster must also be closing branches in the UK. One other DVD show local to me (Apollo on Clapham High Street) has now gone, selling off it's stock cheap, and letting people see why it went out of business - they had about 1o copies of The Calcium Kid.

My local Blockbuster doesn't even have the wherewithall to get a new copy of Pirates of The Caribbean - so anyone walking in to rent a copy one of the most successful fioms of recent years has to go elsewhere to buy one instead.

RIP Prime Time, but not the others.

Wednesday, April 04, 2007

New Reebok RunEasy Site

Here's some fantastic work done by my colleagues at Molecular and Carat Fusion in the US for Reebok's new running campaign Run Easy. The site enables new runners as well as serious runners to share their runs with each other, but more importantly to discuss their runs and the sites and sounds along them.

Take a look and add your runs, pictures and associate play lists with those runs!

www.goruneasy.com

Tuesday, April 03, 2007

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