Anyone who's heard me rail on about finding smart ways to make a difference, won't be surprised to see me posting about this new site from Canada. Better the World is a cool idea that pairs up socially aware advertisers with socially conscious viewers who effectively sell their eyeballs for charity.  To get involved, you simply download the sidebar plugin for Firefox from www.bettertheworld.com. It's early days for them and their user numbers have been slow to grow.  A quick search indicates that they haven't successfully leveraged word of mouth i.e. no one much is talking about them - even though it's a great idea and executed nicely.  Watch the demo video, it's simple but compelling. I guess the point here, is that a good idea is rarely ever enough.  For a site like this to be successful, it will need to reach out to existing communities in order to grow its own.  It has to get the word out, if it doesn't get talked about it won't survive. I guess that's why I'm talking about it.  Now go, tell someone else!

In a large integrated agency like Ogilvy, we're constantly looking for ways to leverage creative horsepower across our various disciplines.  The convergence of media channels is beginning to make that process a lot more straight forward as our teams find new ways of collaborating. A recent campaign for L&P saw us put together an integrated campaign which features a number of 20 minute webisodes destined exclusively for TVNZ On Demand.  The streaming results were impressive, actually more than impressive, so I went looking for something to support what we were seeing in terms of user behaviour.  It didn't take long to locate Razorfish's 2009 Digital Outlook Report which had this to say:

Many in the TV industry insist that online viewing is additive — that individual consumers watch shows both online and on TV, rather than replacing TV viewership with online. However, a study from research firm Integrated Media Measurement said May 2008 marked the first time that a significant portion of  U.S. based online viewers of primetime, episodic TV shows didn’t watch part of those shows on TV.  What’s more, 50% of viewers consider online viewing  a replacement for TV, according to the firm. A Deloitte survey also found that nearly 6 in 10 U.S. consumers would like to easily integrate their televisions with their computers to download or watch online content. 

I'm still not 100% sure what to make of Skittles on-line ploy.  It's definitely cool, at least from my geeky point of view.  The real question though is whether it's effective as a marketing campaign. So what's going on?  Go to www.skittles .com and after you prove you're older than 12, you'll pull up a wiki page with a little flash overlay sitting up in the left hand corner.  That overlay is your navigation to Skittles content on a range of social media sites including Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Flickr.  Rather than going with the usual carefully designed brand website, Skittles pulls together content and conversation about their product from all over the web dynamically. Along with being cool, it was a pretty brave move, highlighted by some of the less than politically correct tweets that appeared on the home page in the first couple of days.  Whatever the site's ambitions are though, it's definitely getting the brand talked about and that's nothing to sneeze at. As I said, still not quite sure what to make of it - but wish I'd done it nevertheless, great work!

I'm not a huge fan of invasive flash banner takeovers...but there are always exceptions.  This advertisement for Apple's iPod touch completely disrupts your desktop - but gets away with it, because it's seriously cool!