Twitter is still something of a mystery to those of us in advertising and marketing. Everyone thinks they need to be on top of it, but no one is completely sure now to use it. Even fewer people have an idea of how to measure whether or not they’re using it effectively. Most of the time brands think about Twitter like this: Create an account, start tweeting, and then measure success by looking at how many followers we have. But that doesn’t tell you the whole story. In fact, that tells you almost nothing.
Pictodeck is just what it sounds like — a deck of pictograms. It’s a collection of over 700 vector pictograms taken from four different sets: PICOL, Android Icons, Pictoico, and Freshpixel. I have converted all of these sets into graphical assets that exist within a Keynote deck. No need to open them in a program like Adobe Illustrator and import them individually. All you have to do is open Pictodeck in Keynote and copy and paste or drag them into your own decks. You can even drag the entire series of 720p slides into your decks (although I wouldn’t recommended leaving them there, since Pictodeck is rather large at about 30MB).
I created this because I’ve found myself spending a lot of time using Keynote to tell stories. I like telling stories through creative uses of typography and pictograms. I found myself using PICOL (Pictoral Communication Language) a lot last year and decided to formalize my collection and distribute it a way that makes the entire library more accessible to those in advertising, marketing, finance — any industry really. If you work with Keynote, Pictodeck is for you.
This was something I spent quite a bit of time on. You may have seen pieces of it here. It’s [now] a little book called Thresher. It’s the first in a series of thought leadership and innovation workshops for Freesytle Interactive.
Summary:
“Thresher is a quarterly publication by Freestyle Interactive. It’s an experiment in what we are calling ‘reverse aggregation.’ Instead of a standard newsletter that gets lost in your inbox, with a dozen disconnected links, Thresher is a collection of articles that take a deeper look at a single topic, trend, or technology.”
UPDATE: Thresher was just chosen as a “Staff Pick” by Blurb! Check it out.
Advertising on the third screen in the fifth dimension
This is a deck I built in collaboration with Freestyle Interactive, Heat, and Wieden + Kennedy on trends and innovation in mobile marketing. And in a completely unrelated note, I don’t think I’ll ever get over the jealousy I feel towards W+K for having a two letter domain name.
The purpose of this deck was to delve into advertising on the third screen (mobile) in this new fifth dimension—where data and information exists in a cloud all around you. This fifth dimension isn’t quite tangible without a device, but if you have an iPhone you can look at a restaurant through your phone and see every review that people left on Yelp or all the tweets tagged with that location.
I made extensive use of two things: color and iconography. All of the icons used in the deck are taken from the open source PICOL icon set. I tried to keep the text to a bare minimum. There are also quite a few videos in the deck, which makes the Slideshare version feel a little static; but you get the idea.
You can download this presentation in PDF format through Slideshare here.
Note: The image above is massive at 13536x1584, and too big for Tumblr. You can find a high-resolution JPEG here.
I have colloquially chosen to call this The Skypeline.
I can’t well cover up the client in this case. This was for a pitch I worked on. (For Skype, in case you were still wondering.) I decided to map the history and evolution of Skype as both a brand and a product.
To do this I used the Wayback Machine to pull creative and copy from Skype’s website dating back to their launch in August 2003. It’s interesting to see how Skype developed over the years, being that it’s been mostly a “free” product and service. Several of the initiatives to monetize their platform have been killed.
Skype business model is something of a paradox. They want more users to sign up for Skype and use their paid services, but every time a new person signs up for Skype that’s one less person that you need to use the paid service to call (since Skype-to-Skype calls are free). It’s not a problem most businesses have. If everyone uses Skype, Skype makes no money. The optimal scenario for them is one where ever customer has exactly half of his or her contacts on Skype so that he or she is using it all the time, but still needs the buy into the paid service to call the other half that isn’t using it.
They would have made an interesting client. I hope to work with them in the future.
Note: Due to contractual obligations, I have decided to remove any brand-identifying information.
The image above is a complete mapping of a major brand’s social media presence on the web. This was an exercise I started doing for all the brands I’ve worked with in order to better understand how the consumer uses social media. Everyone likes to talk about how social media is going to save their business, but I don’t see a lot of examples of people going out there and actually finding out how people interact with the content that brands are seeding out to them.
The colors indicate the specific property in question. Everything having to do with Facebook, for example, is in red. Simply mapping out properties and getting an idea of their size is a good start, but it doesn’t really tell you how the consumer ends up there… or where they go after. The consumer journey remains a mystery. That’s where the madness of arrows comes into play.
The arrows indicate trafficking information. They show where people end up going given any particular starting point. This is the kind of information that can be invaluable when developing strategies for content distribution, and having them actually mapped out on a 2D-plane can make that process much easier. This can also help lead to more optimal linking structures for large brands that have a distributed presence over a number of different sites and networks.
You may notice that the missing piece here is traffic coming from search. It was too difficult to map on a 2D-plane with everything else going on, but is something that was considered as part of the content distribution strategy for this brand.
One of the first projects I worked on at Freestyle Interactive was for the Sims 3 launch earlier this year.
The client wanted a “big Facebook idea” for the launch of the Sims 3, but Facebook doesn’t allow things like page takeovers, skins, or expandable ad units. The only thing Facebook would offer was the use of their new “Engagement Ads,” and there’s just nothing exciting about that. It’s the exact opposite of a big idea.
I suggested that, instead, we should use Facebook as the destination. We could create a site that existed somewhere else and would act as a proxy to a users web experience. And that’s exactly what we ended up doing. We created the Sim Sidekick, an in-browser overlay that users could take to any site. The widget would react to the page by scraping it for keywords and returning an appropriate animation based on the underlying content. The result was a widget that people spent over 4-minutes with on average. Skittles, of course, did the same kind of thing when they relaunched Skittles.com back in March 2009.
It was new territory for Freestyle though, and the client loved it. As good as it was it could have been much better. It could have been a more seamless experience for the user, and had much more interaction with the actual page. Instead of using a simple Flash overlay, we could have injected bits of Flash into the page itself with JavaScript, similar to the kinds of effects that can be achieved with the Greasemonkey plugin for Firefox. Imagine if you went to Facebook only to have a character literally walk across the page and appear to manipulate specific elements on the page. Since Facebook’s layout is so structured, this kind of effect is completely possible.
I foresee more of these kinds of experiences in the future, where the brand can create proxies that allow you to view the web through the brands perspective. Well, at least the interesting brands. I’m not sure this is a concept I’d want to pitch to Tampax.
This video, entitled Pwning Noobs, is a short consumer insights video I made to inspire our creative team. This was specifically for some pitch work and the client was a major game publisher. I went in one weekend and cobbled this together in iMovie and Final Cut Express. It’s made entirely from other pieces of user-generated content. The goal was to create a video that shed some light on competitive gaming culture; PC gamers in particular.
The video inspired a good deal of the creative that made it into the deck, and the video itself was how we opened the pitch. The client loved it and actually thought that it was a piece of creative.
It's all in the numbers
About a year ago I was hired by a word-of-mouth marketing agency to work on a social media pilot project for a client. This agency had typically done event marketing, and this project was quite different. It was, in effect, a social media research project. This was about using social media in a fundamentally different way. It wasn’t about “brand monitoring” or using social media as some kind of new broadcast medium. This was about using social media to develop real, accurate insights and have an affect on how a company thinks about their industry, their consumer, and their marketing. This was, without a doubt, one of the most interesting projects I’ve ever worked on.
The client asked us how they should be allocating brand resources and budgets to create the most effective word-of-moth campaigns. They wanted us to find new opportunities for them. Today, almost any effective word of mouth campaign will reach the Internet, and so it stands to make sense that one could make recommendations based on learning about the larger marketplace, where the brand fits within it, and how the consumer interacts with both the brand and the market.
A few years ago I tried to start a company. The name of the startup was Anatomy Ads. You can see the remnants of a functional prototype at anatomyads.com, if you wish. The purpose of this company was to find a new way to monetize new media.
The idea was to create a truly social advertising network around the idea of “variable CPM.” You would pay ‘x’ dollars for an ad, and the number of ‘y’ impressions you would receive would vary based on how many other people were buying into that space, and at what price. If people could enter an ad unit, at whatever price they wanted, what would happen? Would you have hundreds of people offering small increments for hot properties, or a few big players trying to dominate the pool? How would people act if they didn’t know how many impressions they’d end up getting? Would you ever reach the equilibrium price? These were the kinds of questions I wanted to answer.
Hello. My name is Aaron. I'm a digital strategist who lives and works in New York City. This blog showcases some of the things I've worked on which I've found particularly interesting and worth talking about. You can find my daily blog here.
You can find out where else I exist across the Internet by visiting the links on my website or my Google Profile. If you want to contact me directly you can follow me on Twitter or send me an email.
