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.
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.
Hi, I'm Aaron Richard. You might remember me as that guy from some website who goes by the name "Ralph The Magician."
I'm a digital strategist who lives and works in New York City.
This is one of my blogs. I use this to showcase some of the things I've worked on that I think others might find particularly interesting. I maintain two other blogs: Blogs by Magic & Random Bits of Magic.
You can learn more about me, follow me on Twitter, or send me an email.
