All blogs in chronological order.
 
 

Met het motto 'Pas op de zomer komt eraan' start Heineken online op King Kong-achtige wijze een campagne. Reusachtige Heineken Coolcans, Longnecks, Tapvaten en 6-pack Twisters komen massaal naar het strand. Het is oppassen waar je je favoriet neerzet.

Bron: Adformatie.nl

The four golden rules of site design, based on the CRAP acronym: Contrast, Repetition, Alignment, Proximity.

- Contrast
Elements that aren’t the same should be very different so they stand out, making them “slightly different” confuses the user into seeing a relation that doesn’t exist. Strong contrast between page elements allows the user’s eye to flow from one to another down the page instead of creating a sea of similarity that’s boring and not communicative.

- Repetition
Repeat styles down the page for a cohesive feel — if you style related elements the same way in one
area, continue that trend for other areas for consistency.

- Alignment
Everything on the page needs to be visually connected to something else, nothing should be out of place or distinct from all other design elements.

- Proximity
Proximity creates related meaning: elements that are related should be grouped together, whereas separate design elements should have enough space in between to communicate they are different.

Read Mike Rundle's full article on www.thinkvitamin.com

The long tail is growing appendages. A new survey released today of over 36,000 readers of blogs shows different segments of blog readers have distinct characteristics. Conducted by the Blogads network, the study breaks out blog audiences into four categories: readers of political, gossip, mom and music blogs.

"There are multiple blogospheres," suggested Blogads CEO Henry Copeland. "These people actually run in packs and the packs have very distinct characteristics."

Political blog browsers may be the most engaged in the blogosphere. The largest portion of the bunch read five blogs each day, and over 18 percent spend 10 hours each week reading blogs. In the last six months, 70 percent contributed to a cause or campaign online, 41 percent spending $100 or more. In that time, 60 percent bought software and clothes on the Web. Eighty-seven percent of these big blog consumers purchased books online, and 52 percent spent $100 or more. Fifty-five percent spent on publication subscriptions in that time.

Over 72 percent of these readers are male and the largest age group, nearly 27 percent, is between 41 and 50 years old. In addition, more than 77 percent have a college degree, while over 20 percent have a family income between $60K and $90K. Fifty percent are Democrats, 20 percent Republicans and nearly 20 percent independents.

Though younger, music blog readers are also more than 72 percent male. More than 44 percent are ages 31-40; more than 25 percent are students and over 58 percent have college degrees. Not surprisingly, a large majority, 86 percent, bought music online in that time, and 47 percent spent over $100. Seventy percent bought books online and 63 percent bought clothes. The largest portion, 18 percent, read one blog per day, and almost 16 percent spend about an hour each week on the blogs.

"I think most advertisers look at blog advertising as more inventory," observed Ian Schafer, CEO of agency Deep Focus, who believes many buy blog media simply to boost their impression count, rather than thinking of how they can target segmented communities. The agency has run several blog campaigns for music and film advertisers, including a recent effort promoting Picturehouse Studio's "The Notorious Bettie Page" on liberal, gossip and even faith-based blogs.

While Copeland said some political and entertainment advertisers grasp the idea of targeting specific types of blogs based on the unique audiences they reach, many advertisers "don't get the degree to which these are self-contained universes…This is not a basket of eyeballs; these are very interwoven communities."

Then there are the female blog readers. Seventy-seven percent of gossip blog readers are women, and over 49 percent are ages 22-30. More than 60 percent have a college degree and over 22 percent are students. Compared to the also young music blog audience, fewer, 63 percent, bought music online. More gossip blog readers, 68 percent, purchased clothing on the Web than both music and political blog readers, and over 48 percent spent more than $100. Fifteen percent of gossip blog fans read three blogs daily, and nearly 15 percent spend two hours each week.

The mom blog crowd, a 90 percent female bunch reading motherhood and parenting-related blogs, is a bit more blog-crazed than their gossip blog sisters. Over 12 percent read five blogs daily and more than 17 percent spend two hours a week reading blogs. They also buy lots of clothes online: 72 percent did in the last six months, and 46 percent spent over $100. A large majority, 83 percent, purchased books on the Web; 36 percent spent over $100. Forty-six percent contributed to a cause or campaign, and 23 percent bought toys. More than 45 percent of mom blog readers are 22-30 in age, more than 73 percent have a college degree, and over 21 percent have a family income of between $60K and $90K.

Readers visit blogs for differing reasons, too. While the majority of mom, gossip and music readers visit blogs for their humorous qualities, most political blog readers like blogs because they provide news they can't find elsewhere.

On one point many seem to agree: podcasts. Though often perceived as early-adopters of new media forms, most blog readers don't listen to them. In fact, 62 percent of music blog readers, 75 percent of political blog readers, 77 percent of mom blog readers and 80 percent of gossip blog readers said they never listen to podcasts.

Source : Clickz.com

Emarketer estimates that marketers will spend $1.2 billion on behavior-targeted online advertising this year. And forecasts that the market will surpass $2 billion in 2008.


Three factors will contribute to those gains:
- Behavioral targeting helps marketers get better results from fewer impressions
- Publishers are keen that behaviorally targeted ads tend deliver more revenue from secondary pages
- Users tend to find ads targeted by their actions to be more relevant to their needs.

Only 28.7 percent of respondents in a December American Association of Advertising Agencies survey said untargeted, mass-audience advertising would be "very effective" by the end of the current decade.



Which is probably why, according to the American Advertising Federation, 84 percent of U.S. advertising professionals cite online advertising's ability to target fragmented audiences as an advantage.

While digital ad targeting methods all have their traditional counterparts, the interactive and dynamic tools that the internet adds to the game give targeting a new face



For those with advertising aspirations: forget mass audience media , focus on behavior targeted online ad campaigns. It asks more efforts, but the ROI is definitely higher.
For those with a few euros to spend: go for the eMarketer report "Online Ad Targeting: Engaging the Audience"

Ook beu dat je outfit verknoeid wordt door de draden van je koptelefoon? Je I-pod mag dan al erg trendy zijn, met bijpassend tasje, het blijft knoeien met de koptelefoon. De oplossing vind je bij fonomaniac, zij brengen oprolbare koptelefoontjes die je als broche kan opspelden.

Deze handgemaakte juweeltjes kunnen makkelijk op je kleding of handtas gespeld worden. Ze hebben ultradunne uitrekbare kabels en kunnen ingeplugd worden op alle standaard types van audio spelers, zoals MP3, walkman, iPod, CD spelers, laptops en DVD spelers.

Een 'Sex and the city'-gadget of de nieuwe trend?

PS Heren, jullie worden niet vergeten hoor. Speciaal voor jullie is er de FIFA 2006 World Cup Editie..

No, this is not about the famous 007-drink, Martini. This is about Bacardi..

Bacardi invests 40 million dollar in internetradio worldwide: a dance radio station you can listen to via the web or your cell phone. B Live Radio, will broadcast sets by famous DJs, performed at their worldwide "Bat Beats" dance events.

The reason why they do it? Bacardi wants to attract a broader audience of young adults.

Last week B Live Radio already went live on air in the US and the UK. We'll just have to wait a little longer, but when it comes out in Belgium, well... shake that boottie

Source: Adformatie.nl

An interesting whitepaper by eMarketer, bundling 7 essentials for successful e-mail marketing.
A must read for everybody putting together an email campaign from time to time or trying to convince customers to do so.

And for those suggesting email is death, there is this nice graph, showing that email still is the direct marketing channel generating the second highest ROI: a 16.0 index (only telephone scores better with 18.2). Check it out
 

From Jakob Nielsen's Alert Box, April 18th
Eyetracking visualizations show that users often read Web pages in an F-shaped pattern: two horizontal stripes followed by a vertical stripe.
F for fast. That's how users read your precious content. In a few seconds, their eyes move at amazing speeds across your website’s words in a pattern that's very different from what you learned in school.

In a new eyetracking study, Nielsen recorded how 232 users looked at thousands of Web pages. They found that users' main reading behavior was fairly consistent across many different sites and tasks. This dominant reading pattern looks somewhat like an F and has the following three components:

• Users first read in a horizontal movement, usually across the upper part of the content area. This initial element forms the F's top bar.
• Next, users move down the page a bit and then read across in a second horizontal movement that typically covers a shorter area than the previous movement. This additional element forms the F's lower bar.
• Finally, users scan the content's left side in a vertical movement. Sometimes this is a fairly slow and systematic scan that appears as a solid stripe on an eyetracking heatmap. Other times users move faster, creating a spottier heatmap. This last element forms the F's stem.

Obviously, users' scan patterns are not always comprised of exactly three parts. Sometimes users will read across a third part of the content, making the pattern look more like an E than an F. Other times they'll only read across once, making the pattern look like an inverted L (with the crossbar at the top). Generally, however, reading patterns roughly resemble an F, though the distance between the top and lower bar varies.

Heatmaps from user eyetracking studies of three websites. The areas where users looked the most are colored red; the yellow areas indicate fewer views, followed by the least-viewed blue areas. Gray areas didn't attract any fixations.

The above heatmaps show how users read three different types of Web pages:

- an article in the "about us" section of a corporate website (far left),
- a product page on an e-commerce site (center), and
- a search engine results page (SERP; far right).

If you squint and focus on the red (most-viewed) areas, all three heatmaps show the expected F pattern. Of course, there are some differences. The F viewing pattern is a rough, general shape rather than a uniform, pixel-perfect behavior.
On the e-commerce page (middle example), the second crossbar of the F is lower than usual because of the intervening product image. Users also allocated significant fixation time to a box in the upper right part of the page where the price and "add to cart" button are found.

On the SERP (right example), the second crossbar of the F is longer than the top crossbar, mainly because the second headline is longer than the first. In this case, both headlines proved equally interesting to users, though users typically read less of the second area they view on a page.

Implications of the F Pattern
The F pattern's implications for Web design are clear and show the importance of following the guidelines for writing for the Web instead of repurposing print content:

• Users won't read your text thoroughly in a word-by-word manner. Exhaustive reading is rare, especially when prospective customers are conducting their initial research to compile a shortlist of vendors. Yes, some people will read more, but most won't.
• The first two paragraphs must state the most important information. There's some hope that users will actually read this material, though they'll probably read more of the first paragraph than the second.
• Start subheads, paragraphs, and bullet points with information-carrying words that users will notice when scanning down the left side of your content in the final stem of their F-behavior. They'll read the third word on a line much less often than the first two words.
  

Just a beautiful story I want to share with you. A small inititiative on the West Bank helping to remove communication blockades within distressed communities and between different cultures.

On the road with six clowns in Israel and Palestine
From The Economist, Apr 12th 2006
The Jenin refugee compound, more than 50 years old and one of the oldest camps in Palestine, is home to 13,000 people, half of them under 15. It was the centre of some of the fiercest fighting during the second intifada, and even today many of its schools remain closed. When Israeli soldiers used to enter the camp, the children would automatically put down their schoolbooks and pick up stones.

Not knowing when the next military raid will burst upon them and with little opportunity to escape, Jenin's children have a far from stable upbringing. But over the past month one school playground has been taken over by a carnival atmosphere. There are no advancing tanks, no explosions, no bloody deaths of local martyrs. Instead, from among a phalanx of laughing children, emerges a group of flat-footed clowns who have wandered, seemingly lost, into the cement and wire enclosure. A few minutes later the children are sitting quietly on the floor and the show can begin.

For more than an hour a loud, chaotic and colourful circus event rolls out mysterious card and water tricks, absurd clown skits, juggling of all varieties and a generous helping of good old slapstick comedy—the loudest laughs often coming, as they always do, when the low-status clowns ridicule the big-boss clown behind his back.

Volunteers are pulled out of the crowd to be a part of the performance and after uttering the immortal words “Chillybah Chillyboo!” they are amazed to see water disappear, cards pulled out of hats, magic wands extending above their heads and a real dart being thrown and caught in a clown's mouth. Even children as tough as these grow shy and tongue-tied on stage in front of their peers, but there is always that look of pride and a pure joy at being the one selected.

Boomchucka Circus, formerly Circus2Iraq, has been touring Israel and Palestine for two months. Originally from Britain, it is made up of six fools who answered an advertisement last November looking for performers to create a circus show for children living on both sides of the conflict.

For the children, the show is a new experience: a humorous, high-energy piece of foolish theatre that transcends the boundaries of culture, language, age and race. But there are lessons for the actors as well. The troupe operates as a collective, with each clown funding his own way. Riding on buses, eating handouts on the street and sleeping on floors, often in return for nothing more than the offer of a chance to learn a little sleight of hand, has given the six actors a clearer insight into the daily lives of the local people and the reality of trying to conduct a relatively normal existence within a war zone than any number of subscriptions to 24-hour television ever could. Perhaps the politicians should sign up for the tour.

How much more "direct" a campaign can be? May be a bit patronizing, but the message won't leave many people indifferent. Great idea. The medium being the message: always spot-on. Always.

    

(via advergirl)