Akamai, the largest CDN with access to more information than you can imagine, announced a new service called Advertising Decision Solutions (ADS), a new division in the company that will work with its clients to apply behavioral-targeting layers to ad campaigns; it has also acquired Acerno, a company that has built itself on the notion of “predictive modeling” for $95 million.

Akamai has access to anonymous traffic from all over the world on all type of sites, and has access to track user paths and determine behavior. For example, they can know that a user has been looking at specific cars across multiple sites and suggest a targeted ad on a totally different publisher. The best of all, is that Akamai has access to this data without requiring any integration from publishers, no pixel images, no scripts, just raw data from their content networks.  Read More »

In this tough economic climate it’s important to strive to be your best at your job. There are layoffs all around and we must all aim to please both our clients and our company superiors.

One quick way to do this is impress your co-workers with a skilled series of dares. We have devised the following point system to help you succeed at office dares. Try these out in whatever order you think works best.

One-Point Dares

1. Ignore the first five people who say ‘good morning’ to you.
2. To signal the end of a conversation, clamp your hands over your ears and grimace.
3. Leave your fly open for one hour. If anyone points it out, say, “Sorry, I really prefer it this way”.
4. Walk sideways to the photocopier.
5. While going in an elevator, gasp dramatically each time the doors open.
6. When in elevator with one other person, tap them on the shoulder and pretend it wasn’t you.
7. Finish all your sentences with “In accordance with the prophecy…”
8. Don’t use any punctuation.
9. Interrupt your conversation with someone by giving a huge dejected sigh.
10. Use your highlighter pen on the computer screen.

Three-Point Dares

1. Say to your boss, “I like your style”, wink, and shoot him with double-barrelled fingers.
2. Kneel in front of the water cooler and drink directly from the nozzle.
3. Shout random numbers while someone is counting.
4. Every time you get an email, shout ”email”.
5. Put decaf in the coffee maker for 3 weeks. Once everyone has got over their caffeine addictions, switch to espresso.
6. Keep hole punching your finger. Each time you do, shout, “dagnamit, it’s happened again!”. Then do it again.
7. Introduce yourself to a new colleague as “the office bicycle”. Then wink and pout.
8. Call I.T. help desk and tell them that you can’t seem to access any pornography web sites.

Five-Point Dares

1. At the end of a meeting, suggest that, for once, it would be nice to conclude with the singing of the national anthem (extra points if you actually launch into it yourself).
2. Walk into a very busy person’s office and while they watch you with growing irritation, turn the light switch on/off 10 times.
3. For an hour, refer to everyone you speak to as “Dave”.
4. Announce to everyone in a meeting that you “really have to go do a number two”.
5. When you’ve picked up a call, before speaking finish off some fake conversation with the words, ‘’she can abort it for all I care”.
6. After every sentence, say ‘Mon’ in a really bad Jamaican accent. As in: “The report’s on your desk, Mon.” Keep this up for one hour.
7. In a meeting or crowded situation, slap your forehead repeatedly and mutter, “Shut up, damn it, all of you just shut up!”
8. At lunchtime, get down on your knees and announce, “As God is my witness,I’ll never go hungry again!”
9. Repeat the following conversation 10 times to the same person: “Do you hear that?” “What?” “Never mind, it’s gone now.”
10. Present meeting attendees with a cup of coffee and biscuit; smash each biscuit with your fist.
11. During the course of a meeting, slowly edge your chair towards the door.
12. As often as possible, skip rather than walk.
13. Ask people what sex they are. Laugh hysterically after they answer.
14. Sign or p.p. all letters with your initials and a swastika.
15. Dry hump the photocopier. When someone spots you, stop and cough embarrassingly, then lean in to the machine and whisper loudly, “I’ll see you tonight”.

There’s a great summary of the Motrin social media mishap titled “Crashing Motrin-gate: a Social Media Case Study” on AdAge. It does an excellent job of mapping out the starting point for the chatter and then the tipping point at which it explodes on twitter.

I have to questions whether I think this was worth pulling down for the brand though. I’d be interested to see what percentage of the 300 blog posts (301 counting this one) are from marketing or social media blogs/sites. I think this is a hot subject right now in marketing, but was it really that big when you look at it’s impact on pop culture. Only a couple of hundred thousand people viewed this ad on YouTube. I feel like this might be media going nuts again and making a big deal out of a small fire.

Maybe there was a more intelligent way to respond to the community then issuing a very corporate apology, pulling your site down, and pulling this commercial. Based on some very interesting conversations I’ve been having with our own corporate communications department I’ve been thinking about the best ways for businesses/brands to respond to feedback in the social media space.

This could have been used to engage all of the naysayers into a bigger conversation and in the long term turn them into vocal brand advocates. They should personally message each of the people that commented on Twitter and ask them to get involved on their next ad (in terms of early feedback). Imagine the groundswell of buzz they’d be able to create…

Today was a great day. I really feel like I truly understand hip-hop music now.

The freestyle championship below is shown in it’s translated form. The original can be found after the jump.

Classic….

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As Rob pointed out in an earlier post Adobe announced that Flash 10 would be released for mobile devices with an ARM processor in 2009. It’s easy to skate past this fairly technical sounding press release if you’re in the marketing world, but the implications of what this will do to the mobile marketing landscape are amazing.

For starters ARM devices will be able to view the same Flash sites that traditional Internet users do as opposed to the Flash Mobile only sites they see now. This is somewhat like what the iPhone browser did for regular website browsing.

Smart marketers will still offer experiences that are designed for a mobile experience (i.e. smaller screens, potentially slower bandwidth) but now they won’t be limited in terms of the complexity or media richness. Flash 10 will allow rich mobile experiences that will easily stream video (HD and regular) and integrate with systems like Flash Media Server 2 for collaborative multi-user experiences.

Kevin Lynch from Adobe shows a demo on a G1 after the jump. Now I just want to see it on a iPhone!

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First big announcement is that there’s a new emphasis on the Flash Platform – as originally called by Macromedia in 2005. Flash, Flex, AIR, and Thermo are just tools to develop experiences using the Flash Runtime, and apparently all these names are just confusing people. Adobe decided to consolidate everything into one platform and market it accordingly. Thermo was officially renamed to Flash Catalyst, and for those of you not familiar with Thermo, it’s a new tool still on early stages of development, targeted to designers or more specifically interactive designers, and allows them to convert a PSD or AI file into a RIA with all events, motions, states, animations, and data… and the best part is that it generates mxml and as3 code so a developer can extend and continue the development using Flex Builder.  Read More »

This just absolutely rocked my world. Enjoy for some Friday Fun!

* The TV ad was shot using 200 Toshiba Gigashot Cameras: the highest number of moving image cameras ever used in a film sequence
* This particular technique, viewing looping action in 360 degrees, has never been done before
*The time spent processing footage from 200 cameras was over four weeks - 24 hours a day seven days a week!
* In terms of data, this is one of the biggest jobs a post-production house has ever taken on - 20TB of data
* New offline and online editing software had to be specifically built for the job
* Soundtrack is provided by Crystal Castles
* Integrated campaign to promote Toshiba’s new range of upscaling products - TV, DVD and laptops - that convert standard definition TV and DVD images to near high-definition quality  [Cinematical]

Google Earth was released for the iPhone and IPod in the last two weeks. It had a fairly under the radar launch by Google’s standards. I finally got a chance to play with it this week while working from my hotel.

It’s free and definitely worth checking out. It’s particularly cool how it works with the GPS feature.

Obama’s digital team is hard at work again. Within 24 hours of winning the historic voite change.gov was launched. The new site transitions the focus away from winning the vote and on to streamlining the transitional period and establishing an ongoing dialog with the citizens of the United States.

The commitment to digital as a communication medium has proven effective for Obama which leads one to ponder what else will be communicated via from the Oval office in the future.

Sites like TechPresident.com which billiantly track the technical ascendancy of our two candidates and how they compare have made predictions that Obama will release his weekly address online and on video sharing sites like YouTube. They predict “town halls” will be facilitated online allowing citizens to make sure their voice is heard. They remind us of the digitally savy nature of his campaign, but most of all they predict he’ll be our first tech president even adding a chief technical officer to his chief advisors.

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I stumbled across an incredible story today on the Playstation gamer message boards. A young paralyzed teen had an idea for how to build a rig that would allow him to play video games. The teen worked with Mark Felling who did the physical assembly of the gear and after a couple months they had a kit that allowed the boy to use the vast majority of the controls on a PS3.  Read More »