Last year VW and its agency Deutsch pretty much won hands down with the Darth Vader kid ad.

Genius.

It would seem that this year the major players have realised that 49 million hits on YouTube is a good thing, so they’ve pre-released a lot of their Superbowl ads early. This year VW have taken the Star Wars theme and gone barking mad. This was the teaser ad they released, which is rather cool:

Then they released the actual ad, which is quite frankly a tenuous way to ram in the Star Wars idea:

Thankfully Honda and their agency RPA have come up trumps with a lovely ad for the not so lovely Honda CR-V, starring everyone’s favourite slacker, Ferris Bueller (as played by Matthew Broderick). See if you can spot all the references to the film.

Not much to say about this one apart from ‘flying squirrel suit’

Mental.

And finally, although there will no doubt be tonnes more on Game Day and YouTube, here’s one for the ladies:

Not too sure how many ladies will be watching the football, but what the hey – Beckham in PANTS!

Pwooaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrr…

Mellow birds

George Hurrell, Digital Designer

We’ve seen lots of news stories surrounding piracy and copyright infringement recently, and lots of people getting angry because they didn’t make quite as many millions of pounds as they did last year. Quite the opposite for the CEO of the company behind Angry Birds. I think we all know the Angry Birds so there’s no need to introduce them.

Mikael Hed, the Chief Executive of Rovio said at a conference in Cannes this week “Piracy may not be a bad thing: it can get us more business at the end of the day.” Who’d have thought a games company would be taking this line. He talked about how at least part of Angry Birds’ success has been down to learning from the Music industry’s mistakes when it came to dealing with piracy.

Its quite a refreshing outlook but one that may be easier to take when you have a huge commercial hit on your hands. However I agree with him to some extent. People copy games and many people will then go buy a game off the back of this, the same with music and films. I’m sure we’ve all done it at some point. The only difference I can see with ‘apps’ and games for smartphones is that they only cost 69p so if you do get a dud, you’ve not really missed out on that much.

The ‘creative industries’ are still making lots of money but in some cases and in some years just maybe not quite as much. The film industry should be happy though, and I’m sure we’ve all been waiting for ‘Angry Birds – Pigs of war’ the motion picture to arrive…….no?

#GoodEatsGoodTweets

Jenny Are, Social Media Week Intern

Twitter and pop-up restaurants like #MeatEasy (brilliant burgers and all-American comfort food) are helping London become a hub of food and food chatter. Who hasn’t tweeted about food or shared a picture of their plate via twitpic with the world? I know I have. Twitter is allowing Londoners to engage with the people that make their food, as well as allowing customers to criticise or compliment food and service in an instant, to a potential audience of thousands. And there are plenty of Twitter accounts to get your mouth watering, including @welovefoodtweet and @2girls1cake who focus on food and restaurants.

Brands are taking note; @Boxpark are running a Twitter competition every day this week using the hashtag #freelunch to offer one follower a free lunch (funnily enough!). All followers have to do is retweet a message from Boxpark in order to be in with a chance of winning their free grub. Simple yet so effective.

Benito’s Hat’s social media campaign ran last autumn and saw the Mexican restaurant brand decorate a van with Day of the Dead skulls and flowers and play Mexican music as it drove around central London. The Twitter competition was Central London-based and every hour the two offices that tweeted @Benitoschat and used the hashtag #dayofthedead the most, received a free burrito lunch delivery for their office. Hungry Londoners could also get 50% off their lunches if they arrived at Benito’s Hat in Day of the dead fancy dress and took a picture of themselves and the Day of the Dead van.

Some great examples of how foodie companies can tap into consumers’ appetites for discounts via social media world, and leave us hungry for more!

BBC Sport site revamped

Simon Marshall, Digital Account Director

The BBC released an update to the BBC Sport site this week and very nice it is too. The revamp comes a few months ahead of the Olympics and a post on the editors’ blog indicates that this was a factor in the timing of the update. Of course the internet has come a long way since the last site update in 2003 so it was probably overdue, but a wider screen layout and some neat expandable menus and panels make for a clean user experience.

There are also some neat looking typography tricks with headlines cutting into images to make articles prettier and quote panels sitting nicely next to copy. It wouldn’t surprise me to see a few of these tweaks finding their way into the main news site in the future too.

Google’s Hotel Finder

Jamie McGrath, Senior Search Manager

Google is continuing to make improvements to its experimental tool Hotel Finder, which allows you to enter the location you want to visit and filter results by travel time. Currently the only options for travel time are by public transport or walking, but I would expect an imminent addition of travel time by car.

It will be interesting to see what types of advertising will ultimately become available for this platform. Currently all the data is integrated from Google Places and Google Maps,  both of which are free to use. This is a great example of how Google has collected the two data sources to create a useful platform that will ultimately host ads.

A Swarm of Nano Quadrotors

Andrew Brown, Creative Director

The University of Pennsylvania’s GRASP Lab released a video this week of Nano Quadrators flying in formation.  It’s racked up over a million views in a couple of days on YouTube.  “What’s so special about that?” I hear you cry!  Watch the video: http://youtu.be/YQIMGV5vtd4

Kind of sinister even at this size.  Imagine them equipped with machine gun turrets.  Gulp.

Ray Poynter, Executive Vice President at Vision Critical and the conference chair, opened proceedings by encouraging delegates to reflect on both the title of the conference (is online research even a topic in its own right?) and whether online is allowing the research industry do anything new or better.

One definite conclusion was that online is allowing us to do new things.  For example, we’re now able to find insights from consumers without necessarily asking them questions.  Paul Child, of agency Join the Dots, argued that with online communities, insights sometimes just emerge in-between the asking bits. Community members voluntarily and frequently upload thoughts and content of their own which allows the researcher to “get off the hamster wheel of asking the same questions again and again”.

Fishing for the best insights

Tom Woodnut, a Conversation Strategist, echoed this sentiment, making the point that social media research is naturalistic and not coerced.  The problem with traditional survey research, Tom argued, is that the questions asked are the ones the client wants the answers to.  The conversations that people have online, however, are entirely on their own terms.

Tom urged researchers to think of themselves as fishermen and women wading around in a sea of conversations looking to serve them up with the finesse of a chef, e.g. in enlightening and interesting ways.  According to Tom, traditional online survey research can still satisfy but social media research is more fulfilling and insightful.

Measuring emotional brand associations

T-mobile and Decode have developed a powerful online survey technique to discover people’s intuitive brand associations. Drawing on principles from behavioural economics and neuroscience, their simple and effective online survey technique measures consumers’ speed of responses when associating a brand logo with a set of brand personality attributes.  The implicit brand associations (those that are more speedy and automatic) are then correlated with a dependent variable such as satisfaction, to help determine the brand proposition.  T-mobile showed how they used this technique to transform their advertising strategy with huge commercial success.

Seven Seas and Brass Agency

Along with Tony Parkin of Seven Seas, we showcased the Joint Age Calculator, our innovative online survey used to engage Seven Seas’ target audience in conversations about joint care (typically a low engagement category).  Although starting life as a marketing project, the design of the survey gave lessons applicable across all forms of survey research, such as providing respondents with personal insight, making them more than just a passive responder to questions, and allowing them to socialise their survey answers via Facebook and other platforms.

Is online research always better?

Both the Seven Seas and the T-Mobile case studies pointed to the fact that online research can offer something both new and better.  This wasn’t necessarily the experience presented by BDRC and Ofcom however, who discussed the attempt to transfer the Ofcom media tracker from a face to face methodology to an online one.  The differences in response were ultimately too different to warrant the change of methodology.  With cost effectiveness a pressing issue for all public sector organisations, the investigation was rigorous and worthwhile but just goes to show that face to face is still an important method too.

The survey environment has become portable

Alex Johnson from Kantar Operations discussed the importance of researchers considering the devices which consumers are using to take surveys.  Consumers are increasingly taking web surveys on portable devices such as smartphones and not always getting the intended experience as a result.

Another side effect of increasing portable device ownership (iPads, tablets, e-readers, smartphones etc.) is the growth in consumers taking surveys on the move.  These ‘environmental’ impacts are something we need to be mindful of when designing our surveys.  As device ownership grows and fragments, the researcher’s ability to control the survey-taking environment diminishes.  Although there are some solutions to this (writing shorter surveys is one), there’s work to be done.

So, have online methods changed research?

It’s safe to say that online research is a thriving space that offers agencies and clients alike the chance to do different and, in some cases, better types of research.  However, online research will always be yet another aspect of the researcher’s toolkit and cannot be a panacea methodology on its own.  Ultimately, we must always use our professional judgement to choose the appropriate solutions for answering our clients’ objectives.

When hashtags go wrong…

His comments have been echoed by others:

“We are on the cusp of a real paradigm shift in the way organisations do research – it’s becoming more social. The whole premise of people plodding through surveys in isolation is starting to look outdated. Clever organisations are learning to harness the wisdom of crowds and then distil the essence of that wisdom.”

Michael Silverman, former Head of Employee Insight at Unilever

Hasn’t research always been social?

Surely research has always been social (it involves people after all). Just the other day I was on my way to a client meeting when my taxi driver asked me what I did for a living. Having explained that I was a market researcher, he then spent the next 20 minutes telling me that he was a regular attendee of “research parties” and really enjoyed the whole experience of turning up to a nice venue to meet other people, air his views on a particular topic for a few hours and have a few refreshments in the process (while getting paid for the luxury of doing so). I quickly realised he was referring to the good old focus group and felt a mixture of dismay at the ongoing problem of serial group attendees followed by frustration that my hard toil and late night slogs as a moderator were being trivialised as a mere party.

However, I mused over his comments later on and arrived at the conclusion that framing a focus group as a “party” a) wasn’t altogether that inaccurate and b) is actually not such a bad idea in terms of focusing our attention as researchers on delivering a social, entertaining experience for our respondents. After all, a more enjoyable research experience surely encourages a more interactive session which in turn helps nurture better insights.

The problems of survey research

To some extent, I can empathise with Facebook’s comments. Delivering a more social experience has historically been a lot more challenging in terms of survey research (for a long time, the mainstay quantitative methodology of the research industry). Survey research, unless conducted within the context of an online community or a longitudinal panel, is by very nature a one-way conversation; the researcher sets the questions and the respondent fills in their answers, at no point being able to ask their own questions, clarify their understanding or get truly immersed in the purpose and meaning of the research.

Survey research is indeed the antithesis of social – we extract data from respondents, use their answers for our own analysis purposes and rarely give anything back other than a cursory monetary incentive. In some instances, admittedly, researchers do share a final copy of the research report with respondents at the end of the project but all too often the respondents are long forgotten by that point.

There is at least now consensus that in order to secure the long-term viability of survey research as a methodology, the research industry needs to get better at delivering an engaging survey experience (long, boring questionnaires with question grid after question grid should be avoided at all cost).

Gamification and online communities

Although not enough validation research has yet been done into whether the data extracted from gamified surveys is actually better than that from an equivalent non-gamified survey, the concept of gamification takes the research industry in the right direction in terms of focusing attention on the user experience.

Online communities are also a step in the right direction in terms of socialising research and encouraging consumers to become collaborators and co-creators in the research process rather than passive bystanders. Within an online community, members can share opinions not just with the client and the researcher but with their fellow members. This exchange of ideas over a long period coupled with a more meaningful role and involvement in the research process helps to foster commitment and engagement which in turn leads to, arguably, better insights. Everybody’s a winner.

What do respondents get out of research?

The research industry could still do more, not just to make research more social, but to make it more entertaining, enjoyable and involving. One of the criticisms often levied is that all too often we use respondents in order to extract feedback and information without giving anything back in return (other than cash).

Giving back could be as simple as offering respondents personal insight as a result of taking part. There’s no reason that participants shouldn’t come away from the research process having learnt something interesting about themselves. A simple example of putting this into practice could be telling the respondent at the end of the survey how their answers compared to others who took it (for example, others of the same age, gender and social grade). This tactic has clearly worked well for Amazon e.g. “people like you also bought xxx”.

Personal insight and respondent engagement

A recent project that Brass conducted in conjunction with Seven Seas found that the use of personal insight had a huge impact on respondent engagement. By allowing respondents to discover their ‘true joint age’ and compare it to their biological age using the Joint Age Calculator (and delivering a personalised joint care report to the respondent upon completion) we were able to attract almost 22,000 people to take part in just two months with very little promotion or incentivisation. The client benefited from a robust aggregate picture of the state of the UK’s joint health and individuals who took part got to learn something interesting and useful about themselves.

Integrating research into social

It is perfectly possible to integrate survey research within social media, a bit like Facebook polls now. Not necessarily every question of the survey (client confidentiality is clearly mandatory) but perhaps respondents could be allowed to share the results of less personal/non-sensitive questions with their Facebook friends or their Twitter followers should they so wish. A Trojan horse approach could be taken here by mixing in such questions amidst those that our clients are really interested in to create a win/win situation.

Taking these steps can only help to encourage more respondent engagement and ensure market research has a more positive profile amongst the general public.

Does research need to become more social or is it already social? We’d love to hear your thoughts.

Image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/x-ray_delta_one/

SOPA… So what?

George Hurrell, Digital Designer

Big story this week and one which has been talked about for a little while now is the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA) in the US. Google and Mozilla have joined many other companies opposing these two acts, claiming that the acts would censor the web in many different ways. They argue, and so do a lot of people, that these acts will eliminate due process and even if websites that are found to be providing copyright material are shut down, they will just change their name and start up again.

Google says: “We know from experience that these powers are on the wish list of oppressive regimes throughout the world … Like many businesses, entrepreneurs and web users, we oppose these bills because there are smart, targeted ways to shut down foreign rogue websites without asking American companies to censor the internet.”

Hitting the front page today, Wikipedia has shut down its English site replacing the homepage with a black screen headed ‘ Imagine a world without free knowledge’

I’m not sure how effective this protest is but it has certainly got a lot of exposure. I’m sure all the kids plagiarising content for homework are a bit miffed, but for those willing to make minimal effort you can still sidestep this and enter the site… a bit like these ‘pirate’ sites.

Personally, I’m for the end goal of the legislation, being in the creative industry. Creative ownership and tackling piracy are important issues, but equally important is freedom of speech, so any legislation should be thought out carefully and not rushed through, to ensure that it doesn’t censor information or hinder our access to information.

Google+ is dead, long live… MySpace?

Leah Kayles, Social Media Editor

MySpace is as dead as a dodo, no one uses it any more… right? Well, maybe not quite. Although MySpace certainly has nowhere near the impact or significance it used to have, it surprised me to hear that it still gets more traffic than the much-hyped newcomer to the social media stage: Google+.

According to ComScore, not only does MySpace currently boast more traffic than Google+, people spend more time there (an average of 12 minutes compared with Google+’s 5). This is perhaps due to the nature of MySpace; if someone is looking for a specific music video, they’re likely to spend some time actually watching/listening to it.

Facebook still beats both platforms face down of course, with users spending an average of 394 minutes there when they visit (possibly due in part to constant logins on smart phones). Interestingly, MySpace offers the ability to connect with Facebook, but it’s telling that most of us aren’t bombarded with what our friends are listening to on MySpace every minute of the day; Spotify has that covered. Does MySpace need to become more like Spotify to stage a comeback? Is Google+ a slow burner or a non-starter? What do you think?

Ad Group impression share coming soon

Impression share is a great metric to find out what share of the search market you are taking for your campaigns. The problem with it has been its granularity; it’s a very top line statistic that’s based on your campaign structure and could be for a wide range of keywords with different competition and cost per click levels. This can make it difficult to ascertain which keywords are causing lost impressions by budget or rank.

Google is to introduce Ad Group impression share, likely to roll out from the 30th January onwards. This will offer a deeper understanding into the competitive metric and enable you to find out which Ad Groups could be causing lost impressions. This could still be an issue depending on your Ad Group structure; you may still have a wide range of keywords in each ad group. I would advocate as best practice, and to get a more accurate picture of impression share, grouping similar keywords together and separating them out across different Ad Groups as well as separating them by match type. It may seem like a lot of work, but with some Excel wizardry and AdWords Editor in hand it shouldn’t be too laborious.

The ultimate goal of structuring your keywords like this is so that you can put a market context against each term to see what share of the market you have taken for a specific term and if there is room to scale the keyword further.

Automated rule limit increased

Automated rules have been a time-saver for many PPCs since they were introduced, although it is a contentious subject and not everyone would agree that automating account optimisation is the best strategy. I personally think that it boils down judgement – when and where to use automation. I wouldn’t use automation on my top performing campaigns, ad groups or keywords that are essential to business needs. It’s only common sense that you would take the time to use your human eye in these areas. But there may be other areas of your account you can automate: campaigns with smaller budgets, keywords with low search volumes or enabling some promotional ad copy when conversions are low, for example.

Google has now announced an increase in the number of rules you can create per user from 10 to 100 and also included the functionality to easily undo a rule, should it not have the desired effect.

SEO

Page title changes in SERPS

Page titles are one of the first places an SEO will look to optimise. Generally a page title should be concise, descriptive and unique. In practice though it can sometimes be the opposite, with long keyword-stuffed page titles. Google has been testing its own algorithms which help generate an alternative page title for a given web page to display in their search results. They have found that by using an alternative title based on their algorithms the page title becomes more relevant and subsequently increases the click through rate of a search result.

I would advise using  Google Webmaster Tool’s HTML suggestions to highlight page titles that are too long, too short, duplicated, missing or non-informative. Fixing these issues and making the page title more relevant and useful will give it a better chance of appearing than Google’s alternative title.

Protest blackout the SEO-friendly way

The protest blackout of websites against a proposed anti-piracy legislation is well under way, and if you’re thinking of joining in, here are a few tips on making sure you do it in the most SEO-friendly way:

1. (Imperative) Return a 503 header response for all URLs on the domain taking part in the blackout

2. Make sure the robots.txt file doesn’t return a 503 response if only blocking part of the site

3. Do not attempt to block your website from crawlers using robots.txt – this could have long-lasting effects

4. You will notice the crawl rate drop, this is normal when delivering a 503 response and your crawl rate should resume to normal within days

5. Monitor Google’s crawl activity closely in Webmaster tools to make sure it has started crawling the whole website again.

These steps will ensure that your website doesn’t suffer long term effects of duplicate content, 404s, dropped URLs and the like!

These days however, there’s more to keep clean than your face if you’re after that dream job. Once they’ve received your CV and covering letter, any potential employer worth their salt will be checking out your Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook page before you can say ‘un-tag’.

In this digitally-savvy age, you’d think we’d all have got the message by now that what we say online can stay with us forever. And most people have, to a certain extent. Being a ‘professional’ social networking site, LinkedIn tends to be used for its intended purpose: to make yourself sound like you do more than you really do and you know more than you really know. There aren’t too many hilarious videos of dogs chasing deer knocking about on LinkedIn to date.

Most of us are hopefully clued up about privacy settings on Facebook these days too, although the regular changes mean you might want to just double check that potential bosses can’t see that picture of you drinking vodka out of someone’s belly button in Ibiza last summer.

Twitter however, seems to continue to cause problems for celebs and us plebs alike with its instant, quick and fast-flowing nature. It’s all very well deleting that ill-thought out tweet about your boss’s bad breath or your mate’s ugly boyfriend, but if someone’s screen-grabbed it, you’re stuffed. And don’t even get me started on tweeting unsavoury images…  You can see a snap below that Russell Brand kindly tweeted of his (soon to be ex) wife Katy Perry looking less than her usual polished self, before swiftly deleting it. And you can have a gander at some of the tweets that people probably wish they hadn’t sent.

The point is, unless you have protected your tweets, Twitter is public (one of its biggest appeals is that you don’t have to be ‘friends’ with Bill Gates, Lady Gaga or  Barry Chuckle to hear their thoughts on world peace or to find out what they’ve had for tea ). So make sure you’re happy for anyone to read everything you say. (You can of course keep your Twitter anonymous but this is harder to maintain than you might think.)

This is even more important if you’re applying for a job in social media, digital marketing, online PR and so on. If you look like you’re getting your own PR and social media wrong, how can you be trusted to get anyone else’s right?

The Law of Sharing

Ally Manock, Head of Connect (Social Media, Online Media & SEO)

The Zuck has been taking a look at the data that Facebook holds on the amount of sharing we do. He has done a bit of tinkering and he reckons that every year, for the foreseeable future, the amount of information you share on the Web will double. That’s a lot of sharing!

An upgrade last year to Facebook’s Open Graph platform unleashed the now ubiquitous ‘Like’ button onto the Web….and then services like Spotify’s music sharing (‘Ally is currently listening to I’m a Barbie Girl by Aqua’) and the Guardian’s feature app (‘Ally is currently reading How To Train Your Boyfriend in 5 Easy Steps’). They call this “frictionless sharing” – it makes sharing happen without you needing to click a Like button, or to even think about sharing. Interesting name. Frictionless sharing sustains Zuckerberg’s Law by automating what used to be a manual task, thus removing a brake on the rate at which we can share. It also shows that we are willing to compromise our previous positions on how much sharing is too much.

I’m just hoping that a certain friend of mine won’t be ‘sharing’ twice as much about Celebrity Big Brother in a year’s time.

Who said the internet would destroy the music industry?

George Hurrell, Digital Designer

I don’t know about you, but I’ve found myself getting tired of hearing about the ‘hard times’ for the music industry as profits decreased and piracy was on the increase and the only way for artists to make money was by touring. I always thought they shouldn’t be so greedy, they’re still making money, just not as much. Before I go off on a proper rant though, I’ll get back on subject.

It appears that all you have to do is make good music and people will buy. According to the listing published by Entertainment Retail Association, Adele’s second album ‘21’ came top of the list, beating the hugely popular Call of Duty franchise which beat all box office records yet again with its latest instalment, creatively titled Modern Warfare 3. ( MW3 was named the fastest-selling entertainment property ever, beating Avatar to sales of $1 billion.)

Others in the list include Harry Potter, the Inbetweeners and Inception, so that’s some pretty big fish she’s beaten to the top.

See the full list by clicking on this story’s title.

Personalised search

Jame McGrath, Senior Search Manager

Google announced this week that it’s making some significant changes to its search engine and the way search results are displayed to the end user.

Google is enhancing the functionality of its social search and separating it from its regular web results. The idea behind this is to give users an option to view personalised search results based on recommendations from online peers or view results based on the traditional algorithm of the “public web”.

The new features introduced by Google are:

•    Personal Results, which enable you to find information just for you, such as Google+ photos and posts, both your own and those shared specifically with you, that only you will be able to see on your results page
•    Profiles in Search, both in autocomplete and results, which enables you to immediately find people you’re close to or might be interested in following
•    People and Pages, which helps you find people’s profiles and Google+ pages related to a specific topic or area of interest, and enables you to follow them with just a few clicks.

There are plans to clearly display the differences between personalised search and standard search:

This will come as good news to those SEOs who haven’t embraced the impact of social search, as users will still be able to easily browse non-personalised web results, making it easier to accurately track positions of keywords in Google’s natural search.

It will also be interesting to see what targeting options become available through Google AdWords; the more they learn about their users combined with highly qualified search traffic will be a win/win for advertisers.

I’m not sure the changes necessarily display the most relevant results to users; it’s assuming that you want recommendations from all your online connections and personally, I know I don’t – I get enough of their opinions in real life! What it does do is give Google+ some huge exposure.

They’re referring to it as social search, but really it’s Google+ search, as even when logged out you are presented with information from Google+ (see above image). Rio Ferdiand and David Beckham have Twitter and Facebook accounts but these aren’t included in the ‘social search’ results, only the Google+ accounts are. So it seems this more of a Google+ takeover than a search improvement!

Contactless cards and NFC

Tim Downs, Head of PR

How many of us are aware of this ‘universal’ symbol and what it stands for? (It’s not for an emergency nicotine patch provider.) Well, according to the latest figures there are 19.6 million of us who should be.

The symbol is to denote retailers who provide contactless card technology, which means you can just ‘wave and pay’ and, believe it or not, as of November 2011 there were over 73,000 contactless terminals across the UK.

But amazingly, new YouGov research into NFC (Near Field Communication) and contactless technology shows that only 12% of the British population think they own a contactless card and 80% of those that do have one have never used their card for a contactless transaction, preferring the chip and pin option.

So what’s with the slow take up? Well it’s not a lack of consumer desire, 59% of people asked said they would like to try it to make small purchases for the convenience and speed factors alone.

It would appear that the main barrier is a lack of education which is causing confusion and fear. The confusion is around which banks and retailers offer the services and the fear is over how secure the services are.

So a few facts for you:

•    If you use an Oyster card you’re already carrying out contactless transactions every day
•    Transport for London (TfL) says travellers will be able to pay for journeys by swiping their contactless card across Oyster card readers for its bus, Tube, tram and train services by the end of 2012 – all of the buses will be ready in time for the Olympics
•    The most popular venues for using them are fast food restaurants and coffee shops – McDonalds and Starbucks, little Chef and the Co-op are all ‘wave and pay’ providers
•    Barclaycard is the leading provider of contactless cards
•    One in six of us is expected to have an NFC enabled phone by 2014 – The Samsung Galaxy Nexus already has the chip included, the iPhone 4s hasn’t
•    There are expected to be over 12.5 million locations around the world that will accept contactless transactions during 2013
•    NFC mobile coupons, advertisements and smart posters will offer new marketing opportunities.

CES 2012

James Wheatley, Technical & Scoping Director

The 2012 Consumer Electronics Show returns to Las Vegas this week and companies big and small have flocked to present their new wares to the industry.  It’s basically the daddy of all gadget fests, like a James Bond fantasy brought to life.

Microsoft seems to have come out as the winner without really announcing anything new, in fact its biggest news is that it is not doing CES anymore, though it could be a big year for the company. Everyone is waiting to see how many phones Microsoft can ship with Nokia. Windows 8 tablets are also creating a buzz; I haven’t seen anyone this excited about Windows since the people on the Windows 7 party adverts (who were totally real).

Other noteworthy things to come out of CES so far this year:

•    TVs are now Smart TVs and instead of a remote control we will simply talk to them or wave at them (without feeling like a complete idiot)
•    Laptops are now called ULTRABOOKS; they are smaller, thinner, faster and sound like they are from a kids’ TV show
•    Tablets – we are going to see a lot more of them
•    3D printing firm Sculpteo have created an iPhone App that lets you make a vase out of your face!
•    And my favourite – the dancing robot speaker. Things have really moved on since the bopping flower of the eighties, and the speaker is unleashed by Justin Bieber. What more could you ask for?

• Are you interested in getting a foot in the door in the competitive social media industry?
• Looking to get experience in a top digital agency?
• Have you got experience of events management?
• Can you be in Shoreditch (London) from Jan 18th – Feb 17th 2012?

This internship may be just the ticket!

Brass will be running a number of events as part of this year’s Social Media Week (13th – 17th February 2012). During the three week build-up to Social Media Week London and throughout the agency’s schedule of events during the festival, we’re looking for an executive assistant to help plan, organise and execute the Brass activity.

Duties will include managing event invites, setting up and managing events, liaising with venues, speakers and attendees. You’ll meet contacts across the digital and social media industries including top agencies, speakers and clients, and get experience in handling communications around digital events.

It’s an unpaid internship, but you will get a full reference from the Director you’ll be working with after the week is over, and loads of contacts in the industry.

Please tweet @BrassAgency for more details and to arrange an interview.