Top digital stories this week, incl. memes, mobile & the unlikeminded

For some reason this one really annoyed me, perhaps because it was such a well crafted advert but based on such a lame idea. Some advertising exec will have been sat in their office and thought they’d just had a eureka moment coming up with that line, then just threw a huge budget at it and gave it to one of the most respected Post production houses (The Mill) to actually make something worthwhile out of such a weak concept.

Thankfully it wasn’t just me. This quote sums it up really:

“Such an excrutiatingly beautiful execution of such a lame idea. The production and post people really took a turd and made more gold out of it than anyone could ever expect. But you can so hear some agency hack kind of drooling this idea out the side of his mouth and then making it the responsibility of people with talent. ‘Oh, let’s piggyback a car commercial on the phenomenal human achievement of the LHC and have a car built out of particles!’” (Quote taken from comment on a post at motionographer)

To see the TV ad click this story’s title.

An augmented spectacle to behold

Mark Kelly, Digital Solutions Director

From the makers of driverless cars (and search stuff) comes augmented reality glasses. Google has just announced that a pair of uber-digital geek face wear could be yours by the end of this year.

Apparently the glasses will have a front-facing camera, be voice-activated and Android-based (naturally). The idea of a heads-up display in glasses (as opposed to helmet-like headgear) has been the stuff of sci-fi until now. With info appearing really close to your eyes and in your field of vision, you’ll be able to get real-time updates overlaid onto the physical world. So augmented reality in a more sensible manner?

Walking around with your smartphone at arm’s length to pick up augmented reality info never really worked for me (despite trying out apps like Layar). But having that info discreetly overlaid onto my glasses sounds far more practical.

Data connection will be as per smartphones , so the glasses will use 3G or (at some point, when available) 4G and also have GPS.

I’m not sure if it will just be AR type content but I’m assuming you’ll be able to read tweets and status updates whilst pretending to be ‘in the room’ with everyone else.

And where technology goes advertising will follow, so expect ads appearing in your augmented world view, tailored to the location you’re in. You see a shop doorway, I see a virtual shop assistant, who knows I have a penchant for pies, enticing me in with a 2 for 1 deal.

Amusingly enough (to me anyway) I wrote an April Fool post about AR glasses a couple of years ago. I think Google read it. Obviously.

Anyway, my Harry Hills need changing in the next few months… I was thinking of the new outsized Ray Winstone style but now maybe I’ll wait for these to come out.

Surround yourself with unlikeminded people

Ally Manock, Head of Digital Strategy, Planning & Insight

This is a Slideshare presentation – “A rallying cry for the unlikeminded”. You’ll see from our blog post about Social Media Week that one of the themes has been the Social Media Echo Chamber; we are friends (Facebook, Twitter…) with lots of likeminded people and we all broadly agree about lots of topics. If we are not careful, this can lead to being quite narrow-minded, even if we do tend to usually credit ourselves with being very open-minded.

Surrounding yourself with unlikeminded people combats this. Surround yourself with people that don’t necessarily agree with you! Be challenged!

To take my own advice, if Maggie Thatcher was on Twitter, I’d follow her (I can’t stand her), as she one said, “I love argument, I love debate. I don’t expect anyone just to sit there and agree with me, that’s not their job.”  For once, I agree with you Mags.

Who, meme? Yes, you!

Leah Kayles, Social Media Editor

Memes. They’re all over the internet. Good ones, bad ones, big ones small ones. If you’re not sure what a meme is, a rough description is that it’s usually something funny and/or clever which gets passed around the internet and which can be modified and changed.

A meme doing the Facebook/Pinterest/name-your-social-network rounds at the mo is the ‘What people think I do’ meme, which can be modified to suit whatever industry/job you happen to be in, with hilarious consequences.

Check these out:

http://208.85.144.97/photos/251093-what-people-think-i-do-what-i-really-do

http://i0.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/000/250/198/389.jpg

So for brands, the trick is to jump on the bandwagon, or should that be meme-mobile? (No? Okay…), by creating shareable meme-like content that fans will simply not be able to resist passing round the internet and which will go super duper viral. Without it looking overly ‘advertising’ and sucking all the fun out of it all of course.

If you fancy yourself as a meme-maestro, you can have a go at creating your own at http://www.quickmeme.com/make/. Happy memeing!

Mobile future in focus

After having a sift through the Comscore Mobile Future in Focus Report, lots of the anecdotal evidence we’ve understood has been corroborated:

• Mobile media usage (browsing the mobile web, accessing applications, or downloading content) saw a surge in activity and surpassed 50% penetration in many markets, supported by increased public WiFi availability
• People are engaging with brands through their mobile: more than half of those in the U.S. and nearly half in the EU5 (UK, France, Italy, Germany, Spain) also reported reading posts from brands, organizations, and events
• Smartphones are a shopper’s killer device . More than half of the U.S. smartphone-owning population used their phone to perform retail research while inside a store in 2011
• Mobile web and app usage are now at parity.

It’s nice to know the UK is leading the smartphone charge, with the highest penetration: