iWunder | Wunderman New York Blog

I ♥ Ovi

Hello! You may – or may not be aware, we’ve been working long and hard on the worldwide launch of Ovi, Nokia’s app store. (Ovi means “door” in Finnish which makes perfect sense as Nokia’s HQ is Helsinki.) Ovi allows Nokia customers to instantly upgrade their phone IQ to Mensa status. Ovi + Nokia = Smart phone.

Creating a story for your hometown is one challenge, it is an entirely different proposition when it comes to creating something global, for different countries with different languages. The goal of marketing the store on a translatable platform was quite interesting. One has to resist cultural references and linguistic style, the double entendre and witty turn of phrase, all the while making sure that someone in Chicago will understand it as clearly as someone in Bangkok. Love is universal.

While the road was long and passport required, we’re really quite excited to have it out in the world. J’adore Ovi! 

Show Your Nokia Phone Some ♥

Rich Media Ad Units Perform Better...Most of the Time

Here's a thought provoking study from Journal of Advertising Research “How Rich-Media Video Technology Boosts Branding Goals.”

The research compared performance of various ad formats (rich media w/video, rich media w/o video, GIF/JPG, simple Flash). The findings? Rich Media with Video unit was the strongest performer in aided brand awareness, brand favorability and purchase intent.

The big surprise is that GIF/JPG was the strongest performer when it came to message association (associating brand with value proposition) and here’s their explanation: “the strong performance of GIF or JPG formats on message association suggests that advertisers have a messaging discipline for these formats that is not being transferred to other advertising formats.”

 

  

Unfortunately “messaging discipline” is something that’s easy to lose in a rich media environment. There’s always the opportunity to squeeze in one more frame to accommodate a tertiary audience, a secondary offer, a few more benefits.

Other lessons? Have a clear messaging goal, match your format to your goal, push to integrate video in rich media.

Seeing around corners

I always hate it when people presume to see the future, hot trends ... don't you?  

Ok, with that out of the way, here are a few musings on tools and approaches we might want to pay a little more attention to as we plot our opportunistic post-digital client programs and campaigns in the coming months  ; >   ....

Phone Wars: Is 2010 the year of mobile content?

It was not enough to have a smartphone.  Now thanks to Google’s launch of its “superphone” you should be able to leap tall buildings with the help of yet another touch screen phone.

The new paradigm is mobile computing and mobility seems to be shifting once again. Over the last two years we saw the growth of the mobile “apps” (applications) market drive new consumer computing behaviors. If you have a super smart phone the app stores will allow you to choose which super powers you have.

The Mobile Internet and it’s content appears to be one of the bright spots in our economy. Tuesday, Forrester  released a report that showed the US smartphone penetration is at 17%, which is up from 11% just a year ago.

Whether you are an Apple, Nokia, Google, RIM, HTC, SonyEricksson, Samsung or LG fan the content you can get remains king.  The content super store will provide a new way for brands to create content that entertains, engages and offers new utility for our connected society. 

Will this be the year that pushes our focus to mobile branded content in the form of video, apps and music?

Dispelling The "Above The Fold" Design Myth

An artist's job is to rethink the boundaries of their medium.  Whether it's a canvas or a web browser, our job is to improve its value and use.  Since 1994 web designers, digital gurus and usability pros have debated the topic of designing "above the fold".  The term "above the fold" is a print term that refers to the location of an important news story or a visually appealing photograph on the upper half of the front page of a newspaper.  In the early days this print term was adapted and used in web development to refer the portions of a web page that can be visible without scrolling.  When I started designing web pages most users were unfamiliar with the concept of scrolling.  It just wasn't a natural thing for them to do . As a result,  I would design web pages so that all content would be “above the fold”.   When I was designing e-commerce sites on   AOL, page-level vertical scrolling was not permitted. As AOL moved away from their proprietary screen technology to an open web experience, we enjoyed the luxury of designing longer and wider pages.  That was 15 years ago!  A lot has changed.

That Was Then. This Is Now.
According to ClickTale's scrolling research, Today, 91% of the page-views had a scroll-bar. 76% of the page-views with a scroll-bar, were scrolled to some extent. 22% of the page-views with a scroll-bar, were scrolled all the way to the bottom.  As screen resolutions vary greatly, HTML design has improved and browsers have become common place in a users life the time has come for the term and the practice to die! 

The "fold" simply does not exist.  There is significant research, design methods and technology  that renders the "fold" theory useless.  Research like ClickTale's Scrolling Research Report V2.0 - Part 1 and Part 2 completely unravels the "Above the fold" myth.  The most compelling test they ran was proving ‘Absolute Scrolling Reach’.

"This graph below shows us how much time visitors paid attention to each section of different-sized web pages as they scrolled through them. ‘Absolute Scrolling Reach’ measures the distance from the page top (in pixels) that a visitor scrolls down the page."

Let's think about it for a moment.  If you subscribe The “fold” theory, you are assuming everyone uses the same size monitor, monitor resolution and Web browser.  More over, you must also assume we all have the same number of toolbars. Obviously there are too many factors involved to identify a consistent fold location.  The "fold" is just silly!  scrolling has become a natural practice in surfing the web. Scrolling is also associated with most Web 2.0 design.  Big, clear text and spacious content implies longer web pages.

Web 2.0 Design
Today, I design my pages to use liquid layouts that stretch to the current user's window size in order to avoid frozen layouts that are always the same size. Great consumer centric design does not give equal weight to all the content in a site. It puts its most valuable messages at the top and throughout the design.  If you present compelling content and use proper design queues and tools then your users will find and grab your content.  Here are a few examples of mainstream sites that are designed "below the fold" for millions of uses everyday.

Facebook

The New York Times

YouTube

Where was the fold? 
Did you scroll?  of course you did.   (you are scrolling now)

Advertisers currently want their ads above the fold, and it will be a while before that tide turns. But it’s clear that the rest of the page can be just as valuable to contextual advertising.

Look at the 2010 Ford Mustang site. 

They get it. I scrolled up and down, clicked and shared.

If its good they will scroll.
It is imperative that we begin to educate our clients and account teams that this is no longer a best practice. It really never was. Open up your design and stop cramming stuff above a certain pixel point. You’re not helping anyone. If your content is compelling enough your users will read it to the end.

Educate your peers and clients with these recommendations in mind:

1. Your content is king. If your page contains lots of engaging content, users will scroll to the bottom to view it.
2. Keep important new content that helps users understand the main purpose of your site above the 600 pixel mark.
3. Design universal navigation and business information that can be modular.  It should allow users to manipulate and control its placement. It should also appear above the 600 pixel mark.
4. Minimize your written text and maximize images and video, the web is now a converged 3D medium. Users would rather you engage them instead of asking them to read.  Remember they do scan pages.
5. Use design cues like icons, cut-off images and text blocks to help users expect additional content below the screen.
6. Try to keep browser-less applications within a given screen space and make sure the inputs and outputs of the application appear within that space.

Join me, lets help dispel the urban design myth by sharing this data.

Research used for this post:

• ClickTale's HeatMaps
  
• ClickTale's Scrolling Research Report V2.0 - Part 1
• Jared Spool UIE Brain Sparks:Utilizing the Cut-off Look to Encourage Users To Scroll
• Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox: Changes in Web Usability Since 1994

Moms and Social: Glass Half Empty?

Headline from this Ad Age article "For Moms, Offline Friends Still Wield Heavy Brand Influence" implies that moms aren’t really using social to interact with brands. However, if you look at the numbers 24% moms are using Facebook for product information – while that’s still lower than the 80% of moms who have visited product sites for info, that’s not exactly shabby either.

 

 

The real question is are brands giving moms a reason to engage with them via these channels -- Education? Entertainment? Discounts? What’s the value prop?

New York Wins! NYC Wins!

No - I don't mean the Yankees. (but keeping my fingers crossed!) I mean this years Wunderman Extreme Pumpkin Makeover.

The entry Dusk: Hear, Speak, See No Pumpkin created by Jason Cohen, an Art Director @ Wunderman New York office has taken the top prize with 5047 votes. 

Jason’s entry has secured the global bragging rights of world champion for the NYC Office.

It was a fierce competition this year! The runners up in this years challenge were:

• Wunderman Melbourne - Halloween Down Under! – 2098 Votes
• Wunderman Finland / Jaakko Soudunsaari's – Tweet, Tweet! – 1731Votes
• Wunderman Seattle - Team Donaldson – 937 Votes

Enjoy this slide show which features all of this years entries.

Participants from across the world used Social Media (Flickr, Facebook, Twitter and MySpace) to promote their entries and connect our network of mad carving experts in this global competition.

Special thanks to all who participated, helped to organize and promoted the Extreme Pumpkin Makeover Challenge.  Looking forward to next years entries!

Vote For A Spooky NYC Pumpkin

The final hours of the first annual Wunderman Extreme Pumpkin Makeover Challenge are ticking away. Now is the time to submit your pumpkin or vote for the people in your office who submitted their creations.   Here is a taste!

Cast your vote for some of the NYC Pumpkins!

• Jason Cohen: Hear, Speak, See No Pumpkin
• Jason Cohen: Dusk: Hear, Speak, See No Pumpkin.
• Joanna Peña-Bickley: 8Bit Pumpkin
• Dave Cole: Pumpkin overlooking the east side of NYC
• Joanna Peña-Bickley: One to many late nights
• Chris Lee - Go Yankees Pumpkin

Remember this is a straight up popularity contest. The entry with the most HUMAN votes wins!

Winners will be announced Monday Nov. 2, 2009

by Ed Subitzky

The Extreme Pumpkin Makeover Challenge

A few weeks ago, I was chatting with Tom Gibby, @gradplanner, in our Wunderman UK office when he double dog dared me to put together a global pumpkin carving challenge.  Those of you that have worked with me know that I don't take a creative challenge lightly.

Enter the worldwide premier of the Wunderman Extreme Pumpkin Makeover Challenge.

Using HTML, PHP and Flickr's Photo Pool API the NYC office has stitched together a wunder-destination that will allow us to run this competition across the globe.  In order to do this across the world we created http://www.extremepumpkinmakeover.com as the place where people could submit and vote on the most creative pumpkins!

GAME ON NYC!!!! I need you to break out your mad carving skills to show the wunder-network who's boss.   When you enter your best jack-o-lantern creation, you could win a new Wunderman purple iPod Nano and the global bragging rights of world champion.

Here is how to get in the game.

1. Upload a photo or video of your creation to your Flickr account. (You need to have a Flickr account to post a photo, but not to worry, it is FREE and easy to set up.)
2. Make sure you tag your photo with your name and office location (i.e. John Doe, New York City, USA).
3. Then join the Wunderman Extreme Pumpkin Makeover Challenge Flickr photo pool group.
4. Then click "Add photos or video" When you do, you can select your pumpkin photo or video from your photo stream to add to the group pool. When you add it to the pool, your photo magically appears at www.extremepumpkinmakeover.com as an entry so that people can vote for you.

Only Wunderman Network Employees can enter a pumpkin. (You can enter as many as you can carve.) Anyone in the world can vote! Since this is a straight up popularity contest, make sure to tweet, text, ping or IM your friends and encourage them to vote for your entry at http://www.extremepumpkinmakeover.com

You can submit photos or videos to the Wunderman Extreme Pumpkin Makeover Challenge Flickr photo pool group from October 1 through October 28 2009.  

The entrant with the most votes on Oct 28th at 11:59 EST will win.

Game On NYC - Lets Win!