Unfortunately, very little in life is free, aside from the best things obviously. Assuming that Sinatra telling you that the best things in life are free isn’t good enough, if you are going to ignore ‘Ol Blue Eyes and you are like many millions out there endlessly searching for more, you’re going to pay for it with advertising.

An increasing trend for the web is making the entire browsing experience more personal. Google’s latest algorithm changes are a major change where they are now factoring into your search results what your friends are recommending. Filtering your search results so that the results are based on your location is another, and sure if you’re web savvy you can turn this off, but most people don’t.

What you may have noticed much more recently though is contextual advertising where your browsing activity is monitored – yes, even that activity – and adverts appear contextually on other sites based on what you’ve been looking at previously. This is not a new technology, but it is certainly being used a lot more and this will become something to behold as, just like any statistics based information, the more data there is, the more accurate the statistics become. In the context of online advertising, the results will get smarter and smarter the more data the system knows about what you are doing.

It doesn’t always work though, which often leads to amusing results. I use the Internet to browse a whole range of different topics, some of which interest me personally, and some which I look up for work undertaking online research, or perhaps looking for information on behalf of others.

Recently I spotted a good campaign for recruitment for Royal Marines officers which has been done as an interactive video – good work WCRS – and the video plays and you get a second or two to make decisions which then play out as the success or failure of the mission. I qualified and my team achieved the objective, but I guess being aged 42 I wouldn’t get too far with the selection process these days despite my being invited to apply at the end of the film. It would be a bit like the scene in Apocalypse Now where the dossier said that Kurtz completed airborne training at the age of 38 when he was twice the age of the other recruits, except in real life this kind of thing doesn’t happen.

Some time later I was doing some research for a client involved in selling a cosmetic product – the name is still under wraps unfortunately, but it’s a new and exciting product that women (and some men!) are going to love – and I was looking at a parenting website to see if it would be an appropriate forum for advertising. Sure enough, contextual advertising kicked in, and it was emblazoned with the Royal Marines Officer ad that you can see on the right. In context with the parenting information on the left it didn’t seem to fit somehow!

While the ad displayed was entirely out of context in this example with the website it was displayed upon, the one point that was consistent and made it contextually relevant was me. We’re going to see a lot more in the way of personalised adverts in the future. These will be delivered to you in all forms, not just on the web. Imagine walking down the road and being greeted personally by a digital billboard ad, or walking past a crowded bar at lunchtime and having an advert with a discount code appear on your mobile phone for lunch in that location.

I heard of an edgy ad campaign for a website which utilised the data provided by some web services where a user ‘checks in’ to a real world location to identify if there are any other people nearby that they might know. The agency behind this campaign used this information to phone the bar or restaurant where the person had checked in and they asked to speak with the person. Naturally the person picked up the phone intrigued to know who was calling them, only to be told that ‘Death could find them anywhere’ and asked to visit the website which was a tongue-in-cheek site dedicated to leaving messages to be transmitted in the event of the user’s death! The controversy surrounding this led to $1.5m of free advertising as various news media throughout the US reported on the story and the reactions that the message provoked.

While this is an extreme example, it does indicate that we’re only just started with personalised advertising messages. One thing’s for sure – if you think an ad that you’re seeing is a coincidence, you can be pretty sure that it won’t be. Big Brother is watching.

Google constantly changes its algorithms in order to make results more effective, but every now and then it makes some MAJOR changes, as it did recently with the ‘Panda’ update. Google don’t say what they are going to do, and the advice for webmasters remains the same, with the main focus on developing good quality content designed for humans.

These constant changes mean that it is vital to keep your site content fresh and up to date, ensure it is optimised properly and that you are link building. These things are a constant, and if done properly, you should be rewarded with traffic.

Whatever Google does or doesn’t do, there are techniques to keep ahead of the curve and things that you can implement to make sure you get a good shot at the top spots for your chosen keywords.

However, it is important not to lose sight of the fact that there are other search engines out there. Bing & Yahoo are building market share, especially Bing, which has increased it’s overall global share at the expense of Google, these gains are not large enough to get too concerned – yet. But remember back to the days before Google, Yahoo was champ, now look where it is.

Google may be the king today, but who knows what tomorrow may bring, expect more change!

Yes folks, Google is having another go at social networks. Let’s be honest, they don’t exactly have a great track record in this area (orkut, wave, buzz – all went the way of the dodo) and they seem just a little bit desperate to muscle in on Facebook’s market share.

Firstly, lets start by saying that it isn’t officially live yet, so things may well change, but a quick run down of some of the features are as follows:

On the surface Google + is all about social. It hopes to tap into the millions of people who have google accounts, and add some features they might find useful, such as ‘Sparks’ which looks for videos and articles it thinks you’ll like, so “when you’re free, there’s always something to watch, read, and share.” Another (potentially) useful feature is ‘Hangouts’ which is group video chat, ‘Circles’ is a way of grouping your friends, and Stream is like Facebook’s news feed.

The Google +1 button that now appears next to content on Google, is a way of telling people you are connected to that you like it. Let’s, for the sake of argument, call it a ‘like’ button. Oh, Facebook already did that. Ah well.

There are many other features to Google+, and that is part of the problem. At the moment, it all feels a little like they are just too late to the party. I fear that Google is on a social losing streak. I think that possibly the biggest hurdle that Google faces with this is the reluctance of people to start on another network, when they already use Facebook. Do people really want to start again? Only time will tell…

Clearly some sort of Customer Relationship Management system would be needed that was powerful enough to record 200 million individuals. If each person’s record only contained their name and contact details that would be a lot of information, and it would need to be highly secure to avoid the potential of data being compromised. Being enterprise level, a high speed network would need to be installed, and we would suggest that Rackspace with their fanatical levels of support would be a good partner for the managed server infrastructure, obviously using their new cloud based service.

That’s only part of the back office picture though. Some sort of boarding card system would need to be utilised using mobile technology so that the host of angels could visit people in their own homes and give people their rapture pass. This check in data would then need to feed back to the central booking system, and this would need to be linked to the check in desks at the Pearly Gates terminal.

QR codes would be useful here, so people could be processed quickly, virgins allocated to the right people, etc. and these codes could contain enough information to correctly identify everyone instantly. Indeed, these could be monitored using an intelligent CCTV based remote scanning system if people were asked to visibly wear a trade show style badge upon their arrival.

So that’s everyone issued with a pass, and the secure systems in place to administer their arrival and check in. So far so good. But how would the event be promoted?

It would seem that the words of Harold Camping made the headlines, but as everyone knows, today’s news is tomorrow’s chip paper. (The current generation probably don’t know this – Ed). What this campaign needs is a high quality website to promote the right message and present a positive call to action, probably with a signup box for those wishing to be raptured. A site with high load tolerance would be needed, so stress testing would be critical, it would need to be multi-lingual, and also the site would need to be compliant with W3C standards, making it fully accessible to all people no matter what technology they were using it on. [NB - This would of course mean that it would have to be compliant with Internet Explorer 6, although this may be a step too far. As a side benefit of the Rapture, not being able to access the Rapture website could be a good reason for those still using this browser to upgrade. We think Firefox would be a good choice.]

We would suggest an email campaign to highlight to the world that the end was nigh. If everyone in the world received an email we could track open rates, bounces, etc. quite easily and we’d know if the message got through or not. Rather than a tramp declaring the message on sandwich boards in the street, we could design something that was high quality to draw attention to the call to action, perhaps including the symbols of all worldly religions to promote the partnership aspect of the event. Given that we’d need to distribute several billion emails I am sure that we could negotiate a very low rate per email using our Marion email system.

Then we’d also need a marketing campaign on top of this, and due to the short notice of this announcement, we’d probably go for something like a social media campaign targetting all the platforms including Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, to reach the maximum number of people, encouraging them all to share the message with their friends. Perhaps an incentive scheme could be run along the lines of ‘sign up to the Rapture campaign and win Rapture points’ with more Rapture points giving the person a greater chance of being selected as one of the Chosen Few. Indeed, Harold Camping has probably got quite a few Rapture points by now so he’s pretty much sorted come the day of the races, unless he gets penalised for leading us all up the garden path.

Then perhaps some print advertising wouldn’t go amiss, with shop window displays themed for the end of days (last minute sales, etc.); print based advertising in a variety of international, national and regional publications; a television campaign (we reckon Denzel Washington would be a good lead for this on the basis that Morgan Freeman is getting on a bit now, although this might be a little controversial so we’d put it to the vote on the website); a radio campaign (who more appropriate than Brian Blessed); sponsorship of events leading up to the big day; and merchandising being a big revenue earner along the same lines as the Royal Wedding.

All told, this would need a major campaign for such a major event. That’s why we were a bit sceptical when it was just announced by one man in California, although to be fair it was picked up by the global media. I for one like the entrepreneurial spirit of the guy who set up Eternal Earthbound Pets contracting to look after the pets of those who were Raptured for a fee of $135. The BBC stated in a recent article that he had 250 people sign up, and the owner’s comment to the Wall Street Journal about this was “They’ll be disappointed twice. Once because they weren’t raptured and again because I don’t do refunds.”

While this is clearly taking advantage of the situation, I wonder who made the most money out of this entire escapade in the first place. Or perhaps taking the whole thing with a pinch of salt is why we’re all still here. Cometh the day, we’d like to think that we’d be the agency of choice to spread the word. If we receive a sign, we’ll be sure to tell all our clients first. Be Slightly Different.

These three companies are technology companies, and while this type of branding is widespread in the technology sector with arguably the most well known one being the Microsoft Windows startup musical note sequence, it is widely used in many other areas as well.

It could just be a spoken phrase such as the whispered Mazda “Zoom Zoom” or even a foreign language phrase like Audi’s “Vorsprung Durch Technik” – you don’t even need to know what this means for it to sound like they know what they’re doing. [For those who are interested it means "Progress Through Technology" - Ed].

You may not even realise this is happening, but the sound you hear in an advertisement is just as much part of the message as what they are actually saying, and it works on a different part of your brain to convince you that this is the product for you. Advertisers recognise that you aren’t going to be in front of a television all the time, and they do this so that even if you may not be able to hear what is being said because you popped out during the adverts to make a cup of tea, you can still pick up the sound of the Asda tune from the other room.

Some advertisers take it to the next level though, and embed a piece of music into their brand identity. One of the best examples of this in the UK was made in 1973 and has blighted Dvorak’s 9th symphony ever since.

Incidentally, this was directed by Ridley Scott who went on to make Alien six years later.

There are many other examples, but for my money I particularly liked this one. You may not know Perez Prez Prado’s “Guaglione”, but this was quite a sensation when it aired and today would have been a viral internet phenomenon. I don’t expect you to remember the name of the song like I do, but you may have seen this before:

Even though the song had long since been forgotten from its release in 1960, the advert caused it to be re-released in 1995 due to popular demand, which was fabulous promotion for Guinness as every time the song was heard, the television advertisement popped into people’s minds. Similarly, Levi 501s caused a sensation with this in the mid 1980s:

The next time you watch or hear an advertisement, listen out for the sonic branding. It will be there.

Be Slightly Different.

Many organisations recognise the potential of sporting events to make money, with the London 2012 Olympic Games being a topical case in point where increasingly ingenious ways of capitalising on this continue to hit the news on a regular basis.  The latest one I’ve seen was someone living near the stadium taking advance bookings for people to pitch a tent in their garden.  The price?  A snip at £75 per night.

Anyway, I digress.  The point is that sporting events are seen by business as a legitimate business expenditure.  Sponsors of football teams regularly spend vast amounts of money to have their name emblazoned on the team shirt, or put a hoarding around the pitch, hoping that it will be caught on camera during an exciting stage of the game.

The key word in the last sentence however is the last one.  These events are just games when it comes down to it, although try telling that to the passionate soccer fan at closing time and you’ll be re-educated quite quickly!

Another form of games is that of computer games, which some would say are just as legitimate a pastime as kicking a ball around a park.  Not all people are good at football, or indeed have an even number of jumpers with which to form goal posts, and for these people whole different worlds exist within the realms of computer based gaming.

From a business perspective, the development budgets of many games are now on a par with that of many Hollywood movies.  Grand Theft Auto has made the news for a variety of reasons, but the development budget for this was over $100m.  For a long time this was the highest amount spent on developing a game, that is until Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 was released costing an estimated $200m to develop.

This is pin money when compared to the recurring revenue generated by online games.  World of Warcraft has an estimated 9 million users all who contribute between £10-£15 per month to play.  This has generated a business for the owners worth well in excess of £1bn.  Not bad, considering this is just a computer game, and particularly when considering that it wasn’t so long ago that Manchester United was sold for ‘only’ £790m.

Another smaller example is CCP, the Icelandic company behind Eve Online.  They have just won the Icelandic President’s Award for Best Exporter.  That must wind up those companies that have been exporting bananas from Iceland for decades, because the guys behind this just wanted to create a game that allowed them to fly around space with their friends.  Now almost 500,000 people regularly take to the spacelanes in a global battle for supremacy.  Indeed, at any given time there are around 40,000 people playing at once in the same online world.

Now think back to the amount of money people pay to advertise at football matches to get their brands in front of less people but only once a week.  Online dungeons and dragons and space combat just graduated into the serious leagues, yet corporate sponsors are missing a trick.

Many new games now come with the ability to place adverts in real time on in-game billboards and hoardings, a fact that President Obama didn’t miss when running his campaign for election.  His promotional message was seen on billboards around virtual racing circuits and this helped him to capture the vote of many young people, particularly as his opponents relied on a much less effective way of marketing themselves to this audience which clearly didn’t work.

In the Far East, three out of every four people play computer games, but in the West today our statistics are the opposite. Companies like Nintendo are doing their best to change this and expand the market into the family unit with their Nintendo DS (and the new 3DS), and the Wii consoles.  Others have been swift to follow.

We are at the tip of the iceberg stage of the in-game advertising industry in the West, and what I think is brilliant here is the industry today is almost entirely dominated by young people driving young companies, because many more experienced people almost always switch off when it comes to the subject of games resulting in this falling below the radar of many people.

Perhaps it’s time to reappraise your attitude to gaming as your company might be missing a trick.

DESIGNER

“I really had a lot of fun creating these newsletters & I think it really shows! It was great working with a client who had come to us specifically after seeing what was possible with our own mailer. Henrietta wanted an email newsletter that was ‘slightly different’ & that’s exactly what I tried to deliver.”

Matt Daniels

Slightly Different – Designer

MARKETING

“The success of any email client comes down to two things:

‘the quality of the data and the quality of the design.’

In this case, both those factors were so good that it lead, in my experience, to an unprecedented open rate, click rate and conversion rate.”

Steve Hanson

Slightly Different – Online Marketing Manger

CLIENT

“Our group-wide seasonal e-blast generated an impressive response and our Google analytics showed a dramatic upwards ‘spike’, reflecting a strong drive to our hotel websites. Our ‘Classics’ campaign was given an excellent boost by the e-blast and the interest from customers continued well into January.

There is no doubt that the creative design by Slightly Different achieved its aim to drive people to our websites and we are delighted with the result. We are hoping to do a lot more with Slightly Different in the future.”

Henrietta Lilley

Richardson – Group Marketing & PR Manger

Mobile technology has always been fast moving but one of the most significant developments in the last few years is that of smart phone apps Well we’ve been saving up some answers to questions our clients have asked over the last few months on this subject and thought it would be an idea to share them with you

What does app stand for?

“application”

An application in this context is basically a piece of computer software that a user interacts with. Due to the growth of the mobile sector and the ubiquity of mobile phones – “app” has become synonymous with “downloadable computer program that runs on a mobile device”. So much so, that now most people do not use the term app outside of mobile computing and mobile devices.

How is an app different to a website?

Often an app can behave in a way that is very similar to a website. Behind the scenes however – you can think of an app as being more like the web browser you use to browse a website than the actual website itself. Your web browser, like an app, is an installed piece of software.

What sort of people would use an app?

Every type of person can and does use an app – the only requiement is that they have access to a smartphone or tablet device

Are apps for i-Phones different to apps for other mobile platforms like Android for example?

Some apps are only available for a specific platform [e.g. iPhone]. Other apps are available across multiple platforms. Evenif the same app is available on multiple platforms, it does not mean that the app will be identical across these platforms. As often app developers will take advantage of the unique features of a specific platform. Apps will also behave slightly differently simply by being on a different platform – in the same way that software behaves/looks different when used across PCs and Macs.

Foto credit: NRKbeta / Marius Arnesen

We currently have several apps in development, watch this space, we’ll be shouting about them very soon!

The big app news this week was that the 10 billionth app had been downloaded from Apple’s ITunes.  Now, I always get confused with billions, is it the UK billion or the US version?  Either way, it’s a pretty large number and if nothing else it tells us one thing – phones have changed forever.

And let’s face it, they are not phones anymore, they are powerful mini computers.  You can now get a Smartphone for less than £100, which is more powerful than the first laptop I ever bought and costs 75 times less!

However, the difference is with these new phones is that they have so much potential, the fact that they are touch screen, tilt sensitive, have microphones, GPS, NFD chips….it all makes for some pretty awesome potential.  I don’t believe we have even scratched the surface of what can be done yet, and we may not fully realise this potential until the market fully matures – the speed that Apple and Android are activating new phones suggest that we are nearing this point.  Then we will be living in some exciting times!

The problem is that it is possible now to drown in a sea of useless apps.  Every man and his dog has an app out, all the big companies are embracing the technology in a massive way, but not necessarily doing it very well.  There is an argument that suggests that bandwagon jumping is not the best thing to do.  Companies need to ask themselves – is this any good?  Does it have a use?  Will my customers use it?  If the answer is no, then chances are it’s being done for the sake of it.  My advice – wait until you have something useful to offer!

The best approach is to think about something that enhances your current offering, something that will actually add to your company and brand and not detract from it.

We are now asked more and more to develop apps for phones alongside more traditional channels.  Some of them are just adapting existing techniques to a smaller form factor, but some of them are truly different ideas, with the potential to do very well.  I’d love to give you some more details but they’re all very hush hush!

The apps avalanche is something of a gold rush at the moment, with millionaires being made all over the world and venture capitalists keen to find the next big thing.  Who knows, that crazy idea you have might just be it, you won’t know unless you jump on board.

This month I want to introduce a very special lady to you all, without her, you would not be receiving our great newsletters.

It is my great pleasure to present our all singing, all dancing Mistress of emails, Marion.

Marion is our email marketing system, and we are very proud of her. Over the years we have flirted with many different systems, all of whom did the job, but just didn’t quite cut the mustard. Then we met Marion. We knew immediately that she was the one. With her easy to use mailing list management features, her dynamic HTML email editor and a great set of stats, we fell for her quite hard. When we found out that she could also do triggered emails and split testing, we knew there would be no other like her.

Our relationship with Marion grew and grew and over time we used her to create not only our emails, but also emails for our clients as well. She didn’t mind being shared, in fact she was able to handle everything we put her through, without a grumble. When we asked her to send our digital goodies to thousands upon thousands of people, she didn’t hesitate, she just got on with it. What a gal.

The results of our emails got better the more we used her, until just recently we were lucky enough to be blessed with a major International Award for our own in house newsletter.

Yes, our talented in house team put together the words and pictures, but it was Marion who stepped up to the plate when she was needed and performed like the star that she is.

She may be a bit younger than us, but in the ten years we’ve been going we haven’t met any better, and we’re pretty sure that with the great changes we plan to introduce, she’ll be with us in another ten years time.

We love her dearly, and if you would like to find out why she is so good, why not get in touch, or, sign up to receive our newsletter yourself, and get a big dollop of email love all over your inbox.