This is certainly going to be one of my favourite adverts of all time..

Nintendo have obviously done some sort of deal with YouTube to get this add to interact with the page so well. In this advert we see the video play whilst the page around it starts to shake and crumble. As the video progresses the page is completely destroyed and you can even play with the rubble afterwards.

This is a great example of taking advertising to the next level, admittedly Nintendo have a massive advertising budget but this is surely going to stick in people’s minds for a long time, and end up in a ton of inboxes around the world.
Watch youtube crumble and fall as Warioland Shakes It about…
Watch the Warioland Advert

Hello all, this post discusses the ‘hot new women’ advertising campaign recently conducted by the online dating company match.com. Two adverts, the work of US agency Hanft Raboy & Partners, have been broadcast on British TV that in my opinion are simply brilliant.

The campaign is obviously focused on increasing subscribers to the match.com online dating service, but its the way its been implemented by that is really clever.

Understanding the Market Research
Online dating has traditionally and still is a male orientated market, with the main challenge for companies being to continually generate female users.

So what have match.com done?
Match.com, having the resources and ability to implement television advertising campaigns have released a series of 2 adverts. Both adverts use a mixture of hard advertising techniques (such as attention grabing alarms and repetition) that is now common place with most website ads, however it is worth mentioning that these ads are no where near as annoying as the aging Moonpig adverts.

Advert 1 - Attention Men

The first advert uses large letters and a voice over to announce that men should pay attention because match.com has too many women. Further animations of women and hearts accompany the message that their previous efforts in advertising and attracting millions of women in the past have been successful and as a result they now have too many women on their site. I remember seeing this advert only once and it was while i was watching top gear on some blokey channel such as Dave or Bravo. It did catch my attention and i remember thinking at the time that it was cleverly targeted. But the penny really dropped when i saw the second advert…

Advert 2 – Attention Women

(I will update and include the second advert as soon as it becomes available.. does anyone have a link?)

Again the advert uses Large letters, animated megaphones and a voice-over to announce that women should pay attention but this time the advert refers to the previous TV ad, stating that, they previously ran an ad targeted at men and now have lots of new guys on their site.
The clever bit is, i have seen this ad 4 or 5 times now, continually on female orientated tv channels, so what initially seemed to be an out of sync male focused ad campaign, came full circle and now continually targets women.. nice twist..

In Conclusion…
I thought this was a really clever concept and i like that even tho the ads use hard advertising techniques, they do feel conversational and almost real-time . I’m sure some people are gonna hate the ads but i think there should also be an appreciation for the thought and innovation that went into them )
Match.com seem to have made a step towards “Web 2.0″ advertising where the TV adverts are communicating events and trends that are currently happening online on their website.

Does anyone else have any thoughts on these ads?

I have been really slack with the blog over the last week or two, its mainly been through the amount of stuff i am trying to get through both at work and at home. To try and combat this i am opening up the blog to some guest posters, the first post will follow tomorrow and will be by Gab Goldenberg of SeoRoi. Gab is well known and well respected in the world of SEO and his posts will be about the ethics of blackhat.

My other guest blogger (who we will see next week) is a chap called Sean Mauger who runs an equestrian clothing website. Even though he is not as well known as Gab he certainly has a good head on his shoulders and will be taking more of a marketing look at the industry as opposed to my random thoughts or more technical posts.

Hopefully we can continue this in the future so the blog gets a bit more diversity, if your reading this and feel you might be interested in blogging or have something to add then just pop me an email using dean@chewie.co.uk.

I will be getting back to normal with the blogging in about a week so hopefully posts wont be so far apart in the future.

Well some web developer might be in a bit of trouble. Less that 24hrs before the Premier League kicks off and the BBC Football site is messed up, oops.

I had to laugh at this when i was reading BBC news today. Not because BBC news is particularly funny, on the contrary, since most of our news is dominated by youths getting stabbed up in London… innit blood?

No. The reason i was laughing is because Google are facing some issues with street mapping in the UK, yes thats right, the UK. The country which has the most CCTV cameras pointed at its citizens in the world!

Apparently Privacy International wrote to Google asking what measures can be taken to keep people anonymous.

“We’ve spoken to Google in the past about this and received a snide response telling us to look more closely at their blogs.

“We’ve been told by engineers at Google that the technology is not ready to be deployed.”

Now lets just look at some stats about CCTV Camera’s in the UK shall we?

• The UK has 1% of the world’s population and 20% of the world’s CCTV cameras
• Croydon has more CCTV cameras than New York
• London’s Metropolitan Police Force have approximately 200,000 cameras installed around the capital
• Almost every bank cash machine in the country uses CCTV to record you making your transaction – bet you can’t see the camera!
• The UK has more CCTV cameras per head of population than ANY other country. About one camera for every 14 people
• Harrods London store has in excess of 500 CCTV cameras installed
• It is estimated that there are in excess of 4 million CCTV cameras in the UK, approximately 20% of the World’s total
• In London you are likely to be caught on camera 300 times a day

So with all that to think about, is anyone really going to be bothered with the tiny percentage chance of being caught by a Google street view camera… i think not!

I have been enjoying using the latest version of Wordpress but i am getting seriously pissed off with the fact that every time i try and upload an image i am presented with some red text that tells me “HTTP Error”.

As you can see that text is really not very helpful, so its hard to find out exactly what the issue with Wordpress is. Now i have been searching the net for the answers and the most common answer is to insert this code into your .htaccess.

<IfModule mod_security.c>
<Files async-upload.php>
SecFilterEngine Off
SecFilterScanPOST Off
</Files>
</IfModule>

However, if like me you tried this and it didn’t work, your problem might be something a lot more strange.

[JUMP TO SOLUTION WITHOUT READING MY FINDINGS]

I got onto my hosts because i thought it might be something a bit more serious on the web server, when George (the web host guy) tried to upload an image he managed to do it ok without any sort of problem, i thought it was a bit weird so asked what OS and browser he was using and it turns out it was XP and IE.

I finished off the chat and booted my MacBook into XP mode, opened up IE and sure enough i could upload an image into Wordpress, how fucking weird? Well next i opened Firefox in XP and tried to do it… worked again.

So i booted back into OSX and tried it from Firefox… didn’t work, so i opened up Safari.. didn’t work, i even asked the Evil Green Donkey and some others in my office to try it from their Macs… didn’t work.

For what ever reason which i really can’t get my head around, it seems that this is an issue that is specifically with Flash on the mac, it doesn’t even seem browser related. And i have tried this on over 6 different installs of Wordpress on multiple hosting accounts.

I reinstalled flash for the mac and tried every possible solution to this problem which are listed on the wordpress blog and on another site i found and still no joy. The ONLY way i can upload images to any of my blogs using OSX is to disable the flash image uploader by using the no-flash-uploader plugin, this reverts it back to the html version. To use, simply put that file into your /wp-content/plugins/ folder and then activate it through the plugins section of your admin area.

Now i can have images again, but i do hope that someone finds the issue and fixes it, in the mean time enjoy a picture that proves that none of this is an issue with my hosting and that images work fine once the flash uploader has been disabled. Now all i need to do is install the above mentioned plugin on all of my sites (

As usual, please leave a comment if you have experienced this issue.

Then the speed dial extension is to blame!

I don’t really want to write this because i love speed dial so much, but i have to admit that it is really starting to piss me off. Every single time i write something in a text area i lose focus.

It means that every time i am writing away, the cursor will disappear out of the text area and i am just sat there typing blankly. It seems that whenever speed dial does a refresh in the background this will happen.

The only way round it is to disable speed dial. I have contacted the developers so i hope this will be solved soon. I just wanted to post this in case anyone out there searching about the issue didn’t know how to solve it.

I lost focus 4 times whilst writing this, GRRRRR!

I have decided to get off my slightly fat ass and start going to the gym, we have a fitness first which is situated right between my house and the tube station i use so there is no excuse for me not going to the gym since i will have to walk past it.

So whilst i was eating my nice healthy potato for lunch i decided to check out the fitness first website by typing in fitnessfirst.co.uk into Firefox 3’s awesomebar and hitting enter, to my surprise i got an error back saying the site could not be found. A quick edit of the URL to add www at the start then gave me access to the site.

As i stated in my other post about LondonElects not 301′ing their site, i cannot believe that a company the size of fitness first cant hirer a developer who realises this issue, i wonder how many visitors they are losing a month because people just type in the url and think the site is down.

Perhaps they will give me free membership for pointing it out? Yeah right.

Super quick post…

My friend Sean who runs Joules clothing sent me a link to this site today, its an absolute gold mine of resources for web designers and developers.

Check it out for yourself and be very impressed

http://www.forwebdesigners.com/

Real quick post, but yesterday I got a lively email from Google telling me that my adsense account had been banned because of click fraud. The strange thing is that i have adsense code on only one site and that site has been down for at least two weeks.

I used the please-be-nice-and-let-me-back-on-adsense form and tried to explain that something must be amiss because I havent had any code up on the site for ages. However Google wouldn’t budge and reminded me of this…

My account was disabled and my appeal was denied. Is there any way I can rejoin the programme? Can I open a new account?

We understand your concern about the actions taken against your account. Please know that our actions are the result of careful investigation by our team of dedicated specialists, taking into account the interests of our advertisers, publishers and users. Though you may be disappointed with our decision, we are unable to reinstate your account.

Please also note that publishers disabled for invalid click activity are not allowed any further participation in AdSense. For this reason, these publishers may not open new accounts.

Lastly, please bear in mind that Google does reserve the right to disable an account for any reason, including invalid click activity from any source.

So just remember, even though Google is this really cool company that helps us find what we need on a daily basis, they are also a bunch of bastards who can close down your account without actually giving you any real reason why!