Quick posts but thought it was rather interesting.

Google maps have just added comprehensive transit info for the entire New York metro region, encompassing subway, commuter rail, bus and ferry services from the Metropolitan Transit Agency (MTA), the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, New Jersey Transit and the City of New York.

This means that people in New York have a much easier time in trying to find thier routes around NYC. If we check the Google Transit page we can see that the UK is still lagging behind. I can’t wait for this to come to London, will make life so much easier.

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 :o)
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.