On Monday we attended Google’s creative breakfast session, this one on mobile. Stats and creative examples presented by Brendan Forster drove the main points home:
Australia is a global leader(!) in smartphone penetration and usage
mobile is fully mainstream yet businesses lag in the development of mobile destinations and experiences
mobile search is very local and focused (customers are much closer to conversion)
we use our mobiles a lot at home
together with the tablet it has become the ideal TV companion.
It was nice to see that Google featured our Mojo/Razorfish/UofSydney mobile prototype “Brandtable” with which we explored near-field-communication (NFC)
Have a look at the a couple of presentation screenshots below and download the PDF here. You can also mobile-test your client’s current site or your own work by feeding it into this site. The numbers and videos will surely help you during your next ‘Why we need to think of mobile upfront” discussion.
Whenever you bump into an old colleague (now working at a competitor agency), you might go: ‘Hey, what a small world!’.
That’s what we think as well and were therefore inspired to create these 20 small agency planets.
A big help was Ryan Alexander’s web app ‘Street View Stereographic’. It creates a “little planet” using photos from any Google Street View. Simply type in the geographic location in the search bar. As we did in the below for our own ‘little’ agency Publicis Mojo.
So you think you know the agency scene in Sydney? Not like this you don’t. Try to recognise as many of these 20 creative agencies’ neighbourhoods and buildings. Write them with their # into the comments section and be recognised as a real connoisseur of our small agency world.
#1
#2
#3
#4
#5 (it is around the corner – no Streetview exists)
Google’s version of real-time search was unveiled today, where ‘live’ search results are displayed via AJAX on the search results page.
At first glance, it’s a pretty nice execution, blending real-time with relevance, rather than just real-time, which is the focus of all new social/real-time search engines.
We have recently seen Ad Sitelinks (which are working very nicely, thanks) released in Australia, and Local Business Extensions have been running for a while, but there are some new ad formats on the way as well.
Ad Sitelinks
Video ads
These look designed for the likes of 20th Century Fox to enable playing of movie trailers directly in the search results. This makes a whole lot of sense for movie releases – our “traditional” campaigns would run across search, the content network and YouTube to get users to play the trailer. Doing this in the search results directly should massively improve efficiencies.
ICANN has just opened registrations for non-Latin-character domain names, which will mean websites in Japanese, Chinese and Arabic etc will be able to use domains in their own language.
In Japan it’s common to see TV and Press ads that feature a search box call-to-action as the transliterated domain name in Latin characters is too hard to remember. From next year, these sites will be able to have domains using characters native speakers can easily remember.
Having keywords in the URL is an important part of the natural search ranking process. Having your domain name featuring your main keywords will certainly boost rankings. Read more
Yahoo! has thrown in the towel and entered into an agreement with Microsoft to use Bing as the search engine across all Yahoo sites, whilst being the paid search sales force for Bing. Read more
Well not literally, we don't actually have a club. But we are always on the lookout for talented individuals.
So if you think you qualify then give us a bell or an email or a txt.
