By the way, did you know that Secretary’s Day was created by a marketeer? Harry F. Klemfuss of Young & Rubicam launched the idea in 1952. In the US the concept is now known as “Administrative Professionals’ Day“. This year it falls on 23 April. In Europa it’s still called “Secretary’s Day” and it’s celebrated on 17 April.

Campaign website: http://www.debestemanagementassistent.be
Agency: Proximity BBDO Belgium.

Agency: McCann Erickson Belgium
Account Director: Talia Hendlisz
Creatives: Gregory Defay, Quentin Gascard
Thanks for the pointer, Tanguy

Besides the fact the design looks really neat, I’m very fond of the ‘action-figure’ approach. It’s makes a geek-in-the-box look so adorable and cute, I think this could be a super cool direct marketing gadget to send out to agencies. Collect ‘em all, and rule the world!

The gameplay is nice, goes smooth but is a little more complicated than you might suspect at first glance. Keeping a geek productive, not hungry and happy at the same time requires tact. The IQ tests in between are funny :) The goal is to have your project finished by the end of the week. Challenging. Perfect for a Friday afternoon.

Extra stuff:

QNX homepage
Foundry27 – Learn more about QNX and for code, tips and binaries
Everyday QNX – 25 Ways that QNX Touches Your Life
Pocket Geek Forum – Discuss Pocket Geek on the Foundry27 forums.
QNX’s Wikipedia Page

Thanks for the pointer, Nick Iannitti.

This online innovation comes with courtesy of Pisang Ambon, the delicious banana drink that has been popular for more than 50 years. Research shows that the Pisang Ambon main fans – aged between 18 and 25 – are online for an average of 4 hours a day. Rather than develop a traditional campaign with classic advertising (to which they would be largely indifferent), ClipCaster represents a major step forward in the constantly developing world of new media, internet, and video. Pisang Ambon and ClipCaster will be putting performers in the spotlight from November 2007. The platform will be launched in 12 European countries: the Netherlands, France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Portugal, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.

Agency: BrandBase, The Netherlands
Thanks, Etiënne

The game, playable online now at www.GameKillersTheGame.com, is retro-arcade shooter. The cool thing about it is that you can superimpose the pictures of your friends’ faces (or of the guy who killed your game last night) onto the enemies, so you can get back at the guys who killed your game.

It also includes a built-in leaderboard so you can show off your mad Gamekiller-blasting skillz. It may not be the most challenging videogame, but for the sake of pure entertainment you should definitely check it out. Have a go with a pic of a friend and umm… shoot it into pixel heaven. It’s definitely not the strongest game, but you’ve got to adore the light classical music that plays while you’re trying to survive.

Previous GameKiller post on Coolz0r [March 2006]

Anyhow: Here’s a little timewaster for you: [click to play]

Campaign site
Agency: Emakina, Belgium

Thanks, Bert

Visit the site, and give it a go
Agency: Ogilvy, Brussels

Sounds all pretty exciting to me, but my sober remark in the side line is: would I really need yet another space to them spam all my friends with invites to it? I’m not denying that the growth of users and increase of visits is a good thing. I’m simply questioning the resultive actions. I’d love to see facts and figures of the MyCeres campaign.

Agency: Dartway Interactive, Genova

Follow the link, go to the site, select left if you are a smoker, right if you’re not. Create your dirty little rattle, and send it to some friends. (lowest button below the sliders).

As for the send to friend page:

First line: your name + your email
Second line: friend’s name + friend’s email
Text box: your blabla :)

Check out the site
Agency: Ogilvy (Belgium)

Check out beachshowercam.com (can’t believe it wasn’t taken yet)
Thanks, Bert

Product Details:

• Scratch card creators can email their scratch card link to other people or use a code snippet provided to embed the scratch card on their Web site.
• Scratchers move their mouse over the scratch area to reveal the message underneath.
• Every day, Scratchyourself chooses two winning times. The first person to scratch after each winning time wins an Instant Prize of US$10, and the scratch card creator wins a Bonus Instant Prize of US$10. Scratchers may reveal a message entering them into a Daily Draw for US$50. Users can scratch multiple times to win an Instant Prize but can only enter the Daily Draw once per scratch card per day.
• Winners can choose to be paid via PayPal, check or Amazon gift certificate.
• The current Scratchyourself promotion runs until June 7, 2007. Scratchyourself intends to run a second promotion from June 8, 2007, with bigger prizes.

Example (unscaled version – click here) :

The setup is very easy. First you provide the name of the ticket (the blueprint stamp you see before you scratch) – Next you upload an image (300k limit) and write the caption (text in the bottom left corner), then you pick a color panel and then you login or register for free, to send it off. (took me 20 seconds). Simple, cool and very nifty.

Get your own at: Scratch Yourself

If you think it won’t work, you can guess again. About 5% of the digital viewers already tried to play during the first episode. Not bad if you keep in mind there hasn’t been any advertising for it (yet), apart from a mention on the digital ‘interactive landing page’. Reminds me of the good old days in 1995 where you could play strip-tetris on your 386 and all that. Totally pointless but hey, sex still sells. Even through digital tv games during a commercial break.

Good for an OXO Peugeot Design Award in 2002.
Browse to it at Tom Seymour’s product gallery

I don’t think I can live with this sort of desktop, because I’m too attached to seeing a file name under an icon and to ‘folders’ where I can stash stuff in to. This BumpTop desktop, however, is quite a refreshing idea and I love where this is going. It would be great to have it as an optional feature in my current OS, but not really as a permanent environment to work in. That’s my two cents. Looks super smooth though.

Links:
BumpTop site | DGP site

Side usage of this technology: might be very useful to keep the kids busy while mom and dad are shopping. Or if you want to make it easy for the cops you can place it in some dark corner of the suburbs, where it will attract the stoneys and junks who will stare at it saying ‘woooow’ and ‘duuuuude’. Sort of like a fly-trap, but then for people.

Video after the jump:

Link to the video on the Monster Media site
Thanks, Peter

Thanks, Paul

There’s still a lot to be done, but they’re on their way. The main thing that caused their growth is the personal approach they maintained, to contact every blogger single handedly over email and negotiate the ad placement.

(disclaimer, Adhese runs ads on this blog from time to time)

–

Kris Hoet from MSN EMEA: Everyone is a customer.

How can a company engage with bloggers? How to connect and build long term relationships? There’s a lot of blog trackers and product trackers out there (technorati, tailrank, …)

The first thing you should do is READ! If you don’t care for reading blogs, don’t bother contacting them to promote your brand. Use RSS readers to track your bloggers, follow links to discover more blogs. Comment on blogs, where it makes sense. Don’t kill a bad blogpost, but stay factual.

Stay on track of your comments with tools like co.mments.com or cocomment.com, don’t comment to never look back. People will answer and expect you to come back and follow the conversation.

Set up meetings, invite people to come over and get to know you and your purposes. It helps to get your message out. Word of mouth is still the most powerful form of brand communication. It’s a natural thing that needs to grow in a natural way. Forcing it, or even worse: trying to force it, will lead you further from your goal than you’ll ever wished for.

Kris closed with some cases like the guy who got to drive with an Aston Martin because he wished for it, the Gillette 5 blades disaster and the famous Dell Hell.

She presented a lot of human stories, to illustrate that behind a lot of blogs, real people with real stories live their daily lives and are willing to share it. It’s not always about the high traffic numbers, but very often about ‘what’ is written and for whom. A lot of people write for a small audience and love that, they don’t feel the need to become famous. They do meet in small blogger events, and they love to socialize, but most of all, they love to blog.

The funny remark here is that Skynet started with an ‘everything about skynet blogs’ blog and that shortly after that their ‘top blogger’ started with a mirror blog which is called ‘bloggers about skynet blogs’. Every official announcement the Skynet team launches on their blog gets an instant feedback on that blog, and it’s most of the time razorblade sharp. A nice example of how blogging works.

–

Jesse Wynants from i-merge and Gunther Boutsen from Fishtank are talking about the conversation that ‘happens’ when people use blogs. About opinions everyone has and everyone’s dying to share with the rest of the world.

People blog to become an authority, to be invited to speak at events, to connect with others (clients). People want to meet other people, bloggers want to meet other bloggers. Companies want to create transparency and want to share their ideas, their thoughts. Companies want to share knowledge, engage in conversations. CEOs blog to share their vision.

This presentation is really interesting and in fact goes a little too fast to live-blog. For every reason of blogging, they give an example. They give tips to blog like: create a style, send lots of linklove, set up a schedule, blog every day and keep up the frequency, write original content and don’t copy-paste too much. Personalize your blogposts and blog so that people can identify theirselves with you and your life. Try to organise a battle, start a debate and invite people to participate.

One of the best links I just discoverd is the IKEA hacker site, the perfect example of what ‘anti-consumerism’ means. This blog tells you everything you can do with the stuff from IKEA when you don’t want to follow the papered how-to guidelines. Sweeeet :)

You can also use technology to make it more easy to blog. You can use tools like Flickr, and blog those pictures. With tools like LiveWriter you can create posts offline in an editor that looks and feels like Office Word. You can use Media (audio and video) to make your content more catchy, or aggregate content from other bloggers or users or from yourself (del.icio.us, podcast feeds, video feeds). You can use widgets to make your blog look more ‘alive’ and to discover new things you weren’t aware of yourself. If you start moblogging and send pictures from your mobile phone to your laptop, the spontaneity increases and gives your blog a more ‘human’ face.

If you use metadata, you can strengthen your content and give it date/time/location tags, so the content has more context.

Then Jesse talked about degrees of participation. First degree is just the IP’s, the readers who come by and don’t interact. Next you have the Subscribers, the fans, those who keep coming back and are dedicated readers. Lastly there’s the groupies, the user group who interacts. These are the most valuable people, the ones who drive your community. These are the ones you need to love and praise.

Maarten Schenk, Six Apart. Blogging since 2002, that’s worth a t-shirt.

A lot has changed in a short time. Back in 2003 people thought it was either a forum, some sort of Geocities homepage or a community site. Nobody understood the purpose of RSS. But nowadays, the word weblog is in the daily news, all the major newspapers have blogs with RSS feeds, or are launching them as we speak. Companies treat bloggers like journalists… They’ve come a long way, and they’re here to stay.

Introduces ‘Blogoloog‘, a pet project that ran out of hand. Blogoloog is basically a rough project setup that runs on an old computer at Maarten’s little house. It has a full index of a number of Flemish blog services, and keeps lists of the blogs that have been updated recently. The list has been completed with ‘tips’ that have been dropped in Maarten’s comments.

Stats today:

40.000 blogs, between 9.000 or 12.000 outgoing links, 4000 daily blogposts…

Most of the blogs are hosted with free services. The backend of the state of the Flemish blogosphere looks like this (in order of all-aroundness): MSN Spaces, Skynetblogs, Bloggen, Blogger, Seniorennet are the most popular services. But, self-hosted blogs and foreign blog services are under-represented, so it’s difficult to keep track of the exact online activity.

MSN Spaces is overrepresented, because feeds of this service contain also the updates in picture galleries, which are very often more updated than the actual blogs.

A lot of popular blogs choose for self hosting, because they can avoid third party advertisement and by using paid services, they have more control over their uptime and the backend on which the blogs run.

The popular blogs of the Flemish blogosphere consist of small “blog clubs”, it’s the same people who react on each other’s blogs, add the same blogs to their blogroll… Much like it happens with the international A-listers.

The number of blogs keeps growing, because it’s become really easy to publish for anyone.

From what I’ve heard, there’s going to be 6 presentations of each 10 minutes, all about blogging. What better way to cover that than to live-blog the entire thing?

There’s a Flickr account where everyone can upload pictures and a dedicated blog where we can cross-post our thoughts. Pretty good organized, this event.

It’s been a happy rendez-vous with a bunch of ex-colleagues from i-merge and I also saw Robin Wauters and Ine ‘Wow’ Dehandschutter and Herr Tom De Bruyne, the 2.0′d devil of the famous interactive agency. Also Maarten Schenk from SixApart and Jesse Wynants, who’re both going to give their best on stage.

Let’s see what the show brings. I’m looking forward to this.