This week Sony Ericsson is combining Twitter, live video, hundreds of Space Hoppers and a massive dose of insanity for their latest campaign by Dare. Above anything this is a hopping great technical feat, so when I received an invite to do a shift monitoring, plucking and testing the Space Hoppers in a secret location my geek alarm went into overdrive.
Every time someone tweets the hashtag #pumpt a Space Hopper is automatically inflated slightly until it’s full, resulting in #pumpt becoming a trending topic multiple times last week. The Hoppers are monitored around the clock by scientists (or IABeers…) until they’re ready for plucking and testing.
Children today are growing up in a digital society. They will never know what it was like living in a world without the internet or mobile devices. They are digital savvy and their distinction between offline and online worlds increasingly blurs by the day. But being media savvy is not the same as being media literate.
I’ve banged the drum in previous weeks about the importance of consumer education about behavioural advertising, and the IAB’s recent research has highlighted the need for this.
Today the IAB has published a guide on behavioural advertising specifically for industry, our first step in helping educate the market about this practice (although you’ll be glad to know that this will be my last blog – for now – talking about education). The guide explains how behavioural advertising works, how it differs to other types of targeted advertising on the internet, its benefits to web publishers and advertisers, consumer attitudes as well as online privacy and industry good practice.
The relationship between search and social media is the subject I get asked the most about by advertisers and agencies at the moment. It’s a hugely complex area because both search and social media mean so many different things and work together in so many different ways.
To make matters worse, the last 18 months have seen radical developments in both. However, the two have an undeniably positive effect on each other and I believe that the secret to the most effective, integrated online campaigns lies at the heart of this relationship.
The IAB will be looking into this in far more detail in the future, but right now I wanted to share my own experience below and to gather some of yours. If you feel I’ve missed something, please email me or leave a comment below so that I can adapt it.
© Haymarket Media Group Ltd.
