World Trend Map 2008

Ross Dawson: "While last year’s map was based on the London tube map, the 2008 map is derived from Shanghai’s underground routes. Limited to just five lines, the map uncovers key trends across Society, Politics, Demographics, Economy, and Technology."

Phone with Foldaway Screen

Reuters: "A Dutch company [Phillips's spin-off Polymer Vision] has squeezed a display the size of two business cards into a gadget no bigger than other mobile phones -- by making a screen that folds up when not in use. The 5-inch (13-cm) display of Polymer Vision's "Readius" is the world's first that folds out when the user wants to read news, blogs or email and folds back together so that the device can fit into a pocket."

The final product differs from the last year's prototype that was truly "roll-up". It features a 5" display and is coming first to Italy some time this year.

Stats from Live In-Theater Games

Brand Experience Lab shares some results from the in-theater games they did for MSNBC (The Newsbreaker) in the US and for Volvo in the UK (video below).

For the Newsbreaker:

78% played the game
93% want more games in cinemas
86% prefer a game to an ad
71% unaided MSNBC brand recall
75% more likely to use MSNBC

Definitely one of the coolest ad things from 2007.

Contextual Audio Ads Network

Pay Per Play places contextual (so they claim) ads on websites; the ads are 5-second audio spots on autoplay. On the one hand, sound has been historically underutilized as an ad medium. On the other hand, autoplay is more annoying than pop-ups. Which probably won't stop the same crowd that places those contextual link ads.

Speaking of which. Contextual links have very impressive click-throughs (I'll have to look at conversion rates, though, since I suspect a lot of the clicks are by mistake), but isn't there a way to tie the ads to key phrases instead of single keywords?

A Blog About Chatbots

Toy robots at The Toy Museum in Prague, Summer 2007

Chatbots.org -- an entire blog dedicated to various chatbots. Also see Chatbothub.com, a chatbot developer community.

3D TV With Wii Remote

Update [Feb 15, 2009] -   Hello, scavenger hunters!

Human-computer interaction researcher Johnny Chung Lee at Carnegie Mellon demonstrates how with a Wii remote and a custom code you can turn your TV into a 3D display.



- Thank you, Erwin.

Advergames for iPhone

Not too many of those. Actually, just one.



DrPepper's Matchcaps is simple re-skin of Bejeweled. Not horribly imaginative, but this press release says it's the first advergame for iPhone (it came out in November 2007). So far, it seems to be the only one.




Fingerfracture is a concept for Vans from Miami Ad School that surfaced a few weeks ago. Just mock-ups for now, but way cooler than a simple re-skin.

Another mock-up: iPhone game controller. Clever and obvious.

The Ad Zapper in Your Brains

During commercial breaks,

• 41.2% of viewers channel-surf
• 33.5% talk with others in the room or by phone
• 30.2% mentally tune out
• 5.5% regularly fully attend to commercials

In other news, this winter fewer people eat (68.8%) and more people do laundry (58%) while consuming media (70% and 57.4% in July 2007, respectively). This and other amusing tidbits in the new BIGresearch's research of simultaneous media consumption SIMM 11.

Open Mic

From the mail that AdLab readers and PR people have sent in over the past couple of weeks:

Prudent People Brag: "According to a recent study conducted by the Mindset Media, people who report that they always pay their credit card balances in full each month, [...] to be far less modest than the rest of the population at large -- "Modesty 1’s," who are, perhaps, unable to resist bragging about their highly responsible credit habits.

JunkieAd.com creator would like to let the world know about another blog collecting creative advertising.

USA Today's Media Lounge accepts submissions from ad bloggers.

If I understand the terminology correctly, WebCollage.com lets downstream sales partners reuse the rich interactive functionality of the mothership site with less friction.

Spot Runner (one of the ad automation companies) has acquired GlobeShooter, a network of 1,200 independent filmmakers, videographers, producers and production companies across the U.S.

Flow automatically tracks the design process from idea to end result and manages assets and applications for the most complex workflows.

Hammerhead agency promotes itself with this video.

Luke Sullivan's legendary "Mr.Whipple" guide to great ads is out in its second edition.

For dessert, some spam: "The NOKIA Electronic Email Promo,was established 1970 by the Multi-Million groups and now supported by the Economic Community for West African States (ECOWAS), United Nations Organization(UNO), United Kingdom(UK) and the European Union (EU) was conceived with the objective of human growth, educational, and community development."

MySpace Builds Game Portal?

Looks like MySpace is working on a gaming portal. The URL for this page is games.myspace.com. This could be a hit if the games are less like the ones you can find on other casual game destinations (Yahoo Games, for example) and more like Facebook app games with a stronger social component to them. Social advergames on MySpace would also be an interesting ad channel.

There are plenty of Flash games out there for MySpace users to embed already, but I haven't seen any that let you play with your friends.

Oh, and to the readers of this blog: I just got back from a vacation with no internet hook-up, but now we are back to our regular programming.

Also, this is the 2008th post on this blog since the beginning.