Having researched lately on the subject of game design further strengthened my opinion as how it’s one of the best ways to present interactive narrative. Take a simple subject like cheese, think of an advergame, add some fine art direction and what you get is Old Dutch Master.

Reminds me of Virgin Digital’s “Exercise Your Music Muscle“, but with extra care with the sound. If you’re fond of visual riddles, check also M&Ms Dark Chocolate and Lonely Planet’s 50 Cites.

Source: Chewy

Yes, you got that right. An iPhone + screensaver + desktop app so you can have your “siesta” and wake with the sounds of a rooster.

Enjoying the warm countryside and a live stream of a rooster. Wait, what ? Just interact with the video above, and watch for yourself.

Branded applications are one of the more valid solutions for brands to be a part of consumer’s lives without resorting to commercial interruptions. This campaign for Cerveceria Del Pacifico by Perfect Fools isn’t goodies only, as they support the campaign with original content, blogging at “Claudio And I” the experience of a Mexican rooster farmer.

Source: Perfect Fools

I tried. I honestly tried to use AdSense Competitive Filter to block the ads of one of the most annoying display advertisers in my country.

But Movilisto [Buongiorno] ads kept coming back to my blog. With those pesky “Teste da Morte” ads. And now it got even worse with a repugnant “Máquina dos Peidos” (Fart Machine) ad. The company advertises premium mobile services, and if you google them, you’ll see that consumers aren’t that happy with their shady tactics.

They keep wearing out any credibility of display advertising in the country, and since Google doesn’t seem to provide a decent ad rating tool to users or publishers, I’ll take a stance as a blogger: I’m completely removing AdSense from this blog.

My fellow readers: you don’t have to put up with this ad junk. The amount of their interruption/noise/bad taste is one of the causes of banner blindness and also of the decreasing eCPMs for publishers. And until Google fixes this relevance problem, they are no longer welcomed as an ad network here.

What i can do as a blogger is to share this problem with my audience, some of them working at Portuguese online media companies and advertisers, so they could start demanding Google to severely limit the impressions of Movilisto and provide tools to improve the ad experience. Enough pressure will provide better ad quality, a good way to increase the price of their own display inventory while providing a safe haven to creative display advertising that is relevant to consumers.

What i can do as a blogger, is to ask my readers to protest directly in their blogs or Twitter and let their friends know #movilistosucks.

On the week that Champions League is back, some new work by W+K London and AKQA for Nike with Show Your 5, with Wayne Rooney and Joe Cole captured on CCTV along with local footballers.

Besides the TV ad (above), the website has a lot more footage,  where the young kids show their ball skills to the football stars. If you register on the website, you get a chance to take part in more than 200 tournaments over an 8 week period, on your way to the big final on the 10th May in London.

When this blog was created i used to follow the Interesting Snippets Flickr series from Lynette. A few months later, she published her book and altough she’s been collecting more interesting quotes, the snippets are long gone. I picked up the habit and started collection my own snippets on Tumblr, and thought it would be great to share a few of these snippets to spice your presentations about digital media.

Photo by occhiovivo

Photo by Mark Busse

Photo by midnightglory

Photo by fensterbme

Photo by william addington

Photo by DHdesign

All pictures were selected from Flickr, under a Creative Commons license, so make sure you credit the authors if you use them.

One of the greatest assets of rich media is the possibility of using input devices besides the mouse. Since Flash Player 6, the plugin has been supporting the Camera and Microphone classes, allowing users to have a new set of experiences.
Even if some computers aren’t bundled with webcams or some people just hate standing in front of one, microphones aren’t so intrusive, and it’s worth considering them as a great asset when creating interactive experiences for the browser.

So why don’t you put your mouth where the fun is:

Unleashing the roar with Lynx (aka Axe)

ZeFrank’s audio toys

Voice Draw

Meditation Flowers

Neave.com audio playground

Bouncing Balls

Dandelion

Teast Your Breath

Sound Sculpture by Pill & Pillow

Kettle the pot

Last year’s spooky work for Doritos by Goodby with Hotel 626

Detective Stripes is a hot-site announced this week by Grupo W for Rexona. The interactive plot revolves around a Shaft-like detective whose deodorant leaves no stripes on his impeccable black turtleneck.

Dani Granatta told me last year he was working on a super secret big project, and i was quite curious to find out about it (altough i suspected it would be for Rexona, based on the teasers).

The result is linear storytelling experience, with high quality production work. I always loved when digital agencies gives a behind the scenes look on their work, and Grupo W posted the whole making-of, turning the project a lot more interesting. If you don’t have the time to read the whole thing, let me shorten that for you:

• Real life, photographed storyboard plates
• 10 days of intense shooting on Mexico city, teaming with Distrito Films
• A “TakaTakaTan” beat along with an original song for the website soundtrack
• Lots of green screen shooting, superimposed later on 3D
• Huge doses of color correction and post production art-direction
• Amongst other goodies, a Detective Stripes papertoy !

More pictures on Flickr.

Congratulations, Dani & W team!

The thing i love the most on Facebook is … Online Advertising.

Really. In fact,  i’m not a big fan of Facebook, but the way they manage their display advertising won me over.

They are one of the few publishers who offer a solution to rate ad quality, adjusting the relevance of ads according of to the vote of consumers, and not only on some obscure bidding system.

Lately i’ve seen a few articles on how advertising is intrusive and sometimes annoying (non activated sound on display advertising kills me …), with users building more banner blindness or solving the annoyances with browser extensions like AdBlock.

Please excuse while I bust the ad junk above.

Believe it or not, most of these problems are the fault of advertisers. By not increasing the online display advertising budgets, advertisers leave publishers with online ad inventory that is filled by blind ad networks, an easy target for low quality ads and low bidding advertisers. From casino bets to value added mobile services, we’ve got fed up with all this ad junk.

Considering the ROI of online advertising, we still have a lot to fight for digital’s  larger slice of the advertising budget. When that happens, supply and demand laws kicks in: the “bad” advertising has no economic stimulus (low CPC/CPM) to invest in blank slots (if any still remain) and creative ads get the spotlight.

If you miss a good old (non-intrusive) banner, visit BannerBlog.

When Yahoo homepage had their inventory bought in advance for a year, most of the advertising was not intrusive, with interesting display ads served from time to time. On these conditions, as with offline advertising, the way for advertisers to break the clutter was through creativity and relevance, so no wonder the ads were good.

But then we have Google Ads, that unlike Facebook, doesn’t allow a easy feedback regarding their display advertising , disregarding the experience of the user, in what might be a long term shot in the feet. And they don’t make it easier for publishers filtering the ads.

With users getting used to online reviews, rating and social recommendation, it’s time for online advertising to change their minds and let consumers have the same level of interaction regarding their ads. Advertisers will have the chance to know what consumers think of their ads and publishers have a better chance of increasing their CPC and revenue.

So, quoting a user:

Mr. Webmaster, if you own a website, and there is a sonorous ad, please remove it. I’m willing to see your advertising, but please respect me.

Photos and video are two of the largest forms of online content. And most of the times, they come in pretty regular formats: 4:3, 16:9, 320×240, 640×480, 3:2 (photos mostly).

Photo by Ryan Tow, under a CC License

And although they are not exactly Golden ratio or Fibonnaci compliant, they offer pleasing formats for the human eye.

And how about online ad formats?

You can find it hard to believe, but the only single decent proportion is a 120×90 button that seldom gets noticed. Most of these formats were adopted for historical reasons (big publishers already using them) but it puzzles me how there wasn’t an aesthetic consideration in choosing a large format in golden ratio proportions. Is it the need to not mistake editorial content with advertising ? In print ads, that’s not something they have to worry about. Is it the need to adjust to common layouts? Usually it’s the opposite, with web design layouts adjusting to fit ad units.

If a 4:3 or 3:2 large format was adopted, besides the aesthetic opportunities, there will be also a gain in production efficiency, as many offline campaigns fit in those ratios.

So, do you think we need a new online ad format that fits the golden ratio?