Image: scubadive67 (Flickr)

Some new advice from the ICO on the EU privacy law landed yesterday so after some discussion on Twitter and Google Help, I thought I would collect the current advice on getting your site ready for the new laws that come into affect on 26 May 2011.

For analytics tracking using cookies (Google Analytics, for example) there is key advice outlined on page 8 of the document. The most important bits are:

• "An analytic cookie might not appear to be as intrusive as others that might track a user across multiple sites but you still need consent"
• "You should consider how you currently explain your policies to users and make that information more prominent"
• "If the information collected about website use is passed to a third party you should make this absolutely clear"

Asking for consent before you start tracking people is absolutely fraught with difficulty at the moment and, as far as I'm aware, not possible with Google Analytics without a user controlling their opting in/out with browser settings.

However, over at the RK Talks blog, it seems that the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) has indicated that they won’t be expecting compliance from companies for at least a year after the regulations are adopted.  In this time hopefully we'll see more clarification and, most likely, an official Google tool to help users to opt in and out of tracking although what that will mean for the interpretation of your website data is a whole other, bigger issue.

One to keep an eye on for now then but the current advice seems to be to make sure your privacy policy is up to date and visible.

The tweets and links

Clicking on the promoted trend ‘Red Cross Join Us’ shows up the latest Red Cross tweet with other users’ tweets underneath related to the promoted trend. During the time the ad ran the Red Cross featured the two tweets shown above.

The call to action in the first tweet is a little odd as ‘donating’ tweets will be a new concept to most people but, on the other hand, it sounds like a very easy ask that should have been good for user engagement. I was pretty surprised that they used bit.ly to shorten their link considering that the URL shortening service makes the stats on their short URLs publicly available. Still, it’s helpful for those of us that want to take a look at the effectiveness of their campaign. Taking a look at the stats we can see that the bit.ly link was clicked on, at the time of writing, around 500 times. So far, not so good.

The second tweet was a much more traditional marketing message asking people to sign up for Red Cross Month activity. Although this shortened link seems not to have been done using the bit.ly service, adding a ‘+’ symbol to the tweet reveals that the URL is still using the service which means that we can also get stats on the number of clicks. The data shows that this link was clicked on, at the time of writing, just over 1750 times.

Which is how many conversions?

These figures are, I’m sure you’ll agree, fairly paltry considering the expenditure and exposure but lets drill a little bit deeper. If we aggregate the clicks from these two links and assume a very generous 10% conversion rate for the two calls to action we end up with less than 250 conversions. Assuming a more realistic conversion rate of around 2% we only get around 50 conversions.

So what went wrong and what went right?

If the American Red Cross paid full price for their promoted trend they can’t help but be disappointed with the result. However, one thing they will have got in spades is brand recognition. Sitting on the top of the Twitter trends list for 24 hours is absolutely great for promoting their brand and their campaign.

What I did find a little odd was that the promoted trend was visible to someone who was viewing the top London trends. It seems to me that targeting UK Twitter users with a promoted trend aimed primarily at those in the States would elicit a far lower response rate and deliver a lower return on investment. I did also find that the Red Cross Month landing page left a lot to be desired. There is a lot of dense copy and the calls to action are barely distinguishable from the overwhelming torrent of text which can’t have helped their conversion rates.

Most puzzling of all to me is why they chose to go with such a stale promoted trend: ‘Red Cross Join Us’. The most popular trends are always the ones that demand participation from Twitter users. For example, two popular trends in London today were ‘#thatswhyyourmyex’ [sic] and ‘#thingsthedevilinvented’. Both wouldn’t be mentioned by most Twitter users without adding some of their own thoughts. This is their viral quality.

As you can see in the chart above from trendistic.com, the Red Cross’ trend barely outperformed ‘#thingsthedevilinvented’ and woefully underperformed compared to ‘#thatswhyyourmyex’.

Even if the Red Cross got the promoted trend for free the data still suggests that they squandered an absolutely fantastic opportunity. Not many charities will have the cash to try to do right what the Red Cross did wrong but their failings can and should be learnt from and act as a stark reminder to charities that digital campaigns need to be more than just set and forget. These days our audiences demand interaction, vitality and originality. And so should we.

Update: After I posted this story up on Twitter I was contacted by a member of the American Red Cross' social media team who said that my points were 'well taken' but that they 'did [their] best with 1 hour's notice'.  As I suspected this means that it was a last minute campaign and that they were probably gifted some distress space by Twitter at short notice.  However, I think there are still some valuable lessons to be learnt including optimising trends for user engagement.

Image: PaKKiTo (Flickr)

Yesterday Radiohead announced that they were releasing their new album, 'The King of Limbs', on digital download on Saturday 19 February. Moving away from the pay-what-you-want pricing model of 'In Rainbows' they are offering their new album for £6 as well as £30 for a print copy with assorted goodies.

I really applaud what Radiohead are doing here. In the age of free access to millions of tracks, both illegally and increasingly legitimate, they know that the price for digital content had to be low. They also know that their fanbase is sufficiently rabid to swallow £30 for special artwork to help fill the band's coffers.

The problem, however, comes with their method of distribution. When it comes to handling thousands of payments and downloads on Saturday morning they might find they're without sufficient server capacity to handle it as happened with their release of 'In Rainbows' and the digital release of Saul Williams' last album.

The problem is that their website will not be the only place the download will be available on Saturday. Within seconds of the first downloads the album will be up on BitTorrent and people will be faced with the choice of a crippled official download server or a super speedy and, let us not forget, free BitTorrent download. Of course some will wait and pay but more will flock to torrent the album and that means lost revenue.

Perhaps I am not giving the band's digital team enough credit and they will nail the distribution by temporarily renting extra capacity at a data centre or even using BitTorrent itself to ease the pressure on servers; a method used to great success to distribute massive Linux ISOs.

That said I look forward to seeing how it all turns out on Saturday morning and, of course, listening to the tracks but I wouldn't be at all surprised to find fans grabbing the torrent that’s quicker and easier to get hold of when it comes to crunch time.

Image: smemon87 (Flickr)

We just enabled the new look Facebook pages for Alzheimer's Society and have been playing around with it this morning. I like the new design but there are some issues for charities that are going to have to be overcome. Let’s look at the good and the bad.

The good

1. Post everywhere as the brand

You can post as your Page on other Pages and profiles which means you can now do outreach using your Page and drive engagement by traveling to the mountain instead of waiting for it to come to you. If you have more than one related Page you could also cross-post and cross-promote which will be very useful for organisations that have separate Pages for events or local areas.

2. Notifications for your Page

Once you’ve clicked ‘use Facebook as Page’ you’ll be able to see notifications where people have interacted with you. This will be especially important to monitor now as you can post away from your own wall and this will be the only way of monitoring those external communications.

The bad

1. The photo carousel at the top

Carousel is, unfortunately, the right word. Unlike user profiles, the order of these photos is randomized every time you reload the page. This means you can't do any clever branding with it or use it for any kind of promotion. Bad for us page owners but good for Facebook who will see more advertising revenue as a result.

2. No more chronological posts

At the moment posts on a Page's wall are now ranked using a similar algorithm to the newsfeed. This means that the most recent post by you or a user may not appear at the top. This could lead to a situation where an old post languished at the top of the wall (making your page look stale) or a post promoting something important was pushed out the way for something else.

It's worth noting that you can see a chronological ordering of posts in the 'admin view' option but this won't display for users.

3. Your website's gone

The old page design showed your web address in the info box under the Page's picture. Now the info box has been relegated to a tab only accessible by the left-hand menu. I don't suspect that the URL in it's old place ever drove too much traffic to our website but it'll be driving even less to it now.

The round up

Facebook has a well established history of not rolling back design changes so these are undoubtedly here to stay. I think the design looks a lot fresher but it could definitely do with a few tweaks to make it even more useful for organisations and brands to get their message out there.

Image: Rob Boudon (Flickr)

1. DON'T spam

AwesomeBrand posted ‘Have you seen our new shaver? It’s got 10 blades. That’s 5 more than 5!’ 1 minute ago

AwesomeBrand posted ‘We’re loving the smooth shave of our new smooth shaver. Join us on our Facebook page to tell us how much you love it!’ 2 minutes ago

AwesomeBrand posted ‘Our new shaver has the #XFactor on this #FollowFriday and is almost certainly being used in #EgyptProtests’ 3 minutes ago

DO engage. Social media has to be a two way conversation. One way broadcasting is considered very bad form amongst communities and will only serve to alienate your customers for breaking the unwritten rules of their social media channels.

2. DON’T work against existing communities

AwesomeBrand posted ‘You need to shut this group down right now. No one gave you permission to use our logo and people here are saying our new shaver has nine blades. But it doesn’t, IT HAS TEN! Close the group or you will be hearing from our freshly shaven lawyers!’

DO work with people talking about your brand. If someone has already established a group about your product / service / company, try to work with them and bring their community into your own. You can even try (with permission) to turn their channel into an official one, especially if they have a tasty domain name or unique URL.

3. DON’T harvest personal data

AwesomeBrand sent you a message: ‘Dear future valued customer! We noticed that you followed us on Twitter so you could DM us a complaint. When you followed us we visited your blog and saved your Facebook name, email address and LinkedIn profile. Now you’ll never have to miss any of our great deals or soon to be viral marketing videos because we can reach you, all the time, wherever you are. And to think you could have missed out on all that. Phew, that was a CLOSE SHAVE wasn’t it.’

Social CRM is evolving but generally speaking people are still very privacy aware and surreptitiously gathering their personal data will likely cause a huge backlash.

4. DON’T ignore tone of voice

AwesomeBrand posted ‘Stop retweeting that. I was being sarcastic!’ 2 minutes ago

AwesomeBrand posted ‘Man, our product is pretty much the worst shaving experience out there LOL’ 10 minutes ago

DO be very aware, especially in short message spaces, of tone. Tone of voice is easily misconstrued online. Especially sarcasm.

5. DON'T be satisfied with an echo chamber

AwesomeBrand posted 'RT @DefinitelyNotAnAwesomeBrandIntern You guys have the best shaver ever! It's so good I'm shaving everything. Bad news for the dog ROFL!' 5 minutes ago

No one nails social media 100% of the time and all organisations get coverage for missteps. Instead of burying these issues; embrace them. No one truly believes you're perfect and neither should you. Your fans, customers and clients will think more of you for facing up to your shortcomings rather than sticking your head in the sand.

The most important things your community can have are trust and communication. Be as honest as possible and participate in your community for the greatest long term rewards.

Image: M Holden (Flickr)

At the time of writing, the second morning of amazon.co.uk's Black Friday promotion, the online retail giant's social media presences are being besieged by irate shoppers. People are angry, confused and vowing never to shop with Amazon again. What went wrong and how can you save your business from a similar fate? Let's find out.

Amazon's Black Friday promise

Amazon has been trailing its Black Friday promotion in the UK for about 2 weeks now. It promised a week of spectacular deals and American-style shopping bonanzas the likes of which our Atlantic cousins could only dream of. Every hour a small number of amazing one-off deals would be released and it was a first come first served race to grab them.

So less than 24 hours after it was launched, how can the promotion be going so badly? Amazon's facebook page is filled with angry comments and its own forums are overflowing with disgruntled customers vowing to never set a virtual foot in the store again. Where did it all go wrong?

The deals ... aren't really deals at all

The source of most people's anger is that, having been led to believe that this sale will be akin to Amazon chucking wads of the cash in the air and shouting “bundle!”, there isn't anything actually worth buying at the sale price. The coffee maker that was reduced to £350, the fairly mediocre laptop priced down to £450. These are not the Black Friday deals that people were expecting. A particular piece of pricing that has got Amazon in the most hot water so far is its deal on the computer game Vanquish which, it turned out, could actually be purchased for less than the Black Friday price on the Zavvi website.

If you're going to have a special one-off amazing price you'd better make sure it's not more than your competitor’s price for it on a normal business day.

No one’s listening

Someone at Amazon must be watching, listening to the fury that's brewing out there but you'd never know it. As far as I can see there have been no replies by Amazon staff on their forums and no attempt to answer questions on their Facebook page.

Not all of the comments are plain anger. Lots of people aren't clear on how the buying system works. Is it the first person to click on the item that gets it or the first person to complete the checkout? These questions could be easily cleared up but they haven't been and people are really frustrated.

While Amazon does nothing and says nothing it can only lose. Maybe Black Friday won't lose them sales today but they will lose customer trust and loyalty and that is far worse for their business in the long run and far more important than a couple of days of big traffic.

As one commenter put it: 'glad I read these posts first. Am not even going to bother. Will do my shopping on Play.com.'

Those keywords aren’t the terms you can use to shape your content because it’s your content that has given birth to those keywords. Let’s say you’re selling a product called Blue Widgets. The top keyword referrer to your site is ‘blue widgets’. Success! Right guys? Right ... ?

This ranking success is only a success for people who are searching for ‘blue widgets’. What if only 20% of your customer base thinks your product is called Blue Widget? What if the other 80% are calling your product Blue Sprocket? The problem is that you don’t know what they call it because your keyword list only contains terms that are already driving people to your site. You need to know what the other 80% are searching for.

And that’s where your users come in and more specifically, your community. Take a look at your social media presences and online forums. What keywords are people using there? What are they calling your product? Collect this information and analyse it. What phrases appear most often? Are there any recurring long tail phrases you could use?

Use these newly found keywords to build content and PPC campaigns which will catch searches related to your old keywords. Sure you might not want to rename your main product but you can certainly incorporate new, recurring keywords into subheadings and into copy.

This technique, of course, works just as well for information provision as it does for sales. Organisations can benefit from taking a break from internally approved language and checking out what everyone else in the world is calling their products and services (a disparity that is apparent all too often) and optimizing their website for these ‘unofficial’ terms.

Don’t have a website that just sells Blue Widgets and don’t have a website that just sells Blue Sprockets. You want to have a website that sells ‘Blue Widgets and Sprockets - the best coloured cogs on the web’.

Bonus tip for vBulletin communities: an easy way to export your thread tags (a valuable goldmine of keywords) is to log in as admin into the control panel, click on ‘Threads & Posts’ and click ‘Tags’. You can copy these, page by page, into a Notepad doc (to strip them of formatting) and then paste them into one big handy spreadsheet. I do month on month comparisons so I can spot new and emerging keywords that can be integrated into site content.

The theme of the album is roughly that of Eminem's fall from artistic grace after delivering a double set of stinkers in the guise of his last two albums. Not only is Recovery being billed as a return to form but the stark imagery on the front cover is extraordinarily striking for a rap album.

The lettering on 'recovery' manages to slip in a nice cross symbol in the 'O'; no doubt referencing both the health care connotations of the symbol and it's visual resemblance to the prescription (and non-prescription) pills that have blighted the rapper's health. We're also treated to the trademark backwards 'E'; a nice touch that doesn't at all detract from the powerful symbolism in the 'O'.

However, the massive amount of space smack bang in the middle of the cover is perhaps the most arresting feature of the artwork. The vanishing road of course embodies all the cliches of the 'long road to nowhere' / 'the road a man must walk alone' etc. but it doesn't stop it being any less powerful, especially considering there aren't many rappers who's egos could take a shot of the back of their head being used as their only presence on their own album cover.

The method

I paused five of our keywords on Google Adwords that ranked alzheimers.org.uk number one in the natural results for the same search over a period of two weeks and assessed the differences in traffic and visitor quality using Google Analytics' keyword tool.

The results

Considering that we were number one in the natural rankings I was shocked at how much difference it made to traffic levels by turning off the ads that were triggered by the selected keywords.

Across all five keywords the 'best' performance was a 10% drop in traffic and the worst was over a 50% drop in visitors with the rest averaging out at around 20%. Clearly then, turning off the PPC ads for high performing keywords definitely has a major impact on the levels of traffic you will receive.

Although the quality of the traffic marginally improved as observed in increases in the average time on site, pages per visit and decreases in bounce rate; these gains in no way were as significant as the drop in traffic.

The conclusion

Despite what hardened internet geeks like myself might think about sponsored results (I barely see them as I scan to the natural results) it's obvious from my experiment that people do click on them and that they do contribute a lot of traffic to a site.

So, for my part, I'll be turning my ads back on to capture those internet users that don't discriminate between paid and natural search results and, let's face it, who probably don't know or care what the difference is either.

To bring this fledgling demographic of men back into the pub (and, more importantly, to get their brand talked about by potential customers) Andes have created a sound proof cubicle that can be filled with a variety of non-pub background sounds. This means you can call your (quite rightly) distrustful girlfriend and lie convincingly that you are in the office despite the fact that you're slurring all your words and may or may not have dropped a kebab down the front of your shirt.

Basically, it's not going to fool anyone but it is a cool brand awareness campaign.

The ad for it below is (apparently) in Spanish but you get the idea.

However, as good as VCCP's offering was, my ad of the year is actually a fairly low-profile but totally brilliant ad for a Doritos / Guitar Hero tie-in. It follows the life of a wannabe rockstar called Alan from birth to .. well, you'll have to see for yourself.

And yes it is 4 minutes long but it's the best 4 minutes you'll ever spend watching an advert.

So why is this my ad of 2009? Well, for me that's simple; it's because I watch it for my own amusement. I don't passively consume this ad, I actively seek it out and show it to other people. Undoubtedly it hasn't become the viral hit it was meant to be but in the more-art-than-science world of the viral video I'm not sure too much blame can be leveled at the AMV BBDO team that came up with it.

It also doesn't shy away from having fun with the brands. The stage dive into the Dorito's box is a genius bit of product placement and the overriding message that Alan is a bit of a loser but even losers can rock out on Guitar Hero plays up to the public perception that the game is just for people that weren't good enough to learn a real instrument.

It's fun, it's funny and the chorus still hasn't left my head since I first saw the ad in October last year.

So come on everybody, sing with me: "Alan you are a guitar hero! Trapped in the body of a rock n roll zero!"

3. The Skoda Cake Car

Oh my god it's a car made of cake!

Yeah, it's a car made of cake. And that's all it is.

Since PR companies discovered that 'stunt advertising' got column inches and TV coverage (ushered into the mainstream by the media's blanket coverage of the Bravia Bouncing Balls ad) we've been increasing presented with more and more ludicrously extravagant set pieces intended to wow consumers into submission.

Sony's ad was brilliant because it said that colours weren't static; that they were alive. Colours exploded and tumbled, jostled and jumped. It looked exciting and it made a clear link between the Bravia experience and the jaw-dropping spectacle you'd just witnessed.

And that is why the Skoda ad is so disappointing. Yes it's kind of cool that they managed to construct a car out of Victoria sponge but what does it actually say about the vehicle? Soft and squishy? Bad for something that can do 70 mph. Put together by some TV extras that couldn't book panto in Croydon? Well that's build quality for you.

It's just event advertising for the sake of it with nothing to say and for that reason it's going on the list.

2. Cadbury's Eyebrows

The brief: Create an ad that is more memorable and inexplicably brilliant than a gorilla drumming along to Phil Collins.

The pitch: Er .. there are these kids .. and their eyebrows wiggle .. .. .. in time to music!

If this was the best idea they came up with I want to know what they rejected. I'm not saying they should have milked the gorilla for another campaign but I did expect something a bit more well thought out than some sub-standard 'wacky' YouTube video. The fact that it seems to have been so successful amazes and depresses me in equal measure.

1. The T-mobile flashmob

By the time big business cottons on to anything remotely underground it, by definition, immediately fails to market it to the people that might be interested because the ads usually resemble something akin to your granddad dressing up as Ali G to tell you about the benefits of sexual health check ups in the style of an Eton educated grime MC.

Remember flashmobs? They were pretty cool in 2006. Well, unless it took T-mobile 3 years to co-ordinate a couple of hundred people dancing to one of the decade's worst mega-mixes I'd say that they missed the boat on this one.

At least the ad has a point: sharing is fun. Yes, sharing things on the net is fun. Watching things sent to you is fun. But not when you've already seen it and not when you already saw it nearly 5 years ago.

"Hey everyone! Look! Have you seen this wicked BADGER BADGER MUSHROOM MUSHROOM video?!"

Honourable mention (NSFW)

I don't think this was really anyone's favourite advert and, to be honest, it's not even from 2009 but I do like what Brooker has to say about it.

Image: R Philipson (Flickr)

Lots of sites are still using bad security questions and it's an easy way to get your account swiped. Common questions like 'what is the name of your pet?' and 'what is your mother's maiden name?' are actually pretty easy to get the answers to. Friends with your mum on a social network or like to tweet about your cat? Yeah, you're busted.

The way to get around this is simply to use your imagination. I always pick the 'what is the name of your pet?' question because I don't actually have a pet but I do have an imaginary dog. Only I know his name and since he's not real he never appears in photos on Facebook or does something cute I need share on Twitter. He is my imaginary password recovery dog and you shouldn't wait until Christmas to get one.

4. Use KeePass and go crazy with the long passwords

If you don't have an imagination or you do and your imaginary dog is called "password" you can use the program KeePass to securely hold a list of passwords and even generate random ones for you. KeePass has one master password which allows you to copy and paste your other passwords into your browser. This way you only need to remember one password so you can make the others as complicated and as unhackable as you want.

3. Don't let your online accounts go solo

Where possible, always link a secondary email address to an account. Gmail lets you do it and it's a great idea. Even if your password gets compromised it can be possible to get your account back this way. And since another password secured account is safer than a security question you're better off having it this way. Just don't have the same password for your primary and secondary email addresses.

2. The password is dead! Long live the passphrase!

A password (emphasis on 'word') can be brute forced especially if your password is a word in the dictionary. Far more difficult to get at are passwords that are strings of words put together - passphrases. A string of random words is tricky to remember but if you pick a sentence it's much easier to recall. "ThisIsMyExcellentWorkPassword" with some numbers and punctuation in it is actually a pretty good password.

1. Hack yourself

My recent article, 'How I hacked my own life', showed that there is a staggering array of information available about you on the internet. I found pretty much everything I needed in order to give someone a good shot at cracking open some of my online events.

Only by actively trying to hack your accounts can you really be sure how it easy it is to get into them and only by looking through your public social media presences can you know what information you've divulged that might be used to crack open your online world.

Next week I lay into the 3 most irritating ads of 2009. Subscribe via RSS to make sure that you don't miss out.

The quest begins ..

I allowed myself only one starting point: my name. My name which is, unfortunately in the Google age, rather unique. Googling myself turns up my LinkedIn account at the top of the pile. In less than 30 seconds we have discovered what I do for a living, where I work and where and when I went to university. So far so good but what about getting some really useful information like my age? Well I don't list my age on LinkedIn but it isn't too hard to figure out from the dates of my education although, without an actual birth date, this information is probably only marginally useful.

So, back to Google and it appears that I've got 2 Twitter accounts. One is locked down (as is the cache) but the account name seems pretty unique and this hunch is proved correct when a bit of Googling brings you to a related website and a quick WHOIS gleefully spits out my home address.

Now I have my name, year of birth, place of employment and home address. Now, apart from my address, I'm not that worried about that information being out there on the web because, really, it seems like the kind of stuff that you could get your hands on in real life without too much effort.

But then I have a terrible thought: I've so far assumed that the key bit of information that was keeping me safe was my birthday. I've always been careful to obscure it from public facing sites, even choosing to fill in a false one on occasion (a move that permanently locked me out of my Flickr account when I forgot my password) but I start to get a sinking feeling that I might have actually tweeted about my birthday. I slavishly scan through my tweets and, sure enough, there it is: a big, flashing, publicly available neon sign that says 'THIS IS MY BIRTHDAY'.

Oh dear. Life = well and truly hacked.

The problem with privacy

Although not as true as it always was, for a long time websites with logins relied on your birthday as the key piece of identifying information that differentiated you from an impostor. Before social media kicked off it was a fairly reliable assumption that only you and a handful of friends and family would know your birthday and enough about you to answer any other security questions. Now that social media has grown up it is relatively simple to find identifying information about people; anyone who picked 'what is the name of your pet' for their security question could probably do with an urgent search through their social media presences to see if they've ever let it slip (handy hint: you have).

Now that we're living our lives online with more and more transparency as well as experiencing more incentives and reminders to share what we're doing, we should revamp the way we protect our online identities. Security achieved through 'secret' personal information is just a comforting daydream in the modern media age. For those of us that spend our lives on the web it is time to start hacking ourselves and seeing just what we discover.

The engineer Claude Shannon famously said of security design that you should assume that "the enemy knows the system". Well, now the system is you and you need to find a better way to protect it.

Next week I'll be sharing my tips on improving data security that I learnt as a result of researching this article. Subscribe via RSS to make sure that you don't miss it.

Other advertising agencies certainly seem to have taken an interest in the series of ads with Soho-based outfit, Big Al's Creative Emporium, producing this delightful parody.

Dixon's tube ad parody by Big Al's Creative Emporium

It's unclear whether this was actually a campaign or just the design team horsing around in the office but either way, I like it.

Coke: It's basically just brown sugar water

And to show there wasn’t any kind of bias against Coke the filmmakers also took the time to level a satirical swipe at Coca-Cola's main competitor whose fictional ad agency were compelled to deliver an even more damning creative: 'Pepsi. For when they don't have Coke.'

I've talked before on my blog about the trend of honesty in advertising and Ricky Gervais has certainly taken this modern marketing technique to its natural conclusion. Although many will be certain that we'll never see an ad for Coke that confesses that ‘it’s basically just brown sugar-water’, I for one would get a kick out of big companies having the faith in their brand to lay out the basic truth about their products.

It may be a risky strategy for a corporation like Coca-Cola but I've got a feeling that an ad like that would give them licence to run an incredibly satisfying and successful follow up campaign: 'Coke is just brown sugar-water. Coke drinkers don't care.'

Lego, and augmented reality company Metaio, have developed an augmented reality kiosk that will show you an animation of your whatever Lego contraption you wave in front of it. And of course it's better than an animation because it's an animation superimposed in the real world.

Initially this is just going to sell a boat load of Lego but the future applications of this are staggering as a promotional tool. What if Lego develop an app that allows you to overlay Lego sets and pieces over a base in your living room? You can glimpse your Lego creation before you even take the bricks out of the box.

Kids and adults will be enthralled by this kiosk and it is a perfect example of a company doing augmented reality right: the customers love it, the press love it and it'll awaken the imagination of a new generation of tech-savvy Lego block builders.

Created by M&C Saatchi the ad is a brave attempt to run the gauntlet of the 'refreshingly honest' approach to brand advertising. In one fell swoop Dixons have admitted that their staff are not the best trained, that their shops are not the most aesthetically pleasing and that their sales advice is somewhat sub-standard. They admitted all of this because they're hoping that the message of their ad, 'we're not the best but we are the cheapest', is what will stick in consumers' heads when they reach the final stages of the product purchase cycle.

In many ways this is a twist on the classic Avis ad: 'we're number two ... so we try harder'. The agency behind that advert, DDB, hit upon the idea when they asked the beautifully blunt question, 'why does anyone want to rent a car from you?'. The answer that spawned the legendary advertising campaign was that Avis couldn't begin to compete on price so they had to compete on service; they tried harder.

A similar question has clearly been asked of Dixons. Why would anyone buy anything from you? Conversely, of course, they can't hope to compete against Harrods and Selfridges on service but they can certainly compete on price. 'We try harder' for Dixons is simply 'we are cheaper'.

With the country still feeling the effects of the recent recession it is absolutely right that dixons.co.uk is staking its claim to low prices instead of great service but a major stumbling block of this strategy is the question of whether it is too late for the site to establish itself as a major low-price retailer. The cut-price consumer electronics marketplace has a number of major incumbents: Amazon, Dabs and even eBay are all established players in this crowded and competitive market and consumers are already well versed in the 'try and buy elsewhere' purchasing philosophy.

To bet a brand's reputation on a campaign like this is commendable but very risky. Personally, I have a feeling that Dixons no longer has the clout or the brand recognition to make sure that 'the last place you want to go' is a call to action and not an untimely epitaph.