http://tomhubbardgreen.co.uk Bad ads, good ads, design & technology Mon, 14 Jun 2010 13:20:17 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en This is the first of what I hope will be lots of future thoughts on design landing on my blog. The inspiration is the cover of Eminem's new album, Recovery, which is breaking the hip-hop trend for busy album covers and complicated fonts to deliver a sparse, clean and challenging ... http://tomhubbardgreen.co.uk/2010/06/14/brave-and-stark-eminems-new-album-artwork/ This is the question I set about answering in my capacity as E-marketing Executive for Alzheimer's Society. We were the first natural result for a number of search terms that we were also buying PPC ads for. I wanted to know what the effect of turning these ... http://tomhubbardgreen.co.uk/2010/06/02/im-number-one-in-the-serps-should-i-still-buy-ppc-ads/ The Argentinian beer manufacturer Andes has taken it upon itself to remedy a problem as old as alcohol itself. Both personal experience and lazy pop psychology tells us that men go out drinking less after they get a girlfriend because their better halves don't approve of their man's drunken excesses. To ... http://tomhubbardgreen.co.uk/2010/02/15/advertising-wants-you-to-lie-to-your-girlfriend/ In 2009 there was one ad that dominated the awards and impressed consumers and critics alike. It was, of course, the behemoth of Compare The Meerkat that rightly deserved all of its praise for a fantastic campaign that was funny, engaging and, most importantly, put a new spin on the ... http://tomhubbardgreen.co.uk/2010/01/27/doritos_guitar-hero-alan-the-best-ad-of-2009/ As a preface I'd like to point out that I'm not saying that these ads were bad campaigns. They weren't. In fact, they were all phenomenally successful. But I still hate them. 3. The Skoda Cake Car Oh my god it's a car made of cake! Yeah, it's a car made of cake. ... http://tomhubbardgreen.co.uk/2010/01/19/2009-the-3-ads-i-hated/ 5. Use your imagination [caption id="attachment_209" align="alignright" width="230" caption="Image: R Philipson (Flickr)"][/caption] 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 ... http://tomhubbardgreen.co.uk/2010/01/12/top-5-tips-for-protecting-your-data-online/ Inspired by Evan Ratliff's outstanding article, Vanish, in which he tried to hide from an international crew of internet detectives for 30 days, I decided to investigate just how much I could discover about myself using only the free array of services that the web has to offer. The quest begins ... http://tomhubbardgreen.co.uk/2010/01/05/how-i-hacked-my-own-life/ Last month I wrote about Dixons' 'honest' tube ads that claimed that people went to department stores for advice and customer service but came to Dixons for a good price. I thought that the ads were probably too big a gamble for Dixons (Craig Inglis, head of brand communication at ... http://tomhubbardgreen.co.uk/2009/10/26/dixons-the-last-place-you-want-to-go-parodied-by-big-als-creative-emporium/ The new Ricky Gervais film, The Invention of Lying, casts the comedian as a man who invents lying in a world where everyone else can only tell the truth. Although it deals with various themes one of the film’s best jokes is the way it portrays big brand advertising in ... http://tomhubbardgreen.co.uk/2009/10/13/how-ricky-gervais-wrote-coke-their-best-ever-ad/ 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 ... http://tomhubbardgreen.co.uk/2009/10/07/lego-augmented-reality-kiosk-is-ar-at-its-best/ I was on the tube yesterday when I spotted this interesting ad for online retailer dixons.co.uk: 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 ... http://tomhubbardgreen.co.uk/2009/09/22/dixons-the-last-place-you-want-to-go/ The 1936 film Reefer Madness was funded by church groups in order to teach the youth of the day about the dangers of cannabis. The fact that the film was then purchased and re-cut as a cult comedic exploitation film tells you just how hopelessly unrealistic the film's portrayal of ... http://tomhubbardgreen.co.uk/2009/09/18/uk-think-drug-driving-tv-ad-is-an-embarrassing-throwback/ This article was published in the May 2009 issues of Canary Wharf magazine and City magazine. [caption id="attachment_58" align="alignright" width="230" caption="Image: Matt Hamm (Flickr)"][/caption] Twitter's growth has been exponential over the last year with an ever increasing army of people and brands joining the service's ranks of microbloggers. The reason for its ... http://tomhubbardgreen.co.uk/2009/08/17/all-of-a-twitter-how-businesses-are-turning-tweets-into-dollars/ I doubt many of you have missed this but those that did have to check out this proof of concept video for AR Twitter which can show you the location of nearby Tweeters. Unfortunately this kind of functionality isn't officially available yet because Apple haven't released the code that developers would ... http://tomhubbardgreen.co.uk/2009/08/15/top-augmented-reality-videos/ This article was published in the April 2009 issue of o2 Venue magazine. Sennheiser remaster an old classic No doubt spurred on by Apple's release of their own canal earphones Sennheiser have re-vamped and re-issued their best selling CX 300 earphones. The original CX 300's were considered by many to be the ... http://tomhubbardgreen.co.uk/2009/08/13/new-music-tech-round-up-april-2009/ This article was published in the August 2009 issue of Figaro Digital magazine. Although tools such as heat maps and eye tracking provide in-depth analysis of our users' behaviour there is also a wealth of simple user engagement experiments that can be carried out to better understand your users and achieve ... http://tomhubbardgreen.co.uk/2009/08/10/user-engagement-insights-a-case-study/ [caption id="attachment_68" align="alignright" width="230" caption="Image: ShellyS (Flickr)"][/caption] It sounds like the stuff of science fiction but a new piece of research published in Neurosurgical Focus reveals the emergence of a new frontier of technological security: protecting against hackers that can take control of your brain. In recent years it has become increasingly ... http://tomhubbardgreen.co.uk/2009/07/27/all-your-brains-are-belong-to-us-brain-hacking-is-the-new-frontier/ [caption id="attachment_66" align="alignright" width="230" caption="Image: Dunechaser (Flickr)"][/caption] The first two Terminator films were cult smash hits that defined a genre and spawned a generation of teenage boys with pitch-perfect Austrian accents. They were stylish, timeless and eminently quotable; all factors that made the disappointment of T3 even more unbearable. And so ... http://tomhubbardgreen.co.uk/2009/07/20/terminatorsalvation-explodes-with-a-whimper/