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marketing and brands
October 16, 2004
Your passive personalization profile
Not to pick on Verizon, but here's another interesting tidbit from my online profile at Verizon.com. Apparently I can choose whether or not to be part of their passive personalization (read: marketing). Here's the relevant part of the profile: On the one hand, it's nice that a company gives you some measure of control. On the other, it's not like I think Verizon isn't collecting info about me, I figure they just aren't using it in a way that's visible to me. As I don't really spend that much time on Verizon's site, it's not a big deal. But I mention it here just as curious; I wonder if it is something that will start showing up on other sites.
August 19, 2004
Another keyword ad miss
Oops, forgot to blog this the other day. It's another funny mismatch of article content and keyword-based ads. The article is about freestyle swimming, and all the ads are about a brand of diabetes test monitor called "FreeStyle." 
From SI.com.
July 25, 2004
Adwords and content sites
So David Weinberger pointed to an entry of Tim Bray's on photo integrity -- or rather the "lack" of it. In other words, in the world of digital cameras and Photoshop, don't go looking for truth in pixels. But what I found very amusing were the ads that Google was serving up on Tim's entry: Right. An entry on photo retouching (and implicit integrity) and Google is serving up Susan Lucci's "Youthful Essence." Where I work, we're playing the SEM game, though, like the writer of this article from the NY Times, we know this is a short-term play. At some point, since we're not selling thousand dollar products, we won't be able to pay for relevant search terms. And so far, I've said no to playing in the content space (as opposed to search space), because I don't need our ads showing up in a context that is either completely irrelevant (see above) or even potentially negative.
December 22, 2003
A Google hat-trick
How's this for the joy of a strong brand? You can obscure over half your logo and still have it be recognized: This makes the third Google logo I've commented on (here are the first and second). There are many more worth mentioning (like the one for the ). You can check out the whole series at Google's . If you visit, do be sure to read the 2002 interview with Dennis Hwang, the creator of all these fab images.
October 15, 2003
Cool weblog
I came across the byrdhouse review today. It's tagline is "Smart talk about architecture, design, and photography." Very nice! Two entries I particularly enjoyed were modHouse, which shows a series of logo comps that were developed for a client, and a recipe for color, which describes a neat way for coming up with a natural color palette for design. The latter is cool just because it is such an easy technique to reproduce. The former is cool because it exposes something from the field of design that I'm not sure is common in the field of web design, and that's the idea of exploring lots and lots of solutions to a design problem. I think this is related to the problem with high-fidelity prototypes. Once you get close to something that is real, it makes it much harder to go outside the box and consider a design that isn't simply an extension of a known design. Hmmm...is it a design meme? Kevin, like Ken, is into the cropped face as blog design element.
October 2, 2003
Logo change wikipedia style
I was doing a paper on wikis and stumbled across an interesting logo design effort for the Wikipedia. On the left is the old logo; on the right is the new logo: What's really interesting is how they went about changing their logo wiki-style. You can find information about the voting, the logo ratification process, among lots of others. But what's really interesting are the final logo variants -- they are already discussing alternates to the new logo. Some very slick designs there.
September 22, 2003
More books!
We had a school reception yesterday, and one of my classmates (Yoram, who has neglected his weblog or I'd link to it) and I were talking about the issue of IT and the diffusion of innovation. He recommended two books that look very promising if you're into this space: and .
September 17, 2003
Chalk one up for Playboy
I heard tonight in my Internet marketing class that Playboy is looking to do a women of Wal-Mart issue. Too funny! Actually, this seems pretty damn smart. It's in the Al Franken/Fox category of win/win...if they can do the issue, they win (a bit of humor at Wal-Mart's expense). If they can't do the issue, it will be because Wal-Mart (a la Fox) drags Playboy into court and gets tons of publicity for them. It will be interesting to see what happens next. |
IDblog is Beth Mazur tilting at power law windmills. A little bit Internet, a little bit technology, a little bit society, and a lot about designing useful information products. Send your cards and letters to .
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