During the fog leading up to the festive season at the end of 2008, I totally neglected to post the interactive greeting we created. Fortunately, we did send it out to our contact list(s) and if you weren’t on it, or didn’t receive it, I most profoundly apologize. No matter though, as you can see what we created by clicking here.

Built in Flash and utilizing the Papervision3D engine, the hottest thing to happen to Flash since Flash, we’ve built a cube with images of our team on four of the faces. Clicking on each image will reveal our Christmas alter egos. Fred’s Mr. Hankey is my favorite

Last Exit Festive Greeting in Paper-Vision-3D

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In conjunction with Canon USA and Dentsu America, we recently launched the My Story Facebook application.

The app allows you to quickly and easily prepare a graphical slideshow that tells a story about you, your friends and the great times you share.

You can import photos, either from your desktop or from your or your friends’ Facebook albums (yes you can really do that!), edit them and add text and graphics.  You can then add up to another 5 slides to tell your story, post to your Facebook wall and share your story with your friends.

Enjoy the app and don’t forget to become a fan.

Canon My Story Facebook Application .

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Agh, I missed this the other day. Better late than never!!

See the posting here: Design Licks

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We’re very happy to announce that we just won Best in class for Automotive and Lifestyle categories for the wonderful VespaUSA website. We should be getting sparkling new lucite awards through the mail soon.

View the awards online here.

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A subject close to my heart, blogged elegantly by Tom Evslin at Fractals of Change. 

Essentially it looks as if the FCC will do the right thing by the ‘whitespace’ UHF spectrum freed up by the movement to digital TV.  Tom explains the technologies and approaches the large US telcos are banking on, LTE (enhanced 3G) and WiMAX, may be superseded before they become widely available.

So what does that mean to the rest of us?  That we will have ubiquitous wireless internet data (and hence voice) coverage at fixed line speeds that does not necessitate the astronomical capital investment that is required for cellular networks.  Thus more and better competition for our hard earned dollars.

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We’re very happy to announce the launch of the Vespa USA website. It’s been a thrilling ride to get to this point and we’ve worked with some amazing people at Piaggio Group USA. Our team has been exemplary throughout the process and the results reflect the skill and commitment from the Last Exit team. Congrats to all.

Be sure to check out the scooters as well as the Community Rides section.

VespaUSA.com

A few of the first press articles:

AdWeek

Creativity Online

ClickZ

Media Post

How Magazine

Speed TV

Alternative Consumer

Tree Nation

Motorcycle.com

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I believe that one of the highest accolades must be for a creative agency or design company to ask us to conceive, design and produce their website. This is no more pronounced than in this instance. McCann Ericksons New York business has been a client/partner of ours over the last year or so and being asked to develop ideas for their portfolio web site left us speechless. The process was not straightforward though. The ideas we conceived with creative partner SuperFad were ambitious - at the time, were had no higher option in technology that Flash 8 and attempted to build a 3D site using the ActionScript 2 programming platform. The first version was good but wasn’t a 100% match for our capabilities or the quality of work produced by McCann New York. Without approval of any budgets, we decided to experiment with AS3 in conjunction with the PaperVision3D engine. During that time, Flash 9 / AS3 gained acceptable user penetration and when we presented our experiments - basically a fully redeveloped site - McCann were blown away. Budgets were quickly approved and with some final design direction from the Agency we were done.

Total development time was fraction of that in AS2 - further evidence that whilst AS3 and PaperVision3D demands a higher level of programming skill, it remains a more efficient development tool for spatial Flash projects, whilst providing vastly improved site performance and lower processor draw.

The site displays floating assets representing a selection of McCann NY’s creative output. Rolling over these thumbnails draws connections between related assets, Selecting one will bring that family into a new layout. A further selection will play/preview that piece. In the bottom left, you can select work by media or client and drill down to specific works. IN the top right, you can change the display configurations from random to a grid arrangement and also toggle to and from full screen mode.

Enjoy the site by clicking here: McCann NY

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I had the intense pleasure of visiting the beautiful Brooklyn Museum this past weekend and attending the Gilbert & George exhibition. If you don’t know who they are, or much about they’re work I strongly suggest you go along. This is their first international tour in more than 20 years and is as dramatic, emotional, subversive and as provocative as ever. The duo’s work is definitely unique and tackles (rather brutally at times) themes such as faith, religion, sexuality, superstition, race and identity, urban life, terrorism and AIDS related loss.

My personal reaction, whether I liked a particular piece or not, was profound. My particular interest is the approach they employ and the deeply ‘graphics’ style of their work and the high level of engagement with the visitor - something I feel is very difficult to achieve in a static, passive medium such as this. Perhaps some lessons to be learned here while applying to digital / interactive design, advertising and marketing campaigns and messaging?

Here’s a great review in the New York Times.

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Brilliant though Google and other search engines are at bringing some level of sense and order to the billions of web pages out there, they all still rely almost completely on our ability to look for something in the right way. Keywords are really that - KEY!

Luckily as the amount of content online grows so does the average level of skill of people using search engines. Two years ago the average number of keywords entered into Google’s search field was not much more than 1.5, today it is more like 3.0. We are being more specific when we search which is a good thing - finding a million or more results is hardly a badge of honour now is it?

In spite of this there remains the ‘Did you mean?‘ problem or the ‘Did we mean?‘ problem as I would describe it.

As an agency advising our clients on SEO or search engine optimisation one of the toughest tasks is convincing businesses to think like customers and ensure the way they write about themselves online does likewise. By all means ‘build it’ but they won’t be coming unless the way you talk matches the way they search!

Take Last Exit and PaperVision for example. We are a Papervision3D agency and would like to be found as such when potential clients search for this kind of service online. Because PaperVision is a new technology however the challenge is to make sure we talk about it in the right ways. The correct description for this Flash plug-in is PaperVision3D but a quick check within Google’s Adwords Keyword Tool reveals a whole host of ways people are looking for it - papervision 3d, paper vision 3d or even pay per vision 3d are all commonly used. 

This wouldn’t be a problem but as I say above search engines rely on keywords in a very exact way. Try it yourself - a query of ‘paper vision 3d agency‘ will deliver very different results to one of ‘papervision3d agency‘ regardless of the fact both may be intended to find an agency supplying PaperVision3D.

Granted this all sounds very anal indeed but the truth is that Google and the other search engines are very anal indeed! Words, and the exact way they are used, are all they have to go on when routing that important query of yours to a handful of those 3 billion web pages!

The solution is writing for the web, making frequent reference to important keywords, and writing like the customers you want to attract would ask for you.

The solution is really not rocket-science, or should that be rocket science!

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The headline article in today’s AdAge looks at how car dealerships are utilizing video. It focuses on one particular dealership who has created a nice little (viral) video espousing the concept of transparency and honesty. Hold on, a car dealership saying it’s honest? It might take more than a highly staged video to convince us of that, but nevertheless the event is interesting to me on a number of levels:

1. The accessibility of video: largely thanks to Apple, video creation tools (both hardware and software) professional video creation can meet almost any budget. Of course this depends on your expectation and demands for quality. Distribution tools such as YouTube also offer access to a broad audience, if the content is good enough. Imagine spending $50k on a video and reaching a million people without any additional media spend. Amazing (potentially). Added to this, the fact that the spend is easily measured and analyzed.

2. Increasing the effectiveness of your website: according to Larry Pryg , national marketing and ad manager for General Motors Corps, certified-used-auto business, websites with video are twice as likely to general calls or emails from shoppers to dealers.

Of course, this video has to be engaging and entertaining and, most importantly in my opinion, demonstrate utility; it’s got to be informative, useful and empower the viewer to make intelligent qualified decisions - hopefully quick ones that result in check writing etc. Many dealers still just re-purpose TV commercials, which is OK, as many car ads are stil among the best (most entertaining and well produced) but, of course, there’s an opportunity with the online space and a great expectation of users to offer more interaction and information.

3. Transparency: the main ad this article references from the Clay Corp in Norwood, Mass, attempts to offer transparency and honestly by explaining the typical ways (other) car dealers try to screw you over. Ever since Naomi Klein wrote ‘No Logo’ in 2000 I’ve been convinced by the idea of discussion between a brand and it’s audience/customers, rather than the old industrialist approach of preaching brand values from a well staged, er stage. This video doesn’t really embody that notion completely but we feel that it’s vital to empower our clients with the knowledge to make the right decisions regarding digital agencies. So in that vein, we’ve created short documents explaining how to look for and how to buy digital services such as SEO - a practice that is still largely shrouded in smoke and mirrors.

The comparison I’m making here is a potential one: that many agencies, especially digital agencies are already building reputations as charlatans and spinning a web of confusing processes, technologies and TLAs (three letter acronyms). Time to get undresses, and bare all I reckon.

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