Recent BBC Vision web launches

Quick round-up of some recent BBC Vision web launches which I've had varying degrees of involvement with:

Robin Hood game



Noteworthy primarily for its use of the Unity plug-in which renders Flash-beating in-browser 3D graphics - definitely a technology to watch. Game development by Playgroup and Specialmoves. BBC credits: Marc Ramsay, Richard Lynton-Evans, Paul Thomson and Rosie Allimonos. Trailer embedded below.



Adam Curtis Blog



Peak inside the mind of the legendary documentary film maker (The Power of Nightmares, The Century of Self, The Trap) and find out about his forthcoming collaboration with the Punchdrunk theatre company, It Felt Like a Kiss (see below trail). All I can claim credit for here is the green-on-black retro screen font which I used in a presentation I pulled together for Adam last year. The real props go to Nick Cohen, Roo Reynolds, Cathal Coughlan and Lucy Kelsall.



Comedy Extra



Made-for-the-web comedy clips from a mix of established and up-and-coming talent, including Adam Buxton, Mitchell & Webb, Matt Lucas & David Walliams, Stewart Lee & Armando Iannucci and the don't-try-this-at-home Amazing Wizards. Credit due to Al Boley, Martin Trickey and Will Saunders amongst others.



Remember, you can keep track of all new site launches from BBC Vision at the BBC Vision site launches blog.

BBC Apprentice clips widget

Suffering Apprentice withdrawal symptoms after last Sunday's final? Here's a bundle of best bits (including James' car-crash interview - "In a nutshell, I put a leash on people who spunk money up the wall..." and "I can bring ignorance to the table") in an embeddable widgety package. No link back to bbc.co.uk unfortunately, so I'll have to provide one myself: Lots more good stuff on The Apprentice website and keep an eye out for more BBC widgets.

'Search online for...' - The return of keywords in advertising

Hands up who remembers AOL keywords? Back in the late-90s / early naughties (when AOL was still spamming the world's letterboxes with CD-ROMs) it was commonplace to see an AOL keyword alongside, or occasionally in lieu of, a regular URL on marketing materials. Movie trailers and posters, in particular, would often carry them (see posters for 2001 box office stinkers Swordfish and 15 Minutes).

Fast forward to 2009 and search keywords in advertising seem to be experiencing something of a renaissance, although this time it's Google rather than AOL who are the go-to guys for finding stuff online. However, where AOL keywords were tightly controlled (check out the official Keyword Guidelines), keywords input into Google will return results entirely at the mercy of Google's special sauce search algorithms.

This presents a bit of a dilemma for marketeers; whilst inviting users to Google for your brand more closely mirrors online behaviours (80+ percent of online journeys start with a search), you don't have control over what appears on that results page.

The first URL-free ad I noticed recently encouraging users to search for a keyword was the Orange 'I Am Everyone' campaign, which boldly invited users to "search online for 'I am'", complete with magnifying glass icon (which seems to have inexplicably become the universally recognised symbol for search - I guessing either Microsoft or Apple is to blame...)



The problem was that the newly-created campaign site i-am-everyone.co.uk was decidedly short on Googlejuice (the top organic search result for 'I am' was i-am-bored.com on Google and i-amonline.com on MSN), forcing Orange to shell out for Sponsored Links (still live at the time of writing). Whether the additional cost of the Sponsored Links was offset by a greater response rate to the search-based call-to-action (or the insight they got from being able to more easily track the response rate) would be interesting to know (although the figures from Compete don't speak of a unqualified success).

The decision to promote keywords over a URL is probably easier when you feel confident of getting and retaining the top spot in organic search results. Tamlyn Rhodes points to More4 and Act On CO2 both using the 'search online for...' CTA; both having sufficiently distinctive names and Googled-up parent domains (channel4.com and direct.gov.uk) to ensure they secure the top spot. Warner Brothers also recently adopted the 'search for keyword' approach for elements of their Watchmen marketing campaign, banking on keeping the mighty IMDb off the top spot. Dyson went for belt and braces after its TV ad invited users to "Search online for dyson ball", taking a Sponsored Link as well as the top two organic search results.

Another example which recently caught my eye was the TV and poster campaign for Dido's forthcoming album, 'Safe Trip Home', which makes no mention of Dido and looks more like a movie campaign, inviting users to "view trailer now" by Googling for enigmatic keywords such as 'Lady Landfill', 'Mother Lay-By' and 'Blackeye Lashes'. What's interesting about this one is that the top matches are all YouTube videos which - YouTube being a Google property - get a thumbnail and visible rating; far more eye catching and inviting than your average search result. The video then directs users onwards to the official album site.



Despite the potential pitfalls of promoting search keywords in advertising, it seems likely to increase as marketers seek to respond to how users actually navigate to content online and counter the URL blindness which I'm certainly starting to suffer from. Just watch out for a resurgence of Google bombing/washing...

Holiday reading

Just returned from a week's holiday at the Likya Residence and Spa in Kalkan (thoroughly recommended if you're looking to get away from it all - see Flickr set) and thought it was high time I ended my three-month blogging hiatus with a gentle re-entry post. So, with a nod to Roo Reynolds, who's 'recent reading' post format I've cribbed, here are the books which kept me occupied on the sun lounger:

Case Histories by Kate Atkinson - probably not a book that I would have picked off the shelf in a bookstore (the cover gives some of the wrong signals - the likely subject of a future blog post), but a loan from my brother, whose literary recommendations I trust - a trust rewarded with a thoroughly engrossing novel exploring the universality of love and loss through a rich tapestry of interwoven narrative strands and the birth of an irresistible hero in the shape of private investigator Jackson Brodie. I already have the next in the series (One Good Turn) lined up on the shelf.

Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper by Diablo Cody - an eminently readable, if ultimately inconsequential, memoir from the writer of 2007 indie hit, Juno, which pretty much does what it says on the tin, serving up enough memorable characters and anecdotes to justify the 200+ pages.

Little Brother by Cory Doctorow - probably still best-known as co-editor of Boing Boing (but better known to me as Mr Alice Taylor), Cory conjures a hugely engaging narrator and protagonist in Marcus Yallow, a 17-year old tech-head, battling to outsmart the Department of Homeland Security as it clamps down on civil liberties in the wake of a major terrorist attack. The book was released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike license and can be downloaded from Cory's site. Go do it.

Twitter play: Lyric for the day

Four weeks ago I set up a new Twitter account called Lyric for the day and started posting snatches of song lyrics on an (almost) daily basis. I then tweeted it's existence on my main Twitter account, encouraging fellow tweeters to guess the track and artist by replying to @lyricfortheday. 28 lyrics later and the account has 37 followers and a burgeoning sense of competitiveness, as well as some indie snobbery. There's only one rule (no Googling!). Below is the high score table (one point for the first correct answer) and the answers to date (only three of which went unguessed). Come play! :)

Lyric for the day hall of fame:
R4isStatic (4)
aarons (3)
LouiseBrown (3)
onpause (3)
willhowells (3)
chunkylover (2)
dogwinters (1)
helenroper (1)
ms_jackson (1)
rooreynolds (1)
slim_cop (1)
SplintUK (1)
tbgkerry (1)

Answers to date:
1. Sympathy For The Devil - The Rolling Stones (onpause)
2. Abattoir Blues - Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds (aarons)
3. Babies - Pulp (rooreynolds)
4. Our Mutual Friend - The Divine Comedy
5. Sit Down - James (willhowells)
6. O Maria - Beck
7. Take Me Out - Franz Ferdinand (willhowells)
8. When The Sun Goes Down - Arctic Monkeys (R4isStatic)
9. Faith - George Michael (slim_cop)
10. Mexican Wine - Fountains of Wayne (helenroper)
11. Mrs Robinson - Simon & Garfunkel (R4isStatic)
12. Playground Love - AIR (chunkylover)
13. Singing In My Sleep - Semisonic (R4isStatic)
14. Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In) - Kenny Rogers & the First Edition
15. Fat Bottomed Girls - Queen (SplintUK)
16. Me In Honey - R.E.M. (chunkylover)
17. Cabron - Red Hot Chili Peppers (R4isStatic)
18. Mile End - Pulp (aarons)
19. The Bends - Radiohead (aarons)
20. Chasing Cars - Snow Patrol (dogwinters)
21. Where Is My Mind - The Pixies (onpause)
22. Don't Speak - No Doubt (LouiseBrown)
23. First of the Gang to Die - Morrissey (willhowells)
24. Tiny Dancer - Elton John (onpause)
25. Mysterious Ways - U2 (ms_jackson)
26. Shakermaker - Oasis (tbgkerry)
27. Bohemian Like You - The Dandy Warhols (LouiseBrown)
28. Frontier Psychiatrist - The Avalanches (LouiseBrown)

Job opportunity: Head of Multiplatform Products, BBC Vision

Looking for an exciting new job and at a loose end this weekend? Why not spend it applying for the role of Head Of Multiplatform Products for BBC Vision? Don't know what any of those words mean in this context? My earlier post on my elliptical job title should explain some of them.

BBC widgets

At the tail end of 2006, I confidently predicted that 2007 would be the year of the widget and thanks in no small part to Facebook and iGoogle both 'going large' in that year (see respective news stories), I wasn't embarrassingly wrong.

Yesterday marked a more modest milestone in the 'mainstreamisation' (warning: made up word alert) of widgets as some of my colleagues quietly launched bbc.co.uk/widgets. It's pretty light on widgets at the moment (four at the time of writing) but I've got a feeling that could grow pretty quickly, even if all it does is aggregate more of the BBC widgets already out in the wild (e.g. LiveUpdate, Lily Allen, Glastonbury, Olympics).

One of the new widgets available is the BBC iPlayer widget (embedded below) which promotes a selection of TV and Radio content available to consume on-demand via BBC iPlayer, with some very light-touch personalisation built in (thumbs up, thumbs down). You can't actually watch programmes within the widget (I guess the viewing experience might be slightly sub-optimal at 300 pixels), although the Clearspring wrapper provides easy integration with an extensive range of social media sites (incl. Facebook and iGoogle) as well as the vanilla embed code.

Designed more as a proof of concept than a major distribution play, it will be interesting to see whether it garners many installs. Of course it'll need to get linked to first; here's link number one for Google to spider: BBC Widgets. Now go forth any embed...

Best Films of 2008

From music to movies, the year-end list-making continues...

I'll spare you the lengthy preamble on this occasion and get straight to the list.

Usual rules apply (i.e. all films must have been released theatrically in the UK in 2008).

		No Country for Old Men (dir. Ethan Coen & Joel Cohen)
		Waltz with Bashir (dir. Ari Folman)
		There Will Be Blood (dir. Paul Thomas Anderson)
		Man on Wire (dir. James Marsh)
		Changeling (dir. Clint Eastwood)
		Juno (dir. Jason Reitman)
		Gone Baby Gone (dir. Ben Affleck)
		Gomorrah (dir. Matteo Garone)
		4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days (dir. Cristian Mungiu)
		The Baader Meinhof Complex (dir. Uli Edel)
		The Wave (dir. Dennis Gansel)
		The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (dir. Julian Schnabel)
		In Search of a Midnight Kiss (dir. Alex Holdridge)
		Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson (dir. Alex Gibney)
		The Visitor (dir. Thomas McCarthy)
		W. (dir. Oliver Stone)
		My Winnipeg (dir. Guy Maddin)
		Lust, Caution (dir. Ang Lee)
		Of Time and the City (dir. Terence Davies)
		Son of Rambow (dir. Garth Jennings)
		Charlie Wilson's War (dir. Mike Nichols)
		Water Lilies (dir. Céline Sciamma)
		The Duchess (dir. Saul Dibb)
		Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (dir. Sidney Lumet)
		Quantum of Solace (dir. Marc Forster)

Pop quiz: which actress has roles in three of the above movies?

Related posts:
My Top 25 Films of 2007
My Top 30 Films of 2006
My Top 25 Films of 2005
My Top 20 Films of 2004