February 11, 2008
Simon van Wyk discusses how user experience is so much more than usability.
As global brands try to work out how to make their brands relevant in the social media age, user experience begins to take on a far more strategic bearing.
Indeed, according to the second Annual Online Customer Engagement Report by E-consultancy and cScape, ninety percent of companies are paying more attention to online customer engagement than ever before, with three-quarters of organisations (77%) saying that its importance has increased in the last 12 months.
So with customer engagement key, marketers are learning fast that good user experience is the backbone to online customer engagement. And that user experience is far broader than just usability.
Hygiene factor
Certainly usability is important, and websites do need to be easy to use. Clearly you can't have a good user experience without good usability. But it's just a small part of the whole user experience. HotHouse's User Experience Manager, Piero Colli, likes to describe usability as the site's hygiene factor - something that's important, but simply the minimum standard required.
Read the full story on user experience.
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Technorati Tags: user | + | experience |
January 15, 2008
Simon van Wyk predicts one of the biggest trends in 2008 will be brands creating content and not ads.
One of the biggest things that we're going to see in 2008 is this much written about, much discussed and much anticipated shift of advertising budgets from traditional advertising to online marketing in all its many forms.
The time is right, and it's not just the signs of the oncoming recession in the US. Marketers are growing in confidence online. They are beginning to understand that it's not just about transferring the principles of traditional marketing to the web. Sure, a few years ago, online marketing was restricted to email and banner sizes or whether sites would take pop-up ads. But so much has changed. And marketers can finally move beyond traditional advertising conventions in order to capitalise on digital marketing opportunities.
And that's precisely what Nike achieved in 2007 with its evolution of Nike+ - using the power of the web with the idea of community to deliver a highly engaging experience. They provided motivational goals and progress tracking, virtual racing and global community comparison tools - effectively satisfying a broad target market and giving them something that they truly value.
Read the full story.
Posted By Victoria Kerr @ 10:48 AM Permalink / Comments (0) / Trackbacks (0)
Technorati Tags: online+marketing |
November 19, 2007
One of the joys of the iPod revolution is that an amazingly high number of people now sit quietly on public transport, with white earplugs jammed into their ears.
A couple of years ago they had a phone stuck to the side of their head while everyone around them could hear half of a private conversation. They've still got their mobiles, but now they hold them in front of them while they text, their heads slowly bopping to the music.
Their information-gathering is personal – my music, my conversations with my network. A few years ago (before mobile phones), most people on public transport would read a newspaper. Today, newspapers are something read by (shudder) old people.
Read the complete opinion piece on the HotHouse website.
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Technorati Tags: online+news |
August 22, 2007
Digital technology is ruining the party for creative types. Mind you, the rot started long before that with people like Henry Ford perfecting the use of assembly lines to build uniform copies of his Model T cars 100 years ago.
Ford was the Bill Gates of his time, driving a technological trend into a society-changing phenomenon. His famous line, "They (customers) can have any colour they want, as long as it's black" was one of the first examples of science (and commerce) triumphing over art.
That's not a bad thing - can you imagine what cars would cost if they were all hand-crafted? But it has been a trend that has moved into most other areas of business. Think property developers and their cookie-cutter houses, IBM and computers, Microsoft and software, record companies and sausage-factory music, and film companies and blockbusters on thousands of movie screens. One notable exception to this is Apple - Steve Jobs seems to be able to hold both creativity and mass production in his hands at the very same time.
Continue reading the article "And geeks shall inherit the earth".
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Technorati Tags: new+media+landscape | ad+measurement |
July 26, 2007
The Age today features an article written by Katie Cincotta called Dude, where's my audience? on Gen Ys switching off traditional media. In the story Simon comments on how media has changed and how young audiences are skipping the traditional habits of free-to-air TV, live radio and CDs in favour of content they can access any time, anywhere - courtesy of the internet.
And this any time anywhere model is also much more difficult to measure because it's more spread out and new habits such as media multi-tasking like keeping one eye on the TV and the other on the laptop have yet to be seriously tracked.
Read the full story in The Age.
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Technorati Tags: Internet |
April 13, 2007
Last month B&T's newest sibling Digital Media - Australia's journal of the new media revolution - was launched featuring the "40 biggest players of Australia's Digital Age". Nice to see that HotHouse Founder Simon van Wyk is featured in this esteemed list.
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March 15, 2007
HotHouse was recently selected as one of the coveted Rising Stars in the highly respected Australian Financial Review MIS Strategic 100.
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Technorati Tags: Recognition |
September 8, 2006
Watch out for a brand new online entertainment channel in the YouTube genre, where people can upload the usual consumer generated media type stuff and be endlessly entertained. Anheuser-Busch which brews Budweiser, has reportedly invested something like US$30 million in its Bud.TV project, which will launch in February next year and aims to connect with the world's growing online community.
The company's press release says that the company recognises that adults are spending more time online looking for entertainment to fit their lifestyles, and that this new online entertainment channel will help reach and engage with them.
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Technorati Tags: Budweiser | youtube |
August 28, 2006
Pontiac is launching its sporty new G5 coupe exclusively online. AdAge.com reports that the entire ad budget for the introduction of Pontiac's G5 is earmarked for the internet. Pontiac is targeting mostly younger men for the new coupe, and it naturally make sense to use the online medium.
In what is becoming a trend particularly in the big spending auto industry, it looks like the marketing transition from traditional to online could see auto marketers take a huge piece of the US$20 billion that they currently spend to online.
Indeed AdAge.com reports that "Interactive-buying shop Jumpstart Automotive Media, in fact, estimates that within five years auto marketers will get better ad bang for 20% less."
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August 17, 2006
TIME has just published its list of the 50 coolest websites on the planet with no surprises that it looks like a Web 2.0 beauty parade.
The sites are built on the next-generation technologies and concepts that make the Internet a much better place to live and work and provide dynamic new ways to inform and entertain. All the ususual suspects are there like YouTube, Digg, MySpace and Zillow. But the list also includes serious field reporting like Kevin Sites in the War Zone which is a shining example of digital newsgathering techniques, to clever little gems like Dodgeball which lets your mobile device improve your social life.
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Technorati Tags: web-20 |
August 4, 2006
In a move that is certain to become the trend, Foster's beer in the US has has decided to stop advertising on television entirely and move its US ad budget online. Although many brands are switching some of their advertising budgets away from TV and on to the Internet - moving the entire budget is certainly a sign of the times and reflects the changing media tastes of consumers.
Part of the budget has been assigned to a deal with Heavy.com to create an online dating game which is being used to launch a new positioning for Foster's in the US with the tagline: "Crack open a friendly". According to AdAge, the online campaign is due to launch mid August.
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August 3, 2006
PricewaterhouseCoopers has confirmed for Australia what we've been seeing in other markets - sharp internet growth, coming at the expense of free-to-air TV, radio and newspapers. PwC's “Entertainment & Media Outlook 2006-2010” report as widely reported in The Sydney Morning Herald and B&T forecasts that newspapers, TV, magazines, radio and outdoor will see their overall marketshare decline by 11% in the five years to 2010.
Meantime, the internet’s ad share will grow from 6% in 2005, to 13% by 2010, and pay TV will grow from 2% to 3%.
PwC director Matthew Liebmann said that: "Traditional media will remain the largest form of advertising in our marketplace, but the more rapid form of growth will come from subscription TV and the internet because of its ability to provide personalised messages at the right time for each individual user."
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