the best things in life aren't things
Archive for April, 2008
New era in brand communication
I believe we are witnessing a new era when it comes to brand communication, and clearly this picture below is the best example:
The communication strategy is not new, since it has already been seen before but it seems it is under constant refinement by our fellow marketing “masterminds”.
The story: Hugh Grant was caught drinking and driving by photographers
Facts: There was a beer can in Hugh’s car but it could have been the passenger on the right doing the drinking.
The communication strategy: A dubious photo agency made available this picture showing a catchy red circle zoom of the tasty alcoholic beverage inside Hugh’s car – the zoomed part is also suspicious (you can see why). News magazines and tabloids quickly jumped at the photo and published since people are starved for celebrities gossip (that’s the real reason you are reading this as well). They all wrote about a big celebrity drinking this beer in the car. Yes, Hugh Grant himself!
Consequences: Getting thirsty. You go to your local supermarket and buy Carlsberg. Heck, if Hugh Grant drinks it, why won’t you? 
P.S. I hate Hugh Grant.
A laugh a day..
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Something is disturbingly wrong with that drummer.
Search the future with Google
Google Australia launched gDay today, a new search engine that allows users to search a day in advance of real time:
Google spiders crawl publicly available web information and our index of historic, cached web content. Using a mashup of numerous factors such as recurrence plots, fuzzy measure analysis, online betting odds and the weather forecast from the iGoogle weather gadget, we can create a sophisticated model of what the internet will look like 24 hours from now.
We can use this technique to predict almost anything on the web – tomorrow’s share price movements, sports results or news events. Plus, using language regression analysis, Google can even predict the actual wording of blogs and newspaper columns, 24 hours before they’re written!
To rank these future pages in order of relevance, gDay™ uses a statistical extrapolation of a page’s future PageRank, called SageRank.
gDay is a search algorithm that uses Machine Automated Temporal Extrapolation (MATE™) technology to extrapolate a sophisticated model of what the internet will look like up to 24 hours in the future, with 75% to 95% accuracy.
Find out more HERE