The FARM are excited to hear the Aveeno™ NZ online media campaign (under the Johnson&Johnson client suite) has won the first every Bolly Award! This is an award that has been set up by the Internet Advertising Bureau in NZ to celebrate the best digital creative in NZ.  

http://www.bollyawards.co.nz/

Feedback from OMD in NZ: "Well done, the creative for this campaign has been the talk of the industry and a lot of people (including me) think it’s just amazing."

The campaign performed really well with an average dwell time on the rich media placements of 76.25 seconds and engagement rate of 25.85%.

I downloaded the new Google Chrome OS and ran it on Sun’sVirtualBox VM software.

My first impressions...

It was only an 8 second start up time to the login screen. Awesome! Then a single sign-on to your computer with your Gmail account. Another 8 seconds and the Chrome browser was open with my Gmail account and Google Calander. Now that was impressive! Within 25 seconds of me turning on my computer I was reading my email.

What else is there to Chrome OS? It doesnt seem like there is anything else. I couldn't find anywhere to configure system preferences or anything. Do you want to open other programs or windows, or install other software (like Firefox)? Unfortunately you can't! It felt like I was in an internet cafe with a computer that is so locked down that all I can do is surf the web. A note to all internet cafe's around the world...None of the big players online support IE6 anymore. Please upgrade to anything else!

Anyway, Chrome OS is aimed at netbooks (at least initially). A netbook user would typically like to turn on their computer, have it quickly boot, have their browser immediately open, check their mail and calendar, and then continue surfing. That is what Chrome OS allows them to do, but thats it. The OS is merely a portal to the internet. You can't run anything locally. 

But I guess that over the years Google has been introducing online services and applications so the average consumer doesn't really need local applications. With Chrome OS, Google can encourage the use of online applications such as Google Documents, and (when it gets a lot better) it might actually start to rival MS Office, because it is free and online. After all, who needs local storage when there is cloud computing?

Conclusion... Google Chrome OS boots damn fast! It allows you to quickly get on the interweb. It's not exciting from an OS perspective as far as user experience goes, but damn it's fast!

If you want to try out, navigate your interweb browser to this hyperlink: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/19/guide-install-google-chrome-os/

P.s. Google seems to be putting all types of applications online. What is next? Is Google going to make an online Pro Tools? Now that would be impressive!

Movie releases, particularly those targeting families such as Up, Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs and the just-released A Christmas Carol, have been experimenting with 3D to add extra va-va-voom to the big screen. But now cognac brand Courvoisier has dipped its toe in 3D waters.
The ad, ‘Cognac With Another Dimension’, shows cognac in a balloon glass exploding and then spinning into a vortex that forms a cocktail. Don your 3D glasses and watch it in all its glory here: http://tinyurl.com/Courvoisier

You might remember Toshiba launching a chair into space recently from the desert in America. Well, the footage from that projectile has made its way back to earth and has been mashed together to form ‘Space Chair’, the brand’s latest TV commercial through Grey, London. Watch the biodegradable chair and its specially built camera rig’s graceful and surreal journey to the edge of space and back at http://bit.ly/1hflUf

BBDO Buenos Aires and Sake have completed the human race 10k campaign for Nike. Five celeb runners commentated on their race in real time, via a mobile phone and earpiece, and the resulting wheezing and insights were broadcast live and could be followed via Twitter, GPS and Google Maps. Over 650,000 people followed the race live and online. Watch the action at www.vimeo.com/7424458 and check http://thehumanrace.com.ar/envivo

I came accross some future predictions around Facebook penetration a couple of days ago and is it truly staggering.

Discounting China (Facebook is restricted there) it looks like we will  be approaching 30% of the worlds active internet population will be regular Facebook users by the end of 2009.

In the article they also talked about future projections and the possibility the Facebook audience could possibly top 1 billion users, the digital universe would sure be a different place, for a start we have to play by Facebook's rules while on their platform.

As agencies and marketers what does this mean for us? Well I guess it certainly means no matter who you are at the moment you cannot ignore the big F. The most obvious way to tap in to this huge potential audience is through ads but until now they have been targeted in a fairly standard way. These ads have been more effective in my experience than standard units due to organic impressions generated, context and their non banner like appearance but the targeting has been at best unimaginative, certainly not taking advantage of the social platform.

There is a new option open to us though which seems subtle at first, you can simply target your ads at friends of your connections. These connections are defined by Facebook as: Fans of your page, users of your applications, members of your groups or attendees of your events. Looking in to it a little further this is a different method than the top ten targeting methods currently available. 

Why? Well the ads can have social context which is after all what Facebook is supposed to be about. So if I am working on a new film theatrical release and someone fans my new movie page I can target ads at their friends which will list below the ad that their friend is a fan of my film. If the person viewing the ad would also like to see the film and I am offering pre-release tickets or a competition, who are they going to ask to go with them I wonder.

It is a great step in the right direction I believe for Facebook, there is still much work to be done, I could rattle on for hours about the numerous ways I would like to use the platform but lets save that for another day and simply be happy they are thinking about us little agencies and marketers.