sylleptic - mark hopwood’s blog

Yesterday I presented at the AdMonsters EU Leadership Forum in London. AdMonsters is an international group of people working in online advertising operations and the group included people from a wide range of online publishers and agencies, including Channel 4, the Guardian, News International, AOL, Harvest Digital and Digitas.

My presentation is on Slideshare and here:

I had a great time, especially enjoying the presentation by Fru Hazlitt, MD of GCap London. Presenting was fun too. I recorded the audio, so I’ll replace the Slideshare with a movie of the slides plus audio soon.

My presentation explored the origins and possible solutions (including the one mooted by IASH) to the problem of how to safely place ads next to user generated content. Essentially, I think a combination of behavioural targeting, automated content analysis and manual publisher classification is probably needed, and that a code of practise based solution like IASH’s won’t solve the problems to the satisfaction of advertisers who need innovation and results.

In preparation for Blog Action Day on October 16th, there’s a quiz that tells you what kind of blogger you are. I’m a purist expert socialite, apparently. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or not…

We’ve made some great tongue-in-cheek video content to help BA with their recruitment of new cabin crew, using the Pam-Ann character. It’s pretty funny, and it’s nice to see so many clients and colleagues in the video itself.

Most importantly from my point of view, BA tend to be quite a serious brand, and it’s good to see them having some fun in this work. The site is here.

Do the green thing! The project that I’ve been helping a little bit, to launch a creative, fun environmental website called http://www.dothegreenthing.com, went live on Thursday. The content and idea are really lovely, and it’s bound to generate lots of interest and action.

Well done Andy and Naresh, and everyone else who’s been working so hard on it. Now it’s up to the rest of us to use the site and take the suggested actions.

Some very nice sites that I saw yesterday (thanks to Scene 7 for the details)

http://www.gucci.com/uk/index2.html

A DHTML storefront with NO FLASH and a very nice experience. Try comparing 2 handbags to see what I mean.

http://shawfloors.com/TryOnaFloor.aspx?mode=gallery

A heavy but powerful Flash storefront, powered by Scene 7 (who Adobe just bought) which allows you to swap floor covering, fabrics, and a bunch of other things, using a very nice layering technique.

http://www.oli.co.uk/
Fashion site - check out the Look Book at the bottom of the home page, which allows you to mix and match, resize and combine items in a very nice way.

First prize for a corporate slogan goes to the company (who I won’t name) who said they were all about “data sharing for maximum profit”. In other words, they make as much money as possible by selling your data to other people. As a strap-line, it left me wondering…