sylleptic - mark hopwood’s blog

Back this weekend from a fantastic holiday, all researched and arranged using the Internet. It’s fantastic to think about how much travel has been changed by sites like TripAdvisor, and the sites produced by even small hotels are getting so good. There were only 2 bad experiences throughout the whole trip, both down to the same company, who used to be a client of mine. Can you guess who:

• Is desperate to get their customers to check in online?
• Changes booked seats (checked in online) at the departure gate, so that people who didn’t bother to check in online can be kept seated together?
• Markets exhaustively and expensively to independent travellers, to maximise their yield by cutting out agents and tour operators?
• Oversells a 747-300 by 22 seats, and has the same situation on every flight on that route for the next 3 months?
• Lies about a smaller plane having been sent (and by the way, what plane do most airlines have that is bigger than a 747-300?) so there aren’t enough seats?
• Prioritises the customers of agents and tour operators over independent travellers (who bought their tickets the day the seats came online) when deciding who gets bumped, because it can’t afford to upset their big stakeholders?

I bet anyone who’s travelled with this airline in the last 12 months can name them. The point is that online services and advertising need to be backed up and executed on in the actual business: doing it in the advertising isn’t enough.

I’m not angry, but I am flying Virgin next time!

This morning I received yet another of the daily emails ad:tech have been sending me in the build-up to their exhibition and conference, which starts tomorrow. The subject line this time was “Newsletter 6 - see you tomorrow”. Newsletter 6!

I hope that whoever is looking after email at ad:tech is going to find the time to visit the session at 11:45  on Wednesday, titled “email best practice workshop”.  Daily emails about an up-coming conference just seem like they might not be best practice to me. I hope the show lives up to all their pre-marketing.

No sooner did I discover that Google allow one to target ads on race & ethnicity (as do MySpace, it seems) than I read that they’re introducing contextual advertising for mobile. Aside from the obvious discussion about whether display advertising works on mobile yet (I don’t think so) it was interesting to see the list of countries they’re piloting with:

US, England, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Ireland, Russia, Netherlands, Australia, India, China, and Japan (shortly).

Yes, England! So the Scots, Welsh and Irish (northern or otherwise) and I presume the Channel Islanders as well, won’t be getting mobile ads from Google, but the English will.

Or perhaps they meant the United Kingdom…

Can you spot the mistake? I just bought this “4-way screwdriver” for £1 in Maplins. It does indeed have 4 screwdriver heads…

Not a spelling mistake, I promise…

I’ve had two contrasting experiences over the last few days, that both (weirdly) involve online marketing and gorillas. In the first, we downloaded London Zoo’s Gorilla competition, which involves feeding and interacting with a virtual gorilla on your desktop. It’s quite nicely done creatively, if a bit arduous to play, especially if you’re competitive and have to win at all costs. The problem is, it hasn’t been tested too well, and the whole thing stopped working for 3 days last week when the Zoo’s agency lost its Internet hosting. A really poor experience, and it’s probably put a lot of people off playing the game.

The second is the brilliant, brilliant Gorilla Protection blog. What a simple example of blogging being used by a business, in this case a charity. You send a donation, the next day you can see it making a difference. They put videos, photos and stories online of the work they’re doing almost every day. Why aren’t more charities doing this kind of thing? It’s so effective, and so cheap. Here’s one of their videos.

DSCN0777.jpg, originally uploaded by harkmopwood.

Moneysupermarket “no 1 price comparison site” ad next to the “price comparison sites might not offer the features you need” ad from Direct Line. Marvellous adjacent ad placements at Clapham Junction.

This one not so good, from Youtube.

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They can certainly drink in Liverpool

Originally uploaded by harkmopwood

1 bottle of Larger please!
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So why don’t electronic signs have spell-checkers?

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