I must say I find these numbers hard to believe.  It seems to me that the numbers on Outlook and gmail must be low.  I wonder if it could be because some of the others on the list automatically load images in emails, while Outlook and gmail do not.  Otherwise a really interesting read.  I haven’t found anything comprehensive on this topic until this… so I hope they keep it up and add some depth to the report.

http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2008/06/14/cocoa-for-windows-flash-killer-sproutcore/

http://mashable.com/2008/07/01/google-adobe-flash-search/

The Cure for Content-Delay Syndrome

Favorite Quote…

It’s a disrespected line item in a schedule: “final content delivered.” It’s the perennial cause of delay and the stuff of myth (I once shelved a project for three years while the client “wrote” his content

idotjapan v bromike - JLOOP - 05.02.08 from Greg Stratford on Vimeo.

We’ve all been there. There’s a teacher behind the podium, lecturing. A minister in the pulpit, preaching. When someone is talking at you, it’s pretty easy to tune out.

But when you watch a story unfold on television or a movie screen, you become part of the action.

You hear the waves crash on the beach. See the wind blow and the sky grow dark. Worry as you watch two men search desperately for something precious that’s been lost, anxiously hoping they’ll find it. It becomes your story.

That’s what makes story—and film—so powerful. At City on a Hill, we’re using that power for a higher purpose.

These guys do GREAT work. We’re proud to be on their team.

For more detail about this site, take a gander at the redesign launch email that we designed and sent out for City On A Hill. It tells a bit more about the approach to the new site and the promise of more to come…

We’ve also taken to a new approach for updating our WordPress sites. Since we’ve had a love affair recently with SVN for version control, I decided it made a lot more sense to use direct SVN checkouts of the tagged releases in the WordPress SVN, rather than FTP’ing the entire WordPress directory every time we get a minor release. So… here’s how we’ve got it set up:

1. First, we run an SVN checkout to get the tagged release. This gives us all the core WordPress files.
2. Next, we upload via FTP all the files that don’t belong to the core WordPress file structure. These files are:
3. wp-config.php
4. .htaccess
5. our custom theme
6. our plugins (besides akismet and hello)
7. the wp-content/uploads folder
8. Then we make sure that uploads folder is writeable by the server, and all should be well.

So with this setup, the next time that we need to upgrade the WordPress release, we can simply SSH into the server and run an svn switch command to the newest tagged release and it will update the changed files. Then we run the upgrade script and we’re there. Much easier when you have to update a dozen WordPress sites at once.

So. Anyone see any gotchas in this approach?

We’re very proud of the site.  We worked long and hard to develop an engaging brand platform for this amazing product.  There is a lot of detailed financial information and a fairly intricate architecture to the site, but we hope that the overall feel remains focused on the simplicity of investing with heart. 

Let us know what you think.

P.S.  We’ve been busy over here at JLOOP and we’ve got a number of projects launching in the coming weeks.  Stay tuned!

By default, Blueprint has a stylesheet for IE that adds a position: relative declaration to certain classes. Took me a little while to track this down and the solution is pretty simple: add a z-index property to the nearest positioned ancestor of the dropdown navigation, and set the value to something greater than the z-index of the content (e.g. 100). Voilà! You’re back up and running.

In short, I changed the first line of this:

<div class="column span-42 pull-10 last">
  <ul id="nav">
    <li><a href="#">COMPANY</a>
      <ul>
        <li><a href="/ourstory">OUR STORY</a></li>
        <li><a href="/executivemanagement">EXECUTIVE MANAGEMENT</a></li>
        <li><a href="/news">LATEST NEWS</a></li>
      </ul>
    </li>
  </ul><!-- end #nav -->
</div>

to this:

<div class="column span-42 pull-10 last" style="z-index: 100;">

http://www.adobe.com/flashon/

I love seeing the next evolution of video in Flash. The fullscreen abilities are at full effect here and the HD video is awesome.

Here is how State Farm did it:
Identify your target audience: the commercial aired during the ANTM marathon on VH1.
VH1 has the second highest concentration of P18-49 viewers among any network. [focusing on the 18-24 age group]
The median age of the VH1 viewer is 29.2. (Source: Nielsen)
VH1 has the highest concentration of P18-49 with a household income of $60K+.
51% home owners (source: cablevsionadsales )

Check out how the illustrations and tools in each the Music Room, Your Place/Your Stuff, and Your Car/Your Ride relate to that audience. The copy throughout the site is written in casual, conversational tone, using the voice and terms of the target audience. Plus they have aligned with the popular band The Fray, Projekt Revolution, the X games….

Anticipate their needs and answer them with the benefits your product provides:
At the forefront, this site uses a really basic question and answer technique, anticipating the users’ questions about insurance and coverage. Dig a little deeper and you will be surprised by the amount of lists and tools for tracking assets and calculating worth, no strings attached. (Because this target audience wants to receive value before they are willing to give up their contact info.) And at the end of each answer or tool, State Farm finds a simple way to say “Use State Farm, we’ve got your back.”

Call to action:
Besides the constant “Use State Farm, we’ve got your back” style of messaging, the omnipresent call to action is hanging out on the bottom right, in marketing’s favorite color - RED.

Ok - I kinda went off there. My main point was about customizing your message for the audience. Clearly this site was created for, and advertised to, the target audience of 18-25 year old non-homeowners with an above average income - selling them renter’s and car insurance. They don’t bother even mentioning home owners, life insurance, or disability.

Spend a few mornings watching the Today Show, and you will get a totally different kind of State Farm marketing, like this commerical, as well as a different website: http://www.statefarm.com/ that focuses on Home Owners, Life & Annuities, Health & disability, and Business.

I was so interested in this alternative marketing campaign to a non-traditional insurance audience, that I did a little more research and found this great quote:
“We do life solutions, and we do that by following life stages,” says Melinda Mueller, marketing manager at State Farm. “A first car. Graduating from college. Getting your first job. Getting married. You start buying life insurance when you have a baby. Most renters happen to be in this younger group, but only 3 in 10 have renters insurance. Statistics show that people are getting credit cards and managing their finances younger and younger. But as we analyzed our portfolio business, and compared our market share and market penetration in this group, we saw a great opportunity.”

Interesting, eh?

And yes, I am aware that this all only supports the fact that I am much too old to be losing 3 hours to an ANTM marathon.

We’ve also used services such as QuantCast and ComScore in the past for more commercial projects and I found this article by Andrew Chen a great way of dividing up the focus of these different types of tools.

This space will continue to evolve in the next few years for sure. There is always more to learn, and here at JLOOP we are always on the lookout for new tools to help us measure our goals.

Hollywood quickly adapted and these days every blockbuster movie comes with a video game deal. The role has even been reversed on a few projects where blockbuster movies were based from original video games: Resident Evil, Laura Croft and DOOM. Now major media companies are striking deals with top Hollywood players to buy their way into the video game industry. Steven Spielberg and Jerry Bruckheimer have now both signed on to create original video games. No doubt movies and cartoons will be spat out by Hollywood studios to follow up and cash out on these to-be blockbuster titles.

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