Advertisers compete for the online podium – The Globe and Mail

The London Olympics officially open Friday, but just like the athletes that will parade through the opening ceremonies, the most aggressive and savviest advertisers began staring down their competition far in advance of this moment. In the ad world, the Games began months ago.

In a sign of a broader trend, Procter & Gamble has been targeting pre-Olympic advertising as intensely as it would ads during the Games. P&G has gone hard on Web advertising, releasing ads online before they hit TV.

We intentionally chose to launch a digital-first campaign,” said David Grisim, associate marketing director at P&G Canada. “By launching digitally first, we found that we got a much higher level of engagement than we would in a traditional campaign.”

Olympic sponsors have collectively spent millions to be associated with the Games, and cannot afford to rely on traditional TV advertising to make good on that investment. P&G needed to encourage people to watch and share the ads so that by the time they are seen on television, they are well-known. Its campaign focuses on the mothers behind the athletes, and was promoted heavily on social media to create an early connection, especially with moms, who are a target market for many of its products. A video featuring Canadian triathlete Paula Findlay and her mother, part of a series of “Raising an Olympian” online videos, is a good example of the maternal tearjerker theme.

The results have been better than expected: In Canada, its “Best Job” commercial reached 150,000 views on YouTube in its first week after launching in April. Since then, 1.4 million Canadians have seen it. An even more important metric for P&G is that an average of one in three viewers shared the video with others.

“We’ve never seen numbers like that,” Mr. Grisim said.

via Advertisers compete for the online podium – The Globe and Mail.

Strange Random Olympics Quote:

“Here’s a good trick.
Get a job as a judge at the Olympics. Then, if some guy sets a world record, pretend that you didn’t see it and go: Okay, is everybody ready to start now?” ― Jack Handey

 

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Xbox puzzler The Splatters makes physics fun – The Globe and Mail

Spend five minutes with Spiky Snail’s The Splatters, which hits Xbox Live Arcade April 11th, and you’ll likely be left with a furrowed brow.

Its objectives aren’t immediately evident and its controls aren’t instantly intuitive. You’ll have a notion that you’re supposed to fling colourful, googly-eyed blobs around, making them splat into walls and coat sticky jelly things lying around the play area, but the details regarding exactly how to do this won’t come into focus. There’s a good chance you’ll cue to its presentation, which carries an agreeable LittleBigPlanet aroma thanks to a delightfully lighthearted score, playful menu design, and quirky levels built around oversized everyday objects, but that probably won’t be enough to make you keep playing.

Spend 20 minutes with it and you’ll have a better feel for what you need to do. Pop-up instructions and tutorials will help you to understand that you can control the direction of your blobs not only during takeoff but also mid-flight simply by tapping the A-button a second time and pushing a thumbstick in the direction you want your splatter to fly. What’s more, you’ll discover that you can pull off stunts with each shot that help build combos for higher scores and allow you to more efficiently eliminate those sticky jelly things, which you’ll have come to call bombs.

via Xbox puzzler The Splatters makes physics fun – The Globe and Mail.

Strange Random Physics Quote:

“In physics, you don’t have to go around making trouble for yourself – nature does it for you.” – Frank Wilczek

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• Xbox Marketplace Breakdown – 5 April 2012 (bnbgaming.com)

Canada among the happiest countries in the world – The Globe and Mail

Canada is the fifth-happiest country in the world, according to a global study on the social and economic well-being of nations.It finds the world has, broadly speaking, become a “little happier” in the past three decades, as living standards have risen. One exception is the United States, where life satisfaction has not improved.

The happiest countries are all in Northern Europe – Denmark, Norway, Finland and the Netherlands. The least happy countries are all poor countries in sub-Saharan Africa – Togo, Benin, Central African Republic and Sierra Leone.

But wealth alone doesn’t make people happy. Rather, the first-ever World Happiness Report finds other key factors at play, too: political freedom, strong social networks and an absence of corruption are “together more important than income in explaining well-being differences between the top and bottom countries.”

At the individual level, “good mental and physical health, someone to count on, job security and stable families are crucial,” said the 155-page paper, co-edited by University of British Columbia economics professor John Helliwell.

via Canada among the happiest countries in the world – The Globe and Mail.

Strange Random Happiness Quote:

“Now and then it’s good to pause in our pursuit of happiness and just be happy.”
― Guillaume Apollinaire

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