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Check out this word cloud data visualization based on the text of the 2012 State of the Union Address. Great example of how simple visualization tools can show the key messaging of political speeches. -
Photo reblogged from Typeverything
Typeverything.com - Book cover by Jason Booher (via The Book Cover Archive)
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This jet-powered backpack demonstration is insane! Takes off from a helicopter, jumps off, fires up the jet engines and then lands with a parachute. Seriously you have to see it to believe it!
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From the freakishly brilliant minds @ b-reel check out this new interactive video mashup for Adidas. The player is super fun, it basically allows the viewer to create custom views from a mashup of five pre-recorded videos in real time, using the keyboard as controller.
The dynamic non-standard video sizing that is triggered through the user interaction is seamless and visually stunning. It is not unlike the multi-sized, simultaneously running video experience created by b-reel/Milk/Koblin using htlm5 for the Arcade Fire’s “The Wilderness Downtown” - though the number of running vids is paired down here.
My only complaint would be that while I love the player functionality and the user experience is rock solid the actual video content that is at the heart of this expeirence feels flat. The videos themselves feature five women, decked out in Adidas Techfit gear dancing, in their bedrooms for the duration of the song. Nothing more - just five girls dancing unremarkably, to the same song. There is no story being told with the video elements which in the end add nothing to the overall concept beyond serving as a visual reference to the campaign tagline “techfit your body, dance with your heart”.
That minor issue aside, the execution behind the experience is fantastic. I would love to see live streaming content with this control. I can picture offering multiple live streams with truly dynamic, user defined stream resizing to create a totally customizable, control room-like, ADD satisfying virtual experience at say a major music festival or a huge sporting event.
With recorded media a search triggered multi-view mashup experience would be pretty amazing. Allowing user to search “DANCE” in youtube and randomly pulling embeds from search results would have the same effect as the produced video in the current campaign, but would add variety and increase the likelihood of repeat viewing as each search could yield new results.
Fun stuff, I always love to see examples of truly interactive digital video go live!
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I recently took a peek at the new Facebook features and was pleasantly surprised by the more visually appealing and intuitive display. “Cool Facebook, maybe your quick and useful response to google+ will win me back”, I thought.
Then, I did some digging and came across a mashable article which included the marketing video for the new features from facebook:
Immediately I recognized it as a thematic ripoff of the Google Chrome “Dear Sophie” campaign (which was so effective that I immediately signed my 4 year old and 1 month old up for gmail accounts and began sending photos, videos and daily thoughts).
While it is comforting to know that despite my advanced age, I am still clearly a target market for these services, I can’t help but take away cool points from Facebook on the blatant ripoff. And yes, I know it isn’t fair to judge a robust social networking revamp by it’s poor choice of marketing and promotion, but I make videos for brands for a living, and I can’t help it :)
Have you seen other examples of products or services that have too closely mimicked their competitor’s advertising? Have you seen an ad that is just so bad you can’t deal? If so, hit me up or tweet em’ out using the #adfail hash tag.
