I have the pleasure of being the Creative Director for a great group of people called Noise Inc. We love what we do and hopefully everything we do is loved. We couldn’t do half of the great work without smart people and smart facts and insight. So what better way to give something back to our friends this year than a fact-filled Christmas-themed infographic!

If you want to share it, just had, here’s a handy short link http://bit.ly/twNyNF to the page on the Noise Inc site.

Enjoy, and Merry Christmas!

Nice, short and insightful presentation by Shiv Sing from Razorfish about the marketing benefits of social influencers.

Just noticed that our Mr. Men Pinball game has just re-appeared in the “Hot Games” top 6 on the Miniclip homepage. Considering this game has been around for about 2 years now, that’s fantastic! Not sure of the figures as they’re probably also a little guarded, but I’d expect it to be somewhere up near 40 million game plays by now. Amazing when you consider the population of the UK is about 65 million

That’s the power of a good advergame. Equate that to a traditional media spend on say, Yahoo or the Google Ad Network and the ‘cost per click’ or ‘cost per engavement’ is very impressive on Miniclip or similar gaming sites. People actually spent more time playing the Mr. Men game then the length of an TV episode of the Mr. Men Show! Click through to the Mr. Men Show site was similarly impressive. Double figures where the usual industry average for a click through on a banner is maybe 1.4%.

Obviously, advergames are one of my pet passions and I’ve made a few games before so this is kinda big news yet a big ‘I always told you so!’ moment. I’ll post something more useful in the near future but fo now, enjoy the pinball!

Note the little square bottom right. That’s cool.

I was walking along Oxford Street in London this afternoon when I noticed a gaggle of photographers jostling to get a picture of the three dubious looking characters in costumes. Ah yes, it’s the day before the release of Disaster Movie and this was obviously the last push to drive sales.

Now call me old fashioned but last time I looked, it took a bit more effort than that to drum up punters to go and see a movie. It’s a student movie right? How many students are on Oxford Street at 11.30am on a Thursday? Maybe I’ve just missed the other stuff and this was the icing on the cake of a hugely successful campaign? Maybe the underground ‘student’ army will mobilise and blog the hell out of it in the following 24 hours having seen this image somewhere in a free evening paper.

Either way, I was struck by the fact this was the ONLY marketing I had seen, which made me think…

What if it was my fault? What if it was so brilliantly done that the campaign targeted ONLY the movie’s audience (mainly students) and therefore missed me out with clinical precision. How would I ever know? How many other campaigns are whizzing over (or through) my head without me being aware? I almost feel a bit left out. Like a kid no-one wants in their team for a game for football. #Sniff#

So here’s the challenge… have you seen any marketing for Disaster Movie? I’m genuinely interested to see where it was placed and in what context just to see why it missed me.

At the end of the day, at least it made me smile as I passed.