Competitions

Lately at work
Last week I was engaged to prepare for a conference and was busy in making research. My work together with the P&G team has been about handing over and end my work for the production phase. This week I will perhaps start a new project for a Polish TV station. I will find out more today.

Competitions
The advertising business in Sweden is getting ready for The Golden Egg Award, Guldägget the 2 of April. From the 30 of March one week of seminars and mingel begin.

Among others nominated in the interactive category you find:
Telia Sonera (Swedish telephone- and network operator) "Our Song" by Daddy AB Read about the campaign
Absolut Vodka "In an Absolute World" by Great Works
Nokia "Get out and play" by Farfar

I liked the Facebook application "Our Song", where you basically share one song from the Telia e-store with a friend from your list on Facebook and then the application generates a slideshow of the photos in which you and your friend are tagged. The song is played in the background while your photos is zoomed in and out. Depending on which friend you choose it can be quite entertaining or embarrising...

Coming up on the Polish market

There are many award competitions coming up or already took place on the Polish market:

The Impactor Awards (February)
This competitions honor those whose impact on the media and advertising industry has been particularly significant. The laureates are appointed by the market experts from the Polish Advertising and Media Academy

The Polish Advertising KTR (April)
It is the largest advertising competition in Poland, held since 2004. The categories this year is: Advertising Print, Outdoor, TV Advertising, Cyber, Active Advertising (including PR), Design, Workshop TV, Illustration, Photo.

Each year the competition involve about 120 Polish agencies in advertising. An integrated part of the main competition is Young Creatives, whose prize is a trip for young teams to Cannes Young Lions. This year's jury session take place between April 11th and 18th, with the participation of 180 jurors conducted by Milka Pogliani from McCann Erickson Worldwide.

The Golden Arrow is Poland's longest running competition honoring direct marketing. Started in 1995 and draws more than 150 entries each year. The jury awarded 10 Golden Arrow statuettes and 26 distinctions 2008. VFP Communications publishing house is organizing the award. VPF is publishing the weekly "Media & Marketing Poland".

Among the categories you find: Search Engine Marketing, e-marketing, viral marketing, mobile marketing, telemarketing, website, campaign, dm, non-profit, b2b, Golden Arrow Design.

During 2008 and the category Website, the agency Tequila (Winterfresh and client Wrigley Poland) and the agency 180heartbeats (Knorr and client Unilever Poland SA) won awards.

Kreatura Advertising Awards (March) is a running competition for creativity in advertising and promote new talents. The competition annually judges more than 300 advertising works and publishes a book and CD featuring winners.

The "Webstar festival" is promoting the best websites and online advertising and ranked by sms voting by users.

Hypermedia won awards for Impactor (2002-2005), Kreatura, Golden Awards and was considered "best interactive agency in 2008" according to the magazine Media & Marketing Poland.

The websites is in Polish but the links is to the shortlist and resultlist:
impactor.pl (shortlist for 2009)
www.goldenarrow.pl (the resultlist of 2008)
www.konkurs.kreatura.pl (shortlist for 2009)
www.webstarfestival.pl (the resultlist of 2008)

Belvedere One-X

Belvedere is a world known brand of vodka made in Poland and is following traditions dating back 600 years ago. It is handcrafted in small batches to ensure superior quality. Belvedere IX (One-X) is the new super-premium vodka and comes in a glam-punk style, black and pink graffiti bottle and will initially be available only in selected nightclubs. Graffiti artist is André Saraiva. The One-X website is made by the agency Berlin Cameron United.

Earlier campaign: Belvedere’s “Luxury Reborn” with photographer Terry Richardson (the virtual palace of downtown, bohemian and artistic luxury)

Get your voice on the air

Host your own talkshow - the BlogTalkRadio


I´m not a frequent radio-listener of a specific channel to get news, but downloading podcast in your interest is a great format.

The BlogTalkRadio (launched 2006) is open to anyone and can be a complement to your blog, you can invite other bloggers or guests. A way of promoting yourself and your subject. Today you find thousands of talk shows, branded, featured channels, celebrities, politicians (president Obama, of course) the Pentagon, bloggers (no downloads or extra equipment needed).

The service is for free and allows any user with a phone and a computer to host a live, interactive radio show. The profit comes from licensing and sponsorship fees (branded channels), payment for banner, pre-roll audio and streamed live events.

BlogTalkRadio on Twitter
Blogtalkradio.com

Related article
"BlogTalkRadio lets anyone including the Pentagon start talk shows"

Simply the Best Stuff!

The question "What do you think is the Best Stuff in the world?"
is found on this site. As simple as that...

Media Cloud

- a tool to track how news get covered (project from Berkman Centre)
CNN is one of my news source, both tv and online. On tv they often mention iReport, the reports from users all over the world. I was talking about citizen reports in one of my earlier blogs and last month CNN had 900 reports uploaded to their site.

To keep track on news can be an ambitious project. Rss or similar feed system give you an overview of your selected sources, but personally I have too many sources in my rss that seem to cover each others topics and stories. Some of the sources may not be necessary but it will take time to compare.

That is why I think the idea of Media Cloud is an interesting service to help you compare media sources. This will make it easier for you to choose the most interesting source that cover your needs.

Media Cloud is a system (set of data and tools) that compare news from blogs and newspapers (english) from around the world. The system keep track on the content in every story (pull the story text out of the HTML) and automatically builds an archive of news stories and blog posts. The result is visualized based on 1) The top 10 most mentioned terms for each media source 2) the most mentioned terms for each media source that occur most frequently in stories along with your specified search term like "Obama" 3) A world map of each media source indicating the coverage of those countries. It´s possible today to compare up to three different media sources.

The world map

This is an open-source project and in an early stage. At this point 1500 media sources is available today. The search abilitiy - and the selection of sources covering the world feels limited today. I was looking for newspaper covering Japan and China for example but there were just a few choices.

The search results
I compared BBC, New York Times and te Guardian Blog, wrote the term "Madoff". For New York Times the terms "security" and "wallstreet" is most common, while BBC and the Guardian blog the terms "united states" and "united kingdom" appears in the top 3 terms.

Sometimes the search result can be a little confusing. I was comparing New York Times, Reuters, MSNBC and "social media". The outcome was very different and in this case I didn´t understand how- and what the given terms was based on.

This is the beginning, but I think the idea is very useful both for professional- and "private" researchers.

The interview with Ethan Zuckerman about Media Cloud (Nieman Journalism Lab)
The Berkman Centre
Media Cloud
About Media Cloud on Read Write Web

The real challenge for MIT - beat the Post-Its

I´m addicted to those yellow, pink, blue, green notes. My desk is full of them but I haven´t yet beat one of my former colleagues whose computer screen looked like the fabulous back of a peacock.

Forbes.com had an article published in January "Why Computers Can´t Kill Post-Its". Pretty fun, "Office workers are like electricity: When they want to get something done, they follow the path of least resistance" which is why "the Post-it note continues to flourish on every surface of the contemporary office, despite all those expensive computers ready and willing to help". According to a researcher on MIT.

All (the other) things you can do with these small quadratic pieces...
The Spectacular Sticky-Note Experiment

Draw it! Viral game with Post-it

It´s not (only) about your great skills in drawing you have to be a master in guessing. 3M launched a viral game Draw It, where you can challenge other players to guess what you are drawing on your Post-it note. Like Pictionary. The players have to come up with the answer in 30 seconds. Article in thedrum.co.uk

I can tell you for sure, it´s hard to write a Leopard on the screen with only your touchpad. My online competitors took wild guess on Camel, Horse, Cow (My year in Art school was no good for this game),...But, I beat them in the end!

The P&G team

Since last week I joined the P&G team so all of my projects are currently for this client. I´m responsible for strategy/concept/ideas and function as a consultant from the strategy department. Since client service is the owner of the projects I will have regular contact with the client. I work together with the account manager so he is responsible for all the contacts but I´m part of the meetings as well.

Challenges - the responsibility for a project manager
I learned a lot during a time in February. My role was not project manager for 100% but still I got the feeling of how it works. I worked with the development for two projects (P&G) and made sure deliveries were on time. The working flow inhouse, resources, dialoge with the client, bring the ideas and feedback from the client to the information architectures and graphic designer, to discuss and finally approve the design.

It take some time to get used to the traffic system and the fast changings with resources, especially when the deadline is close and to know my own limits. To be the link between the client and the rest of the team, veritcal as well between the members in the team is a great challenge!

* Skaters in the sun, teamwork :)

Strategists The plan for the strategy department is to work more with "new business". More engagement in pitching and bring in new clients and cases. The latest pitch went very well and Hypermedia won this client! Since the beginning of this year there have been several projects going on with brands like softdrink, retailing stores, banking and cases for P&G etc.

Earlier work The campaign I mentioned in my blog from january, the early discussions for a contest was approved by the client and the project is under production at the moment.

During this time I´ve been here I have had many mentor talk about the projects, what is working and is good thinking now and what can be improved in my work. Most of the time we discuss the solutions I came up with, if the strategy and the concept works, if the if the big idea is "selling" and understanable and according to the brief. This daily- or weekly meetings, updates and sometimes brarinstorming is helping me a lot in my work.

Regrets... yes, I really regret I didn´t bring my camera on Friday. The work arranged a special Cuba night at work and there had been a great opportunity for a nice photoshooting, but... I just tell you instead ;) it was a very good time. At occasions like this, you always discover things and talents people have that you had no idea of. Always intriguing.

* (The photo, outside "Slote Tarasy" last weekend) People observation is fun, especially skaters. People are always helpful and caring if something goes wrong even if you don´t know the person, but , of course , you have one thing in commmon, wearing the "things" on your feet that make you easily fall... if you fall in the mall, it´s too unpredictable for people around you...