adidas in Australia - +10 Playoffs using Google Earth

A pretty amazing game. A general knowledge quiz on 11 players, using Google Earth to home in on their home towns, cities they play in and so on. Very good experience, once you can get Google Earth to work.

Info here (Via Adverblog)

New adidas Site and Campaign - Step Inside KG

adidas has launched a new site and ad in the US featuring NBA star Kevin Garnett.

The campaign focuses on KG's different personas - the Warrior, the Kid, the Hero, the Leader, and the Comedian. Each persona features a short vignette, with an insight into KG and the new KG3 shoe.

The site also allows users to view and download (to PSP) the film, and even see a 'making of'.

Mary Woodbridge's Mount Everest Expedition

This viral site is currently spreading like wildfire

Wonder who it's for?

Currently showing 11,000 users, as at 3pm on Monday 16th January

User-Generated Content

My colleague Cory Treffilitti, at Carat Fusion, has developed an passion for User Generated content - that is anything (video, pictures, podcasts) created by consumers that promote brands.

Perhaps it can be best shown through this drive by Firefox to get it's users to create their own ads for the browser, with the best winning a prize - Spread Firefox

Cory's created a blog to document examples of the form, and capture the movement in what will surely be a pivotal year.

Read his UserGenerated blog to stay up to date!

US Christmas Sales Figures Compared

Study by Performics.

Sadly not figures for the market as a whole, but 'sales per relationship', based on 300 advertisers tracked by Performics - effectively performance-driven advertisers, using affiliate marketing.

Update on Google Image Results Post

I now have some answers from Google:

It seems that they've been doing this for a while, on limited search results. Another example is Fido Dido, which seems to work on any variety of Google, but is a low volume search term. They've been experimenting to see how it looks, how it works in terms of response etc.

Another way of doing a low volume test is using a common word (e.g. laptop) but in restricted way - for example users from Denmark searching on google.co.uk - see the screen grabs below.

They say that this is similar to what they're doing with the 'One Box' - non-web search results at the top of the page. An example of this is to search on 'King Kong', which, if you are logged into Google local with your postcode will give you film results at the top.

I'm guessing that they're at the data gathering stage on this, and that it will be fully integrated - perhaps with options to turn it off - later this year.

Update - it also works on UK Map

Google Integrating Image Results into Web Search?

Here's an odd thing that my colleague Jackie Junker Frandsen noticed a few minutes ago.

Jackie is based in Denmark, and when he did a search for 'Laptop' on google.co.uk he got the usual results, with three image results shown under the top three paid listings (see pic).

I've tried to replicate this from the UK - but all I get is the standard Google results.

We had two theories -

1 - they are the top image results - except that they aren't - they don't appear in the top 5 pages of image results

2 - that they're ads - except that they don't bill themselves as ads, and whle two of them click through to merchant pages, the third goes through to a student's page

On reflection I think that they're examples of image integration - but the images have been chosen by Google - they're not the top results for the page. Which leads me to think that this is an engineering test. Also, this only works on 'laptop' - nothing else we can think of gives any picture results.

For the record the pictures click through to:

Computercare.ca

A page at University of Michigan &

Abcom.uk.com

7Up in the Netherlands

A new site for 7Up in the Netherlands. Type a thought into the box, and see someone walk past the screen thinking it. They don't seem to be screening rude words - not in English anyway...

See it here

Created by Qi Ideas