Creative types pull out all the stops for Christmas e-stunts
The DLKW Christmas webcam: Monkey doesn’t envy whoever sits next to the camera 
And the award for best Christmas e-message to have landed in Monkey’s inbox has come from ad agency DLKW – they of the Howard/Halifax ads. The agency has set up a webcam, designed as a snowdome, showing a bunch of festively dressed and, er … busily working staff. A click of a button sets off an alarm in the agency and the staff proceed to do wacky things or hold up messages. There is also a twitter feed and phone number to ask for “requests”. It’s like Big Brother-meets-Mad Men gone interactive. Or not.
A runner-up gong goes to the cringeworthy miming of hordes of the staff at Publicis to the Black Eyed Peas’ I’ve Got A Feeling. Weighing in at over five minutes it is worth it to see head honcho Neil Simpson dancing on a table, some girl doing the running man and a guy trapped on the toilet reading a paper. Albion has gone off on a tangent and decided instead to help a Christmas Farm decide which one of their turkeys to keep as a pet and which one to eat. Are you guys West Wing fans, per chance? One is called Brad and one is called Beyonce. Their lives are in your hands and Beyonce is winning.
St Luke’s has gone for a bunch of staff ringing handheld bells in succession to make up Christmas songs, which is sweet, but perhaps a little derivative of the classic AKQA stunt from last year, Monkey appears to be off the list this year. The “what on earth were you thinking award for bad taste” goes to Work Club and production company Hotspur & Argyle. The companies have developed what is meant to be a comic spoof of a Metropolitan Police interactive anti-knife crime campaign, called Drop the Weapons, which really, really does not work and is in poor taste. Bah - humbug!
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More than 700 complaints back Lib Dem MP’s campaign against altering images in adverts
Virgin Media ad ‘offensive to ginger people’
Mark Sweney guardian.
Twiggy in the Olay advert that, it was ruled, could give consumers a misleading impression of the effect the product could achieve’
A magazine ad for an Olay beauty product featuring Twiggy has been banned by the advertising watchdog, after more than 700 complaints gathered for a campaign against airbrushing in ads by the Liberal Democrat MP Jo Swinson.
In the ad, Twiggy, who also fronts Marks & Spencer’s TV campaigns, promotes the Procter & Gamble-owned Olay Definity eye illuminator. Her picture appears next to the words: “Olay is my secret to brighter-looking eyes.”
“Because younger-looking eyes never go out of fashion … reduces the look of wrinkles and dark circles for brighter, younger-looking eyes,” the ad continued.
The Advertising Standards Authority received two complaints that the ad was misleading because the image of Twiggy had been digitally retouched.
In addition Swinson forwarded more than 700 complaints, gathered via her anti-airbrushing web campaign, that the ad had was not only misleading but also socially irresponsible, because it could have a “negative impact on people’s perceptions of their own body image”. Read more…
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About a month ago, WebProNews interviewed Google’s Matt Cutts, who suggested that page speed may soon become a ranking factor in the world’s most popular search engine. Speed has been a consistent theme with the company over the past year or so, with the release of various tools and announcements. It has become quite evident that Google places a great deal of importance on speeding up the web. With that in mind, it’s not hard to see why Cutts’ suggestion could soon become a reality. Google has always maintained that it is trying to deliver the best user experience, and by delivering results that load quickly users should get just that.
Do you think it’s a good idea for Google to use speed as a ranking factor? Share your thoughts here.
While many webmasters are embracing the notion of speed as a ranking factor as a welcome change, there are also plenty of people who do take issue with it for a variety of reasons. We’ve had some interesting comments from readers on the subject. Here are some of them:
So, we all have to pay for the most expensive hosting now or we won’t get found in search engines. I won’t be able to host on my own servers at work now. It went from paying for backlinks with huge advertising corporations to get sites PageRank up, Now we have to go with even bigger corporations that can afford to have a massive pipe connecting to the Internet. I don’t think Google mean to, but they are squeesing the poor people of the World out from search results and glorifying huge corporations – Be careful Google!
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Page speed is going to be a big political issue. Apart from concerns about net neutrality, what about countries who’s internet infrastructure is vastly inferior to the technology rich countries. Regions like south east asia and central china have much better connections than east africa. Even some parts of Scotland have poor internet links based on the ageing BT networks. Also the people who can afford dedicated servers and high quality bandwidth have a big advantage over the common Joe who has to rely on shared hosting. Does this make google less democratic? or are they just following what they think people want, ie faster loading sites? Read more…
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Satellite broadcaster to launch Europe’s first 3D channel at screenings of James Cameron blockbuster in 700 cinemas
Avatar: created using 3D filming techniques. Photograph: Twentieth Century Fox
BSkyB is to launch a nationwide 3D ad campaign in cinemas tomorrow, using James Cameron’s sci-fi epic Avatar to promote its launch next year of Europe’s first 3D TV channel.
The satellite broadcaster chose the film to carry the first major consumer awareness campaign for its 3D channel because Avatar, which Cameron has been working on bringing to the big screen for 14 years, was created using 3D filming techniques.
Sky’s ad campaign, created by its in-house agency resource Sky Creative, will run ahead of showings of Avatar in 700 cinemas nationwide when the movie premieres tomorrow, and will run for six weeks.
The ads run with the strapline “3D TV from Sky, coming soon to your existing Sky+HD box”. In July BSkyB outlined plans for the as-yet-unnamed 3D channel that will offer movies, entertainment and sport.
BSkyB is also launching a marketing campaign for the 3D TV service at the O2, of which it is a sponsor, and at its shop at the Westfield centre in west London. Read more…
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Web giant Google told to stop scanning books and pay €300,000 in damages and interest to publishers
Mercedes Bunz and agencies guardian.co.uk, Friday 18 December 2009 15.44 GMT Article historyA Paris court has today ordered Google to stop digitising books and pay €300,000 (£266,000) in damages and interest to a group of French publishers.
Google was ruled by the court to have violated copyright law by digitising books and putting extracts online, following a legal challenge by major French publishers.
The La Martiniere group, which owns the Editions du Seuil publishing house, had asked the court to hit Google with a fine of €15m, claiming that publishers’ and authors’ works were being illegally copied and published on the web. They were joined in the lawsuit by French publishers’ association SNE and authors’ group SGDL.
“Even if we can’t undo the process of digitisation, this means they cannot use any of the digitised material any more,” Yann Colin, lawyer for La Martiniere, told Reuters. Read more…
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CBI analysis shows workers will face pay freezes next year
Bank of England interest rates to hit 2% by the end of 2010
Kathryn Hopkins guardian
Prime minster Gordon Brown was given a helping hand today ahead of the forthcoming general election as a leading business organisation said that Britain’s battered economy would finally exit recession by the end of the year. However, it cautioned that recovery would remain “sluggish” for at least two years.
In its latest snapshot of the UK economy, the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) said that gross domestic product (GDP) would grow by 0.5% in the final quarter of 2009 as consumers rush to the shops before VAT returns to 17.5%, from 15% at the turn of the year. Read more…
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How Twitter roughed out the idea for the ‘retweet’ function. Not shown: annoyed users.
Twitter’s “retweet” function has temporarily disappeared - which one might hope means that the company’s great worked-out-on-a-napkin experiment, which aimed to take the effort out of mouthing someone else’s pearls of wisdom, has died a rapid death. 
Sadly not: according to NextWeb, it’s simply been taken down for a bug fix. Damn - we had hoped that it might have realised that the bug was in the function, not the code.
Why? “Retweeting” usually involves seeing something that someone you follow says, and then copying it into your stream of consciousness*. Before Twitter introduced a “function” for doing so, this meant laborious use of the “copy” and “paste” function, imposing nearly two seconds’ brain effort on time-harried social media experts.
But it also meant that those who thought about what they were working with could add their own comments, by quoting the tweet and adding their own thoughts to them. Read more…
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Are you one of the million Tiscali customers being shifted over to TalkTalk in January? I’m one, and if you are too I recommend you do this. Ring up and say you’re going to switch providers. The call centre worker immediately offered to halve my monthly bill and give me three months free, and I didn’t have to haggle. The call centre is 0845 077 4488 (although it’s only open Monday to Friday).
Perhaps Tiscali thinks I’ll be happy because of the big reduction. Hardly. I feel that I’ve been a mug, blithely paying a monthly bill that could have been halved at any time if I’d threatened to leave. Read more…
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A specialist firearms officer has been disciplined for boasting in an online forum that he could “put a bullet” between the eyes of his sergeant.
The 41-year-old police officer was given “words of advice” and transferred to another unit after officials at Greater Manchester police read his postings on the networking site UK Police Online. Read more…
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Revenues from customers in Britain were diverted to Google Ireland
Simon Bowers guardian
Google is one of a number of multinational companies engaged in ‘transfer pricing’, seen by many anti-avoidance campaigners as one of the biggest challenges for the exchequer Photograph: Alamy
Google, which has an estimated 90% market share of UK internet searches, last year used a cross-border network of subsidiary companies to ensure it did not pay a penny in corporation tax on its £1.6bn advertising revenues in Britain. Read more…
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