Mini Augmented Reality Ad

Nice tie in between digital and print by those clever people at mini.

lastminute.com retail space

lastminute.com opens its first shop in London on Monday.

The temporary outlet – or ‘live retail space’ – is due to appear in London’s Covent Garden from Monday for 48 hours before moving to Birmingham and Manchester later in the month.

The lastminute.com store will give a selection of live experiences from the website’s portfolio of products free of charge.

The ‘good stuff’ store will at midday on Monday at St James Street in Covent Garden for two days before being packed up and moved to Birmingham on March 10-11 and Manchester on March 13-14.

Perhaps a useful article on design signoff

Perhaps a useful article on design signoff http://24ways.org/2007/10-ways-to-get-design-approval

Three ways to see what search engines think of your site

1. Use the search engines’ webmaster tools.

All three search engines offer tools for webmasters to help you understand how the engines see your site. At minimum, you should connect your site with Google’s Webmaster Central and Yahoo’s Site Explorer. MSN also recently launched its own Webmaster Center, and you should consider connecting your site there, too.

2. Use the site:yourdomain.com search command to diagnose problems.

Even if you don’t use the various webmaster tools provided by the search engines, you can still learn a lot about what they think of your site with this command. Here are some:

• How much of my site is in the index? If you have a 500-page web site, but the site: command shows that only 75 pages are indexed, you’ve just learned that you have crawling issues. It could be that your internal navigation is preventing the bots from reaching all your pages, or it could be that your site doesn’t have enough trust/authority to be crawled more deeply. (Getting more quality inbound links, especially to deep pages on your site, will help with the trust/authority problem.)
• How often am I being crawled? Each search engine shows a “Cached” link with each result in the SERPs. If you click that link, you’ll learn when your pages were most recently crawled. What does it tell you? Crawl frequency is another sign of trust. If you’re not getting crawled regularly, work on creating quality content and attracting quality links. Check your main competitor regularly to see how often they’re being crawled — if it’s a lot more often than your site, set your goals accordingly.
• Do I have duplicate content issues? I once worked with a client whose CMS published multiple copies of each page at different URLs. The home page, for example, was available at domain.com and domain.com/home/. The CMS also had e-commerce forms on a secure server, and it recreated the entire site on the secure server, so that https://domain.com/about/ had the same content as http://domain.com/about/ — and both were in the index. I quickly discovered all of these problems by using the site: command.
• Are my page titles and meta description tags unique? This is another aspect of duplicate content. If you have a lot of pages with similar page titles and meta description tags, you’ll find fewer pages getting crawled and indexed. When you run the site:domain.com, it shouldn’t look like the image below.

Brand Name Advertising on Google

Why are are people bidding on competitor brands and what you can do to improve your results. From imediaconnection July 01 08

Google Ad Planner

Google Ad Planner Shakes Up Web Analytics
Google’s new Ad Planner service offers media planners an alternative to Nielsen and comScore. Full Article

eMarketer June 30 2008

Email open rates drop by 3%

MailerMailer’s latest Email Marketing Metrics Report (pdf) takes a look at open and clickthrough rates, the best days of the week to send emails and how personalisation and subject lines can affect open rates.

Dark or Pure GHD

Great little viral game for GHD care of Sal. Some of haven’t got much hair so it was nice she passed it on.

Last year we also had TBWA\Manchester viral ad –‘thy will be done’ aka ‘ghd wanker’. The viral ties in the strap line – ‘ghd, the new religion for hair’. A great insight into the female psyche…?

Difficult is worth doing

Honda latest advertising droped this in my in box. Click here to find out more.

Retailing Revolution: Fingerprint Payment and Interactive Dressing Rooms

According to the New Future In Store by TNS, sixty percent of shoppers across the globe believe that they will be able to pay for purchases using just their fingerprint by 2015 more…