A playdate in the Sandbox
By Mike Newman
Lastweek saw Google’s first Creative Sandbox event outside the US, held inSydney’s Carriageworks.
Robert Wong, Google’s New York basedExecutive Creative Director, explained his job was like that of anyagency CD, and to prove it he set the evening up with a slogan:
“The best thing you can do tonight is to make friends with a geek”.
The idea was to inspire by giving Australians a hands on chance totouch, feel and play with the latest technologies from the GoogleCreative Lab and YouTube. Products showcased included ChromeExperiments, Wave, Insights for Search as well as iGoogle and Mobileapps.
Wong called on agency creatives to take advantage of “a veryspecial time. The web is ready, audiences are primed and creative’shave this huge opportunity to do something that’s never been donebefore.”
Local Google staff enthusiastically manned each of the demo stationswearing t-shirts asking: What happens when creativity meets technology?
The question probably remains unanswered, in as much as most ofSydney’s ‘top’ creative directors were conspicuous by their absence.(But after all, the cricket was being shown on old technology thatnight.)
Nevertheless, a couple of ad agencies impressed by showing theirdigital creds, notably Earth Hour and Virgin Mobile’s RightMusicWrongs.
YouTube Product Manager from San Bruno, Jay Akkad, put things inperspective with his quote that YouTube boasts 450million users/month.Making it the 3rd largest “country in the world”.
His presentation highlighted Levi’s ‘Guy back flips into jeans’ as anexample of how popular videos last longer than advertising campaigns.But new technology YouTube videos will be more interactive; they can beannotated (with speech bubble etc.) or more interestingly, like the USad agency Boone Oakley has done, they can actually take the place of afree standing website, with click through case histories, reels, thelot. There were many in the crowd who hadn’t seen it already and wererightly impressed.
H&R Block has built games into their otherwise pedestrian video andHP’s YouOnYou Project, a more interesting example, allows users toupload, remix and express themselves using mash technology now readilyavailable.
On the business side, YouTube’s new Insight tool gives account holdersall kinds of feedback on who it is that watches your videos, where theycome from, how long they viewed, where interest peaked and fell andmore, and you can compare it against other videos in the category oragainst the whole YouTube catalogue. Which means viral campaigns cannow get instant feedback from hard data as well as from communitycomments.
Google’s free Insight for Search, is an even better tool if data is your king.
You can get detailed behavioural info on who is searching what keywords, where they come from, when they search, what they search next,etc., etc., across months or years, and against up to five competitors,as well as view forecasts for the next few months. A great way to trackand interrogate the results of a campaign, and probably interesting ashell for media buyers.
“Statistician will be the sexiest job for the next ten years” enthusedAaron Koblin from Google’s San Franciscan Creative Lab. (That’s OK, Iguess, they’ve waited a long time for their moment.)
Koblin’s job is finding creative ways to visualise data. If you’ve seenthat video showing 24hours of air traffic movements in the UnitedStates sped up to sixty seconds or so, then you’ve seen some of hiswork.
Another one of his gems is a map of Amsterdam that shows the locationand volume of SMS messages on New Year’s Eve, rendered as 3D towersacross the city that pulse phallically around midnight.
It’s also worth checking out his Radiohead music video for ‘House ofCards’ where Koblin made his 3D programming available for users toremake their own version, substituting anything from oil blobs to Legobricks for his pinpoint lines.
The most bizarre of Koblin’s collaborative projects was his internetposted request for peoples’ drawing of ‘sheep facing left’. Bizarrenot because of the way he analysed the responses, but because just oneof the more than 10,000 people who joined in asked “Why are you doingthis?”
The evening’s local heroes were Stephanie Hannon and Lars Rasmussen,based in Sydney, who are in the final development of Google Wave, adiscussion and productivity tool enabling people to communicate in realtime using text, photos, symbols, even maps, by sharing a wave whichcan be embedded anywhere on the net (eg. blogs etc). Even robots canhop on the wave, as language translators for example, so documents orsophisticated projects and mock-ups can be co-created online fromanywhere with the ease of instant messaging.
What else was in the Sandbox to play with? Heaps.
Synchronised banner ads that interact with each other, or that canaffect the host page itself (you might have already seen the SuperMario that explodes the whole page). Interactive gimmicks that addvalue to Google Earth and Google Maps, where you can add notes,drawings, send smoke signals(!) or even decorate any building in theworld with party lights like Coca Cola did for its campaign lastChristmas.
In short, the Sandbox is packed with a lot of technology that islooking for a client vehicle. Which brings me to my favourite: a milktruck that you can drive through any location on Google Earth by usinga Wii Fit balance board.
Not sure what commercial use it can be put to. But that was the whole point of the event. To make creative people wonder.
Michael Newman michael@brandnewman.com.au