What, in your opinion, qualifies something as a good advert? Answers on postcard, or alternatively in the comments section below, if you find that easier.
In the technical sense the main thing is surely that you actually end up buying the product in question. In terms of absolute results, I suspect that subtlety is probably key. If an advert manages to plant the suggestion that you want to buy something without ever making you feel advertised to, then it's likely to achieve its goals. The problem is that if a person realises this is happening then a fairly strong negative reaction might result, and they might not buy your product out of spite. For example, I'll probably never buy anything I see Derron Brown holding, just in case.
Personally, I've always liked adverts which abandon all subtlety and turn the whole thing into a joke. If your advert shows up next to my wall in Facebook then I'll probably ignore it (unless it actually looks interesting), but if makes me laugh then there's a good chance I'll try your product just for the hell of it. Boddingtons used to be one of my favourite beers (it probably still would be if I could find the stuff), but there's a good chance I'd never had tried it if it wasn't for frankly magnificent adverts like this:
There are a host of other great adverts from the Boddingtons people, but that one has always been my favourite. Years later it still makes me giggle. It's a fantastic set up, followed by at least four quality punch lines one after the other. It seems clear to me, on reflection, that I'm vulnerable to the appeal of surreal adverts. Very, very obvious and over the top seems to work as well, though, because I think the (fairly) recent run of Old Spice adverts are solid gold genius too. It all started with this one:
There really is nothing like a bit of comically over the top hard sell, is there? Happily they followed it up with more of the same:
Aside from the fact that that wasn't actually a swan dive, I think I prefer the sequel to the original. But it gets better. For a while, the "Old Spice Guy" would answer questions adressed to him via YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and other online sources. There are literally hundreds of these thirty second clips, but I think this particular dialogue with Alyssa Milano might be my favourite:
Now, of all the words I might have associtated with Alyssa Milano, "comedy" and "timing" probably aren't that close to the top of the list, but colour me impressed with her reply:
This is about as close to being entertainment as advertising can get, in my opinion. I would likely give Old Spice a try if I could find any near me in Edinburgh. But I can't, so 10 out of 10 for effort and creativity, Old Spice, but you kinda dropped the ball on the follow through. Unless you're reading this, of course, and you want to send me some in the post. That would be acceptable.
I'll leave you with one last highly entertaining, but also functional, clip:
Sunday, January 30, 2011
Saturday, January 22, 2011
The Day Job Part 2: Let's get SAUC-E!
If you know when I started my PhD you'll be aware that it took quite some time for me to finish it. There are various reasons for this. One is that I spent quite a bit of time working and getting industrial experience during it. The other is that it took me something in the region of 18 months to figure out what it was I was actually going to do. This happens quite a bit at the Ocean Systems Laboratory, you don't actually start working on a particular project or problem, you just sort of find something which seems to need doing. It also didn't help that it talk me 9 months to get any feedback on the first draft of my thesis. One of the major things which took up my time, though, was the Student Autonomous Underwater Challenge - Europe, or SAUC-E for short.
This post is going to focus on my own part in the proceedings, but you should assume that everyone else on the teams worked at least as hard as I did, and their contribution was at least as important as my own. This is my blog, though, so I'll mainly be talking about me.
Basically, teams of students build an underwater robot which then has to complete an obstacle course. Let me stress: it is not in any way like Robot Wars, so you can abandon that notion right now. The crucial word here is autonomous, as in you have no contact with the vehicle after you push go; it all has to run on autopilot. The first competition was just ramping up when I joined the OSL and I offered to go along to the site and help out. The fact that it was held at Pinewood Studios (which is a movie studio, not a furniture store) was no small bonus (I've wandered about on the sets for Casino Royale and Stardust), but the competition itself was also very cool indeed. I leapt at the chance to be part of the team for the second year of the competition, and then stared in disbelief as a technical issue nuked our chances right before the final. Up until that point we'd been leading the field by quite a margin, so finishing second to last was no fun at all.
The next year myself and one of my colleagues decided this wasn't going to happen again, so we damn near killed ourselves working sixteen hour days for a couple of months, and then we took the robot to France for SAUC-E 2008. Each year there are a number of supplementary tasks which must be completed. One is to write a paper (or "report" if you're not down with the academic lingo) about your entry, another is to produce a video diary. Our video diary for the 2008 competition does a pretty good job of showing our frustration at the previous year's result and the amount of preparation we put into it this time round:
It was a hell of a lot of work, but we got there and we damn well kicked everyones' asses. In the final we cleared the entire course on our first try. Everyone else used their entire twenty minutes of time. We used about seven. It was a good feeling. This isn't a hugely fascinating video to watch and, but here's the official video of out final run:
What you don't say in that video is me standing on a table with a microphone in my hand narrating what I think the robot is doing, then the entire team practically leaping into the air when it completed the course. Still, here's a picture of us (minus one team member who had to leave a day early) from an article in an industry journal:
[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="450" caption="Team Nessie victorious at SAUC-E 2008. Click for the article this picture is taken from."]
[/caption]
The next year we reworked a lot of the electronics and moved to a much more hydrodynamic external design. This was a good thing, because previously Nessie had been slow, and now the competition area was a lot bigger. The 2009 video diary sums it up:
Most of the tasks were adaptations of those from previous years, but a fairly intense new one was also introduce: dock inside an elongated box placed on the floor of the pool. None of the other teams even attempted this last task, but I'd arrived a little late to the on site practice time thanks to other commitments. Everyone had their jobs and things were running pretty well. My responsibility was the mission controller (the captain, if you want to use a ship's crew as a metaphor) and we weren't quite ready to start doing any serious tests with this yet. So I started working on a strategy to do the docking. There was plenty of grunt work for me to help out with; I did some code review and put together some mission plans, but at this point I was essentially surplus to requirements. So I messed about with the docking thing.
[caption id="attachment_469" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Nessie IV in the practice pool."]
[/caption]
First of all, I built a detector which could find the box from above. I'm not really a computer vision guy, but after a lot of experimentation and playing I managed to put something quite stable together. There was no space in the practice pool to actually attempt the docking itself, though. I put a behaviour together which I was pretty sure would get the vehicle into the box, but I had no reliable way of testing it. I put it to one side and got on with the serious business of the competition itself. This was held at a different location, so needless to say every algorithm needed to be re-tuned to the new environment.
One of the other teams did very well in the qualifying stages and went into the final in second place by a very narrow margin. We new what we could do, and we know what they could do. They had a much better sonar, but no cameras, so some tasks were just plain out of their reach. Even so, it was going to be close. The day of the final we got a bit of extra practice time in the morning. At this point the docking had received about ten minutes worth of practice time, and it's performance had not been what you would call "successful," exactly. I was fairly sure the last night's late night coding session had found all the bugs, though. "Fine," said the team. Give it a shot, but we don't want to waste too much of the practice time on it.
It worked first time.
"Did anyone see that?" There was a judge at other side of the pool, but no one was looking at us. We wouldn't get any points, but still, we wanted the judges to SEE it. Someone from one of the other teams saw some of it though, it seems, because they took this video:
Out supervisor came running over. "Was that autonomous?!" He demanded. Apparently one of the other judges was standing at the monitors and there was a camera inside the box. There was a little bit of a buzz.
We tried it again. It worked again. This time someone had actually put a tape in the VCR, which is nice, but I don't have that video.
The organisers were smiling, but not in a 100% friendly way. No one was actually supposed to pull off the docking this time around. But we had. There was no time to add this behaviour into the plan for our main run in the final, but this year there was a new rule: you could demonstrate the tasks individually to pick up extra points. The final, as it turned out, was not quite as close as we were worried it might be, and Team Nessie picked up another first prize.
[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="450" caption="Team Nessie victorious at SAUC-E 2009. Click for the article this picture is taken from."]
[/caption]
As well as the industry journal from which the above picture has been taken, the BBC paid some attention to the competition this time around, as well (which you can find here). Yep, that's me at the end of the video. They interviewed me for the article they wrote on the competition and used a lot of my quotes. I learned an important lesson from this: assume anything you say to a journalist will be taken literally, and don't assume that they'll check their facts, even if you specifically tell them to because you're not certain of your numbers. For example, the figure of £10,000 mentioned in the article is actually closer to £100,000.
This post is going to focus on my own part in the proceedings, but you should assume that everyone else on the teams worked at least as hard as I did, and their contribution was at least as important as my own. This is my blog, though, so I'll mainly be talking about me.
Basically, teams of students build an underwater robot which then has to complete an obstacle course. Let me stress: it is not in any way like Robot Wars, so you can abandon that notion right now. The crucial word here is autonomous, as in you have no contact with the vehicle after you push go; it all has to run on autopilot. The first competition was just ramping up when I joined the OSL and I offered to go along to the site and help out. The fact that it was held at Pinewood Studios (which is a movie studio, not a furniture store) was no small bonus (I've wandered about on the sets for Casino Royale and Stardust), but the competition itself was also very cool indeed. I leapt at the chance to be part of the team for the second year of the competition, and then stared in disbelief as a technical issue nuked our chances right before the final. Up until that point we'd been leading the field by quite a margin, so finishing second to last was no fun at all.
The next year myself and one of my colleagues decided this wasn't going to happen again, so we damn near killed ourselves working sixteen hour days for a couple of months, and then we took the robot to France for SAUC-E 2008. Each year there are a number of supplementary tasks which must be completed. One is to write a paper (or "report" if you're not down with the academic lingo) about your entry, another is to produce a video diary. Our video diary for the 2008 competition does a pretty good job of showing our frustration at the previous year's result and the amount of preparation we put into it this time round:
It was a hell of a lot of work, but we got there and we damn well kicked everyones' asses. In the final we cleared the entire course on our first try. Everyone else used their entire twenty minutes of time. We used about seven. It was a good feeling. This isn't a hugely fascinating video to watch and, but here's the official video of out final run:
What you don't say in that video is me standing on a table with a microphone in my hand narrating what I think the robot is doing, then the entire team practically leaping into the air when it completed the course. Still, here's a picture of us (minus one team member who had to leave a day early) from an article in an industry journal:
[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="450" caption="Team Nessie victorious at SAUC-E 2008. Click for the article this picture is taken from."]
[/caption]The next year we reworked a lot of the electronics and moved to a much more hydrodynamic external design. This was a good thing, because previously Nessie had been slow, and now the competition area was a lot bigger. The 2009 video diary sums it up:
Most of the tasks were adaptations of those from previous years, but a fairly intense new one was also introduce: dock inside an elongated box placed on the floor of the pool. None of the other teams even attempted this last task, but I'd arrived a little late to the on site practice time thanks to other commitments. Everyone had their jobs and things were running pretty well. My responsibility was the mission controller (the captain, if you want to use a ship's crew as a metaphor) and we weren't quite ready to start doing any serious tests with this yet. So I started working on a strategy to do the docking. There was plenty of grunt work for me to help out with; I did some code review and put together some mission plans, but at this point I was essentially surplus to requirements. So I messed about with the docking thing.
[caption id="attachment_469" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Nessie IV in the practice pool."]
[/caption]First of all, I built a detector which could find the box from above. I'm not really a computer vision guy, but after a lot of experimentation and playing I managed to put something quite stable together. There was no space in the practice pool to actually attempt the docking itself, though. I put a behaviour together which I was pretty sure would get the vehicle into the box, but I had no reliable way of testing it. I put it to one side and got on with the serious business of the competition itself. This was held at a different location, so needless to say every algorithm needed to be re-tuned to the new environment.
One of the other teams did very well in the qualifying stages and went into the final in second place by a very narrow margin. We new what we could do, and we know what they could do. They had a much better sonar, but no cameras, so some tasks were just plain out of their reach. Even so, it was going to be close. The day of the final we got a bit of extra practice time in the morning. At this point the docking had received about ten minutes worth of practice time, and it's performance had not been what you would call "successful," exactly. I was fairly sure the last night's late night coding session had found all the bugs, though. "Fine," said the team. Give it a shot, but we don't want to waste too much of the practice time on it.
It worked first time.
"Did anyone see that?" There was a judge at other side of the pool, but no one was looking at us. We wouldn't get any points, but still, we wanted the judges to SEE it. Someone from one of the other teams saw some of it though, it seems, because they took this video:
Out supervisor came running over. "Was that autonomous?!" He demanded. Apparently one of the other judges was standing at the monitors and there was a camera inside the box. There was a little bit of a buzz.
We tried it again. It worked again. This time someone had actually put a tape in the VCR, which is nice, but I don't have that video.
The organisers were smiling, but not in a 100% friendly way. No one was actually supposed to pull off the docking this time around. But we had. There was no time to add this behaviour into the plan for our main run in the final, but this year there was a new rule: you could demonstrate the tasks individually to pick up extra points. The final, as it turned out, was not quite as close as we were worried it might be, and Team Nessie picked up another first prize.
[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="450" caption="Team Nessie victorious at SAUC-E 2009. Click for the article this picture is taken from."]
[/caption]As well as the industry journal from which the above picture has been taken, the BBC paid some attention to the competition this time around, as well (which you can find here). Yep, that's me at the end of the video. They interviewed me for the article they wrote on the competition and used a lot of my quotes. I learned an important lesson from this: assume anything you say to a journalist will be taken literally, and don't assume that they'll check their facts, even if you specifically tell them to because you're not certain of your numbers. For example, the figure of £10,000 mentioned in the article is actually closer to £100,000.
Friday, January 21, 2011
Spins a Webb, any size...
Okay, so there has been a shameful lack of posts here in recent weeks, and for that I apologise. I've had some stuff going on in both my personal and professional lives, and so this blog has really been put on the back burner. I swear to you that there is more coming, though, and soon. I have a fairly large and media laden post which is mostly written, but not yet bloggified, for instance. In the mean time, how about a small diversion?
Even if you know me in real life, you might not be aware of this small fact, for which I feel no shame whatsoever:
There are various reasons for this. I love the iconography, I love the visuals, I love the character and the supporting characters. Most of all, though: I love the story, and if I have a couple of drinks in me I may wax lyrical about this at length (that's starting to make sense now, isn't it?). The previous set of films got some things right, but an awful lot wrong. Casting, for instance. I have hope for the currently in production reboot though, and just about everything I read about it or see raises this hope a little higher. Today, for instance, I saw this and it made me very happy indeed:
It's been enhanced in software, which is why the background looks so weird (you can find the original here), but it just looks so right. That's a picture of Peter Parker in the Spidey suit, likely having just had his ass handed to him. He's not stupidly muscled, because Spider-Man is supposed to be wiry, and furthermore: he's played by someone who acts well, looks the part and is actually capable of cracking a joke. What joy. Insert smiley face here.
While we're on the subject, the recent casting for the next Batman film makes me quite happy, as well.
Even if you know me in real life, you might not be aware of this small fact, for which I feel no shame whatsoever:
Spider-man is my favourite fictional character.
There are various reasons for this. I love the iconography, I love the visuals, I love the character and the supporting characters. Most of all, though: I love the story, and if I have a couple of drinks in me I may wax lyrical about this at length (that's starting to make sense now, isn't it?). The previous set of films got some things right, but an awful lot wrong. Casting, for instance. I have hope for the currently in production reboot though, and just about everything I read about it or see raises this hope a little higher. Today, for instance, I saw this and it made me very happy indeed:
It's been enhanced in software, which is why the background looks so weird (you can find the original here), but it just looks so right. That's a picture of Peter Parker in the Spidey suit, likely having just had his ass handed to him. He's not stupidly muscled, because Spider-Man is supposed to be wiry, and furthermore: he's played by someone who acts well, looks the part and is actually capable of cracking a joke. What joy. Insert smiley face here.
While we're on the subject, the recent casting for the next Batman film makes me quite happy, as well.
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