Barely Concealed Narcissism

Catching Up With ‘09: My way of making up for putting these posts off…for months at a time.

It’s hard to survive in this cross-platform, cross-media, cross-channel, cross-everything-but-dressing world without, well, mixing up your executions a bit. So building VH1’s The Great Debates campaign was both entertaining and relevant.

VH1’s The Great Debates ran for a week after July 4th, providing its viewers with the answer to such debates as “Star Wars vs. Star Trek” or “Beatles vs. Stones.” LocaModa was tasked with bringing this debate to the general public. Using digital out of home and web executions, we gave users the ability to text or click their votes and then we showed live updates in Times Square, in bars across the country, on VH1.com, and on Facebook. We also used some “social polling” to check in with how popular each topic was on Twitter. And VH1 carried the baton even further, displaying live text-in results during the show. How’s that for a little buzz-word bingo action?

(Note: Video shrunk a bit to fit here. See full size.)

The campaign garnered a large number of interactions, especially considering its short seven day flight. And it’s already been named a finalist for a 2009 MITX award. We’re hoping the accolades continue through 2010.

Catching Up With ‘09: My way of making up for putting these posts off…for months at a time.

ATT’s digital out of home presence at pop star Demi Lovato’s summer tour was really my first major launch at my newest gig. We gave concert goers (and online participants) the opportunity to text or email messages and pictures to screens at the show, then provided them with a “playback” viewing of all the messages at that show. Users could go online after a concert and see a virtual replay of the DOOH screen. They could then capture the screen as an image and post it to Facebook.

Turns out 12-18 year old girls love to text. Who knew?

This campaign, one of Loca’s most successful in terms of user numbers, is a great example of engaging an otherwise bored [albeit captive] audience. AT&T had hundreds of eye balls staring at their brand; and by the end of the campaign their brand was on thousands of handsets (in the form of mobile text-backs).

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As I continue the transition from building ActionScript executions in Flash to going with a Flex-only method, I came across something I hadn’t tried in Flex before: size reports.

The Flex debugger provides an “uncompressed” size of your application in the trace output, but there’s no obvious way in the UI to show that breakdown. Being that Flex’s guts are in the command line, however, that’s where we can generate the size report.

If you check out your project preferences, click on ActionScript Compiler and add the following to the text field under “Additional compiler arguments:”

-link-report output.xml

where “output.xml” is the path to the file generated.

Once you’ve got your file (which is really a thorough report on class linkage and more), though, you’re not yet done; if you open it up and take a look, it’s quite confusing.

Fortunately, there are a couple apps that will parse and clearly display the size report. I haven’t really tested them fully, but both look promising:

ItDepends by Joe Berkovitz

AIR Link Report Visualizer by kahunaburger

h/t to Tim Walling for help on this