advergirl

Museum AR app completely changes the landscape, um, streetscape

The Musuem of London launched a break-through AR app last night. It uses 3d, video and geolocation to remake your personal tour of London into a live look at the past.

Here's how it works:

The app leads you to various locations around London using either the map or GPS. Once you’re there, click the “3D View” button, and the app will recognize the location and overlay the historical photograph over the live video feed of the real world, giving you a brief glimpse into how the past looked:

 
 

 
 

This strikes me as a huge opportunity for tourism bureaus...to do more than show a map of the city and show people what to expect inside the great restaurants, big venues, beautiful museums. Love what technology can do for experience. Totally downloading this one.

More at Buzz Beast

Social retailing at the crossroads of recommendations and social search

That post last week about Cap's new Facebook Connect-powered tour experience got us talking again about the promise and possibility of integrating brand content with live social input.

Of course, we looked at all the usual examples (including the still-creepy-over-a-year-later Prototype Experience), but there's one that stands out as an easy, powerful integration more brands should be making:

Levi's Friends Store

 

It's a friendly, personal little shopping experience that asks you to log in with Facebook Connect to see both what other Facebook users like and what your actual friends say about their favorite denim. All the brand's coupons and offers from their own Facebook page appear in the right rail.

 

I'd love to see this built into Facebook itself, but the experience on this outpost is nearly as good. You do have a sense of what people like you are choosing - with a much more personal face on it than the algorithms Amazon uses ... the ones that somehow decided I should really buy The Rambler and a 38-piece casserole set (pass, thank you).

That said, looking at my personal friends store, I'd guess this isn't highly adopted technology yet ... all my recommendations seem to come from other ad bloggers (@griner is the next review down). Still, this feels like a step in the right direction.

Capital University uses Facebook Connect for a what-it's-really-like tour

Talk to any admissions counselor and they'll tell you that students who take the campus tour are more likely to choose that school. Any liberal arts school worth its salt has invested heavily in those tours. They're romantic (what life could be like) and choreographed (but not exactly what your life would be like).

If you can get the potential students there, you're halfway to getting them in. But how do you get more students to take the tour?

Colleges have tried a lot of tactics - from getting more students to physically attend (busing students in en masse, offering a special concert or other programming, waiving application fees) to taking the tour experience to students (elaborate college fair booths, online videos, integrations with Google Streetview). The former are expensive to maintain; the latter just don't have the same emotional context. They don't feel like school.

I think Capital may have cracked the code with a new Day One experience on their website. This was one of the final projects I worked on at Ologie. It definitely evolved between our last notecards-on-the-wall brainstorm and its recent launch, but I recognize the general approach:

• Balance of big ideas (dreamy) and specific opportunities (tangible)
• Personalized experience (Facebook Connect decorates the workspace with your real photos)
• Guided exploration (continuously choose-your-own-adventure from custom populated menus)

Oh, and shiny-object moment: I totally love how the photo nav works on those desktop iPhones.

Take a peek:

 

   

Your first job matters

Or: Why some of my most successful friends were once baristas.

Remember that CareerBuilder ad - "You'll spend more time with your job than you will with your spouse. Choose wisely." 

It must have been circa 2001*. Before the towers came down. I read it, poster-size, on an (inadequate) shelter up on the el platform waiting for the morning train. Great advice. Why don't more people think that way about work? Choosing your job is choosing your life.

Especially, as it turns out, your first job.

Here's the #1 mistake I see advertising and marketing newbies make:

They take a job in-category, but out of their interest area.

Biggest violator: Would-be strategists and account managers take a first job as an assistant or admin to someone who has the job they want someday.

The truth: The admin only moves into the big office in the movies. It's the Pretty Woman** story of work. 

Second biggest violator: Could-be writers and designers take gigs as account coordinators, just to "get in the door."

The truth: There are few walls in this world higher than those between the right and left brain sides of agencies.

I totally get why any newbie would do it, though. College behind them; real life waiting. Unsatisfactory job market; lots of pressure to land somewhere. An agency with a great brand offers you a chance to join up? It's hard to say no.

But here's what you don't know yet: The work you do typecasts you. And, changing your brand is hard.

When you're looking for job #2, your resume is going to lie about you. It will say what you've done not who you are. And, getting people to listen so you can tell a new story ... not easy.

It's actually easier to pour coffee.

To take a job entirely out of category- one that people will instantly know was just a make-money-while-I-find-my-dream-job kind of gig.

And, do the work that gives your energy and inspiration on the side as a freelancer or volunteer to stay fresh.

Yep, you read that right - Advergirl says go live in your parents guest room and work at Starbucks. It's the best possible move for your ad career.

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Notes:

*That's right, the woman who can't remember the name of the restaurant she ate at last night, CAN remember the year and location that she first saw an advertisement almost a decade ago

**A 20-year-old movie reference that will like be lost on the very people I'm writing to because I'm too damn old to speak with the right context and nuance.***

*** Thinking I like this DFW-style footnoting. Troubling new blog feature?