Steve Ellis : Marketing

Press release: A Rough Guide to the World

Steve — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 09:00:00 GMT

Here's the formal release:

Metia creates a ‘Rough Guide to the World’ web site for leading travel publisher

· Interactive site uses Windows Internet Explorer 9, HTML5 and Flickr to allow travellers to participate, contribute and share their unique travel experiences online

· Global launch of Windows Internet Explorer 9 showcases the Rough Guide to the World

September 16^th 2010 – Metia today announced the launch of the ‘Rough Guide to the World’, an interactive web site designed and developed for leading travel publisher Rough Guides. The new site, selected as a showcase for both the Global and UK Microsoft Corp. launch of Windows Internet Explorer 9, allows visitors to browse hundreds of travel experiences from Rough Guides’ inspirational book, Make the Most of Your Time on Earth. Rough Guides is challenging travellers to help complete this ‘Rough Guide to the World’ by contributing images of their own experiences via Flickr.

The site uses the latest web technologies available in Windows Internet Explorer 9, the latest version of the web’s most used browser, including support for HTML5 (the latest mark-up language for the web), to deliver a faster and more immersive experience for users. In addition, the site integrates with the Flickr photo sharing service through its API to serve geo-tagged images and is hosted on the Windows Azure platform.

Visitors to the site use a compass control to navigate an interactive map of the world and explore destinations based on their favourite activities from extreme sports to high art. Search functionality allows users to display image sets (including their own Flickr photos) as a layer on the map.

Users can build a list of their favourite experiences, drawn from the Rough Guides book, Make the Most of Your Time on Earth, and share them with friends using Facebook, Twitter or email.

Steve Ellis, CEO, Metia, says: “All organisations are seeking to create rich interactive experiences that engage their audiences. Rough Guides has a great brand and loyal customers, who are united by a mutual commitment to authentic travel experiences. Our brief was to use the very best of new technology and popular web services to create an interactive experience that would resonate for Rough Guides’ readership and other like-minded travellers.”

Peter Buckley, Digital Publisher, Rough Guides, says, “It has been genuinely exciting to work on this project at such a pivotal moment in the evolution of web functionality and design. New technologies are now allowing web creatives to define the way we use the Internet, rather than fitting design around clunky web page structures.”

Buckley continues: “The Rough Guide to the World brings together the best of new web technologies, standards and services with the use of Internet Explorer 9, HTML5 and the Flickr API. Effectively, these and other technologies offer a palette of tools through which we can now engineer amazing web experiences.”

“With Windows Internet Explorer 9, companies like Metia can extend the power of Windows into their websites and turn them into fast and interactive applications that are just as familiar as other Windows software-based applications,” said Dean Hachamovitch, corporate vice president for Windows Internet Explorer at Microsoft.

Key Facts

· The site includes over 500 experiences from the Rough Guides’ Make the Most of Your Time on Earth book

· The map is based on the Mercator Projection of the World

· At its starting point, the map displays approximately 600 tiles. At this zoom level each tile equals approximately 700km²

· At its highest magnification, the map of the world is composed of more than 90,000 individual tiles, of which 1,800 are in view at any one time. At this zoom level each tile represents a 40km² area.

· The site supports several IE9 specific features including Favicon pinning and jump lists.

Technology

Windows Azure platform

· Microsoft SQL Azure (using spatial queries)

· Flickr API

· Bit.ly API

· CSS 3 (W3C Validated)

o Box shadows

o RGBA colours

· HTML 5

o Canvas tag

o SVG (W3C Validated)

o WOFF (Web Open Font Format)

o Semantic Structure

Notes for Editors
You can view the experience at http://makethemost.roughguides.com.

The Rough Guide experience site will be showcased within the HTML5 section of Internet Explorer 9 Microsoft, please see the link www.thebeautyoftheweb.com

The site is best experienced using Microsoft Internet Explorer 9 – which can be downloaded free – but also works with other modern browsers which use HTML5 standards. HTML5 consists of a series of web standards, which enable modern browsers to provide more interactivity and a richer user experience without the need for plug-in technology.

Experiences are from Make The Most Of Your Time on Earth, 2^nd Edition, Published 1^st September 2010, ISBN: 9781848365247, $29.99.

About Metia

Metia is a digital marketing agency with annual revenues of £16 million and operations in London, New York, Seattle, Singapore and Sydney. Employing over 230 professionals, Metia delivers experiences, solutions, services and tools that are focused, smart and repeatable – and that generate measurable value.

For more information: www.metia.com

Media contact:

Melanie Hesketh, Metia

+44 203 100 3584

melanie.hesketh@metia.com

About Rough Guides

Rough Guides is a leading travel content provider with more than 700 travel guides, gift-books, maps, phrasebooks, bespoke custom publishing guides and digital products, including eBooks and mobile applications. From country guidebooks to city guides and inspirational travel specials to Round the World planners, there’s a Rough Guide to suit everyone with accurate, up-to-date information and informed, contemporary writing. Make The Most Of Your Time On Earth™

For more information visit: www.roughguides.com

Media Contact:

Rachel Sprackett, Rough Guides

press@roughguides.com

Tags: Microsoft, Rough Guides, Internet Explorer 9, HTML5, Metia, Make The Most Of Your Time On Earth

Taking the wrappers off a 'Rough Guide to the World': an #IE9 beta launch showcase

Steve — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 17:55:00 GMT

Some time round about now in San Francisco and London, Microsoft is formally taking the wrappers off IE9. Which means our NDA and embargoes time out and we can shout about the Rough Guide to the World.

I suspect the launch will grab a bunch of coverage, because despite a lot more competition being out there these days, Internet Explorer is still the planet's most popular browser. Consequently, a new version gets noticed and talked about, so I'll leave it to other posts to review the features and capabilities of IE9.

Our interest is that we have just completed a project with Rough Guides the travel publisher - the Rough Guide to the World - that uses the best of IE9 and the HTML5 standards within it. In fact, for good measure, it also uses Flickr's API, shares via Facebook and Twitter, and just to complete our tech buzzword bingo, it is hosted in 'the cloud' on Microsoft's Azure platform.

The site has been quietly live on Azure at makethemost.roughguides.com for a couple of days now. But now that the global launch of IE9 is underway, we can talk about our role in building the site. In fact, the Metia and Rough Guides teams will be in the keynotes at both the San Francisco and London launch events.

If you want to take a look the site you'll need to download IE9 (do, it's worth it), or be using another HTML5 capable browser.

If you want a teaser there are some screen grabs below. The more formal press release, which describes the site, will be linked as a post here from 10.00am tomorrow.

If you are a marketer who wants to know how to create experiences like this for your brand, or you need to understand the implications and opportunities of these new technologies, then get in touch.

If you are a developer and interested in the story of how we built the site, well we built it in just six weeks, so there is a satisfied but tired team here. In the next few days and weeks we'll share some insight into the technical story, here and on some developer channels too. Stay tuned.

Tags: Microsoft, Rough Guides, Internet Explorer 9, HTML5, Metia, Make The Most Of Your Time On Earth

World Cup Fever: the final score

Steve — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 21:23:00 GMT

Not everything goes to plan. My World Cup journey ended in a bar in Washington DC, rather than Johannesburg.

While neither England or the USA exactly set the competition alight. Metia came away with more than a few extra fans.

Metia's Mobile Keepy Uppy game has now been downloaded over 25,000 times and continues to get over 1,500 downloads each day.
The Youtube video has been viewed over 7,500 times.
The World Cup Pivot has had over 15,000 people use the site to interactively interrogate the player stats.

Football fever aside, each of these projects was conducted as a Proof of Concept (PoC), designed to explore aspects of mobility, social, and data analytics respectively. Aside from the obvious output, each PoC generated learnings about the different technologies, channels and social outreach techniques employed. All of which will now get fed back into our client's projects.

If any of this stuff interests you, or you are curious about how it can be applied to real campaigns and projects, get in touch and we'll share the inside track.

Tags: Mobile, World Cup, Keep Uppy World Cup, Metia Labs, Microsoft Live Labs, Pivot, Seadragon, World Cup, Metia

Can you spot the eight iconic World Cup moments in our video?

Steve — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 09:19:00 GMT

Here's something to occupy the barren hours before kick off.

The creative team tell me there are a magnificent eight moments of iconic World Cup history recreated in the video we knocked up for our Mobile Keepy Uppy game.

Can you find them?

BTW - we passed 10,000 downloads at the weekend.

Tags: Mobile, World Cup, Keep Uppy World Cup, Metia Labs, World Cup of Time Wasting

Beach Break Live: Silverlight 4, Photosynth, Spotify and thousands of students

Steve — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 15:03:00 GMT

This week we have had a team over at the Beach Break Live student festival in Wales. Our role was to build and sustain a virtual experience that gave a flavour for the live events happening at the festival.

Live streaming wasn't an option, so instead we created a site that used Microsoft Silverlight 4 to mash Photosynth images and Spotify playlists related to what's on around the different festival stages.

Aside from a few local bandwidth issues caused by thousands of students simultaneously nudging, poking and checking-in with each other, everything worked just great.

Take a look below or check out the site to get the full Photosynth experience.

Just because you can, doesn't mean you should

Steve — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 16:43:00 GMT

Yesterday I got a piece of personally targetted direct mail with a proposition specific to my business. Nothing unusual there. But it was sent to me at my home address. In fact the whole creative angle was trading on how clever the sender was to connect the two pieces of data in a piece of personalised DM - a colour photo of our office, with my name on it, sent to me at home.

After a spooky moment, the first thing that popped into my head was, Stalker!

Probably not the effect the DM agency had in mind. Needless to say I'm not buying.

The convergence (confusion?) of social/personal and business worlds has created opportunities for companies to make errors of judgement in how they make use of the data they can gain access to.

Technology is always opening up lots of new possibilities. But just because you can now do something, it doesn't always mean that you should.

Need to supercharge your sales process?

Steve — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 15:51:00 GMT

Good post here by Gartner's Richard Fouts on using customer references across the breadth of an organization.

It comes complete with this nifty little quote from Richard:

"Case in point: now that Metia has supercharged Microsoft’s customer reference solution, the sales process moves faster, site traffic has increased and more prospects and customers download Microsoft case studies."

Couldn't agree more with Richard's general sentiment: "when customers migrate to evangelist territory, they are worth 10 great sales people".

Ever seen a microsite full of interactivity & video inside a 55k banner ad?

Steve — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 15:05:00 GMT

Want to see a whole microsite experience squeezed into a teeny tiny banner ad? The Mass Effect 2 launch campaign is now live at MSN UK Gaming.

What's all this about? See the previous post. World's first interactive and expandable banner ad (we reckon)

Mel Carson at Microsoft Advertising has posted on the banner here.

Correction: I'm told after opimisation the banner is only a tidy 41k

World's first interactive and expandable Silverlight banner ad (we reckon)

Steve — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 14:41:00 GMT

Normally I'd shy away from ever claiming a 'world's first' - someone, somewhere must surely have got there first? But in this instance we think we are on solid ground.

Working with the team at Mediacom we have been busy putting the finishing touches to a digital advertising campaign to launch Electronic Arts' next big title: Mass Effect 2. The campaign launches next week.

The brief was screaming out for the use of special effects to create a compelling in-game style of experience. Microsoft's Silverlight was perfect for the task. Deep Zoom and Smooth Streaming offered our creative team angles for creating a game experience effectively within the digital banner (that's a static image taken from the banner experience above - and another below. I'll post a link when the campaign is live next week).

Everyone including the client loved the concepts and creative solution. Just one small problem. When we came to discuss the opportunity with Microsoft Advertising, none of the usual suspect ad serving companies were capable of serving expandable and truly interactive Silverlight banners.

Undaunted we spoke with Ad Dynamo, the South African HQed ad serving marketplace. Ad Dynamo were up for it. Together we have spent a couple of months planning and building the world's first genuinely interactive Silverlight ad serving capability as a collaboration with Ad Dynamo, ourselves and the folk at Microsoft Advertising.

So when the Mass Effect 2 campaign launches on MSN next week, it'll feature the world's first ad served expandable Silverlight banner. The campaign is getting broad exposure on the MSN homepage, amongst other locations, so it'll be seen by millions of visitors.

Our Silverlight team - and the client - are all excited by the creative experience achieved. But being a restless bunch, they have already moved on to explore what other creative effects are now possible to deliver within digital advertising formats that can be enabled by Silverlight ad serving.

And, obviously, Microsoft is pleased to open up the world opportunity offered by Silverlight's capabilities to advertisers and creative teams. I suspect it is an area many creative agencies aren't currently equipped to explore. If creative agencies want to know more about the project, or need some help in using Silverlight to create rich experiences, get in touch.

Update: the Microsoft Silverlight product team have posted on this project here. Thanks chaps.

Data driven design? Analytics vs aesthetics?

Steve — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 20:17:00 GMT

Something else for marketers and especially designers to embrace - data driven design.

James Governor has a great analysis of the drivers behind Adobe's Omniture acquisition - Adobe Omniture: Data meets design. Here comes Google! if you are a marketer or a designer read it and understand how our world is changing.

Charlene Li compares brand value and engagement

Steve — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 08:20:00 GMT

Charlene Li, now the sole employee of Altimeter Group, has produced a new report - free to download - correlating leading brands' level of engagement in social media and their value.

The report can be found here and explanatory post from Charlene here.

Metia, PageLife and SEAT

Steve — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 13:35:00 GMT

Our SEAT Exeo project has been written up as a Microsoft case study and put up onto microsoft.com, find it here.

Many thanks to the SEAT team for agreeing to share the highlights.

Tags: Seat, Exeo, Silverlight,Microsoft Advertising, Metia, PageLife,

TechNet UK goes virtual June 19th

Steve — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 07:40:00 GMT

Great to see Microsoft's UK operation making the most of the company's virtual events platform (mentioned a few times by me, including first of all here).

Why go virtual? My view is here.

Or in the words of TechNet UK:

... helping you to cut costs, increase efficiency and reduce environmental impact, whilst still getting all the latest information you need on Microsoft technologies and technology insights.

Sounds like enough good reasons to me.

Find out more here or better still tune in on June 19th.

Tags: TechNet, Microsoft, virtual events

Digital magazines: it's all about interactivity

Steve — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 15:38:00 GMT

A few months back we announced the PageLife platform for producing e-Magazines - or digital magazines - built using Microsoft Silverlight technology. So it is interesting to note a couple of pieces around the topic of e-Magazines.

ReadWriteWeb has penned - the Digital Magazine: Has its Time Come? - prompted by the demise of the print format PC Magazine in favour of a digital only edition. In fact RWW takes a dim view of the digital version PC Magazine.

We perused the June edition, but didn't see a lot of interactivity. Also many of the hyperlinks simply opened up pages in PC Magazine's website. A letter from a reader in the feedback section of this issue noted how he likes to print out parts of the digital PC Magazine. That implies to us that PC Magazine hasn't fully escaped the shackles of print. In fact it seems very much like the print magazine simply transplanted into an eBook. The magazine has plenty of fans, and is known for its reviews, however, it still has a few tricks to learn about digital magazines by the look of it.

RWW did reference much better examples, in particular Avantoure, a lifestyle magazine that started life exclusively as a digital edition. Avantoure looks to have an interactive design team that are digital natives and operate free from any print legacy.

This point links to the second post from MediaWeek on Buyers Wary of Electronic Subs Counted into Circulation Stats. The piece quotes media buyers as complaining that digital editions aren't worth the paper they are not written on.

Scott Daly, executive vp, executive media director, Dentsu America, said he sees “absolutely no value whatsoever” to digital editions and that if he were negotiating with a magazine that sells digital subs as part of its circ, “we would probably discount it, because a digital version of a magazine is not the reason we’d go into a magazine.”

I agree. Sticking a passive ad inside a sealed PDF to be despatched to free circulation oblivion would be a waste of money. The point is media buyers need to capitalize upon the opportunity for interactivity to get the best from the medium.

That's just what Mediacom did by asking us to help their client Seat with this example of an e-Magazine created for a recent Seat car launch. We pushed for rich interactivity, Seat agreed, and loved the results. Shortly, we should be able to share a few of the performance analytics. The lead conversion rates are most noteworthy, they are much higher than we'd normally expect from a microsite (although the work of Mediacom and MSN in targetting would have played role too).

Several more PageLife based e-Magazines are in the pipeline. We'll keep an eye on performance and report back.

Tags: PC Magazine, e-Magazines, Avantoure