New Florence. New Renaissance.

Ikea and Noto typeface

Noto is considered the most universal typeface in existence. That’s because computers don’t necessarily recognize all glyphs, particularly in less common languages that have their own scripts. If your computer doesn’t recognize a letter, it will render the glyph as a box, which is called a Tofu in the typeface biz. Noto is short for “No Tofu,” providing visual representations of every letter of all of the 800 languages. It’s part of Google’s goal to make a font available for every language that is considered a script by Unicode, the consortium that creates standards for computers.

Given that in the last year Ikea opened its first store in India, where there are 22 national recognized regional languages, to go along with stores across Asia where conventional Western typefaces don’t work as well, it makes sense that the company wants to use a font that will support a broader range of languages.

Fast Company

 

 

 

BA "Look Up" Magic

I am headed to UK next and hope to see one of these billboards in London (they are not that new, but I have not been to London in a few years).

"The charming execution, which featured adorable children on the digital boards pointing at overhead planes, masked a technologically complex backend. It involved mounting an antennae on the roof of a building near each board. The antennae picked up data from the transponders of British Airways aircrafts within 200 kilometers and fed that information into to an application that identified the flights. The application then sent the information to a server that served the messages about the plane's destination or origination. A "trigger zone" acted as a trip wire to determine when a plane should instigate a message and cloud altitude data determined if the plane could actually be seen."

 

 

Digital Marketing Data Nuggets

Spending on digital media surpassed television ads in 2017, and now global digital spend is anticipated to top $333 billion this year.

Thanks to Tamas Hevizi for pointer to the infographic from Visual Capitalist. Here are some nuggets

 

• Search:
  The top five search results for a keyword on Google get 70% of the clicks.
• Social media:
  80% of B2B leads come in through LinkedIn vs. 13% on Twitter and 7% on Facebook.
• Video marketing:
  Video will represent 82% of all internet traffic by 2021.
• Cold email marketing:
  Emails sent between 10-11am have the highest open rates. Tuesday is the best day to send cold emails.
• Paid advertising:
  The mobile ad blocking rate has increased 90% year-over-year.
• Lead generation:
  61% of marketers say generating traffic and leads is their top challenge.
• Content marketing:
  47% of buyers viewed 3-5 pieces of content before engaging with a sales rep.

 

 

 

 

Orbital Ads

Oh no, you may say, but they are headed our way. From Slate

"Since Sputnik 1 was launched in 1957, satellites have been a mostly invisible part of our daily lives, allowing us to make phone calls, monitor the weather, and map our locations. We can sometimes catch them in the night sky, but they’re hard to spot, even if you’re looking for them. Satellites like StartRocket’s Orbital Display are meant to be watched, and as satellites are becoming easier to launch, our skies could become the biggest screen of all.

StartRocket isn’t alone in the for-profit entertainment satellite game. ALE is the Japanese startup behind Sky Canvas, a project to launch a series of satellites that release shooting stars on demand—“a whole new level of entertainment,” its website boasts. Its first show will take place over Hiroshima in spring 2020."

 

The new subliminal ad?

ASMR or "autonomous sensory meridian response,” is a meditative phenomenon that's surging in popularity, It describes a tingling sensation some people experience in the scalp and spine when hearing certain everyday tactile sounds recorded in a quiet repetitive, scratchy and often lightly percussive manner.

Crinkling a newspaper. Spraying a water bottle. Typing on a keyboard. Stirring macaroni and cheese. Whispering into a microphone. Tapping literally anything.

Millions of people these days watch or listen to videos of strangers performing these mundane actions. They say they’re mesmerized. They say it relaxes them and even helps them doze off during restless times.

WSJ (sub required)

you probably saw this Michelob ad during the Super Bowl

and this Pepsi one shows it can distract as much as help concentrate

 

Amazon as advertising giant

Amazon.com Inc. handles nearly half of all online sales in the U.S., giving it a popular platform and a wealth of consumer data. Now it’s on track to become the next juggernaut of online advertising, and its rise threatens to upend Silicon Valley’s ad titans and change the way business is done on Madison Avenue.

WSJ (sub required) 

As the chart in video shows it is still a distant third behind Google and Facebook but fast accelerating

 

Great recruiting vid

From the SodaStream team, led by CEO Daniel Birnbaum.

Since the ad, it has agreed to be acquired by Pepsi for $ 3.2 billion

The State of Marketing Tech

Marketing technology is increasingly enabling marketers to be more strategic and direct their investments more effectively. But marketers also face challenges as they implement new strategies and integrate new technologies. More than half feel “overwhelmed” by the sheer amount of mar-tech data they’re now confronted with, according to Accenture Research. Meanwhile, only about a third of marketers globally believe the CEO of their company recognizes the revenue and cost-saving potential of investing in mar tech, and the majority think the mar-tech industry itself is evolving faster than their company’s use of it. Still, nearly seven in 10 marketers are turning to mar tech to increase overall ROI, and nearly half are doing so to improve their marketing efficiency.

AdWeek

The best part of the Super Bowl–the commercials

Ad Age has a running tally of all the pre-released SuperBowl commercials including one in which the world’s richest man, moonshines as an actor.

Netflix’s micro-markets

Attracting a global audience isn’t just a matter of luck–nothing at Netflix is. Rather, Yellin and other colleagues go through endless rounds of AB tests and experimentation on everything from how to position the show to different users, how to dub a show in order to maintain authenticity in tone and language, to how to pick the right dubbing actors. (In order to maintain continuity for Winona Ryder fans, the same actor who dubbed Ryder’s voice in Beetlejuice and Bram Stoker’s Dracula dubbed her voice in Stranger Things.) The idea is to personalize the show in as many ways as possible for every single Netflix member, regardless of where they live. In the past, Yellin explains, Netflix thought about its international users more by market. So a user in Morocco, say, would be shown the same poster art and other materials related to a show, as everyone else in Morocco. But Netflix found that “taste communities” transcend borders, and that your own “taste doppelgänger” might live on the opposite side of the globe. Now Netflix instead caters to its 2,000 taste communities. “We want the people who tend to watch the same things,” he says. “If we know that you watched the same thing as a whole other group of people, we’ll put you in the same taste community and we’ll understand how to suggest titles to you and know which ones bubble up to the top.”

Fast Company