AdWonder Blog

Its been a fantastic weekend for EyeWonder attendees here in Toronto at FiTC. The event was well-balanced, jammed full of fantastic presentations, and the parties were of course awesome. Some of the highlights:

• Sneaks on Flash Media Server 3.0 - there are some innovations having to do with H.264 and stream switching which will drastically change the performance of our video ads. I can’t wait for us to start working with the new stuff. I also am interested to see how this affects some of EyeWonder’s recent work in the in-stream market.
• Grant Skinner’s favorite things - I’ve seen Grant talk before, but he discussed some of his more experimental tactics. He’s always fantastic at explaining how he approaches things without overwhelming people. If you’ve never checked out his site - I highly recommend it (www.gskinner.com/blog), but it looks like he’ll also be posting conference notes here in the next few days.
• 2.5D vs. 3D discussions - there were three areas of note here - the 3d panel, Ralph’s solo presentation which was great (although I missed a little running late from lunch), and several sneaks in the Adobe keynote. Adobe showed some very cool future animation/tweening tactics to lower the entry level for creating 3d animation. The conference had a panel with several Adobe product managers as well as some of the smartest dudes around on the subject. One thing of note that I think is useful, for those of us in the advertising world, is the thought that you don’t have to spend all this time learning something like papervision if you don’t want to - often times creating a small animation and either exporting as a video or series of bitmaps will make more sense. Pro: 3D libraries for flash afford you are the ability to allow for interactivity, and also to save on bandwidth, Con: CPU usage for any vector-based animation is something you’ll want to consider carefully.
• McDonald’s happy meal workflow - Julian is always really smart about presenting things that are both techy and practical, so it was fun to see how Fuel conquered their most recent cross-promotional endeavor with an international happy meal project. He discussed a lot about what technologies/tools they used to make internal communication and the final execution both successful and efficient, and I’d be surprised if a lot of folks didn’t walk away with the correct notion that they need to start using things like bugzilla and subversion to vastly improve their own team process.

That’s it for now - hopefully some of our agency friends will win some fun awards at the final event tonight - good luck everybody!

So it’s been a month, and I’m finally able to start reviewing my notes from Flash on the Beach. There were tons of inspiring sessions and interesting people, and Brighton is really a super-cool town. I don’t want to write yet another review, since you can see more qualified thoughts and wrap-ups like these all over the place:

http://theflashblog.com/?p=302

http://www.jonnymac.com/blog/

http://swfoo.com/?p=157

http://www.rockonflash.com/blog/?p=84

http://www.gskinner.com/blog/archives/2007/11/conference_reca.html

As everybody else said - the speakers were amazing. Lots of really unbelievable work, including some non-”flashers” (or probably more like ex-flashers) like Robert Hodgin and Rob Chiu, who were really intelligent, creative, and inspiring. From a rich media perspective, there was certainly a lot to take in, although mostly in the form of tools we can start thinking about incorporating into our own releases, as well as cool stuff you can start thinking about doing in your campaigns.

A few ideas:

Particles (Seb Lee-Delisle’s crash course) - I never really thought about how much cool stuff you can do with some really basic math. When I get a few minutes, I might post a few ideas.

PaperVision3d - I know Ryan and I have been talking about it for awhile, but there are starting to be a few really cool interactive ways to incorporate this sort of technology into an ad to make it a REAL 3d experience (instead a video which uses 3d effects).

AIR apps - With the word “widget” currently overtaking the internet, it’s cool that there is now a platform that will allow you, with the tools you already know, to create desktop applications. Lee Brimelow did a great talk on how to quickly create AIR apps, and while a little branding widget may not be taking advantage of all the cool stuff AIR can do, it’s certainly convenient on the production side of things! We just released a product called SocialWonder, which will allow you to post online widgets through EyeWonder ads, but what about a downloadable little thingymibobber as well?

Nifty FMS ideas - Lisa Larson did a great session about cool FMS applications like games, communications, chats, etc. There are certainly lots of innovative ways to apply some of those things to your campaign - virtually limitless possibilities as long as we are still considering challenges in audience scalability.

Man, I can’t believe it’s mid-November and I haven’t written since August. My most sincere apologies to those of you who stop by to see what’s new every once in awhile. I have been traveling pretty much non-stop to visit many of our clients, and also to attend a few Flash Conferences as well.

Some of the noted trips:

1. LA - got to spend a bunch of time over with Tequila - they are doing some super-cool stuff on the Nissan brand with Flash 9 and AS 3, which I’ll get to share with ya’ll next week. They are embracing the component in a major way - kudos to them for doing some pretty amazing stuff. Also Ayzenberg has started to use the component now - which is VERY exciting!
2. Adobe MAX - I agree with what Grant S. said about it - it’s a little bit more corporate and less personal than some of the more grassroots conferences, but wow the community is HUGE. There are a lot of cool things coming out with Adobe - most notably AMP (Adobe Media Player), a new version of Flash Media Server, and some pretty cool little side projects they have using AIR like Buzzword. AIR is growing up quickly, and now that you can export Flash projects into AIR applications directly in Flash, we’re probably going to start seeing lots and lots of AIR applications.
3. NY/DC - met some more of our fabulous agency partners and got to do a shortened best practices presentation for 80 creatives! It is definitely a little nerve wracking when you hop off a plane, speed into Manhattan, and then immediately walk into an 80 person presentation, but I guess there’s no better way to get over an early morning flight than that.
4. Dublin - London - Flash on the Beach - Dublin is officially my new favorite city. It’s friendly, the pubs are great, you can walk everywhere, and everybody drinks Guinness (it’s good for you, you know). We also have a really great new office there, which we share with some really cool dudes called MadDog Multimedia, so it’s exciting to see us expanding the way we are. I didn’t mention that I also got to go over to Germany recently to visit our new office in Cologne. I’ve got to learn German.

As I find the time, I’ll put up some more specifics on some helpful things I learned at Flash on the Beach as well so stay tuned. And I promise it won’t be 3 months from now.

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