Cadbury has been known for their unusual ad campaigns like the Cadbury Gorilla ad from late 2007, but I have to say that their new ad campaign has stepped it up.

I’d post a video of it here, but I can’t find it hosted anywhere that has embeds so you’ll have to check it out on The Sun’s article page to watch it.

article:  Cadbury’s ad raises eyebrows

According to The Sun, it’s “one of the weirdest adverts ever to appear on telly”.

It’s from the same production company as the Gorilla ad, Glass and a Half Full Productions.

Update

The video has finally been posted… enjoy!

Through small progressive changes by outside forces the sketch on my whiteboard has slowly evolved into this:

Someone carved JASSON into a tree in the woods near the family farm. I say ’someone’ because I don’t remember doing it. The tree is fairly large, so I may have done it as a kid but I really wasn’t the type to run around carving my name into things. 

The lettering has warped a little through the years and its hard to make out all of the letters, but through the magic of Photoshop I tweaked the photo to make them stand out.

Whoever carved my name into the tree, it’s nice to know that I have a “monument” to my name… even if this one is deep in the woods of WNY.

So after a couple tweaks I made my Time Stacks widget available publicly and after two days of being live it’s the highest ranked clock widget on Chumby.

Whoo hoo!

Yesterday we launched the first version of Captions on YouTube videos.

Video owners can now add multiple closed captioning files to their videos in over 120 languages.

Here’s the original blog post:
New Captions Feature For Videos

FlashForward was just in San Francisco and this was the first one I’ve been to that was run by Metalliq and not Lynda.com.

We had a booth right near the entrance and had a lot of foot traffic. Between the office, booth, and conference, I only made to a few sessions. Unfortunately the general buzz of the conference was disappointment.

Instead of the usual format of multiple sessions running at the same time, Metalliq daisy-chained all of the session into a large dark auditorium with no tables and instead of having inspirational and learning sessions they also decided to go with all inspirational. So new Flash users who were hoping to learn something were stuck watching portfolio and site reviews of more advanced designers and developers without gaining any knowledge on how to reach that level.

The last day of the conference I was talking to one Metalliq organizers and they mentioned that they were happy with the turn out but realized they need to switch it up for the next conference.

In either case, it was great catching up with my Flash friends and I made some new ones as well. 

Here’s YouTube’s blog post, Video Annotations Now Display On Embeds and some samples:

]]> http://www.usingutensils.com/design/let-the-embedding-begin/feed/ 0 http://www.usingutensils.com/design/macro-strobing/ http://www.usingutensils.com/design/macro-strobing/#comments Wed, 30 Jul 2008 06:21:07 +0000 jasson http://www.usingutensils.com/?p=222 This last Sunday I went to a photography lighting class in San Jose. We didn’t get to actually shoot a whole lot, but I met some new people and learned a few things:

Definitely watch for more, but as you already know, it might take a few months weeks before I post them. 

The buzz started when 37signals wrote a brief post earlier this week stating that features were a one way street and once they are in place they can’t be removed on large, popular products.

After reading the post I saw it more as warning to research new features and avoid feature bloat.

While it’s impossible to always create a killer feature, research and testing can help point things in that direction (I blogged about this two years ago in Hitting the Sweet Spot (see pull-quotes below) and my sentiments are still the same).

While I agree that removing rarely used features can sometimes be painful it is by no means impossible or wrong to do so and my friend at Elapsed Time did a great job articulating this point (see post and pull-quotes below).

Feature Gene Pool

Product features should be viewed in a Darwinistic manner, where the ultimate goal for a feature should be to carve out a niché that is integrated within it’s environment and not counter to it.

And like genes, both “good” and “bad” features should attempt to grow and evolve by testing various tweaks to see what works and doesn’t.

However if the feature isn’t viable after multiple “generations” or is detrimental to it’s environment, it needs to either have its parts merged into another feature or get out of the feature gene pool all together.

37Signals: Features are a one-way street

“The lesson: Once your user base has grown beyond a certain point, you cannot take features away from them. They will freak out.”

Elapsed Time: Features ARE NOT a one-way street

Besides the pull-quote below, he also calls out a great list on what strategies to take into account when reviewing features.

“I disagree – knowing what features to deprecate is one of the toughest challenges in prod/eng/UX mgmt but good leaders have to make these types of calls.”

Using Utensils: Hitting the Sweet Spot

“There is a lot to be said for kick ass new features and ideas but if those features aren’t well thought out, well executed and/or robust enough most users will think it’s cool then simply move on to the next site. However if there is a multitude of scattered features users will just get frustrated and leave.

Hitting that S-Spot often requires time, experimenting, and user feedback but once the features have reached the point where they are interactive, robust, and more importantly useful the users will keep coming back for more.”

MicroPledge: Thank you, Adobe Reader 9!

Definitely check out the post it’s hilarious and steeped sarcasm. Here some quick pull-quotes:

“For starters, version 8 was a 22 MB download. Version 9 is a mere 33 MB — a whole major version up, and not even twice as big…”

“On my cable connection, it took about 5 minutes to download, nicely allowing me enough time to brew a decent cup of coffee while I waited…”

“I was impressed. It started in a minuscule 13 seconds, plus the time it took me to skim their poetic and beneficent license agreement.”

“Ah, the joy of using a new product. Unlike Microsoft products, Adobe’s new, bigger Reader behaves exactly the same as the old one. In fact, it’s so compatible I can’t even tell the difference! Boy, I know good release management when I see it…”

Whoo Hoo… a few days ago we launched Annotations internationally! 

On a completely unrelated note, Happy 4^th of July!