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Customize a Ralph Lauren Rugby with an iPhone app or interactive store window
Ralph Lauren has been on the cutting edge in their use of technology for a long time.. This past Thursday their Rugby brand launched their latest effort called ‘Make Your Own’ that includes an iPhone application and interactive window at their store in Greenwich Village.
The iPhone application lets you create their own Rugby shirt directly from their iPhone by choosing from a variety of shirts, patches. letters and adornments to make your own unique creation. If are having trouble finding your inspiration you can browse and purchase other peoples creations as well. The app also smartly uses Facebook Connect so you can post your creations to your Facebook feed. The coolest feature is that you can see how the newly created shirt will look on you by uploading a photo. With all of that finished you can then purchase the shirt and/or post it to the gallery to inspire other people.
The interactive store windows spot a large iPhone and the experience is pretty much a simplified version of the app to make it easier to use in that format. I like this better than their previous interactive store windows for two reasons. First is that it is an interactive experience unlike the passive experience that was created with QR codes. Second is that you can participate in the brand experience of customizing a shirt day or night and when you are finished you can leave your design on the store window for passerbys to see.
Of all the work that Ralph Lauren has done over the years to push the boundaries of technology in high end retail I think this work is their best. They were the first major American retailer to use QR codes but that technology never caught on because QR cods are never going to be part of the technology landscape used by the mainstream American consumer. It will always be relegated to niche promotions like the old Ralph Lauren store windows and the recent Kidrobot Dunny launch. American’s are going to completely bypass technologies like QR codes that were created during the pre-iPhone era in favor of mobile applications that offer a richer experience. In this case the iPhone app will get me to finally buy a custom Rugby because I am a design freak who wants to obsess over every detail of the shirt and that just wasn’t something I wanted to do for n hour in the store.
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More examples of how good messaging can save a bad experience
Who knew AdAge had a sense of humor?
Just over 2 years since the launch of the iPhone and this is the first time I have ever seen the designers who were smart enough to create a custom iPhone message give the user a another way to experience their work. Bravo to FL-2 and can you send me the code so I can add it to my all Flash portfolio site?
While you are there also check out their very cool Twitter visualizer I Tweeted My Pants.
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City of Champions Redux
If you have every spent any time around with me you know that I was born and raised in Pittsburgh, which I am very proud of, and I am a die hard Steelers and Penguins fan. So the blog will be taking a few days off to celebrate the return of the City of Champions thanks to our Steelers and now the Penguins!
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Take the pledge for all of us
Thought this was funny if you know someone in your studio use one of these typefaces to the pain of the rest of us. If so you can help with this poster to make your colleague take this pledge and sign it. Preferably in their own blood.
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Following the Monster.com career path may get you lost
A friend of mine sent me an email about the new Career Path functionality that Monster.com recently launched. He thought it was interesting and worth checking out so I headed over to see what I would predict for my future. The concept is kind of like a virtual guidance counselor with two different options to get advice. First you can put in your current job and it will tell you what would be a good next move or you give it an ending point and it will try and build a career path for you. Let’s just say that I am glad the functionality is still in beta because it wants me to become a Web developer or producer. I will be curious to check back in on it in a few months to see if it gets smarter as more people use it and it gets smarter.
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Your advertising career evolution
Dad always said the longer you’re in advertising the farther away you will get from what you love to do. I thought this illustration was the best visual representation of that fact I had ever seen and it made me laugh.
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Facebook advertising standards are a hypocritical joke.
So I will assume if you are reading this that the headline got your attention. It’s a direct reflection of how sick and tired I am of feeling the need to write this parade of articles about just how hypocritical Facebook is about a lot of things.
About a month ago we all watched as Facebook take down the Burger King campaign Whopper Sacrifice because it went again what they called the site’s “user expectations”. This means that the ad created an experience or an action that went against what user would expect when they use the site. So they made their line in the sand with that decision and we all took note. So tonight as I was mindlessly cruising the site something caught my eye that made what they did to Whopper Sacrifice even more of a complete hypocritical joke. What caught my eye were the two ads I took screenshots of and are just a sampling of actual ads that are running right now on Facebook. They are built to look exactly like the Facebook user interface and in some cases have absolutely no advertising message at all. At least with Whopper Sacrifice there was a message about what was going to happen while here you have a “user expectation” that is just a complete lie.
Once again I am completely baffled with who is so asleep at the wheel at Facebook with all of these issues. They have a site that every advertiser would kill to be able to harness and would throw buckets of cash at them to do it but they can’t keep their head out of their ass long enough to have it happen. We all can see the potential but right now I wouldn’t let any of the brands under my watch spend any money to create a major campaign on Facebook because if this kind of stupidity. The fact that Facebook can’t see that is the biggest reason why they are going to have nothing but these bush league ads on their site for the foreseeable future.
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Corporate stop sign design
A few years back the video about what it would be like if Microsoft designed the iPod packaging was all the rage. It was a really funny and sadly realistic look at what happens when corporate America takes control of the design process. This new video looks to be the successor to that Microsoft video at it explores what if there were no stop signs, and a major corporation was charged with inventing one. It is again a sad and often painfully true inditement of the majority of corporate creativity, where groupthink and endless revisions rule the day.
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Adbusting Photoshop style
Messing with subways and street outdoor ads have slow become an really interesting art work over the years. The latest and most interesting work I have seen appeared in Berlin recently where they put custom Photoshop palettes over the clearly highly retouched ads.
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Ogilvy’s advice on the recession has a recession
I came across an interesting site today from Ogilvy who ever trying to spin the message has launched a site all about the recession in an attempt to keep brands from cutting their budgets. This site gives you access to a series of booklets with titles like ‘Optimizing The Marketing Budget In Recession’ and ‘Turning Shoppers Into Buyers’. They are target at CMOS and CEOs to highlight strategies and tactics to try and take advantage of different channels through these economic troubles.
Enough about the set-up. So after reading the into to the site I was curious and wanted to see what they had to say about turning shoppers into buyers. I clicked on the link and low and behold a lead generation form pops-up which is to be expected on something like this. I filled out the form and hit download to get the PDF. A few quick seconds later the file had downloaded and popped open in Acrobat. The first thing I noticed was that it was only 1 page which seemed strange but maybe it was some really good and really condensed knowledge. I scrolled down to find…. YOU HAVE GOT TO BE #@$%ING ME.
After all the lead up, after the pitch to position themselves as the shepherd who can get you through the storm all you get is a 1 page coming soon PDF? You expect clients to trust you next year with their limited budgets when they are under intense pressure for results when you can’t even come up with the goods on your own advice? I will check back next week and see if any real content shows up and if it does I will write a follow up on what they have to say.
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