Project 3 for Jason Arena’s Dynamic Persuasion class will be a group project with my homie Keith Beltramini. I’ve always had a great experience working with him, and he’s an awesome 3d/motion graphics designer.

Here are the layout comps:

Assessment of Online Advertising

Technology is ever-changing; it is always improving because of man’s need to constantly push forward. Of late, one area of technology that has exponential increased usage is the internet. A large reason for increased usage is the changes in marketing practices over the last few years. Growing up in this time period has given me firsthand experience of how differently the internet has been used in the past and how it is used today.

In the past and sometimes even today, banner advertisements have been a primary source of revenue for many companies. With flash introduced to the marketing industry, banners have been a powerful way to market products, due to the low cost for production and publication, as well as the high amount of impressions or click-throughs. With our improvements in technological knowledge, banner ads can now be displayed according to a website’s subject; this has increased click-through rates. However, the general public of the internet have become smarter; they’ve developed a sort of banner-blindness, and banners oftentimes go unnoticed.

Because of this, a new form of marketing called Viral Marketing has exploded on the internet. The main cost for a Viral Marketing campaign is its production and maintenance of the campaign project as it becomes more used. Viral Marketing is made successful by word-of-mouth advertising; users share their experiences with other users, and those users share their experiences with even more users. The process repeats, ‘infecting’ and spreading the message to a mass amount of users in a short period of time, the way a real-life biological virus spreads from one infected person to each one they come in contact with. This process is more likely to be a success rather than other marketing methods due to the fact that users will experience the viral content because it is endorsed by a friend.

The main goal in the production of a Viral Marketing campaign is to create something that hasn’t been seen before. There are many different methods in which companies do this; viral content is found in the form of images, audio and video clips, websites, games, or a combination of the respective mediums. There are also many different tones that a company may take; for example, (cool!) http://halo3.com/believe/shell.html, http://www.hbovoyeur.com/, (weird/funny) http://www.petmoustache.com/, http://www.shaveeverywhere.com/, http://www.thepantswhisperer.com/, ((axe loves) hot girls) http://www.xn--folytasdajtkot-4gb3k.com/.

With fast broadband access in more and more homes everyday, viral content has become heavily video based. I only see it going further from there, bringing video and other viral content to the wireless channels, as phones with video and internet capabilities are becoming widespread.

I was having troubles with scope issues last night so I didn’t get much done. Now that I figured out the problem it should be pretty smooth sailing from here.. I need to populate the database with lyrics, so if you’d like to help, post your favorite lines of a song here: lyrics visualizer beta

that’s all for now..

edit** After speaking with Jason in class AND finding out that we only had a week to complete this project, I’ve decided to remove the lower charts information area at the bottom, and remove the rating system as well, as that’s not necessary now that the chart’s been removed.

In Jason Arena’s Dynamic Persuasion Design class, we’re being asked to create a project that is a interactive experience based on user generated content. My project idea is a website that allows users to submit their favorite Music lyrics and rate other submitted lyrics. The website has different sorting features, such as, top-rated lyrics, most-used words, most popular artists, and recently posted.

I’m still trying to figure out how I want the data to be visualized; I’m not sure whether I want it to look neat “web-app” like, or more dynamic, messy, and organic. Sketches/comps to come!

I was inspired to do this when Jason put Keith Beltramini’s discussion board post up on the projector: ecotonoha, I’m not sure how I put the two together, but the idea came to me, and I’ve been thinking about it since yesterday.

This summer was a busy but super-fun one! My internship at ROKKAN was mind blowing! I really got into OOP (Object Oriented Programming) and briefly went through AS3 - Matt Wright was a really good mentor, and taught me a great deal. I’ve done work for Deutsche Bank, 4Kids.tv, Time Warner, Jump Shoes, and Jawbone, just to name a few. The only project that is live right now is the splash page I did for Jump Shoes, I’ll post other work as they become live. All the peeps at ROKKAN were very welcoming and they really took care of me. It was an awesome experience that I’ll never forget.

I’ve also been freelancing for Thumbplay, a mobile content company/community located in the Soho district of NYC, it’s been a blast!

I’m currently sitting in Jason Arena’s Dynamic Persuasion Design Class right now, and I hope this class is as great as all his other classes! Hopefully I’ll be able to bang out a couple of portfolio worthy pieces - I can’t wait to graduate and continue working in the real world!