Cross channel AR game from Lego

Looking forward to seeing this in action

Anyone can sit there and watch American Gladiators on TV, but fans of Lego's Bionicle toys can now battle it out online in a new interactive video game experience.

Canadian kids-entertainment powerhouse Corus has partnered with Lego on a new campaign called "Bionicle Glatorian Legends" to promote the Bionicles, a line of robot-like toys produced by Lego. The centerpiece of the campaign is new augmented reality video game technology on YTV.com. Essentially, it brings the user into the game via a webcam with flash animation and the online and "real" worlds are blended together. Users signal their participation by logging on with their webcam and signalling the game visually with a marker that they can download on YTV.com.

The campaign starts on Aug. 31 and the two augmented reality games will be available for six weeks. It is targeted at kids aged 6 to 12, a viewership that coincides with the target demographic of YTV's Crunch programming on Saturday mornings. The campaign's broadcast tie-in comes on Aug. 29 at 9 a.m. when YTV host Andy will show kids how to play the game during the morning programming.

"It's a brand new way to engage kids online," Tim Cormick, VP client Kids are invited to battle it out on YTV.com with an innovative new online video game technology.marketing at Corus Television, tells MiC. "As far as we know, it's never been done on any other network's website."

The campaign was born when Corus approached Lego with the new technology, and Lego, through their agency Starcom, replied with a brief outlining their Bionicle strategy. It was a good fit, says Cormick.

There is a detailed, ongoing storyline behind the Bionicles toys, and the release of this campaign ties in with the introduction of a new chapter in the Bionicles' story. It also ties in with a new Bionicle DVD release on Sept. 15 that will promote the new storyline.

"The idea from a business perspective is by engaging the fans, they want to come back for more," says Cormick. "The way you want to continue the story is with the products themselves."

The campaign will be promoted through YTV with ad spots, on-air billboards, and on YTV.com via leaderboards and box ads.

www.ytv.com

How does the web see you?

Sweet visualisation project. Mine is below

Personas is a component of the Metropath(ologies) exhibit, currently on display at the MIT Museum by the Sociable Media Group from the MIT Media Lab. It uses sophisticated natural language processing and the Internet to create a data portrait of one's aggregated online identity. In short, Personas shows you how the Internet sees you.

http://personas.media.mit.edu/

Bank Will Allow Customers to Deposit Checks by iPhone

Thanks @damjanov for sharing this from The New York Times

J. Michael Short for USAA

Customers of USAA can photograph both sides of the check, send the images through an app and then void the check.

By SUSAN STELLIN

Published: August 9, 2009

The Internet has taken a lot of the paperwork out of banking, but there is no avoiding paper when someone gives you a check. Now one bank wants to let customers deposit checks immediately — through their phones.

USAA, a privately held bank and insurance company, plans to update its iPhone application this week to introduce the check deposit feature, which requires a customer to photograph both sides of the check with the phone’s camera.

“We’re essentially taking an image of the check, and once you hit the send button, that image is going into our deposit-taking system as any other check would,” said Wayne Peacock, a USAA executive vice president.

Customers will not have to mail the check to the bank later; the deposit will be handled entirely electronically, and the bank suggests voiding the check and filing or discarding it. But to reduce the potential for fraud, only customers who are eligible for credit and have some type of insurance through USAA will be permitted to use the deposit feature. Mr. Peacock said that about 60 percent of the bank’s customers qualify.

USAA may seem like an unlikely innovator in mobile banking. It ranks in size just below the top 20 banks in the United States, and serves mostly military personnel, though many of its products are available to anyone.

But with just one branch, in San Antonio, and customers deployed all over the world, the company has been aggressively developing an anytime, anywhere banking strategy. Three years ago, it introduced the option of depositing a check from home using a scanner. That laid the groundwork for the phone deposit feature, which USAA plans to offer on other phones this year.

“Mobile is going to be a bigger part of how people do commerce and how they interact with their financial institutions,” Mr. Peacock said. “The great value that we see is the time savings.”

About a million of USAA’s 7.2 million customers use their cellphones to access their accounts — either via text message, a mobile browser or an iPhone application introduced in May. The deposit feature, which USAA previewed in an online video, puts the bank in the vanguard of the effort to turn cellphones into portable branches.

“USAA has been pretty progressive with this,” said Nick Holland, a senior analyst with Aite Group, a financial services research company.

The most popular banking tasks done on cellphones are reviewing account balances, transferring money, making payments and finding A.T.M.’s, analysts say. But in general, mobile banking has been slow to catch on. Mr. Holland said tighter budgets have forced banks to focus on using technology in ways that cut costs or generate revenue, rather than simply creating buzz.

“If banks can get people to stop calling call centers for mundane inquiries and instead send a text message,” he said, “that saves a bank about $14 for every one of those inquiries.”

Mr. Holland predicted that other banks would follow USAA and offer some type of mobile deposit capability, especially deposit options aimed at small-business customers who may be willing to pay for the convenience.

A study released recently by comScore, a digital audience measurement company, found that more than 15 million people in the United States used mobile banking each month, a number that is expected to grow as networks become faster and more people migrate to smartphones.

“It’s the iPhone that really propelled things to the forefront,” said Marc Trudeau, a senior director at comScore.

While comScore found that just 3 percent of mobile banking customers use Apple devices, Mr. Trudeau said the iPhone had paved the way for applications that let customers accomplish tasks more efficiently than with a phone’s Web browser.

For instance, Bank of America, which has an iPhone app, has more than three million mobile banking customers, and 43 percent of them bank with an iPhone or iPod touch, said Tara A. Burke, a company spokeswoman.

A cellphone is also always at hand, so it is potentially a more convenient than a computer. In fact, comScore found that people most often use mobile banking services at home.

“We’ve all seen the ads showing people banking from a beach in the Caribbean,” Mr. Trudeau said. “The reality is much more mundane than that.”

How Ad Position Affects Conversion Rates

Thanks Online Media Daily for this post on banner location.

For marketers wondering how conversion rates change depending on where ads appear on Web pages, Google Chief Economist Hal Varian appears to have an answer.

Varian calls the problem "tricky," because Google ranks ads by bid times and ad quality, so ads in higher positions tend to have higher quality. These higher-quality ads tend to have higher conversion rates. He writes in a post on the AdWords blog that this means marketers may see a correlation between auction position and conversion rates.

Another fact that influences conversions: marketers increasing bids might see their average position move lower on the page. That's because when bids increase, ads appear in new auctions, and tend to work their way up from the bottom. This can push down the campaign's overall position, he writes.

"We have used a statistical model to account for these effects and found that -- on average, there is very little variation in conversion rates by position for the same ad," Varian writes. "For example, for pages where 11 ads are shown the conversion rate varies by less than 5% across positions."

An ad that had a 1.0% conversion rate in the best position would have about a 0.95% conversion rate in the worst position, on average, Varian writes. He explains that ads above search results convert within ±2% of right-hand side positions.

Didit VP Mark Simon says the New York company sees similar conversion rates occurring with its clients. "Not all traffic is converting traffic," he says. "The trick is to offer the creative and post-click experience that draws in the right searchers and drives them to convert, while also targeting the right market segment to convert on a given term."