Last night the 2010 new media age Effectiveness Awards took place at the Grosvenor House Hotel in London.
With Claudia Winkleman presenting, and comedy from Milton Jones, it was billed as one of the biggest events in the interactive media industry calendar; as usual, bringing together some of the best people from the digital sector to recognise hard work in the industry and consume numerous bottles of champagne in the process!
There’s never a dull moment at Rocket HQ.
Last Friday we ran our very first ‘Well Fun Party’ election. With a new Fun Minister and his deputy at the helm, fun and wellbeing at Propellernet is going next level.
A perfect way to end the week, the rocketeers gathered around the soap box to hear candidates make known their manifestos and pitch their promises, with claps of support and jeers of disdain, they listened intently to seek out the best team for the job.
Minds made up, everyone took to pen and paper and casted their vote- all of which were then counted by independent adjudicator Karen Smithson, who is also our Fun and Wellbeing Co-ordinator!
On the 14th April 2010 something big erupted in the travel industry, or as one of our clients called it: an ashtrocity! The Icelandic volcano, called Eyjafjallajökull, ejected volcanic ash to heights in excess of 30,000ft and few could have predicted the chaos and millions of pounds it would cost the travel industry and the economy.
With huge amounts of ash in the atmosphere, controlled airspace in the UK was shut down for fear of damage to the aircraft engines. By the 17th April, there was a no fly zone in the airspace of more than 25 countries. This resulted in the largest air traffic shut-down since World War II and caused millions of passengers to be stranded not only in Europe, but across the world.
Airspace was closed for six days; a decision which was later criticised by most airlines who were suffering huge financial losses.
According to Giovanni Bisignani, the Director General of The Air Transport Association, the ash crisis cost the airline industry up to £130 million a day in lost revenue and more than £500 million to the economy. Bisignnai was very critical of the delay to reopen airspace, citing unnecessary delay.
When we started looking into the world of video-SEO at the beginning of this year, we came across a number of technologies which we knew would allow us to get really creative and generate some great results for our clients. One of the most exciting technologies was hotspotting; the creation of an interactive, clickable layer on a video which allows viewers to interact with what they are seeing.
We loved it because it fitted nicely with our SEO-PR ethos- that is, developing creative ways to gain links and selling these creative ideas in to the media from a PR perspective- and complimented the existing work we were doing for our retail clients. Westfield London shopping centre was one of these clients and footage of the ‘Greatest Fashion Show on Earth’ event struck us as the perfect opportunity to create our first hotspotted video. By creating a virtual front row, we could bring the excitement of a catwalk show to life for fashion fans who could not attend the fabulous event themselves.
So, we set to work researching all of the items in the video, creating countless landing pages and tracking each and every model in the footage as they walked the runway.
