Agency.com pulls a Modernista! for Skittles
In the offline ad world, creatives are always quick to cry "rip-off." Pretty much everything strikes me as derivative of the Bible and Beowulf, but protecting the originality of "the idea" is hard-wired into ad culture. Does that translate into online? Agency.com has built a new site for Skittles that is pretty much a carbon copy of Modernista!'s much-lauded "un-site," which of course some claim is a rip-off of an earlier Zeus Jones site. The Skittles site is an interesting case study for a consumer goods company. Let's face it: Why would anyone go to a packaged-goods Web site? But nowadays, in social media, people are talking about all sorts of stuff. Agency.com gets that with a "chatter" link that pulls up the results of a "skittles" search on Twitter. It could be on to something. Does it really matter if Modernista or Zeus Jones got there first? —Posted by Brian Morrissey |
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Published on February 27, 2009 | Permalink
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Zeus Jones playing Santa's helper this year
The holidays are here. Have you been too busy watching your 401(k) disappear and the foreclosure signs sprout up around the neighborhood? Don't worry. Zeus Jones is here to help. The Minneapolis shop, which did a nice job of reimagining the agency Web site recently, has created a sweet gift guide of awesome stuff its employees found around the Internet. The interesting part is how ZJ constructed the product discovery—something few sites seem to get right. In addition to a price slider, the site sorts by gender, age and relationship type, along with special picks from agency staff. The product set is reassembled based on the choice made. A couple of quibbles: You can't link to products within the Flash interface, and clicking through to the product pages requires the pop-up blocker to be turned off. Still, it's an interesting and different type of agency holiday site. Also, if you're picking out gifts for the AdFreak staff, Gianatasio would like the Evel Knievel Super Stunt Set. —Posted by Brian Morrissey |
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Published on November 25, 2008 | Permalink
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What is Zeus Jones doing with its new site?
Modernista! took the cake for reinventing the agency Web site, normally a drab and frustrating affair, by creating a meta-site. It was even cited as evidence of the shop's awesomeness in a recent fawning profile. Some, however, claimed Modernista! ripped the idea off from Minneapolis shop Zeus Jones. (Lance Jensen, avid AdFreak commenter, said that isn't true.) Well, Zeus Jones is back with a new site of its own. It takes a feed approach, aggregating employee feeds from Twitter, FriendFeed, del.icio.us, Vimeo, SlideShare and other social services. The site is comprised nearly entirely of widgets, in keeping with the Zeus Jones take of "marketing as a service." Users can even copy the widgets to their own sites, and use them to pull in the Web activities of their friends. The side panel features a scrolling feed from the shop's blog, From the Head of Zeus Jones. Check it out and let us know what you think. —Posted by Brian Morrissey |
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Published on August 27, 2008 | Permalink
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