Hasta La Creative!

Some people think animated GIFs are stupid. Some find them charming. Possibly because of this rift, Twitter seems caught in a pictorial purgatory that makes everyone unhappy.

Like it or not, animated GIFs have become a massively popular form of communication, quickly evolving from passive-aggressive zingers to earnestly useful bites of video that are convenient to watch on just about any platform.

While Tumblr and newer sites like Ello have readily embraced them, Twitter and Facebook have most certainly not. Aside from last year’s quasi-hoax from Giphy, Facebook’s been pretty consistent about not wanting animated GIFs in news feeds. (I originally took this as a stance on user experience, but now that all Facebook videos autoplay silently, I realize I was a chump.)

And then there’s Twitter.

Its love-hate relationship goes back a few years. Here’s a quick recap:

September 2012: Twitter bans animated user avatars but existing ones are grandfathered in (that’s why you still see them from time to time). In fact, other than nudity and profanity, this is just about Twitter’s only restriction on avatars.

November 2013: Animated GIF service Giphy announces it’s been integrated into Twitter’s Media Cards, meaning you can (kind of) post an animated GIF in a tweet. But they were more like attachments you had to expand and didn’t show up in most Twitter streams. And you were restricted to using Giphy images instead of any animated pic you liked.

June 2014: Twitter Support announces you can “share and view animated GIFs on Twitter.com, Android and iPhone.” But that’s not entirely true, since what you’re sharing is a GIF that’s been converted into a looping MP4 video file, meaning you have to click to watch it.

September 2014: Popular GIF service Twitpic announces it is shutting down due to the high cost of a trademark battle with Twitter. This is especially bad news for animated GIF lovers who rely on the third-party service to share animations on Twitter. However, Twitpic announces a few days later that it has been acquired and will stay alive after all.

Where things stand now
We did test runs on the three most common options for posting an animated GIF to Twitter. We tried out Twitter’s built-in media upload feature, the popular Giphy database and the scrappy third-party Twitpic. We tested each on the Web, in TweetDeck and in the official Twitter mobile app. The result are below.

Spoiler alert: Each is flawed, cumbersome and questionably worth the effort.

Excited? Great! Here we go!

 
1. Posting an animated GIF directly to Twitter or TweetDeck.
This is definitely the easiest route, but it has the huge setback of not actually appearing as an animated GIF in people’s streams, and on TweetDeck it looks like total garbage.

How it looks on Twitter:

Testing something w/ animated gifs. Please ignore. http://t.co/v9a3McVKRl

— David Griner (@griner) September 25, 2014

How it looks on TweetDeck:

How it looks on Twitter’s mobile app (Android):

(Clicking the thumbnail would play the GIF, which is actually converted into an MP4.)

Conclusion: It doesn’t autoplay, it’s not really a GIF, and it doesn’t work on TweetDeck, even though the desktop and Web app was acquired by Twitter way back in 2011. So I wouldn’t call this a great platform for sharing GIFs. Because it doesn’t.

 
2. Posting an animated GIF via Giphy:
I got a “forbidden” error when I tried uploading my test GIF to Giphy, but I was able to find a similar one already in the site’s database. I then clicked to share via Twitter, which automatically populates your tweet with a Giphy URL and lets you edit the tweet before posting. As you’ll see, the end result is mixed.

How it looks on Twitter:

Another animated gif test, this time via giphy. http://t.co/bKqjK8HO7C

— David Griner (@griner) September 25, 2014

(While Giphy was the only one of the three options that actually autoplays the GIF in a Web tweet, this only works if you embed the tweet like I’ve done here. In a user’s Twitter stream, it’ll just look like text and a link unless the follower clicks to expand the tweet. In other words, it’s likely to get overlooked by Web users on Twitter.com but would look good if dropped into a blog post.)

How it looks on TweetDeck:

How it looks on Twitter’s mobile app (Android):

(Clicking the link expands it to a video thumbnail, which you have to click again to watch on Giphy.com. Bleh.)

Conclusion: You still don’t get your animated GIF into the stream on TweetDeck, and on mobile it’s barely noticeable. It does look good on the Web when expanded or embedded, but not too many active Twitter users see tweets that way. I’m not altogether condemning Giphy as a service, but I would say its role as a tool for sharing animated GIFs on Twitter has likely been overstated.

 
3. Posting an animated GIF via TwitPic:
At AdFreak, we’ve been using TwitPic for a while now as our animated GIF tweeting service of choice. It autoplays GIFs in TweetDeck, which a lot of our readers seem to use. So you can see why we, like many others, were disturbed to hear the service was being shuttered and then relieved to hear about its stay of execution.

How it looks on Twitter:

Another animated gif test, this time with TwitPic. http://t.co/Rw3Z0wNvJc

— David Griner (@griner) September 25, 2014

How it looks on TweetDeck:

(Hey hey, it worked! Twitpic was the only one of these three options that actually played a GIF in stream on TweetDeck.)

How it looks on Twitter’s mobile app (Android):

(Clicking to expand the tweet only shows it as a still image. You have to click the link to view it as an animation on Twitpic.com.)

Conclusion: Twitpic is great for TweetDeck but looks pretty bad on mobile and Web. But with no TweetDeck support for animated GIFs from Twitter itself, playing in stream is a pretty good selling point for Twitpic.

It’s worth noting that my Twitpic posts were the only ones to get a positive reaction from followers, likely because many of my friends are TweetDeck junkies:

@griner FYI, I saw the twitpic one in my stream on TweetDeck, but just a link for the pic.twittter one…

— Jeremy A Williams (@jeremyawilliams) September 25, 2014

@griner Ironically enough. I would have expected the exact opposite

— Jeremy A Williams (@jeremyawilliams) September 25, 2014

@griner I can see this one in Tweetdeck. The others are links. I’m not good at ignoring Madagascar.

— Andrea Updyke (@AndreaUpdyke) September 25, 2014

In Summary
Tweeting animated GIFs, for now, is still like trying get to the grocery store by riding a tricycle made of wet cardboard and rusted coffee cans. You’ll eventually get there, but you’ll look and feel like an idiot most of the way.

Which service you should use really depends on your audience. If most of your followers are mobile-savvy millennials on the go, Twitter’s native upload feature is probably best, though it’s still disappointing and (again) doesn’t actually use animated GIFs.

If your audience is more likely to be Twitter power users savvy with TweetDeck, I’d stick with Twitpic (while it exists). 

Hopefully Twitter will get past its conflicted feelings on GIFs soon and decide to either support them 100 percent or block them outright by forcing them into click-to-play MP4 videos. I wouldn’t bet on seeing autoplaying GIFs in all your streams anytime soon, though. And with Twitpic being an outlier that’s already in the crosshairs of Twitter’s legal team, I wouldn’t get too comfortable with that being a long-term option, either.

Everything’s crappy and nothing works like it should. Welcome to the future, everybody.

For decades, urban cyclists have been seeking the ultimate bike lock, only to find each one’s vulnerabilities eventually demonstrated on YouTube. But what if the answer were in the bike itself?

Designed by three Chilean engineering students, the Yerka Project is an “unstealable” bike that functions as its own lock.

If the video below is anything to go by, it looks like they took The Club and built a bicycle into it. I don’t mean that as glancing praise, either—it really is a really cool idea.

The guys behind Yerka (which is kind of a Nordic word for “strength”) have been experimenting with a few different designs, including combination lock frames, smartphone-enabled locks, and a step-through frame.

Yerka is still in the prototype phase, with a Kickstarter campaign in the works to raise money for large-scale production of their finished bike models. 

If you ever hoped to pretend your phone were a fish or an aquatic plant, Sony would like to present its Xperia Z1S.

The brand, along with Wieden + Kennedy and development partners Motim and SoftFacade, is demonstrating the phone’s waterproof technology by developing apps designed to be used in and under the water.

A new feature on the phone uses ultrasound to sense when the phone is submerged. A handful of 30-second videos (directed by Sean Pecknold of Society) demonstrate the apps, which capitalize on that detection technology in ways unusual, somewhat amusing and mostly frivolous.

One of the apps is “Goldie,” an on-screen fish that flops around like it’s dying when you take the phone out of the water. Another is “Plantimal,” a modern cross between a Tomagotchi and a Grow Monster. There’s also “Rainy-oke” for, quite literally, singing in the rain, as proven by a drag queen performing Cyndi Lauper.

“Photo Lab” mimics the process of developing photos by hand, in an extra cutesy twist of the knife to a practice all but eradicated by the digital age. “Sink Sunk” offers perhaps the funniest and most practical application of the water detection technology: It’s a simple game for when you’re bored and cranky, hanging out in your kiddie pool.

That’s it, at least so far. The brand is making the source code for the feature available via Github, so other developers can play with different uses, too.

In the meantime, it’s a reasonably fun way for Sony to promote waterproofing, even though that feature is not unique to the smartphone manufacturer or model. And it fits well enough into the art-meets-engineering motif of the brand’s “Be Moved” platform, launched with W+K early this year—even if it does feel a little heavier on the engineering part.

The brand recommends you avoid submerging your phone for more than 30 minutes at a time, though. Just in case you were planning to take it on a nice long scuba dive.

We have heard it coming for years: Wearable technology is going to be a hot trend. The fact that it’s now here is no surprise, but what may be are the gaggle of advertisers ready to pounce, according to Businessweek. 

From watches that engage with your phone to glasses that help you get your NSA on, wearable technology has been discussed for years. The masterminds behind these new toys have been working to perfect it. Now that they’ve developed a few decent products worth shilling, advertising is ready to focus on what this story calls “the new frontier.”

To boldly go, indeed.

(more…)

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

There is a struggle happening for the soul of Adland right now. It doesn’t help that many young, talented people prefer to work in tech, where the perks are stellar and the challenges never-ending. Hell, wine runs from water fountains in Silicon Valley and other pockets of technical innovation like Boulder and Austin.

How are ordinary citizens of Adland to compete?

Insert Contagious, a company that helps brands and advertising agencies understand and adapt to shifts in marketing, consumer culture and technology. Addressing the Adverati at Cannes last week, Contagious execs Nick Parish and Will Sansom helped ad people feel better about themselves and their chosen profession.

Let’s listen in.

Parish and Sansom managed to weave Bill Bernbach, Howard Luck Gossage and Mary Wells Lawrence into their talk. Hey, that’s what I would do if I was on stage. Show your alliances and some knowledge of what came before.

“Creativity should not serve technology. Technology should serve creativity,” reasoned Sansom during the talk. Sounds good. But you know what sounds better? Technology and creativity both in service to real customers’ needs. The question for marketers today is so much bigger than what any ad campaign can offer. The question is how to provide something useful, or something beautiful, that also works as marketing.

Coca-Cola is one brand with answers to these non-rhetorical questions. Whether you drink their soda or not, it’s hard not to be impressed with the company’s innovative efforts to provide clean drinking water in Africa and Latin America.

The post Marketers Are Innovators, So Please, No Lagging appeared first on AdPulp.

Two weeks ago, fashion brands were dominating the weekly VideoWatch/Shareablee top 10 chart for  Instagram videos.

Well, sports have take over the action, with seven of the spots in the rankings going to a wide range of sports/entertainment-oriented brands. We admit that the WWE is more “entertainment” than “sports,” but the plastic facemasks, tights and kneepads seem to fit in here well enough with the likes of theatrics-embracing UFC and flop-happy pro basketball. And then there’s Vans: appearing with clips from a skateboarding competition.

But then there’s Major League Baseball, making its first appearance in the rankings by repurposing a funny-minded clip from Whistle Sports’ “Bad British Announcing” series.

Instagram continues to be dominated by brands that leverage action-packed social videos. But GoPro and Red Bull are not on the charts for once, and other companies are starting to flex their 15-second muscle.

L’impression 3D est une des grandes tendances de l’année, elle ne cesse de s’améliorer et créer des produits impressionnants et de plus en plus étonnants. Joshua Harker a travaillé sur une nouvelle technologie d’impression 3D qui repousse les limites de la qualité, et créer des petits bouquets comprenant 10 à 12 pouces de fleurs.

The French media conglomerate will sell half its Activision Blizzard stake, worth about $866 million, in its latest move to reduce debt and focus on its media properties.

L’artiste Takeshi Murata a créé la sculpture Titled Melter 3-D, en forme de boule réfléchissante qui fond sous nos yeux de manière perpétuelle. Cette sculpture est en fait un zoetrope qui trompe notre oeil et donne l’illusion d’un mouvement de fonte infinie. Elle est exposée à la galerie Ratio 3 à San Francisco.

Après le grand succès du clavier en bois sans fil Oree Board, le studio Oree Design a imaginé un chargeur sans fil Smartphone, Bluetooth et micro dans un seul bloc de bois ou de marbre conçue artisanalement. Cette nouvelle création Orée Pebble 2 ravira les consommateurs de belles technologies.