A new home page design that expresses the premium quality of the adidas brand went live last week on the company’s U.S. e-commerce site, shopadidas.com.

The clean, distinctively adidas design introduces a series of rotating banners that reflect the company’s current marketing campaigns.  The rotating banners automatically refresh the look of the home page, while giving consumers multiple pathways to select products based on gender, brand, sport and product type.

Shopadidas.com also features links for popular searches and top visited locations, as well as three sub-banners that subtly highlight distinct product collections and sub-brands.  Other features include a view into the shopadidas Twitter feed, and a simplified site map that makes accessing content easier for the consumer, while improving the site’s visibility in search results. 

Isobar’s redesign team worked within a very short timeframe to develop the new design, which accomplishes adidas’ business need of making their products easier and more intuitive for the consumer to access than ever before.

Want to see some of the most stellar creative executions in digital? Then don’t miss Evan Gerber at ad:tech San Francisco on Wednesday, April 21st, where Evan and a panel of experts will showcase killer campaigns and demonstrate how you can apply these successful strategies to your own digital marketing efforts. Register for the Full Conference or Premium pass as Evan’s special guest with code: SPKRGUEST and get 25% off the online price.

It’s finally here. miCoach has launched in the U.S. and is on sale here for the first time. Get yours now! It’s been a long time coming after three years of working on this project. The screen below shows what the adidas.com USA home page looked like today. Just below that is the newly designed miCoach homepage to coincide with this launch and some new branding/campaign work. Awesome work everybody!

Also, some really nice words about our site design on the FAST COMPANY web site today. These words are music to my ears and illustrate that all of our hard work has really paid off in creating a rich yet easy to use experience. This is much, much harder than it sounds.

• “The Web site, which was created by adidas along with Molecular, does not miss a step–it’s intuitive, fun to use, and keeps pace with almost everything a runner needs.”
• “The Web interface coupled with these devices is often where they trip over their laces, but not in this instance. The miCoach site is easy to navigate, and includes just about everything you need in order to track and improve your running.”
• “The Adidas miCoach Pacer is the most full-featured and enjoyable personal training device on the market.”

Click here to read the full article.

[Originally published on Ricardo Salema's blog.]

By now, marketers know that brands cannot fully control their own message anymore. Consumers now have a diverse set of channels through which they can interact with their digital world, and they’ve taken rightful ownership of their own destiny when interacting with brands through those channels.

In an effort to be heard and to increase engagement, brands are turning to new, innovative ways to approach the digital marketing landscape, from social environments such as Twitter and Facebook, to blogger outreach and global alternate reality games. Like anything else new and innovative, the risk of failure in these approaches runs high, and the payoff is unknown.

But failure, if done early and often, can be more instructive than success. Let’s look at four new and innovative ways that brands attempted to engage with their consumers through digital, and see what lessons we can learn.

Lesson 1. Tell a story, but make it your story
In February 2008, 50 bloggers and gamers received mysterious packages in the mail containing clues to an online alternate reality game (ARG) with a clear call to action: Find “The Lost Ring.” These packages kicked off a six-month effort across the globe by more than 150,000 players in seven languages to uncover a lost Olympic game. The game officially ended at the Beijing Olympics, and it generated more than its share of accolades in marketing circles.

But that’s only half of the story. The game is a classic example of what’s known as “dark marketing” — a viral campaign in which the sponsoring brand (in this case, McDonald’s) is barely, if ever, acknowledged. The theory is that mentioning the brand would turn potential gameplayers off when they realize that they’re simply playing a part in a larger marketing campaign. In this case, it wasn’t revealed that McDonald’s was participating until months after the game began.

ARGs have proven to be successful in the past and are an incredibly viral method of participatory storytelling on a grand scale. Yet in most cases where measurable success was achieved, the ARG told a story that was at least tangentially related to the brand that sponsored it. Consider ABC’s “Lost Experience” and “Find815″ ARG campaigns, which gave rabid fans of the hit show something to do during its hiatus while simultaneously telling some of the show’s back story — all without diminishing the experience of watching “Lost” for consumers who didn’t participate. 
 

BMW created an ARG surrounding a fictional town, “Oberpfaffelbachen,” that built a huge ramp up to launch the BMW 1-Series in America. In each of these cases, the story of the game tied back to the story of the brand, even if the tie-in was slight or tongue-in-cheek.

Lastly, in order to measure the success of an ARG, it’s important to understand how the brand is perceived before, during, and after the game. Using sentiment analysis tools to continually measure what people are saying about the brand can identify the baseline sentiment and the brand lift during the campaign, as well as any lingering effects after the game has ended.

Lesson 2: Turn the chairs inward (and take a seat)
It’s become a marketing cliché: Your consumers are talking, and your brand is the topic of conversation. In an effort to show that they understand this, Skittles decided to bring that conversation to the fore in the guise of its official website, which it replaced with an unsupervised Twitter feed that showed every tweet mentioning the Skittles brand. At the same time, the brand allowed website visitors to switch between its Wikipedia page, YouTube account, and other social media outposts using a simple widget. Within 48 hours, the messages on Twitter were littered with expletives.

Skittle’s parent company, Mars, had a great idea, but while it exposed conversations around the brand to the bright, harsh light of day, the company neglected to participate in it.

By participating, Mars could have managed the conversation around its brand, instead of letting it spin out of control. Consider what Pepsi did with the “Pepsi Cooler“ on FriendFeed, a social media aggregator now owned by Facebook. Pepsi managed the conversation through multiple social media channels partly by taking a seat at the table and participating as an equal contributor.

Lesson 3: Behave Yourself
My iPhone is the most personal of personal technology devices. It’s always on my person, it’s always on, and it contains my contacts, calendar, and music; it’s my life in my pocket. It makes perfect sense that a smartphone app can be a great way to increase engagement with consumers.

But remember, when in the personal space of your consumers, it’s vital that you follow their rules of etiquette. Pepsi released an iPhone application to support its AMP energy drink that was designed to help make male customers more successful with the ladies. The app categorized women into types, and it offered pick-up lines targeted to those types. The backlash was so great that Pepsi yanked the risque app from the App Store and offered a public apology.

Mobile apps have been a great way to create a service out of a brand. Molecular worked with Nikon on an app that helps its consumers take better photos, regardless of whether they own a Nikon camera or not.

When you engage with consumers on their turf, on a device as personal as their mobile phones, make sure that service is helpful. To Pepsi’s credit, it admitted the mistake, but it could have been avoided by understanding how far it could take the joke without offending its audience.

Lesson 4: Keep the circle of trust intact
Reaching out to influential bloggers is a great way to generate buzz around a new product launch. The best bloggers will give a fair and honest review of the product, thereby extending the trust that these folks have established with their loyal audience to your brand.

When ASUS reached out to bloggers to review the new Eee PC 901 laptop, it was counting on that trust. But instead of simply letting the bloggers review the product, they made it a competition. They chose six bloggers to write a minimum of three 200-word posts a week about their laptop over the course of four weeks. The blogger with the most readers would win the laptop.

ASUS didn’t expect what happened next: The blogger with the most readers wrote a review that, while honest and fair, wasn’t exactly favorable to the product. So ASUS changed the rules. Instead of the most readers, the winner of the laptop would be chosen by a vote taken by the six bloggers themselves, resulting in another blogger winning in the end. The readers revolted by posting scathing comments on the announcement of the winner.

Product ratings and reviews work because they are written by the folks consumers trust most: other consumers. When a brand tries to game the system, this breaks the circle of trust. Instead of changing the rules, Asus might have been better off thanking the winner for his review, acknowledging (or defending, when necessary) the product’s limitations, and working the feedback into future products.

Conclusion
There are so many new ways of interacting and engaging with consumers today. Their conversation is fragmented, their attention span short, and their tolerance for BS is low. Without well-established roadmaps for success, it is inevitable that we will sometimes fail when attempting to engage with consumers in new and innovative ways. But by learning from failure, we are left with enormous potential to provide exceptional brand experiences that do succeed.

[Written for and originally published at iMedia Connection]

Designers partnering in business strategy formation bring many fresh tools, techniques, and perspectives to the process. From methods for gathering information, forming insights, generating ideas, imagining concepts, validating concepts, and articulating a design vision that can make ideas real, design strategists (or strategic designers) bring unique value every step of the way.

One of the most powerful tools at the disposal of the strategy team is the collection of all of the strategic intelligence that realizes the strategy into a single visualization that quickly communicates the forces driving the strategy. From the digital business perspective visualizations often reflect strategies for single or multi-channel products, services, and experiences. The end result may be a completely new web site, a specific set of web-based services for a target market, or a multi-site strategy reflecting a diverse marketing campaign embracing social networks and other discrete touchpoints.

Visualizations can be all-encompassing, covering a full range of inputs that typically include over-arching corporate strategy, brand positioning, competitive positioning, and target consumers as well as outputs such as strategic drivers, principal ideas and concepts translated into prioritized products and services, and brand and design principles to apply when tackling implementation. On the other hand, visualizations can also focus on one contributor to the strategy information stream. A good example is the quantitative and qualitative research driving the establishment of market segmentation and creation of target customer personas.

Strategic design visualizations provide business design strategy a number of great benefits. Here are a few.
1. At a glance they provide a visual framework and a strategic context within which to house a quick view into the extensive research, insights, and findings driving the strategy. The report in word, the extensive presentation deck, the reams of research documentation are all still valid. Yet the visualization allows the viewer to quickly grasp the essence of the strategy and its principal highlights.
2. Visualizations are excellent ways to begin the socialization of strategy process across the organization.
3. Visualizations can be an excellent way to show how all departments within a company play a role in the execution of a strategy.
4. Visualizations can communicate the business logic driving design initiatives. In other words, one can draw a line through the visualization connecting the strategic dots that connect a piece of content, a new feature, a tone of voice, a certain aesthetic, to the core strategy.
5. Visualizations provide support objectivity when brainstorming ideas for new products and services.

Hey reader! If you have used great information design at your company to share your design and business strategies you may also have noticed the benefits. Why not share them here!?

In our worsening economy, the concept of leapfrogging is very applicable in the marketing space today. Marketers must adapt, in some cases quite abruptly. But funds dry up, and dollars are scarce. This is where innovative thought becomes especially crucial to survival. The bad news is that the stakes are higher, the resources are scarce, and some will find themselves burdened with implacable constraints.

The good news is that innovative output is driven by creative thought, and leapfrogging is doable even in challenging circumstances. By exploring the creative process, marketers can use the tools they have at hand to succeed under even the most challenging circumstances.

Think small, in a big way
Often, consumers and marketers alike have trouble seeing beyond their current world, or adapting to things which are totally foreign. It’s not always about the epic change that blows their mind, but more about the smaller tweaks that can change everything. Think about online social networking. Social graphs are not new phenomena — they have been around for ages — and the Web has been commonplace for a decade. But new combinations of existing technologies and functionalities provided consumers with new opportunities to communicate, and new ways for brands to reach their constituencies.

Another example is rich internet applications; revolutionary applications like GoogleMaps leverage technologies that have een around for some time. But how does this translate for a marketer with a limited budget and a stressed executive team? In a few different ways.

For example, leveraging best practices from other fields can provide a competitive advantage when upgrading a web site or other digital promotion. Consider that insurance companies don’t have the best brand perception among consumers. People find them intimidating, and think that the service provider is out to get them. By adopting a rich interface more commonly seen in a retail site, insurance provider HumanaOne  surmounted these challenges and created an award winning experience.

Don’t win the game, change it
Innovation isn’t always about finding a solution to a particular challenge so much as changing the context of the problem. In this economic environment, risking a new approach may well prove to be more successful than embracing a known challenge. Think of gaming, for example.

Forced to compete with the consumer electronics giant Sony and the software behemoth Microsoft, Nintendo was faced with a costly, grueling deathmatch with no guarantee of success. Instead of running a risky approach to create costlier machines with better graphics and compelling gameplay for the typical console audience, it developed a platform with a different, kinetic style of play — the Nintendo Wii. By promoting console gaming in a whole new way, Nintendo managed to dominate market share and create a growing niche for itself.

Cut costs, not corners — track and react to digital users for free
In today’s environment, metrics become increasingly important to justify scarce resources. But in the perfect Catch-22, companies are spending less on marketing budgets, making it harder to track the success of their digital channel.   However, free tools are available that enable marketers to keep tabs on how their site is performing, and on the sorts of things that are being said about them across other digital media for free.

For example, Google Analytics provides tools for site owners to tag and track traffic, referrals, and segmentation data. A valuable tool for tracking competitors, Alexa provides demographic information on the end users visiting any site. Keep in mind though that these solutions aren’t perfect. While the suite is comprehensive and the price is unbeatable, Google has its shortcomings. It is important to note that Alexa relies on a subset of the Web’s user base, as the system relies on a voluntary end user install.

Gleaning free insights from the digital channel does not stop at the Web. It is possible to get a feel for how a brand is performing in blogger buzz through tools like Technorati or Blogpulse. While this isn’t the same as having a fully trained staff and all the tools in place, it is better than nothing and provides vital information that can frequently be actionable, or create better touchpoints with the client.

As Twitter gains in popularity, brands are beginning to use the tool to gauge consumer sentiment and respond quickly on an individual basis. Take JetBlue, which uses Tweetscan to keep an eye on when its name pops up in the streams, so they can interact with clients on an as-needed basis. This innovative tool helps JetBlue reinforce their friendly, approachable brand persona, and helps them leapfrog from the traditional image of a monolithic, unresponsive airline.

Analyze your approach
All too often, stakeholders focus on the end results — without thinking of the means to get there — or rigorously apply a strict methodolodgy with no analysis or forethought. Stop for a moment and think about the team, the goals, and the constraints. Chances are there are ways to inject creativity into the process, and inspire the team to foster ideas ranging from the very tactical to the highly strategic.

One useful tactic is to have participants in a brainstorming session write ideas instead of blurting them out. This approach not only encourages a greater number of responses, but minimizes the likelihood of stale groupthink. On a strategic level, changes can be made to the entire project process, to add more collaboration or open thinking into the process. At Molecular, we perform creative imagining sessions with key stakeholders and larger audiences to inspire great ideas and drive enthusiasm for a project. Carefully timed to coincide with the completion of data gathering, the output from this work leads clients to identify new opportunities and means to achieve success.

Conclusion
Economic times are rough, and marketers must respond to this situation quickly and decisively to stay on top of the challenges and changes. Innovation is core to survival, but funds are scarce. Fortunately, there are ways to make substantial progress without dropping a bundle of cash. Think about what innovation truly is — there is room for big change without redoing everything from the start. Look past the current business constraints and think about how to apply strengths in new places. Search for ways to lower overhead, such as free tools to track digital performance. Finally, remember that innovation happens from the very start to the very end of the project. Imbue the fabric of every day with room for creative thought, and plan the project to remove constraints and encourage creativity.

(After all, what goes around should come around, right ?)

So, I happen to believe we’re all social. In some way shape or form, both offline and online, and whether we like it or not. Simple put, the things we do and don’t do account for our ‘social-ness’.

The questions I’m specifically putting out there are around the virtual or online world:

HOW social are we?

HOW ARE we being social? And most importantly,

WHAT CAN WE ALL BE DOING using today’s Social Media tools to manage the relationships in our lives in ways that make it stronger, evolve, and compound to pay off over time?

No doubt, real life human-to-human interactions go a long way, but in our busy lives, there is only so much time to be able to meet, greet and interact with all the people in our lives. Plus there’s the geographic and financial factor. *sigh*

Enter – Social Media.

Remember the time when someone you hadn’t met in 20 years sent you a ‘gift’ on Facebook, commented positively on your status, or complimented your flickr collection? When a colleague or client started following you on twitter, or friended you on Facebook? For that matter, you probably also recall asking someone forgetting to send you a Linked-in recommendation after promising to do so, or when your blog content got republished word for word without any attribution whatsoever? Depending on the relationship and the type of social touch point you had, you were probably touched, elated, humbled, unhappy or disappointed even.

By following some of the basic tenets of Social Media—listening, connecting, sharing—and combining them with real world common sense and courtesy, we can take that personal or professional relationship to the next level. That’s the power of this social ether I think. Here are:

15 ways to up the ante on our online ‘social-ness’ and build better relationships

1. Always respond comments and invitations. Never dis-engage
2. Comment on status messages, it’s easiest to engage them in their current frame of mind
3. Take the time to rate or review something you tried or used (remember how someone else’s rating helped you make a purchase decision?)
4. Recommend people you vouch for on Linked-in before they ask you
5. Share a job opening as your status message
6. Comment and praise the blogs you admire and follow
7. Go beyond just wishing them Happy Birthday on FB. Do at least 2 more things
8. Ask to follow a client or a colleague, whom you look up to as a thought leader
9. Initiate connecting like-minded people on your social networks
10. Comment on a colleague’s post you’ve read, even a simple acknowledgement goes a long way
11. Add something positive that is centered around the needs of the person you are interacting with
12. Let your Thank-you messages become public (it only compounds the effect)
13. Every so often reach out to a bunch of people you’ve interacted with the least
14. When you don’t have anything positive to share about a friend or colleague’s blog, a simple acknowledgment for their effort goes a long way too
15. Compliment a well executed offline deed and echo it online

Some Questions:

What are other ways you’ve improved the quality of a relationship using Social Media?
Do you believe in Social Karma?
Is SRM (Social Relationship Management) going to be key for organizations going forward?

Share your comments and thoughts, you know – be social….and excuse me if you will, as I brush up on my ‘social-ness’ and go offer up some ‘thumbs ups’ on Facebook and praise Chris Brogan and Mike Troiano whose blogs provided inspiration and insight for this post.

…Uhmmm, call me a bit karmic, but it does feel good. And that’s never a bad thing.

Much to my delight I received my copy of the long awaited Attik Noise 5 book. I’ve had a pretty decent look through it and I have to say it is a thing of sheer beauty. When I think about the time and effort / and love and attention / and beer and (probably) crying that has gone into this amazing book it makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand to attention.

For those of you who do not know – The Attik are a legendary design firm originally set up in Huddersfield, England by two friends Simon Needham and James Somerville. They pioneered a multi layered techno graphic design style in the 90′s which became very popular and inspired a lot of designers, including myself.

Since college I have been a huge fan of Attik’s work, from my internship there in 1999 all the way through my professional career. I have followed them with admiration and sometimes frustration, such has their rocky history been. Like any true masters of their craft, they have risen from troubled times and have now produced this book, almost in defiance of anything and everything that has stood in their way.

This book is graphic design and print porn – there are so many different inks, printing processes, stocks and gorgeous layouts it really makes you wish all books were created this way. There is absolutely no way this book could be commercially printed on a grand scale. I think if I am correct, there are only 3000 copies in existence. Every copy was hand finished and each features some incredible print processes made possible by Celloglas- a decorative print finisher in England.

As a fan and a print geek I am very pleased to own a copy of this piece of graphic design history. You can find out everything about Noise 5 here.

I have been asked this question many times from junior level designers to seasoned creatives:

How do you reset the Smart Object transform values back to their default (the original resolution of the embedded object)?

It would be very nice of Adobe to add a contextual menu entry as a right click or ctrl click on the smart object that said “reset smart object”, or even better a sub menu that states the current dimensions like “80% of original” with the reset option. Since this functionality doesn’t exist, I’m going to share with you a simple method I use to reset the smart object dimensions:

1. Select the smart object in your layers, use Cmd+T or Edit > Transform > Scale:

You will notice the ratio in your toolbar reflect the modified scale:

2. Enter 100% for both width and height to reset the smart object back to original:

And there you go:

Piece of cake! As easy as this is, its usually overlooked.
Hope you find this useful.

Thought this was a very interesting statistic even though it is not very surprising. The most popular camera on Flickr these days is being challenged by the simple photo abilities on the iPhone. I am sure it is a reflection of many things including mobility, and even audience type. It does in the end become the most versatile tool for capturing life’s moments and Flickr may be more popular now with casual photo enthusiasts and not serious hobbyists or pros.

Lot of other great information here as well. Check it out when you get a chance  -  http://www.flickr.com/cameras/