Disney and Google Build an Amazing Interactive Circus to Hype Oz | Gadget Lab | Wired.com: "Disney and Google have built something that’s beautiful and fun and points the way toward the future of web technology and marketing to come:
Find Your Way to Oz, a Chrome Experiment that is essentially an interactive circus in your web browser. This stunning bit of entertainment, which promotes Disney’s forthcoming movie,
Oz the Great and Powerful, went live Tuesday. At first blush, it’s simply slick online marketing. Look beyond that, though, and you’ll see a successful experiment built by Google, Disney and U.K. app and web developer
Unit 9, that shows off the sort of immersive experiences possible when using web technologies such as
WebGL,
CSS3,
WebAudio,
WebRTC and other
HTML5 tools. Hollywood marketing machine meets tech evangelism in the future of online storytelling. “It’s a really cool, very emotional experience,” Alex Komoroske, a Chrome product manager, told Wired. “And for us, this is really about inspiring people. Even a couple years ago, or a year ago, this type of experience wouldn’t have even been possible on a web platform.” While Google has built plenty of
Chrome Experiments to show off creative ways to use new web tech — most notably an interactive collaboration with
Arcade Fire — none of its past projects have been so gorgeously detailed. Navigating around the Kansas circus, you see tents with different attractions. . . ."
Google’s changes to mobile advertising could fix company’s major problem - The Washington Post: "There are a couple of reasons that mobile advertising is such a challenge. First, it’s hard to deliver a good, but not intrusive, ad on a smaller screen. Second, it has traditionally been difficult to get a mobile ad campaign going. In the past, Google’s AdWords program has required companies to submit separate campaigns for different devices, locations and times — a labor-intensive process that often results in companies running hundreds of simultaneous, similar campaigns. With the changes, however, advertisers will be able to control several branches of a single campaign, with options to control customized mobile and desktop ads for different locations and times from a single place."
Google to buy marketing services company for $125 million | Reuters: "Channel Intelligence helps retailers, manufacturers and other advertisers make their products and services easier for consumers to find and buy online and in local stores. ICG said it will get $60.5 million for its stake in Channel Intelligence. The transaction is expected to be completed in the first quarter of 2013."
Yahoo reveals 'non-exclusive' ads deal with Google | ZDNet: " . . . However, there was no mention of Yahoo's
advertising relationship with Microsoft. Yahoo didn't provide a ton of additional details, but here's a snippet with a little more of the nitty-gritty from
today's blog post announcing the agreement:
By adding Google to our list of world-class contextual ads partners, we’ll be able to expand our network, which means we can serve users with ads that are even more meaningful. For our users, there won’t be a noticeable difference in how or where ads appear. More options simply mean greater flexibility. We look forward to working with all of our contextual ads partners to ensure we’re delivering the right ad to the right user at the right time.
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