Last day to nominate those shonky services
Today is the final day for nominations for the 2015 Choice Shonky Awards, the type of award that companies actually don't want to win.
“With nominations closing, and only 22 days before the ‘winners’ are announced, this is your last chance to dish the dirt on what you believe is Australia’s shonkiest offering,” says Choice head of media Tom Godfrey.
“We are sounding the consumer call across the country for people to come forward with a product or a service they believe is the Shonkiest of the lot.”
Seven companies, including Commonwealth Bank, Arnott's and Kmart, received the anti-award last year.
“Sadly, the Shonkys are in their 10th year. We hoped business would have lifted their game years ago but the steady streams of complaints we receive every year seems to suggest we have a lot more lemon squeezing to do.”
To qualify for a Shonky Award, companies must demonstrate at least one of a few different criteria, including faults, a lack of transparency, false claims, poor value for money or for "having the propensity to outrage or amuse".
You can make your nominations at the Shonkys website.
Product launched to integrate DOOH and social media
OFA Marketing Production has launched a digital out of home product which provides off-the-shelf dynamic content, including the ability to integrate images from Instagram.
The cloud-based platform, Doohfa, will be on display in Central Park Sydney as part of the Beams Arts Festival, and will curate Instagram images submitted in the festival’s Instagram Competition and integrate them for display.
Doohfa managing director Dave Petschack said: “With Doohfa, brands can manage their content across multiple digital out of home (DOOH) networks from the one web-based dashboard. They can truly avail themselves of the immediacy and dynamism of digital display networks – even updating their brand messaging from their mobile.”
Adobe and Livefyre link up on social content
Adobe has brought on board social media software provider Livefyre to help businesses create and deliver digital content and experiences on their campaigns.
Livefyre has grown from a simple social commenting vehicle to its multi-use StreamHub platform offering live chat, live blogs, instant messaging and content curation.
Among its enterprise customers it can list AOL Tech, Dow Jones/The Wall Street Journal, CBS, Conde Nast and Fox News.
Within this link-up, Adobe is looking for brands to fold content from its Creative Cloud service into social content found and promoted by Livefyre. This content will then be delivered via Adobe Experience Manager.
SpotX launches In-Content Ad Unit to boost inventories
SpotX has launched a new video ad unit they say addresses video inventory constraints and viewability concerns.
The new 'In-Content Ad Unit' will also allow for a single management setup that works across desktops, mobile web and mobile apps.
This unit will give publishers the ability to slot video ads within content on their site, the video only playing while actually in view and typically placed between paragraphs of copy to be as non-intrusive as possible.
Premium publishers can use the units in HTML5 and Flash environments to deliver video ads too.
Recomazing research suggests value of friend recommendations
Research from social recommendation service Recomazing states that 52% of people will still act on a friend's approval of a service even if there are negative reviews online.
Recomazing, which launches today, allows Australians to find, share and store trusted business recommendations from within their social media circles. The company claims it is already assisting more than 5000 businesses in parlaying their great customer service into new recommendations.
The service aims to guard against false negative reviews, and foster the positive purchase decision impacts of friend recommendations.
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