Rediscovering Quora + more

Probably the biggest thing that happened was me rediscovering Quora the question-and-answer network. I replied to a question ‘What are the major reasons behind Yahoo’s drastic downfall?‘ and then republished it as a blog post with a few more bits and bobs. Traffic blew up on the post when Dave Farber published a link to it in his Interesting People email list. I read Yahoo’s $8 Billion Black Hole – Bloomberg Businessweek on Thursday and it felt like part two of my piece on Yahoo! which looks to now and forward whereas I looked at macro factors and heritage. Rediscovering Quora also reminded me of the lost opportunity in Yahoo! Answers.

Great video mash-ups plugged the gap post the Game of Thrones series launch

I got to see Keith Weed present an aggregate view of social as it pertains to Unilever’s brands and whilst on stage he revealed that they had an inter-agency war room set up to steer the media spend around Knorr’s #LoveAtFirstTaste campaign.

Short of Tinder integration I don’t really know what else they could have done. I do wish that it wouldn’t keep recommending chicken dishes to me though. Check out the campaign site here and the ad below.

Really nice creative driven by MullenLowe.

Pepsi went big with a digital OOH augmented reality campaign in Singapore. Most AR projects tend to be smaller rather than going for giant screens. Pepsi has an under-appreciated heritage in pioneering media devices. It did QRcodes on cans in western markets, so far ahead of consumer adoption that they had to provide instructions on the cans explaining what a QRcode was. This was on Pepsi Max which is right in that young adult / youth marketing space.

Hasbro who own the Monopoly board game, posted this surreal live stream on their Facebook page. It is strangely compelling like some bizarre form of performance art.