Want to catch up with what happened in the digital world this week? Our weekly cheat sheet will fill you in on everything you missed while you were scrambling to meet deadlines and put out fires.
Read about the era of Old Spice Marketing Director Mr. Wolfdog, Reddit’s new online video series, Otoy’s plan to change animating methods via cloud, Pinterest’s analytics tool and Google’s latest note-taking app.
1. Old Spice’s newest spokesman: Mr. Wolfdog
Old Spice brings home another marketing win with their campaign for the new “Wild Collection” with the help of their fictitious Marketing Director, Mr. Wolfdog. Within a span of a week, his appearance has generated over 4 million views on YouTube, 600,000 views on OldSpice.com and MrWolfdog.com, as well as more than 2.4 million likes on Facebook. The company made a brilliant choice to further their success by conducting a Google+ Hangout where Wolfdog personally interviewed potential interns who endured a few random/hilarious commands. With, what seems to be a focus on online video consumption, this campaign was an excellent form of interaction between a brand and their consumers.
2. Reddit launches a new web series, “Explain Like I’m Five”
Reddit recently created a series of original videos, funded by YouTube, entitled “Explain Like I’m Five” where two adults explain complex issues such as the stock market, existentialism, and the crisis in Syria to five-year-olds in a simplified way. The series is inspired by the “Explain Like I’m Five” subreddit which gets an estimated 4 million page-views monthly. Each video ends with a message driving viewers to DonorsChoose.org which is an online charity that provides teachers with classroom resources.
3. Otoy looks to the cloud for animation
With 3D graphics animation on the rise, Otoy wants to move the entire process to the cloud. This week, at Nvidia’s technology conference, Otoy displayed demos allowing users to create special effects using Octane Render in less time and at a fraction of the cost. Rather than using expensive hardware, animators can now simply pay for the time needed to create their 3D scenes by using cloud graphics processors. Individuals can download the cloud-based application to any computer for a small fee of $199 in order to start creating custom designs. Since its reveal in November, Octane Render has gained thousands of users.
4. Analytics tool improves Pinterest’s business accounts
Pinterest announced their new business accounts a few months ago but have now decided to optimize the experience by introducing an analytics tool for those accounts, free of charge. As long as users have a business account, on Pinterest, they can find several categories of information to choose from such as site metrics, most recent, most repined and most clicked. Not only does the new analytics tool help businesses use their platform successfully but it also strengthens their brand content by assessing the collected data.
5. Introducing Keep, Google’s new note-taking app
Google announced the new Keep app this week. There really is no other app that Google Keep can be compared to, other than sticky notes. The note-taking app lets users post pictures, make quick lists and add notes via text or voice recognition. Even though the app shows no “wow factor,” one feature that does stand out is the speed of which the content can be stored. The simplicity of the app leaves room for nothing but potential to be a great tool.
