Is this Tom Cruise or not? Watch the clip below and figure it out. This clip has just started pounding it’s way through YouTube promoting a new film (Superhero Movie - which has an lowly IMDB rating of 4.4 at present).
The real actor impersonating Tom Cruise in the clip below is Miles Fisher and he had us all laughing
1.4.2008: We are delighted to announce the arrival of TrustBanners - a scientific breakthrough in advertising. The results come about from 18 months of research with Professor Olaf. Prilo an expert in the study of brain function.
Below: The dots stimulate both left and right eye individually, stimulating the human mind to feel compelled to immediately consume or purchase the subject matter in the middle (eg: the apple shown). The animated version of the image below can be seen (here)
The Amazing Facts from viewing a TrustBanner: - 87.9% average increase of product desire in test subjects. - 76.4% switched brands after seeing a single TrustBanner - 63% purchased consumable products within 7 days. - No Click / CTA required. Can be applied to any banner ad.
WATCH THE VIDEO OF TEST SUBJECTS:
We look forward to hearing all you feedback and everyone enjoying TrustBanners in your favourite websites soon.
Amnesia is proud to announce the forthcoming launch of TrustBanners - a revolution in Internet Advertising and web based media. Stay tuned. The full release of this amazing and unique breakthrough will be released in 24 hours time.
Is it a hoax or real life weirdness? So Thomas Beatie has told the world (or specifically The Advocate) he’s pregnant. I have a sneaky suspicion this is an April fool to be revealed on Tuesday. Now, I love april fools, but this is just so unoriginal. Many have done the pregnant man thing in the past so not a great choice for an April Fool. Here’s just a few of those man-mums …
Saatchi & Saatchi’s campaign for UK health education featured this pregnant fella. It was their second ever campaign and paved the way for Advertising domination. (Read more here)
Arnold Scwarzenegger played a less-than-convincing mother in “Junior” .. well more convincing than our friend Thomas.
However, my all-time favourite pregnant man has got to be Vyvyan from The Young Ones. He declares to the house mates he’s pregnant, they prepare for the birth only to find out the baby is not quite what they expected.
So let’s see what gets born on April 1st 2008, but I’m not convinced.
3 Girls 2 Cans - A game not to be confused with a viral video on YouTube with an uncannily similar sounding name. The idea is to combine two girls to create a 3rd ULTIMATE GIRL. We’ve bottled up all our favourite fast play viral ingredients (which means games don’t last too long) so run around and go for the big score and #1 Rank.
Your ‘circle of influence’ will attract anything that moves! - BEHOLD the power of combining Lynx fragrances to make a killer third fragrance!
Avoid making “abominations” (Male / Female combos)!!!! YUK!
I stumbled across this photo in my archives and thought it was good for a caption competition. It was taken when I was working on Gordon Ramsay’s website whilst working at our sister company in London.
So … captions below.
Best entries WIN an exclusive Amnesia ipod cover (thanks to our friends at People Like Us)
Here’s a screen shot of Safari, the Apple browser in action on a Windows PC released on Mar 18 2008. The first thing I noticed is the way fonts are rendered, even down to a small point size. Being used to IE and Firefox it all seemed a bit fuzzy to me. I looked for an option to turn font smoothing off but could only alter the intensity of anti-aliasing. Have a look at the images at the bottom of the article and compare the difference.
So which Windows Browser is fastest? Safari, Internet Explorer or Firefox? What surprised me was the speed of Safari in several rendering tests I ran in which it outperformed the two big guns by a big margin. For this I downloaded a CSS benchmark test created by nontroppo. I then tried some script tests here from CelticKane.
Firefox
IE
Safari
CSS render
285ms
574ms
51ms
Script Test
859ms
1209ms
257ms
Putting this into layman’s terms - a blink of the eye is roughly 50-80 ms so when you start to compare the above then you realise the time differences we’re talking about are very visible even to the untrained eye. In the real world when I visited some heavier html/css websites in Safari they seemed visibly to load faster.
Font rendering comparisons from the three browsers: Notice the Safari rendering on the right is quite different…
Firefox
IE
Safari
So what’s the downside? Well Firefox and IE are very well supported by the development community. Plugins like PicLens do not work yet (I tried) so basically it’s good for browsing, not much else at this stage. Having said that the speed of browsing makes it worth a look (if you can bear the fuzzy fonts).
Interestingly the default search engines include only Google and Yahoo. Hmm is the omission of Live Search a subtle poke at Microsoft?
Note: Tests were completed running on a Centrino Duo Inspiron 1720 with Vista Ultimate.
PUZZLE #2: So we know a few people that claim they can find ANYTHING on the Internet. Are you one of these people? Well here’s your chance to prove yourself… (This challenge posted 10.42pm GST+10 on Mar Feb 22 2008):
Is this image real or fake? (only part of image shown here). Winner = [winner's name to be posted here].
Rules for this challenge: 1. Winner to post answer in comments. 2. Winner must post full image url. 3. Winner must explain the back story behind the image. 4. Winner should state how long it took them to find. - Amusing comments and guesses are welcome. - No prize - just the glory of having your name (in red) above!
Ning is billed as being a tool for creating your own ‘white label’ social network. Recent data supports claims from the company that says that popularity is steeply on the increase. Alexa stats show that the site is attracting roughly a third of that of Bebo. According to comScore Ning is now getting over 3,000,000 users a month.
We first looked at Ning early in 2007 and tried out a couple of the features (want to see? - go to amnesia’s ning url: forget.ning.com). We probably would have done more with it but we didn’t like a large portion of the page being taken up with Google text ads …so we’ve let it sit there gathering dust.
We do however quite like Ning and think that there is definite promise especially with some new features on the way. The next 3 to 6 months will be very interesting to watch and if the traffic curve from the last 3 months continues then it shows every sign that it will be ‘the one to watch’ in 2008.
Here at Amnesia there’s often debate about our work environment and what we put in it (what goes on the walls, what music we play on the speakers, etc.). Interesting to see this “desk project” and peer into the environments of others.
Here are the facts on Moonvertising. It is an advertising Hoax. It has become clear that many people are confused by the Rolling Rock ads as to what is going on and if it is real or not. Amnesiablog covered Moonvertising a few weeks ago (here) but obviously (having read the comments, see sample below) we probably need to clarify the facts again.
“I THINK TECHNOLOGY IS GOING A LITTLE TOO FAR. WHILE ITS KINDA COOL IN THEROY… WHATS NEXT? I MEAN COME ON REALLY. THIS ISNT METROPOLIS! BATMAN DOENST EXSIST… AND I WANNA BE ABLE TO LOOK AT THE MOON WITHOUT A BEER LOGO ON IT”. -Terra
Here are the real facts on Moonvertising:
1. It is a Spoof/Hoax campaign for Rolling Rock Beer. 2. There will not be any ads beamed onto the moon on Mar 21 2008. 2. Coke actually tried to do this in 1999 (here). It was banned by the FAA. The power of the lasers needed were deemed likely to cause major problems with bypassing aircraft. LOL. 3. The campaign is created by Advertising agency Goodby Silverstein and Partners. 4. Rolling Rock has produced several spoof campaigns in the past using FAKE ad exec “Ron StableHorn“ 5. It is technically possible to produce images reflected off the moon’s surface but seems unlikely that it could ever appear anything like the image below. 6. Here is an image from 1968 when two argon lasers were beamed from Earth (photo taken looking back to Earth from space[edit] ). Might imply that if the technology were ever used it would work better on a new moon not a full one.
BREAKING NEWS:
www.trustbanners.com - Are “mind-control” banner adverts possible in websites? Check the above link out…
If you just typed www.googl.com, gogle, goog, www.goo, wwww.google.com, “www google.com”, gooogle you are not alone, in fact the volumes of people mistyping the word Google is staggering - and that’s just the start of the story. We had a closer look at the phenomenon today whilst trawling some search data.
Let’s start with the ironic fact that the most searched word on the Internet is “Google” itself. Now ask yourself why would people already using Google be searching for the word Google? (Read on for theories). The same rule applies to the other search engine - including Live Search (Microsoft), Yahoo, and AOL- yes, the number one word typed into all these engines is… GOOGLE.
Amnesia estimates (based on access sample data we have available to us) that the number of people in Australia (population 22 million) typing the word “Google” into search engines including Google every month is well over 40 million (twice that of the entire population of Australia) and of these searches around 2% of people mistype the word. - That’s potentially 800,000 search queries falling to a typo in Aus. If the same numbers apply to the US that would mean roughly 8 million ‘Google typos’ per month.
So why are people searching for Google inside Google? (+ Why so many typos?)
Search Toolbars often get confused with the Navigation Toolbar where you type in the URL mistakes where you think you are typing the url, not searching…
Automatic Search kicks in when it doesn’t find a live url, so the person may have been trying to navigate rather than search. Miss-types below may be largely re-directed by this automatic browser behaviour.
Search engines are used largely for navigation - ie: they may know what they want, even the url - it is just easier to go through search to get to it.
People are so used to having Google open, they just stop thinking about what they are doing.
We think that most people know how to spell Google, so ‘fat finger syndrome’ as it is lovingly called in the industry may be responsible. ie: often we simply can’t seem to get our fingers to the right keys (urrr… not that people really have fat fingers. Maybe ‘Small Key’ syndrome ought to be a more p.c way of describing this?)
Some of the most Popular Mis-types:
wwww.google.com
gogle
www.googl.com
gooogle
www google.com (space instead of dot)
goggle
googl
www.goog
www.google.co
www.google com (space instead of dot)
www.google.c
ww.google.com
www.googl.
If anyone has any more data on this let us know in the comments and we will amend the article.
Apparently in London a lot of people are walking into street poles while texting on their phones. In a trial scheme this week in London, pads similar to those found on rugby posts are being installed on selected poles in “text injury black-spots”.
Scott Wade’s artworks are dirty, detailed and disposable.
Scott uses a brush and his hands to shade amazing artworks into the rear windshields of really dirty cars.
He has a whole myriad of images in his gallery and has made his art into a fully fledged business!
Even if you are not a designer, it’s just a great piece to watch. French electro duo Justice (well known around the world for their album “Cross” or dance floor banger “D.A.N.C.E”) did another really good track called “DVNO”. Listen to it and have a look at how it’s synchronized with graphics. Enjoy!
The BBC has recently launched a re-designed homepage. It’s currently restricted to the homepage only, but I hope that they can follow this through to the rest of the site (no small task I might add).
The site allows users to modify and personalise their own homepage, cherry picking content to suit their needs.
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Advertising, Funny, Video, marketing | Tagged: hoax, impersonator, impression, miles fisher, parody, spoof, superhero, tom cruise | 
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