June 2007

An article in today’s DMNews talks about the success of Steve Spangler, a science teacher from Englewood, CO, creator of the Mentos-Diet Coke geyser experiment that last year became a viral video phenomenon.

Mr. Spangler sells cool science experiments on the internet. Turns out blog posts lead to sales spikes. This is excerpted from the article:

In June 2004, his [Spangler’s] site experienced “an incredible spike in sales” because of one particular product called Instant Snow.

Netconcepts [Spangler’s eCommerce provider] told Mr. Spangler that the spike was due to a post about the product on a blog.

“We launched our blog in July 2004,” [Spangler] said.

Mr. Spangler estimates that 15% of his sales come from his blog.

Thanks to Conrad Fink in New York for spotting this info.

Unfortunately, we have another entry for our “bad copywriting” thread. This one is from Virgin Mobile and McKinney + Silver, Durham, NC (thanks to Tim Nunn of AdFreak). Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday’s New York Times Magazine featured an article about the avant garde French designers M/M.

They’ve worked for Calvin Klein, the Musee D’Art Moderne and Bjork. And it’s well-beyond just graphic design, typography and inventing fonts - they’ve done magazine covers (Paris Vogue), stage sets and music videos.

One wonders how and when M/M’s ideas will work their way into the mainstream. Is there some way we can use their thinking in web design? Email campaigns? Inspiring stuff.

To get a better feel for their work, go to the Times article and watch the multimedia presentation.

Our colleague Gary recently pointed out another reason why dynamic websites perform better in search than static websites. Read the rest of this entry »