Squeaky CEO, Anthony Del Monte & Famed NYC Photographer, Ricky Powell
Why do we love NYC? Because millionaires take the subway with homeless people. Because you can eat lunch for a dollar or a thousand. Because the food, the energy, the pulse. Because most of all the people…heroes, villains, workers, players, characters and institutions. Yesterday one of NY’s true institutions, Rickey Powell, stopped by the loft to discuss his upcoming photography show at Squeaky on July 22. I toasted my coffee to his boilermaker (prelunch) and as always Ricky didn’t disappoint. As the song goes “to know know know him…is to love him”.
One of the main challenges luxury brands face online is maintaining exclusivity while participating in a platform that is the polar opposite of exclusive, open to all with an internet connection, 24/7. At Squeaky, we have dealt with these challenges first-hand working to craft digital strategies for some of the leading luxury brands including MaxMara, Christian Dior, Lexus, Movado and others.
So how do we translate this notion of luxury on a platform that is accessible by the masses, while speaking to the actual consumers and evoking desire from the aspirational consumers?
One answer we have arrived at in our experience, is to redefine what exclusive means. Rather than exclusive being the clientele the brand attracts, it should instead be the content and experience the brand conveys. Here, the focus shifts to the brand to provide a value add online just as they do offline. By curating the images, videos, copy, content and experience a brand puts out online, exclusivity is created.
It now becomes about luxury brands figuring out what content to offer and how to offer it in order to ensure the online audience receives a premiere experience, just as they would in-store. This provides a distinct opportunity for brands to tap into their heritage and identity to and explore new and exciting technologies in order to achieve a memorable, informative, and exclusive online position.
One way brands are doing this is by curating and editing content to represent not only the brand identity, but to add valuable lifestyle content for the audience.
This post is based on the original article appearing on Elizabeth Schofield’s, Fashion’s Collective.com
There’s been some chatter on All Facebook of Facebook’s strategy to leverage their open graph platform to ‘declare war’ against Google and their dominating search engine business model. Although there is not immediate concern for the Google empire this is an important development for marketers to keep their eye on. All Open Graph-enabled web pages show up in search when a user likes them. The results are very preliminary, but as Facebook’s evolution of search continues marketers will need to think about optimizing their sites for Facebook’s search engine.
Play Me, I’m Yours is an awesome project featuring street pianos in cities across the world. Located in parks, squares, bus shelters and train stations, outside galleries, markets and on bridges and ferries, the pianos are for any member of the public to enjoy. From 9am-10pm each day until July 5, 60 pianos will be available to play across New York City. Go to the website to view locations throughout all five boroughs via Google Maps.
iPhones, iPads, and iPods have taken over the world. Apple is everywhere, and as a leading digital agency we need to be prepared to shift gears toward developing web pages that can run on these devices. Add it to the list. It seems every client wants their site coded for IE6, but now want it to be viewed on an iPad. We do to. But, the only problem is your slick flash based website does not run on Apple devices. It’s unfortunate and it’s does not seem like Apple is going to change their possession anytime soon.
Apple has said that Flash is vulnerable to viruses and other malicious software and Symantec also highlighted Flash for having one of the worst security records in 2009. In addition, Flash uses software rather than hardware to decode video and therefore uses more power which is a serious downside for use on mobile devices. One of the biggest problems is the fact that Flash isn’t built around touch-based navigation. A lot of Flash requires hovering over an image for a menu to pop up and there is no concept of this with touch navigation. This would mean Flash would have to be re-written in such a way so as to be compatible with finger navigation.
So what can we do? Developers must consider HTML 5, CSS and Javascript as coding options so that more of the web is accessible to over 50M people (the number of iPhone users in the US). Here’s to hoping that Apple and Adobe can play nice in the future. If you need help give Squeaky a call and we can give you a hand.
