Sometimes in advertising you come across an idea that works so well in one place so you wind up finding other places to replicate it.
I Am Thankful
At the tail end of 2008, me and the other folks at Dixon Schwabl created a holiday themed website that was part self-promotion and part community involvement. For this project we collected a handful of messages from friends and family and we displayed them one at a time on an interactive Flash website. The website featured a snow globe and every time you "shook" the snow globe a new message would appear.
Users of the website were encouraged to add their own messages to the site, via a form in the Flash site. They could also add their message and send it to another person. When that person received the email it would include a unique URL that played their message first.
Here’s how it looked in action:
The 3D scene and the snow globe were created by my friend, Ian Auch. The movement of the snow globe and the triggering of the animations were something I remember spending hours tweaking until it felt right. I believe the dynamic animation of the text flowing in was based on a feature in Flash that let you animate letters individually.
Pluta Cancer Center
The Pluta Cancer Center website is a resource for patients and family members to get information on where and how their treatment programs took place. This project was one we launched in early 2009 and it featured one page where users could inspire others or be shown messages of support in an interactive way.
When you got to the You Can page, you would see curated messages floating in space. As you navigated around the word-cloud like interface you would see message snippets come in and out based on where you mouse was within the page. Clicking on a message showed the entire message and its author.
A button on the page brought up a Flash-based form—similar to the one in the holiday card—that let you submit a message and your relation to the organization. The messages here were processed on the web server and stored until someone re-entered it into the database of messages that fed the page.
To be honest, I may have programmed the full website or maybe just the You Can page of messages. It’s been long enough that I don’t recall, but I remember working on the You Can page. I remember we wanted it to feel like an open and endless space where someone would feel like there was endless support and people backing them up in their fight.
Fin
The holiday card’s user message feature was an example of us using our self-promotional work to prove out and learn our way through something that we eventually implemented for a client. This was something that we sometimes did from time to time as a way to use ourselves as the guinea pig before we could confidently sell a bleeding edge technology or solution to a client.
In the 2010s you might have used social media campaigns to accomplish what we did with these sites. You might even try to make a custom hashtag happen. What I liked about these sites were that they were almost less about promoting the brand and they were about moving someone emotionally with just a few lines of text—presented in a fun way.