This Strange, Beautiful, Indescribable New Media Technology Just Won The World's Top Ad Award

To call the Barbarian Group's "Cinder" project a mere "coding platform," — which, technically, it is — is a huge injustice.

It's more like a massive multi-media animation dashboard for gigantic outdoor spectacles. But it also works in one-off apps on iPads. (See video below.) It can transform the side of an entire building into a shimmering, reactive sheet of light. Or it can rearrange your iTunes collection into a series of animated planets and solar systems.

And it's just won a Grand Prix at the Cannes Lions ad festival for innovation, the first time an award has been given for that category.

It's incredibly difficult to describe. Officially, Cinder is "a powerful, intuitive toolbox for programming graphics, audio, video, networking, image processing and computational geometry."

It's easier to show you what it does than describe it in words. Here are some images of Cinder in action, and there's a video at the bottom that gives more information:

Cinder Creative Coding from The Barbarian Group on Vimeo.

Four New Ads From Apple Show The Company Going Through A Thrilling Change In Direction (AAPL)

For years, Apple's advertising has almost been a parody of itself. A product appears on a white screen. A disembodied finger starts tapping and swiping its way through the device's features. A self-satisfied voice — often actor Peter Coyote — proclaims the experience "magical."

Apple was telling us its products were magical instead of showing us that — a key error in effective storytelling.

In four new ads from Apple, however, that format has been ditched in favor of a much more thoughtful, inspiring message about how Apple's devices actually function in the real world. Instead of telling us they're magical, the ads show us they are. (See video below.)We said last year, amid the iPhone 5 launch, that Apple's ads were becoming old and stale. More recently, Microsoft launched a new campaign for its Windows 8 tablets that parodies Apple's ads. That's a sure sign that the shark has been fully jumped.

Since then, the company appears to have done some soul searching. A recent Bloomberg story described a process in which ad agency TBWA/Media Arts Lab makes entire finished commercials for Apple, which senior vice president of marketing Philip W. Schiller then shoots down, costing the company millions.

The process has recently borne fruit, however.

In the newest ad, five people describe how apps have improved their lives. They're not playing Candy Crush Saga. The users include a Paralympic athlete who adjusts the angle of her prosthetic feet with an app, a Kenyan bush doctor who uses a health care app, and there's a particularly beautiful section about an app that preserves the language of native people living in the Arctic Circle.

It follows on the heels of a corporate image ad dedicated to the primacy of design at the company: "This is our signature, and it means everything," it says. The closing shot shows the motto, "Designed by Apple in California."

That was preceded by two ads for the iPhone highlighting iTunes and the phone's camera. They showed people using the devices in real life, with an understated music score. The subtle message is: We make this easy. That's why you choose us.

To many this will seem like trivia. But at major companies, and Apple especially (Steve Jobs used to sign off on ads personally), changing your corporate image and doing a whole new marketing campaign are regarded as major endeavors. Apple spends roughly $1 billion a year on ads. So this is one of the biggest corporate image makeovers of the year.

Nails will be bitten and sleep will be lost at Apple as the marketing folks wait to see whether the new direction has an impact on sales.

One thing they need not worry about, however, is their creative reputation. The ads look and feel great. They took a risk, and the first part of that — do we like them? — has paid off.

The new "Designed by Apple in California" ad:

Why You're Absolutely Right To Think The Candy Crush IPO Is A Terrible Idea

Many people are baffled as to why anyone thinks it would be a good idea for King, maker of the super-addictive mobile phone game Candy Crush Saga, to file an IPO

Bad things happen to mobile game companies who want to sell equity on the stock market, as Zynga has recently discovered. But then you hear about the guys who made Bejeweled — acquired for $700 million-plus in 2011 — and it becomes clear. Perhaps Candy Crush is the new Bejeweled, and perhaps King is the new PopCap.That, obviously is the temptation.Unfortunately, the odds are going to be against King. Here's why.Games are, by definition, fleeting and faddish. You can't even copyright them (only their names and branding). So competition is fierce. And no one needs them, the way they need food, housing or transportation. Games therefore seem like the very definition of something you should not invest in — and game companies seem like the kind of startups who might best remain private, where they can ride the financial roller coaster of the App Store behind closed doors.We got a recent glimpse of the terrors of game company economics from Zynga. In Q1 2013, its revenue declined 17% to $264 million, as users got bored of Farmville and Zynga Poker. 520 workers lost their jobs.Zynga acquired OMGPop for $180 million in 2012, to obtain its super hot Draw Something app brand. In 2013, it laid off the entire OMGPop staff. Few play Draw Something now. Yet over at Rovio, maker of Angry Birds, there are rumors of an upcoming IPO, too. The company has a new COO and a new board member, which makes people thinking it is planning a strategic move.Angry Birds is one of the most successful mobile games ever. Yet what little we know about Rovio — it's still private — suggests all is not well in the land of green pigs.A recent Forbes article pointed out just how one-note the company is. Its games include: Angry Birds, Angry Birds Space, Angry Birds Friends, Angry Birds Star Wars, Bad Piggies, Angry Birds Seasons, and Angry Birds Rio. It also does a lot of Angry Birds licensing, for toys and movies.Its latest product launch is expected to be … Angry Birds Go.Simon Moller, chief creative officer at Kiloo — a company that makes Subway Surfers — believes Rovio is in trouble: “The games are the drivers of the brand and they’re declining at a rapid pace.  They are relying on the plush toys to sell themselves, because all of their games are just the same game… again.  Every time they launch a new game it’s worse than the last one.”Take Moller with a pinch of salt. He's a rival, of course. But he has a point: How much further can Angry Birds possibly go before the demand for boomeranging toucans is satisfied?A Rovio IPO would be guaranteed to make at least one person rich, however. Kaj Hed, its current majority stockholder.  According to Arctic Startup:

Ever since writing our, "Rovio's $42M Investment In 2011 Actually Went To Its Owners," we've been curious about the Angry Birds creator's ownership structure. What's most defining of the structure is is Kaj Hed's near 70% ownership through Trema International Holdings, followed by Niklas Zennström's Atomico Ventures and Accel Partners at roughly 10%.

So why does King want to expose itself to this less-than-promising "next level"?

In 2000, three guys — John Vechey, Brian Fiete and Jason Kapalka — invented Bejeweled, the gem-matching game that was originally played on the web. In 2011, after Bejeweled had become one of the dominant games on hundreds of millions of feature phones and then smart phones, PopCap was acquired by EA for ~$732 million, mostly in cash. Here are its revenues through 2010:

In 2011, revenue grew grew 30%, EA reported.See those bars on the PopCap revenue chart, reaching smoothly for the sky, year after year? That's the lightning that King is hoping to rebottle.Maybe it will succeed. Maybe, like PopCap, King can grow its portfolio of addictive games so large that even if a few fall out of favor there are newer bigger ones to replace them. (PopCap has 169 different games, when you count versions for various platforms.)But even PopCap isn't immune from misfortune. It just laid off 96 people at its Dublin studio. EA said it wasn't sufficiently profitable.

PopCap will be fine, of course. But that's the thing with games. More often than not they end with the phrase, "Game over."

Asked About Privacy In A Post-PRISM World, Ad Exec Says Of Google And Facebook: 'There’s No Alternative. ... There’s No Choice'

The PRISM scandal — in which the NSA has been accused of accessing data on people from Facebook, Google and other online service providers — has got the adtech business worried.

By focusing the nation's attention on the ease with which private data can be collected online, might this provoke a backlash against online advertisers?

After all, they've been doing this for years, in various ways. Not for national security, but for their own lists and databases. And, of course, the extent of the government's data collection from Google, Facebook et al. has turned out to be much smaller and more focused than initially feared.

Might PRISM get people thinking about how much of their private information they're giving for free to online advertisers?

AdExchanger asked that question of several adtech execs recently, and we were most struck by the answer of Greg Sterling, the founder of Sterling Market Intelligence, a local search  marketing consultancy. He noted that anyone who wants to control their privacy online is in for a shock. The only way to guard your data is to opt out of internet life almost entirely.

And most people just aren't going to do that.

"These are services that they use everyday like Google, Facebook, etc. and there’s really no alternative. Realistically there’s no choice in the matter for many people unless they were to completely stop using these tools and technologies that have become so ingrained in our lives."

Read his full quote here, in which he gives a bit more context. Broadly, he believes consumers feel powerless because they don't know what to do to guard their privacy.

REPORT: Web Ad-Blocking Company Sells User Data To Advertisers

Ghostery, one of the most popular ad-blocking services on the web, is owned by a company that uses the data it collects from its users to help advertisers target their ads better, the MIT Technology Review reports.

Ghostery is a widget users can install in their web browsers, and it's made by a company called Evidon. It blocks the tracking code that advertisers use to target you with ads, keeping your browsing private. MIT says:

Yet few of those who advocate Ghostery as a way to escape the clutches of the online ad industry realize that the company behind it, Evidon, is in fact part of that selfsame industry.

Evidon helps companies that want to improve their use of tracking code by selling them data collected from the 8 million Ghostery users who have enabled the tool's data sharing feature.

"This is not a scheme," MIT quotes Scott Meyer, Evidon's CEO, as saying. It's helpful to give advertisers Ghostery's data because advertisers don't generally want to target people who have opted out of advertising, he says.

It's no secret, either. Evidon was originally called "Better Advertising," as its own web site makes clear.

Samsung Is Spending $5 Million To Subsidize Jay-Z's New Album, And Actually It's A Brilliant Use Of Its Money

At first glance, Samsung's $5 million deal with Jay-Z to release his new album, Magna Carta Holy Grail, as a free copy on 1 million Galaxy and Note mobile devices, seems like a collossal act of marketing hubris.

But it's not. Once you understand Samsung's corporate finance structure, it turns out to be a fantastically good deal for the Korean electronics giant.

First, the case for the prosecution:

That all turns out to be irrelevant once you look at the scale of the advertising budgets Samsung is working with. This chart comes from Horace Dediu, who maintains a blog post titled The Cost of Selling Galaxies:

Samsung spends more than $4 billion annually on advertising. $5 million is, therefore, barely a rounding error in Samsung's accounts.

And Samsung isn't strictly paying for phone sales. Sure, a small number of people will be tipped in favor of a Galaxy rather than an iPhone because of the offer. What Samsung is really getting is free PR and the media exposure that goes with that.

As of 3 p.m. today, Google News registered 312 news sources carrying stories about the deal in the last 24 hours. That number will surely double in the next week or so. And then there's the word of mouth ... and so on.

To buy that level of exposure through traditional advertising would have cost multiples of $5 million. (Oddly, had Samsung done just that, few would have noticed or complained about the budget.)

In the 3 minute TV commercial Jay-Z made to support the giveaway, he says, "We don't have any rules. Everyone is just trying to figure out, that's why the internet is like the wild west, the wild, wild west. We need to write the new rules."

In part, it's scripted, self serving nonsense. Jay-Z isn't really that interested in writing the new rules of the internet. Rather, one of the songs on his album has a "wild west" theme.

But he is right about one thing: The old rules — in which a $5 million budget would have been blown on TV commercials within just a few weeks — are increasingly pointless.

Has Amazon Really Figured Out How To Screw Small Businesses Out Of Their Google Rankings? (AMZN)

Amazon has found a way to lower the Google search rankings of small businesses who use its Pro Merchant program, according to The Daily Dot. The news site describes the process as "black hat" search engine optimization (SEO) that places Amazon search results above legitimate results for the actual businesses people are searching for. That's a serious charge. But that's not quite what is going on. In fact, we're not sure that the Dot has this right. Basically, the Dot says, Amazon is maintaining web pages for small businesses that no longer do transactions via Amazon. Because Amazon has fantastic SEO, those defunct merchant pages on Amazon appear above the business's actual, official web pages on Google. Any company that tries Amazon's Pro Merchant program and then abandons it risks having their old, unused Amazon page rank above their actual site in Google search, the Dot says. However, when Business Insider tried to reproduce the Dot's searches — to see if abandoned Amazon pages really did rank above merchants who no longer sold there — we couldn't see the problem. For instance, one source cited in the article, "Dani, the owner of the New York-based jewelry store 47stcloseouts.com," complained: ... the search results for Dani's Amazon storefront continue to beat the listings for his actual store on Google. The result was more customers going to Amazon instead of his store. "I was competing against myself," he said. But Dani's store is fully operational on Amazon, right here. It was the same with Carolina Rustica, a furniture store that the Dot previously claimed had abandoned Amazon and was now dismayed to find that its name and links were not removed. But Carolina Rustica is right here on Amazon, still selling. And, if it were the case that Amazon is refusing to delete abandoned storefronts simply because it wants the SEO, then that would be sketchy, but technically not "black hat" SEO (which can get you banned from Google entirely). After all, Amazon is not seeding the web with questionable links to those pages. It's just not deleting the pages. That might be sneaky, but it's not "black hat." We previously noted that Google is involved in a war with Amazon over product listing ads. If it were the case that Amazon was using unethical pages to gain SEO inside Google, you can bet that Google would examine that very closely indeed — especially as it would give Google the chance to suspend Amazon from its search rankings for cheating the system. Google, obviously, hasn't done that, even though it would be a huge boost to its own product listing ads and a killer for Amazon's. Amazon did not return the Dot's messages. We asked the company for comment too, and we'll update this post when we hear back.SEE ALSO: See How Google's New Shopping Ads Are Crushing Amazon's Search Listings Join the conversation about this story »    

How To Switch Off Apple's iPhone Tracking System In iOS 7 (AAPL)

Apple introduced a couple of new things for advertisers in its upcoming iPhone operating system update, iOS 7. First, it forced more advertisers to use its iPhone tracking system, IDFA (sometimes called IFA), which stands for ID for Advertisers. Second, it rearranged the settings on your iPhone so that it's actually easier to switch off the tracking if you don't want advertisers to get your personal data. Most people don't even know their iPhones track what they do and send that data to advertisers. And Apple makes the iPhone and iOS 7 with tracking in a default "on" position. If you want to switch it off, here's what you have to do. Go to the settings app on your iPhone. Now tap on the section labeled "Privacy." (This is actually a big change for Apple. In iOS 6, the tracking options were not under "Privacy," they were under "General" — where most people were unlikely to see them.) Next tap on the section labeled "Advertising." This brings up the "Limit Ad Tracking" option. Move the slider button to "on." Yes, it's confusing: To switch ad tracking off, you have to move the "Limit Ad Tracking" to on. Advertisers love this counterintuitive mechanism because most people either don't touch it — in which case tracking is on by default — or they get the on/off decision wrong, leaving the tracking on when they've switched it to off. Here's a visual walk-through. 1. Go to Settings and hit "Privacy": 2. Next tap on "Advertising": 3. Finally, switch "Limit Ad Tracking" to the "on" position: SEE ALSO: Apple Wants More Advertisers To Use Its iPhone Tracking System SEE ALSO: Apple Has Quietly Started Tracking iPhone Users Again, And It's Tricky To Opt Out Join the conversation about this story »    

Apple Wants More Advertisers To Use Its iPhone Tracking System (AAPL)

Apple has tightened its rules for advertisers who are trying to track users on their iPhones. The company wants advertisers to universally adopt its IDFA (or IFA) system for tracking. IDFA stands for "identifier for advertisers." The move will likely increase the number of people whose iPhone activity is tracked by advertisers, because in newer versions of Apple's iPhone operating system (iOS 6 and later), the privacy controls are situated in the "General" menu within Settings, and not in the "Privacy" menu. Tracking is on by default. Users must choose to switch it off if they do not want to be tracked. (Here are some instructions for switching off tracking.) IDFA is similar to a cookie — it allows advertisers to know that a specific iPhone user is looking at a specific publication and can serve an ad targeting that user. The tracking is anonymous. It doesn't show advertisers any personally identifying information. But it does show them what you're doing and what you're interested in. Apple had stopped supporting developers and advertisers who were using other ways of tracking people on their iPhones, AdExchanger reports. Now Apple is removing access to information from advertisers who are still trying to use those old methods. And in May, Apple began rejecting apps that used the old system, UDID, from its App Store. The company wants all advertisers to use IDFA, in other words.SEE ALSO: Apple Has Quietly Started Tracking iPhone Users Again, And It's Tricky To Opt Out Join the conversation about this story »    

The Price Of Running A Campaign On Apple's Fancy Ad System Has Dropped From $1 Million To $50 (AAPL)

Apple has lowered the minimum entry point for running a campaign on iAd, its mobile ad system, to $50. When it launched in 2010, the minimum buy-in price was $1 million. The new price is aimed at app developers who want to run their own campaigns, GigaOm reports. Apple has a new "Workbench" product to help developers get started on their own. Previously, Apple hoped big corporate brands would run splashy campaigns on iAd. Apple was hoping that iAd — offering space on apps running on people's iPads and iPhones — would be a bit like glossy magazine ads: Expensive and tasteful. But it turns out that mobile advertising is more nitty gritty than that. It's about driving app downloads, and e-commerce. It's more like search advertising than TV advertising, in other words. The minimum price of an iAd run has been declining for a while. It was halved to $500,000 in 2011, and then reduced to $100,000 in 2012. The current entry point is now 0.005% of the original price. Reality appears to have arrived at Apple: The advertisers whose budgets are really driving mobile ads tend to be small, direct-response driven companies. Those clients want to spend a few dollars at a time, tweak their campaign, and then spend a few more dollars, and so on, until they perfect the ROI on the money they're spending. It's non-glamorous, turnkey stuff. But there are hundreds of thousands of those $50 advertisers, and only a handful of big corporate clients willing to spend six figures or more on a branding campaign. The real test comes when Apple launches iTunes Radio, which will be fuelled by iAd money. Ads on that music streaming service could look/sound a lot like those on Pandora. Sure, there will be big corporate brands. But there are plenty of small local and regional businesses running on Pandora too. That's why Pandora books ~$100 million in mobile advertising annually whereas iAd only gets ~$125 million.SEE ALSO: Meet The 29 Most Important People In Mobile Advertising SEE ALSO: Apple Admits Steve Jobs' Vision For iAd Was A Huge Flop Join the conversation about this story »