As part of our Favorite Brand Experience series, we’re pleased to bring you an interview with Soichiro Nishigaki, Creative Director at Fallon Tokyo.

Your idea about the perfect working day?
The perfect working day to me would be to start with riding a bicycle with my iPod on a brilliantly sunny morning. If my loving iPod shuffles to give me songs of Dave Matthews Band, it would be perfect! At the office, no meeting in my calendar, being creative, leaving office around 6pm (not only me but all of my team) and having a happy time drinking beers with my team.

Favorite Brand Experience:
Recently I found the side-kick banner. This way, the user can go deep for getting an experience without leaving the site.  These days there are many rich banners that come floating up or expand without the user’s initiation.  Personally I always think that those kind of things are just really really annoying to users. It could be giving a negative impression for your brand. But this side-kick format provides you with a rich experience with a lot of entertainment and surprise only when the user wants to see it. I like that.

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When are you inspired?
Sometimes it just hits me or coming out from talented folks in my team, but it’s not always that way.After spending hours and days and nights with my team, killing small ideas, stretching, twisting, re-starting.. and then, suddenly brilliant simple idea comes out which we all say “this is it.”
 

What needs to be changed/improved in order to achieve ultimate engagement with users?
First of all, I’d say, we all should do have a clear objective, which means all the people from client, agency and productions should be trying to achieve the same goal. Online engagement with users takes place in various ways it is constantly changing. You can’t say ‘this is the only right way to go.’ Communication through digital can be anywhere and has so much potential. So we all need to be working closely together, being flexible and challenging.

Eyeblaster was just awarded a ClickZ Marketing Excellence Award for our Mobile Marketing Tool – Channel Connect for Mobile. The Awards recognize the technologies, and companies that made a positive difference in the online marketing industry in 2008, moving the industry forward by providing brilliant examples of what can be accomplished.

Here’s what the judges had to say:
“Eyeblaster offers a clearly differentiating product that ports a capability that advertisers are already familiar with to the mobile Web. This should spur further improvements in the area of mobile Web ad serving.” -Davis Brewer

Take a look at the insightful Brandweek interview with Pepsi’s Bonin Bough, who oversees all things tweet, blog and YouTube-related.  He discusses why the Dear Mr. President Campaign was so effective.

Here’s an excerpt from the full article:

“BW: The “Dear Mr. President, Refresh Everything” social media campaign (where consumers could upload a video through an ad banner)-how big of a success was that for PepsiCo? Why did it work so effectively?Â
 

BB: It speaks again to giving people a platform to share their thoughts. And that’s really important. Just look at YouTube. If you really think about it, it’s the largest broadcast network in the world, and in such a short amount of time, too. People are willing to share if they are given a structured opportunity to do so. That was a change mindset we tapped into. It was phenomenal program that drove a ton of interest. It spoke worlds to the fact that Pepsi is about enabling experiences via the music platform.”

  

Original May 7th Post:

Congratulations to all Webby winners, including R/GA and Pepsi for the revolutionary Dear Mr. President Campaign, which enabled viewers to send a personal message to the President via webcam in banner.

We previously wrote about this groundbreaking campaign here in the blog

For the second year in a row, Eyeblaster has been selected as the ‘best technology’ by the Spanish digital marketing industry.

The voting for the awards, organized by Interactiva magazine, is a mixture of public votes and a monthly jury vote. Voting takes place throughout the year and is followed by the entire Spanish digital marketing industry. The development of the results is published on a monthly basis in the Magazine and it is considered a very prestigious acknowledgement.

I am personally thrilled with this award, especially in a year where we saw many very cool technologies competing for the best technology award. And of course, a second time win is even sweeter.

I am grateful to our clients and to the professionals in the industry, who demonstrated such confidence in Eyeblaster. The show of support was also for the hard work given by our service and support teams who strive to ensure that technology is not a cold interface, but that it is delivered with a human touch by a company who is there, always, in order to make sure everything is done the best way possible.

¡felicidades! to all
Oded Lida, Latin Region Manager

(updated Apr 27th)

A hearty congratulations to JVST and Eidos for receiving a 2009 ad:tech Best B2C Online Display Ad for Tomb Raider Underworld.  The ad includes full screen HD Video and a gorgeous full page skin.  Check it out on the Eyeblaster Creative Zone:

 

“What made this banner execution so successful was the collaboration between the JVST Media & Creative Team, Eidos, Eyeblaster and the Publisher. Eyeblaster gave JVST the opportunity to be the first to utilize Full Screen HD. The JVST Media team in turn bought some of the most visible placements across the online gaming space. The JVST Creative team in the mean while worked really closely with the Publisher and Eyeblaster to implement this new HD tech on the homepages & match the creative to some of the publishers’ editorial.   And of course this wouldn’t at all have been possible if it wasn’t for the clients’ willingness to explore what’s next.”  Roderick van Gelder, Executive Producer / Partner, JVST