Five things worth sharing from the last week or so, brought to you by a different member of the Browser Media team every Friday.
This week’s My Five is by Lisa.
1. Happy Data Privacy Day
The 28th January 2016 marks the 10th international Data Privacy Day, aiming to promote awareness around the escalating importance of protecting personal data online.
With more than 12 million Brits having fell victim to cybercrime last year, the day is arguably more relevant than ever before. Fiind out more about improving and maintainng privacy online at https://staysafeonline.org/.
2. My Little Phoney
Toymaker Hasbro, has pulled out all the stops to market its My Little Pony brand as a wonderful and magical entity.
Unfortunately, this has involved the unpermitted use of a font; and piracy is definitely not a wonderful and magical entity.
The typeface in question, Generation B, is owned by Font Bros and is only available for use on the provision that license fees are paid. My Little Pony have used the font all over their products and website, but haven’t paid any license fees (you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink).
The brand are now facing fines of $150,000 (£104,820) per infringement.
3. Google tests live-stream
Google reports that political search volume spikes over 440% during live televised debates as more people turn to the web to gain further insight as events unfold.
Responding to this, the search engine has teamed with Fox News to create a more enjoyable and innovative experience of the political campaign currently occurring across the pond.This experimental feature will deliver its own real-time streaming of photos, videos and text in the search results for “Fox News debate” rather than simply pointing to third party sources.
Some claim that by implementing a live-stream to surface real-time information, Google is attempting to supersede Twitter. I guess (real) time will tell.
4. #GIFTheFeeling
It’s a risky move when brands decide to give customers some free reign to play around with their marketing activities. Coca-Cola is the latest brand to fall victim to the pitfalls of personalisation in their most recent campaign, #GIFTheFeeling.
The brand launched a GIF creator as means of promoting their new ‘Taste the Feeling’ slogan. A tool which offers users a series of responsive templates to overlay with “a feeling”.
Twitter and Tumblr users were very quick to hijack the tool for trolling purporses.
In a comment to Digiday, Coca-Cola have responded to the backlash:
“Our intention is to invite people to share their feelings in fun and uplifting ways as they discover our new ‘Taste the Feeling’ campaign. While the vast majority have used ‘GIF The Feeling’ in positive ways, it’s unfortunate to see that some people have chosen to use our campaign to do just the opposite.” – via Digiday
5. You autocomplete me
With Valentine’s day just around the corner, comedy writer, Aaron Gillies called upon Google Autocomplete to help him create a quick-win dating profile.
The results are pretty funny:
I used Google autocomplete to write a dating profile and it may be the best dating profile ever pic.twitter.com/DyspovLr3t
— TechnicallyRon (@TechnicallyRon) January 21, 2016
I’m not entirely confident this approach will find him true love any time soon – Autocomplete doesn’t exactly inspire confidence for the dating scene after all:
