Today we live in a world of choice, where brands are prepared to offer their buyers above and beyond the generic, but at a premium rate. Element Bars is new brand and probably the most transparent Health Bar brand I’ve come across in my many an hour spent scanning nutritional information in supermarket aisles. Based in the US, the site lets you build your own Health Bar from bar textures, to dried fruits, nuts, sweets and additional vitamins. The best part of this is watching the nutritional information update as you add and take out certain ingredients. Once you’ve crafted your very own Health Bar you can name it and share it and order your first box of 12 to sample. To give you an idea of the premium rate a Chewy bar with organic sultanas and Apricots, Organic Almonds and cashews, choc chips, honey and Soy Protein comes to about USD 36.00 which equates to about USD 3.00 a bar.

We increasingly see brands offering this level of customisation as consumers become more informed about products and are willing to pay a little bit extra for a choice in product. Whether it be customising sneakers, to tailored clothes, and custom built Laptops and computers, and even Domino’s highly complex Pizza builder. The generic product, the one size fits all model doesn’t cut it any more and as marketing demographics continue to splinter by more than just age, sex, and socio economic group and we realise that the word majority is actually made up of a series of minorities. Trying to create a overarching product is high risk without a solid R&D phase behind it.

So the benefit of having in- built choice in products means you can access a larger market share and with an online database behind it you can gain valuable insights into who your buyers are; are they mainly chewy or crispy texture people, or do they like nuts more than lollies? From there you can roll out popular flavour to recoup some economies of scale for your business.

The product research learning curve and testing phase can occur while Element Bars are generating sales and those real learnings can be applied to build “popular flavours”.

There is of course the flip side in this model as humans can only really focus on five to seven things on a page at once and so limiting choice can actually help users arrive at the desired end goal quicker. There is a point when a plethora of choice can become a deterrent to convert and the user experience required to manage the process must become more complex. For the Element bars site the level of choice and customisation is high but well managed through the progress bar and the dynamic nutritional information label.

Then check out the domino

There has been a recent viral craze around choreographed Wedding dances on You Tube and you have probably seen this latest instalment which made its past Ellen, right into 6 o

The 13th Annual Webby Awards were announced last week and as per ususual they have on display an extensive range of innovative online work from Website, to Online Advertising, Online Video and Mobile. This year Nine Inch Nails front man Trent Reznor was named artist of the year in recognition for his work condemning the old record industry distribution systems. This year Nine Inch Nails released their album The Slip on their website for free download.

Other winners included SNL face Jimmy Fallon for Person of the Year, Comedian Sarah Silverman as Best Actress, Lisa Kudrow for Outstanding Comedic Performance and renowned Family Guy Creator Seth McFarlane as Film/Video Person of the Year. Twitter was Breakout of the year and the most prestigious agency of the year award went to R/GA for outstanding performance across all the Webby categories.

I’m still making my ways through the lists of nominees but paying particular attention to the interactive advertising categories it’s amazing what you can do with banners these days. The winning banner campaign was from Clemenger BBDO NZ for Distracted Drivers which allowed users to send a text message via the banner, similarly on an amazing level the people’s choice winner, Pepsi’s Dear Mr President by R/GA allowed users with web cam access to record video messages through the banner!

And the list goes on so enjoy.

I like most people spend my day to day life wading through data. In between emails and facebook I work in online advertising and in my first week my boss said to me “You gotta learn to love the data.” And whilst I have learned to get along with data it’s a love hate relationship.

In my surfing the other day I came across a talk that JeffreyVeen did at the Web 2.0 Expo recently on designing for Big Data. Veen is one of the founding partners of Adaptive Path and probably most well know for his work on Measure Maps which was scooped up by Google in 2006, that also took Veen with them to work on Analytics.

Whilst coming from a strong Software, data analytics background he is able to distill a few of his key design principles that can be applied to a whole range of disciplines. It’s a good talk and definitely worth the 20 minutes if you have them. But I just wanted to share one example he used – that of Harry Beck’s London Underground Tube Map.

The iconic linear, non -geographic map was created in 1931 by engineering draftsman Harry Beck and has stood the test of time with his design concept still being used today as a standard for train systems around the world.

Rather than trying to superimpose a diagram of the rail system over a geographic road map Beck drew on his previous experience working with switch boards and created a linear diagram that closely resembled electrical schematic diagrams. Beck saw that train passengers had no real need or care for the geographic accuracy, but simply wanted to know which train to catch to get from A – B.

However if this map was designed for drivers it would be completely useless to them and that’s the take away – Beck designed for his users and gave them the information they need with no excess clutter, and that’s a challenging thing to do.

Other good examples Veen used for data design were Dr John Snow’s work mapping the cholera outbreak and Charles Joseph Minard’s depiction of Napoleon’s Russian Campaign of 1812.

Being in advertising or design our over/under ever lying goal is to communication with people, the majority of them complete strangers. Whether it be for a branding or direct response acquisition purpose, the marketers job is to find a way to meaningfully communicate with someone.

Squished shoulder to shoulder on a tram yesterday I witnessed a great example of communication between two strangers. The two ladies had seen each other at the same event a couple of months ago, one recognized the other and they discussed that night; what dress one wore, who they were with that night. The conversation then moved onto where one of them worked and what they; which she apparently wasn’t getting paid enough for.

One of these women would have been in their mid twenties and the other over 60. The most amazing part of this – wait for it – was that the younger girl was deaf. The older lady didn’t know sign language but they talk with their hand, their bodies, eyes and faces. We can communicate using all our channels, and each one give the other meaning and reinforcement.

For me I’d say this was the same as trying to communicate through any kind of ad campaign. You need to make use of all the channels available to you – word of mouth, print, logo, videos. Digital comes with its own channels; search, display, affiliate, social media, etc. A lot of the time it’s easy to use your ‘voice’ to communicate; that is the strongest communication tool, but don’t forget to use all alternatives “arms, eyes, body” to engage with the people that don’t necessarily hear you.