Break All The Rules (and Still Be Successful)
Feb 15, 2008 by Patrick Winfield | Design, Social Networks
With great design and implementation you can break all the rules and still be successful. This, by any other means, shouldn’t have worked. It shouldn’t have reached the ridiculous number of 3,338 diggs after being posted just 4 days ago. It was Flash animation. It was an advertisement for a product. It was selling you something. But as the submitter ‘ad-hater’ #1 stated :
If all advertisements were done like this, I might actually start reading them.
What happened? It was a healthy combination of good design and smart implementation of a beautifully created product that spawned a much deserved buzz. Pink Floyd was selling their limited edition 40th anniversary 14 album box set called ‘Oh, By The Way’. The Flash animation was designed by a London digital creative agency called Bloc.
If we look at the presentation and design of the interface that the user controls to view the various albums in the set we see that it is very minimal.
The names of all the 14 albums are on the bottom along with an option to purchase the set. The content area is predominantly black, allowing the eye to move directly to the album cover which is centered in the screen.
Behind the album, and in between each transition, is a beautiful rainbow type color spectrum that is from the ‘Dark Side of The Moon’ album cover, created by graphic designer Storm Thorgerson, possibly the most iconic Pink Floyd cover of all time. The color spectrum also moves in sync with the music that is being played by each album selection and shifts each time another is selected, creating a beautiful and subtle distraction to the transitional emptiness.
To navigate through to the next album, with out clicking on the name on the bottom navigation, you can choose to click on the right or left side of the screen. As you hover over either side a large white arrow appears. This is an extra element of navigation possibly for the more advanced user but becoming more common.
You can also flip the cover to view the track list of each song and launch the music player to shuffle through some of the tracks.
With so much information packed into this presentation…I mean promotional advertisement, you feel more informed or educated about the band and the music than you feel you are being sold to. With clean, sharp design and spot on implementation you can easily soar to over 3,000 diggs in little under 4 days while doing all the things that usually will render your content buried in under 3 hours.
Looking at some of the comments, over 400, and you will get an idea as to how people reacted to this wave.
Did you see it? What did you like, if anything, about the ad?
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8 Responses to “Break All The Rules (and Still Be Successful)”
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The only thing I don’t like is the fact that when I press “Buy the box set”, nothing happens.
This really is a bad thing. I’m surfing with Firefox. In Internet Explorer it works, though.
Geld, I agree- the same thing happened to me while using Firefox. Good call. Thanks for reading and commenting!
Unfortunately it happens to me on a lot of websites. Even on e-commerce sites. It’s really a turnoff
Good Recap Pat.
I’m definitely thinking of buying the boxset now after seeing the ad. So I’m guessing this campaign was a success for them.
[...] Break All The Rules (and Still Be Successful) With great design and implementation you can break all the rules and still be successful. This, by any other means, shouldn’t have worked. It shouldn’t have reached the ridiculous number of 3,338 diggs after being posted just 4 days ago. It was Flash animation. [...]
I dont really like pink floyd but wow that is great flash implementation. I have tried to do some implementation of flash on my site but I doubt its anywhere near that.
Rules are meant to be broken?
A lot of useful information was packed into that promotional advertisement, in a non-imposing way. That made people to feel more informed about the popular Pink Floyd and their music. A good presentation by someone who knew the trick pulled that on all of us, and we willingly accepted.