Quirk eMarketing

Thanks to an invite from the friendly folks at Warner Bros., Nic, Matt and I were lucky enough to attend the world premiere for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince last night.   For the past year or so, Quirk has been providing Warner Bros...

Greetings comrades. After a few months in the Quirk gulag for bad behaviour, I have managed to escape to bring you some great PPC insight, which I scraped off the walls of my cell...

Ok, so I admit I know nothing about American Basketball, but I'm still a leetle surprised at the success of the Most Valuable Puppets adverts from Nike. They've been dominating viral charts with more than 133 000 views...

Sony Ericsson's Hero Challenges series (in promotion of the WTA World Tour) demonstrates how the serve of Venus Williams is too powerful for the American Football Line. Love it!

Ah, technology – what a wonderful thing! It brought us the mobile phone and the Internet. I would not be able to live without either (and neither would you… admit it). Now, technology has combined the benefits of both...

We’ve often discussed the importance of strategy on this blog – you need to know why you’re doing what you’re doing for any marketing plans to work. An essential part of this process is goal setting – which occurs on a number of levels as well...

A few days ago, on a wet and cold wintery morning, I received an email about an agency referred to as BooneOakley. Naturally, every agency wants to express its creative prowess through their websites and online presence...

A few days ago, on a wet and cold wintery morning, I received an email about an agency referred to as BooneOakley. Naturally, every agency wants to express its creative prowess through their websites and online presence...

In my research for this post, I found a white paper titled, Integration: The Holy Grail of Online Marketing. I almost didn’t feel the need to read any further; not because it wasn’t a good or valuable paper, but because the title encompassed everything that I needed to know...

The news of Michael Jackson, the “King of Pop” meeting his untimely death at the age of 50 has shaken the world. Whether by Tweeting, Facebooking or blogging, the world has come together to pay homage to this pop legend...

Over the last few weeks many have been keeping a close eye on Iran. If you have no idea what I'm talking about (where have you been?) you can read about it all here. The situation is still unfolding. Most of the first reports of violence and protest came from Twitter...

News of Michael Jackson's death has spread like wildfire around the Web. The first reaction a friend had when hearing the news last night was to Google the question "is he really dead"...

In the EA Game’s Tiger Woods PGA Tour 09, Tiger can perform what they called a ‘Jesus Shot’, where he walks on water to hit a ball that landed on a lily pad in the lake...

It is often thought that usability negates the visual component of a website, or at least supercedes it as a priority. Not so. The look and feel of a site is integral to usability because it is key to the user experience...

This morning, I was shocked to read that Microsoft's Outlook 2010 will be using Word to render HTML emails, the same rendering engine used for Outlook 2007. This makes me sick to the core!...

Microsoft could learn a thing or two from the people behind Semanti. Launched yesterday, this search engine add-in offers something that, quite honestly, puts Bing’s attempts at superseding Google to shame...

Recent reports released by Nielsen Online revealed that 60% of Twitter users don’t return the next month, indicating that Twitter has a high “I don’t get it” factor.  A few months ago I was one of the many uttering those exact words...

Mostly, graffiti is regarded as an urban curse; an unnecessary defacing of public property. Artists like the (probably) UK-born Banksy have taken this perception and firmly given it the finger...

Im going to start this post with a disclaimer: originally this video was NOT intended to go viral – in fact the incident itself, I’m sure it’s safe to say, was not intended either.  Regardless of this, videos of Obama swatting a fly during and interview with CNBC have struck a chord with...

A Corporate blog is a strange beast...

Cutting right to the chase, corporate communication refers to the methods that a company uses to communicate with its customers, stakeholders and employees...

The partnership between Louis Vuitton and Takashi Murakami is being celebrated by this short film which is spreading across the Internet "like wildfire". It's an interesting application of branded art. You can read more about Murakami here...

We’ve all seen our fair share of bizarre adverts (Cadburys Gorilla spring to mind?) but this one really made me stop and think… “huh?”. The advert, for Oasis, the drink for people who “don’t like water,” is played out like a spoof of Godzilla (remember, the giant creepy reptile?)...

These days Social Media is a bit like a well cut mullet, work in the front and party at the back. This mix of business and pleasure in Social Media seems to be on the up and up, and is the subject of this week's Friday Fact Box.  Social Networking can often be an extension of business goals...

We presented Idea Bounty at the Being Digital Conference in London this week. Carrying the infamous Giant Cheque on the underground just as London's tube strike struck was a bit of an event in itself - but it somehow arrived in one piece and the day began...

Two well known South African websites have recently undergone face-lifts, one more successfully than the other. Nando’s, one of my favourite chicken fast-food outlets, have gone the ‘aesthetics first, award-winning’ route...

This morning I played dress-up. By myself. For the third time this week. After hitting the snooze button and leaving myself with 10 minutes to get ready – choosing an outfit can become more of a debacle than most think...

Part of the Web Development process that is very much neglected in the industry today is website usability. You may wonder why that is. After all, it seems that a usable website should be the core principle for any website development project...

I've been following the news about the Google Wave platform, and really believe it will change the way we communicate online. In essence, Google Wave is an in- browser communication tool which allows real- time, live communication through email...

This economic climate has affected the world over (and much to my dismay, brought an abrupt end to my Sunday splurge of Woolies cheesecake) but interestingly enough, in the case of the iPhone and their growing applications store, things couldn’t seem rosier...

So by now im sure most of you have seen the wonderfully hilarious video of the encounter between Sacha Baron Cohen and Eminem at this years MTV movie awards...

This week’s Quirk newsletter topic is “Branding in the Digital Age.” If you ask me, this sounds like one of those classic phraseologies that enthusiastic marketing geeks types scatter about wherever they go. In other words: codswallop...

Perhaps it’s my obsession with the Senior Vice President of Industrial Design at Apple, Jonathan Ive. Or maybe the success of the Google search page. Or possibly my seething hatred for retina-burning animated banner adverts and MySpace profile pages...

After finishing our seminars at the Rwanda Tourism College in Kigali we travelled North to the Virunga Mountains for a once in a lifetime experience - seeing the Mountain Gorillas...

If this title makes you feel like you’ve just won a game of Jargon Bingo, you are not alone. Us Web types are quick to latch on to names for things – Web 2.0 (and 3.0), LAS, “The Online Conversation” – and it’s easy to talk about a concept without really thinking about what it means...

Not stopping at conquering air travel, Virgin take to the rails with Virgin Trains; a system of fast, overland trains connecting London to Glasgow...

We are extremely proud to announce that Quirk eMarketing is now a Google Analytics Authorised Consultancy (GAAC). The first in Africa and one of just over 100 agencies world wide who can profess to be accredited...

There was a time, not that long ago, when ‘sex’ was the most searched term on the Internet. This was back when Ravi had only just discovered Dolly Parton and the closest thing to a Social Media mega site was GeoCities...

This is one of the coolest viral campaigns I’ve seen in a long while. Meet ZooZoo, the viral character created by Vodafone, who features in every viral ad along with friends and even his girlfriend (yes, ZooZoo’s got game)...

Kigali, though just 40 minutes by plane, felt like a world away from Kampala. There was a sense of calm and orderliness in Kigali that came as a surprise and a slight shock to the system after the hustle and bustle of Kampala...

Breathe a sigh of relief, the second part of Subdomains vs Subdirectories is here. No more waiting.  Subdirectories are the best choice when you want a page to target specific keywords that are related to each other and the root domain’s theme...