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Axe’s Cheeky Ad Campaign Won the Web in 2010
When it came to advertising in 2010, the social media buzz was all about balls — specifically, Axe’s Clean Your Balls viral video — according to a report by Zeta Interactive.
The nearly three-minute ad, created by BBH New York, beat out Nike’s “Lebron/Rise”, Google’s “Parisian Love” and Old Spice’s “Smell Like a Man” campaigns, among other contenders, according to Zeta, which scours 200 million comments on social media including blogs, tweets, message boards and other outlets, and then determines sentiment to arrive at its rankings.
In the case of Clean Your Balls, a fairly obvious double-entendre seems to have won over fans on social media. The ad, for Unilever’s Axe male grooming brand, features Jaime Pressley as Monica Blake, an “ex-tennis phenom” who tells a rapt fake infomercial audience how to clean dirty soccer, golf and tennis balls. That video has gotten 4.5 million views on YouTube, which was dwarfed by Old Spice’s 25 million, but had better overall buzz, according to Zeta.
Voice Search gets personal
When we launched Voice Search more than two years ago, we wanted it to “just work” right out of the box, without an initial setup process. And so, we built speech models broad enough to accommodate a wide variety of people, regardless of gender, age, and accents, or variations in pitch, pace, and other factors. But we always knew we could build a more accurate model by listening to your voice, and learning how you — as a unique individual — speak. So today we’re launching personalized recognition.
If you opt into personalized recognition, we begin to associate the recordings of the words that you ask us to recognize with your Google account. We then automatically use these words to build a speech model specifically for you. This speech model enables us to deliver greater recognition accuracy. Although subtle, accuracy improvements begin fairly quickly and will build over time.
The first time you use Voice Search, you’ll be presented with a dialog to turn on personalized recognition. Google takes your privacy seriously, so you can enable or disable personalized recognition at any time through the Google voice recognition settings on your phone. If you’d like to disassociate your voice recordings from your Google Account, you can do so through the Google Dashboard in the Speech section.
The personalized recognition functionality is currently available for English in the United States. We plan to support other countries and languages in the near future. To enable it, you must have Android 2.2 or higher, and download the latest version of the Voice Search app from Android Market. The new app also includes some improvements to name recognition and speed, especially over 3G and EDGE connections.
So go ahead and download the latest Voice Search app, and let’s get personal!
Scan this QR code to download:
Posted by Amir Mané, Product Manager and Glen Shires, Member of Technical Staff
