Advertising Campaigns

Starbucks Love Project promotes philanthropy, creativity, and music in interactive interface

• español

Investing in an interactive digital marketing campaign is a very clever move in my opinion. Add in user submission tools, social media, and a humanitarian cause and you’ve got yourself a winner in my book.

After spending some time with Starbucks Love Project, I knew I had to pass it along to II readers so you could also smile and enjoy being serenaded by people of all ages from around the world. Then, if you feel inspired, feel free to upload your own video singing the melody “All you need is love,” or create your own “love drawing” with their simple Flash drawing board. If that level of interactivity is intimidating, you can continue perusing their video archive of singers, or browse Starbuck’s red products, all the while helping promote a campaign to fight AIDS in Africa.

Personally, I enjoyed the video of an American grandmother the best. I was extremely impressed that she had the technical skills and knowledge to record a video of her singing and post it to the site. I don’t even think my mom could do that! However, this video proves that it is possible to target online audiences of all ages with digital technology as long as the instructions are clear, the user interface is self-explanatory, and the HCI is inviting.

My main qualm with this site is that once a country has reached a certain number of user-submitted videos, the additional videos fall off the right side of the screen. For instance, when viewing videos from the United States, I can easily see 66 videos on my computer with a 1680×1050 resolution. The only indication that the video display rotates is a small red arrow that is confusingly located on top of other video stills. Users are supposed to click on this arrow to swap out the screens to view more videos. Personally, I think it would have been better to either make the screen scroll slowly depending on mouse position, or put larger arrows in white or black above the video display in the red header section. This would have made it more apparent to the user, which is important since there are hundreds of videos that are initially hidden due to lack of screen space.

My minor qualm is that I have never understood the reasoning behind attaching small noise effects to buttons and movie clips. I think this functionality is a “cool factor” when developers first learn the attachSound command, but it is mostly used gratuitously and is something that, in my opinion, should not be used.

Other posts that might interest you:

• AVA Colorado Rafting company creatively puts users in the raft to navigate site
• II’s picks for 2010 Webbys – Websites
• User-submitted multimedia database unifies those affected by cancer

© 2010 Innovative Interactivity (II).
Download II's Security Policy (PDF)