Still searching?

Still searching?
Our industry is about brands, their expression, their growth, the communication of their look-and-feel and their painstaking protection. It's also about research, careful, brand-relevant research pivotal in the creation of on-the-mark strategies and truly impactful creative. Agencies rely on the world on the other end of the computer screen: the world of information brought to us by the internet. Tapping into this resource helps give our creative context, justification, intelligence and ultimately, relevance. But do creatives, strategists even creative directors really know how to search? Do they get the best out of the internet? Or are they overwhelmed by the increasing morass of text-based confusions delivered to them in the course of an average search?

What are pictures worth to us?

A thousand words... and that's often what a traditional internet search turns up, thousands and thousands of words, acting as 'descriptive summaries' of what lies within the page. Are our design studios and copywriters able to wade through this wall of text to glean brand-orientated information? Are they able to investigate competitive brand identities, competitor agency's campaigns, in a way that means anything to them? Brands speak about themselves in pictures, colours, combinations of colours, fonts, hard-won image-based identities. A picture based result display would revolutionize the leg-work factor of our industry, and it's here...

Toffee Ripple, the sweetest way to search

Toffee Ripple is the innovation of Johannesburg based Software Development company Full Cream Software, a division of local through-the-line agency Mortimer Harvey and Associates. It's designed to facilitate our search experiences by rendering the results in the form of thumbnails.... We get a sneak peak at the pages turned up in our search, a pictorial representation, a real look, without having to digest the text at all. It amounts to the experience of the internet in a totally image based environment - the brands within the pages speak to us in their own language, the language of the picture.

The brainchild of Joburg whizzkid Mark Carrol, the program promises to sweeten the way we search, and give agencies the search efficency they need to deliver on target.

How does it work?

- Use your favourite search engine (Yahoo/Google/etc.)
- Let Daisy the Cow (Toffee Ripple's mascot) get involved in the search
- Let her gather your results in the form of a gallery of thumbnails
- View your search results and enter only the pages whose 'look' confirms that they're useful to you at all.

Get the picture?

For more information, visit www.toffeeripple.com.