David Miliband was a busy man this morning, launching his new carbon calculator – hosted, significantly, on Directgov rather than Defra’s own site. (In fact, there isn’t even a Defra logo on it.) He’s also done another short piece-to-camera on YouTube – and as before, it’s a very good, very natural performance.
The carbon calculator itself is a great big Flash application – which is beautifully done but, I can’t help feeling, is overkill. A basic HTML form (with a bit of Ajax functionality) would be more accessible, quicker to load, and might feel more genuine, more earnest somehow. With the application running so slow on launch day, presumably due to wide public interest, those might have been wise considerations…
(I don’t want to mention today’s Second Life appearance to promote the calculator, but I suppose I have to.)
I’ve been meaning to mention the cross-department ‘Act on CO2’ campaign for a while… it’s remarkably brave to run a TV campaign which ends on the call-to-action ‘just go to Google and search for Act on CO2‘. You’d better be very confident in your SEO strategy… or be prepared to spend big on pay-per-click advertising, bidding big to guarantee top spot on the results pages.
Response
[…] Update: caught the TV advert earlier today… and I see they’ve reverted back to the ’search for Act On CO2‘ tagline, as opposed to quoting the Directgov URL. Well, I guess that would explain why searches for that particular phrase are up – I doubt many search terms have a TV campaign dedicated to them. Plus, I guess it means they were happy that the ‘no URL’ approach worked last time. […]