16 Feb '19

Algorithmic uni marketing billboards

widgets web

In the spirit of Murdoch University’s free your think marketing campaign, I’ve put together a dynamic full-page ad billboard as my pitch for the ANU’s next marketing campaign.

Disclaimer: this is in no way an official ANU campaign. Seriously, though, it’s a great uni—and you should come study with us.

The campaign is called: verb your verb—hit refresh to see the different options.

If you want to see it in fullscreen, you can do that as well.

How does it work?

It uses the same reveal.js template that I use for all my talks/slides—it’s basically a one-slide presentation.

Each time the page loads, it:

1. pulls a random background image from unsplash
2. chooses two verbs at random from a list of the 1000 most frequently used verbs
3. places them on the billboard in the form verb your verb, randomising the location and text style

As with all things on this blog, you can check out the source to see all the details.

UPDATE 12 March: I rewrote the billboard code from vanilla js to clojurescript because it makes me happy (source here, and you can still see the original js source here).