I’m sure you’ve seen those Apple commercials showing off iPods that are fun and modern — hip to the bone. Their high energy projects a vibe that reinforces a cultural relationship between Apple and their customers.

Keying in to the power of such a relationship, our client Demandware wanted a similar mood to show off their eCommerce platform. This B2B “ad”  lives right on their home page and lets you rock out to music by “The League”.

Marketing is a crucial component to product and often company success. With so many available possibilities to communicating your message, it is often the simple approach that makes a big impact with your audience.

I love comfort food — the familiar flavors, simple ingredients, and all that food on the plate! According to food trend experts, comfort food is IN. Bonny Wolf, food commentator for NPR, states that food trends in 2009 are “colored by the economic recession”. She adds, “We’re in uncertain times, and this is the time when we crave comfort food.”

So what does comfort food have to do with flash product demos, the meat and potatoes of your marketing toolkit? Three words come to mind “Comfort, Simplicity and Value.”

Comfort

Like the rich flavors my nana simmered into every pot of chowder she made from simple ingredients, a product demo has to be more than a sequence of bland screenshots and voice over track pieced together. Instead, it is a seasoned recipe including branding elements, on-screen messaging and supporting imagery. These elements come together with sound and motion to communicate the features and functions of your product and express the unique flavor of your company establishing credibility, competence, and familiarity.

Simplicity

Restaurants are serving up simple, home-style dishes like pasta with meat sauces or meatloaf with mashed potatoes to ease diners back to their tables. These uncomplicated dishes serve up plenty of flavor while saving prep time and costs. CGI sees Marketing and Product Managers craving simplicity as they shoulder more responsibilities and fewer resources. Our flash demo template solution offers a simple process, saving time and money. The result: a compelling product demo in formats compatible for tradeshow use, online broadcasting, and socializing on the web.

Value

In college, breakfast at the Shawmut Diner was my favorite meal of the week and worth every penny at $6.99! The huge quantity of good food beyond satisfied my hunger at a price that would make my Nana proud. Designed to be scalable, with source files as part of the fixed price, makes the solution like ordering the Breakfast Special! With the ability for Google Analytics to be cooked right in, your can track your investment.

I guess you could say our new Flash product demo template solution is comfort food for savvy marketers looking for value without sacrificing quality or effectiveness. Check out some samples of recent demo we have created using our fixed-priced, template solution and tell us what you think.

1000 or 1,000? The number is pretty easy to decipher regardless, so get off my back about the commas, right? How about 1000000 or 10000000? This is where the sweet, sweet comma can really come in handy.

Recently we built an opportunity assessment calculator for a client. The tool allowed our client’s sales force to work with retail managers and determine how they could increase profitability with their e-commerce enabled website. The tool allowed sales to show, in dollars and cents, what small improvements and changes could mean to their bottom line. Awesome for the client, kinda strenuous for the developer (moi) because numbers need to constantly change from a bare bones format that make AS3’s math functions happy, to a beautiful looking piece of art that might appear on a bank statement.

Adding in a dollar sign is easy, but how to add commas!? Being that AS3 offers virtually no support for number formatting I found myself cruising the private sector; reading one code monkeys opinion after another. While I found plenty of functions, it seemed like they all made assumptions on what the expected input would be. No numbers larger than 9999, no negative numbers, no decimal points, etc. I finally tossed on the ol’ headphones and cranked out my own addCommas function. It accepts a real number as an input and spits back the same number as a string with commas.

Have fun, make sure to have her home by ten:

function addCommas(number:Number):String {