Hand-crafted data visualization

If you're a big brand advertiser and you need to get your high-up marketing execs excited about web analytics, what can you do?

Well, one thing you can do is pay someone to build you a really funky interface for your web analytics data:

Much in the vein of 3D Site Stats, this type of 'analytics' is designed more for entertainment/engagement than serious analytics. It's created by German agency Scholtz & Volkmer, and is up for an award at this year's Cannes Lions festival. It has some quite nice visual features (like highlighting a particular data line when you hover over the 'person' representing a part of the site or audience), but its best feature is only revealed when you press (and hold, for about 20 seconds) the D key on the keyboard. Heh.

Funnily enough, Webtrends hired Coke's former interactive marketing VP, Tim Kopp, as their VP of marketing in January. I wonder if Tim had anything to do with this project?