Three reasons not to tell people NOT TO REPLY TO THIS EMAIL. First, CAPS are annoying. Second, the whole thing is kinda rude. Third, people hit "reply" anyway, and if you have "...@donotreply.com", it actually ends up in the inbox of the owner of donotreply.com domain and the greatest misdirected hits end up on this blog
"Instead of letting people just hit reply to these support mails, they make the customer click on a link," Faliszek said. "It's sad, too, because I'll get these e-mails from people and they're like 'Oh, man, I really wanted to grill, but it's not working.' Sometimes they'll even send pictures of their grill, too." (from Washington Post)
Speaking of disruptive agency site (re)designs, how about this one by a Brazilian agency Gringo? Compare to an earlier and more sterile version. A side note: swear words in one language usually lose much of their pungency when used in a foreign context.
Oh, yes, and keep the volume on your computer down.
A couple of years ago, I wrote a thesis on in-game advertising. One chapter about history didn't make it into the final version, but now you can view and download the entire chapter in its original format, complete with proper references. Here, I am publishing a series of excerpts, illustrated, where possible, with screenshots and gameplay videos that have began to appear on YouTube. This first installment deals with the early years of advergames. The next one will be about brands and arcades.
The exact moment when third-party brands become part of the games is hard to pinpoint. The Internet Pinball Machine database that lists 4,832 different units contains images of the Mustang (1964, Chicago Coin) machine. It is unclear whether the makers licensed the brand name of the Ford’s new sports car that appeared in April of the same year but the website describes it as being about car culture, and the game’s playing field and backglass art incorporate images of cars that look similar to those early Mustang models.
One of the early games that appeared on mainframe computers together with Hamurabi and Hunt the Wumpus in the late 1960s was Lunar Lander. It was a text-based simulation where a player piloted a spacecraft by typing in acceleration values. In 1973, Digital Equipment Corporation (the same company that put Spacewar! on its PDP-1 machine) commissioned a graphical version of Moonlander to demonstrate the capabilities of their new GT40 graphics terminal. One of the game versions included a hidden feature:
If you landed at exactly the right spot, a McDonalds appeared. The astronaut would come out, walk over to the McDonalds and order a Big Mac to go, walk back and take off again. If you crashed ON the McDonalds, it would print out “You clod! You've destroyed the only McDonald's on the Moon!” (source)
While this cameo was most likely a joke of an anonymous programmer and wasn’t sponsored by the fast food empire, the “only McDonald’s on the Moon” was probably the first instance of a brand integrated into the gameplay. It is not clear whether this Easter egg (as hidden features are known) survived the subsequent commercial adaptations of Lunar Lander (the game was made an arcade by Atari and was also distributed on tapes for Apple I), but for McDonald’s it marked the beginning of a long involvement with the medium. Arcade cabinets would become commonplace in its restaurants; the company recently initiated a trial of McImagination game kiosks shaped to resemble corporate characters.
In 1982, McDonald’s teamed up with Atari for a nationwide contest in which the restaurant gave away 12,000 video game consoles and home computers worth over $4 million. In 1983, Parker Brothers was working on a McDonald’s-themed game with Ronald feeding hungry aliens with shakes, fries and hamburgers and with the aliens biting into the Golden Arches, but apparently the game failed to generate interest outside the 8-9 year-old demographic and the project already advertised in the catalog was scrapped.
Regardless of whether the lunar McDonald’s was authorized, by the early 1980s video games had become a large enough part of popular culture to attract at least a few marketing minds at mainstream companies. Around 1983, Coca-Cola approached Atari to produce a game to be given away as a gift to the participants of Coke’s sales convention in Atlanta. Atari came up with a special version of Space Invaders, a blockbuster game that had sold millions of copies since its release a few years earlier. The rows of aliens were replaced by the letters P, E, P, S, I and the command ship above them was replaced with a Pepsi logo. The player controlled a ship whose goal was to shoot down as many enemy characters as possible within the three-minute limit, after which the game would end and the message Coke Wins would flash across the screen. Only 125 copies of Pepsi Invaders were made, but the game eventually trickled down into the broad gamer community.
At least three other promotional games were produced and offered to the general public through mail-order by consumer goods companies that year. One was Tooth Protector from Johnson & Johnson, a bizarre game in which the main character, the Tooth Protector, was armed with a toothbrush, floss and dental rinse to protect teeth from the cubes dropped by Snack Attackers. The manual read:
The game ends if 3 teeth disappear or if 3 T.P.s are carried away and eliminated by the Snack Attackers. When you are successful in protecting the teeth, valuable points will be accumulated, and there will be no end to the fun you can have! (source)
The other game was by Ralston Purina whose commercials for Chuck Wagon dog food featured a tiny wagon rolling out from a bag of dog food and across the kitchen floor. The commercials apparently were so popular that the company decided to turn it into a computer game with the wagon as its main character. The game was appropriately titled Chase the Chuck Wagon.
Finally, there was Kool-Aid Man made by M Network for General Foods. It, too, was tied to a commercial in which a giant pitcher was breaking through a brick wall and served Kool-Aid to everyone in the vicinity; the concept was reiterated on the game’s box art and in the opening sequence. In the game, the Kool-Aid Man fought evil Thirsties who were stealing water from a swimming pool.
Whether these three games were a marketing success is hard to tell. Distributed for free in exchange for proofs of purchase, they are now considered collectible rarities unlike many other Atari titles of that period, so the companies probably didn’t send out too many units. One of the reasons why these games didn’t do well is their bad fortune of being released during the unraveling of the game industry known as the Video Game Crash of 1983. In 1982, when these titles were probably commissioned, the industry was at the peak of its popularity and profitability; that year, the American public bought $3 billion worth of games (over $6 billion in today’s money), tripling the previous year’s amount. The news media sensationalized the boom and many companies rushed to open video games division to capitalize on the tidal wave; Quaker Oats, for instance, acquired US Games and presented eight titles, mostly clones of the existing hits, at Chicago’s Summer Consumer Electronic Show of 1982. The market became saturated with bad games and numerous variations of the same concepts, and the next year the sales dropped to $2 billion, and then to $800 million in 1984 and $100 million in 1985. Quaker Oats’ game division lasted one year.
How much would you pay to use Twitter? How about Facebook? Gmail? Would answering a simple "How much would you pay for it?" question help us to understand how the valuable is perceived differently from the disposable?
I was going through a credit card bill and among the usual sad thoughts the activity conjures there was one relevant to this blog.
There are a lot of online services out there, and I'm actively using a fraction of them. I pay for some, but many are free. The question is, why am I paying for the ones that are on my bill even though there are free alternatives, and which free ones would I pay for if the free ride abruptly stopped, and it was either-or?
I've never bought a ringtone and am not planning to, but I think I've spent around $100 on similarly ethereal Second Life objects over a few months.
I pay for Skype and for Rebtel (very convenient VoIP for cell phones), two cell phones, but (or, perhaps, hence) no land line.
I used to pay for Angie's List but don't have any need for it after moving to a managed building. (Besides, their monthly subscription model feels wrong -- I don't need to fix my plumbing every month. Plus you need to call them during office hours to cancel.) I would pay for Craigslist if I had to. I'd rather pay on demand than monthly. I think between $5 and $10 for a week of usage is about right. I would also pay the same amount for a "pro" version with better search, even if a free standard version was available.
I gladly pay for Flickr not because I can't live without the service, but because, like many Mac users, I think that the attention that goes into designing a flawless experience deserves to be rewarded. I'm sure a part of the fee pays for the "pro" next to my name, too.
To be visually entertained, I pay for the basic cable, broadband, and a Netflix-like subscription from Blockbuster. I'd drop Blockbuster and pay the $20 monthly bucks for a Hulu-like service with a decent library of streaming movies and shows. I have never bought a movie DVD from a store or a TV show from iTunes. (Do people with large DVD collections watch each movie at least four times to justify the $20 instead of renting it at $5 each time? I know it makes sense to buy DVDs for kids since they can be entertained by re-runs forever.)
Out all the free stuff I use, I'd pay for Google if it suddenly made all of its services paid. Depending on the price structure, I'd rather be paying for a subscription to everything than piece-meal for each service. If I had to pick piece-meal, I'd pay for search, Gmail, maps and reader. I am among those Blogger users who've been demanding a paid service for years in exchange for a hint of customer service and advanced features. (To its credit, Blogger has significantly improved over time.)
I would pay for email in general if it suddenly stopped being a free utility. Unfortunately, there isn't much room for price elasticity there.
I wouldn't pay for Facebook or MySpace (especially if I were already paying for email), but probably would for LinkedIn. Probably not, or very little each time I need something, for YouTube or other similar sites. Not for Twitter or any of the instant messengers (assuming I had a cellphone or email).
I'd pay for an RSS reader (Google's, especially if it had an offline client), but don't know whether and how much I'd pay for individual blog subscriptions. Maybe it would be a buck for any ten -- so, $10 for any combination of 100 feeds a month, pro-rated weekly, with the money distributed back to publishers by the aggregating service. If it were a universal model, I wonder which blogs would end up with most subscribers.
There is, of course, a difference between paying for a service in the sense of a general set of functionalities (email, social networking, photo-sharing) and a paying to a particular provider for the service (Gmail, Facebook, Flickr).
Which sets of functions that are free do you think are worth paying for? I included a quick poll below; if you are on RSS and don't see it, please take a minute to come over and submit your answer.
P.S. There's a lot of talk and an entire upcoming book about the business model of free. I recommend F'd Companies, a book about similar models that tanked during the dot-com boom, as a fair-time reading.
There are quite a few advergames designed to be played on the popular Wii console out there. Pictured above is MINI's Pinball. Early last year (news), Wrigley's has optimized a number of its games for the Wiimote, and Live Free or Die Hard movie was also promoted by a Wii-able game (now gone). Like the iPhone advergames, Wii games are designed to be accessed through the console's browser.
Eventology from Argentina creates Wii-powered games for tradeshows to attract booth traffic (see in action in this YouTube video). [update, May 19, 2008: the devices are not Wii-based and are build by Eventology directly; see comment].
You might have already seen Clay Shirky's now famous speech about cognitive surplus given at Web2Expo and the dramatic comparison of the time spent watching TV (200B hours a year in the US) and building Wikipedia (100M hours total).
He mentioned another number I thought was interesting: "In the US, we spend 100 million hours a weekend watching just the ads" (fast-forward to 5:52, or read the transcript). The order of magnitude seems right but I can't figure out how he arrived at his estimate. Here are the inputs I'm working with.
- Number of hours spent by men watching TV on weekends: 6.98hrs (less for women, but I'm keeping the math simple). I don't know if the number is an average across the entire population or only accounts for those who watch TV. - Number of ad minutes per hour of TV programming: 16 (wiki), which means 3.72 hours of ads total for a two-day weekend (16*6.98/60*2).
Now, to arrive at the 100M hours number, we need to assume an active audience of 26,881,720 (100M/3.72hrs) viewers on each of the two days. How accurate is this number? I'll try to check with our media folks next week, but drop a comment if you have ideas.
Of course, this little calculation assumes that Shirky's remark was not a mere rhetorical device (hey, if we just stopped watching ads we could build a wikipedia in a weekend) and that people do watch all of the ads throughout the entire 7-hour TV binge instead of doing laundry or zoning out.
The rumored Ikea-themed stuff pack for The Sims 2 is due out on June 24 for $19.95, according to this this now removed but cached page on EA store.
Ad copy from the site: - Turn your Sims' living room into a haven of comfort and relaxation with a plush Ektorp sofa, a unique Expedit TV unit, a complementing Leksvik coffee table, and chic décor, like the Vanna mirror. - Create a bold, vibrant, and revitalizing bedroom with a new Malm bed, matching chest of drawers, a shapely Storm floor lamp and a bright IKEA PS rug. - Indulge your Sims with an office that is sure to promote order and productivity with its elegant Vika Hyttan desk, inspiring Kila desk lamp, bold Helmer drawer unit, and Lack zigzag wallshelf.
"In its first year, sales of the H&M Fashion software pack [for the Sims 2] reached 1m. EA also struck a deal with Ford to enable Sims players' characters to own a Focus or Mustang car. To date, 2.7m Ford add-ons have been sold."
Because if you are, we have -- not one, not two -- four open spots for digital media planners with different levels of ninjahood: associate media director, planner, coordinator, and assistant.
This is where in Boston the digs are, and here are the vistas. We'd be working together on a lot of stuff. My friend Tammy who sits across the hall and heads up the team could use some help with her 17 active projects clients, so there's a tangible sense of urgency. Hit her up on her LinkedIn page for specifics and tell her you're an AdLab reader.
Where the ninjas dine (and play Xbox; see that screen?)
I work at Hill Holliday ad agency in Boston as emerging media strategist across many different accounts. Before that, I was doing grad school at MIT CMS, where I helped launch the Convergence Culture group. To get in touch: email or contact on LinkedIn and Facebook.
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