Chris Jordan "looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books."
Some of his works are now exhibited in Second Life: SL URL, more info, Flickr screengrabs. -- thank you, Francis
There have been quite a few articles discussing ad opportunities that Joost will offer -- in AdAge and Wired a few months back and now in NY Times and elsewhere as Joost announced the first batch of 30 advertisers joining the three-month test. I haven't seen any screenshots, though, so I thought I'd take some of my own (Hill Holliday blog).
Computerworld: "There is one unavoidable and fatal fact that will kill the nascent e-book market in its cradle: People love paper books.
So many predictions about the future have failed because futurists tend to overemphasize the possible over the desirable. They give too much weight to technology and not enough to human nature."
Daily Mail: "Electronics giant Sony has sparked a major row over animal cruelty and the ethics of the computer industry by using a freshly slaughtered goat to promote a violent video game.
The corpse of the decapitated animal was the centrepiece of a party to celebrate the launch of the God Of War II game for the company’s PlayStation 2 console.
At the event, guests competed to see who could eat the most offal – procured elsewhere and intended to resemble the goat’s intestines – from its stomach."
Mattel launched Barbie Girls, a "virtual world" that "will allow children to create their own virtual characters, design their own room and try on clothes at a cyber mall." (Forbes.) In the same article, a company exec is quoted saying it's "the first global online virtual world exclusively for girls". The cool part is that "the doll-inspired handheld portable device will be available in July at an expected retail cost of $59.99. It is designed to unlock even more content and activities on BarbieGirls.com, like adopting a virtual pet and buying clothes using virtual money."
I barely squeezed in for a moment (the site was so overcrowded it wasn't accepting new people all morning). The experience is pretty straightforward; it's somewhere in the neighborhood of Kaneva, Coke Studios and Virtual Laguna Beach but more pink. A few interesting things I noticed:
The virtual town has a cinema that among other Barbie-related things plays spots for Mattel's products.
And you get virtual bucks for watching the spots. The B Bucks can be spent on furniture for your room, accessories, outfits -- that kind of stuff.
Apparently, other Mattel products have promo codes that you can enter to unlock more content.
Think big. Think outside the bun. Come out and play. Researchers at the Institute for Infinitely Small Things suggest "how one might go about performing corporate commands as literally as possible." How can one Think Different?
- Train your thoughts to flow backwards - attempt to use adverbs appropriately - consciously freeassociate until mental paralysis
Sebastian from the German Inworld Advertising Network sends in a tip about Future Ad Park (SL URL) they have set up "to demonstrate behavioral targeting capabilities". Their blog post explains: "Depending on the interest-profile of an avatar, ads are replaced immediately on billboards to deliver a personalized and relevant advertisement. The interest-profile is not only determined on the basis of where an avatar sojourns, but also combined with inquiries-data to make a prediction what he is really interested in."
Second Life is probably the closest we are to the Minority Report kind of billboards that address you by name. I've already posted about SL billboards that look for keywords in the user chatter and display appropriate ads. You can also mine other user data for targeting purposes -- name, of course, age of account (this is already being done by in-world businesses), favorites, and perhaps clothing and attachments the avatar is wearing.
This also explains why I'm posting so much about Second Life and in-game advertising: I think these environments are the testing ground for the things to come in real life.
On a related note, Austin American-Statesman interviewsJoel Greenberg, a former senior planner at GSD&M (partner of MIT C3) and now VP of marketing innovation at Electric Sheep, a company behind much of the corporate presence in SL. In the interview, Joel describes what a good SL ad network could look like:
"What we are going to do is, we are going to give ad units for free. Give ad units to people to put wherever they want, and we are going to share their ad revenue with them. So it could be a poster on a wall, [...] maybe a billboard outside, maybe a button somewhere. It may be a coaster on a wall. It may be sandwich boards on their body [...]. And people will be able to place ads in the network. The advertisers will be able to choose their criteria and where they want to place it. And the publishers will be able to say there are the things I'm accepting. Just like in a regular ad network.
We will allow anyone to be a publisher, whether they are a ("Second Life") landowner, or a store owner or just an avatar in-world who doesn't own land, they can still be a publisher. They can wear it. Maybe they want to put it on their hat; they can hold it. "
Bus shelters in several Canadian cities were equipped with built-in two-way radios "that connect commuters between different cities, in real time, with just a push of a button." Am flying to Toronto next Friday, drop me a line if you know where to find one to test and report back. -- core77
Update [Apr 27 2007] Nevermind. Apparently, this campaign is from last year.
"The so-called 3D broadcasting is so simple in concept it's surprising it hasn't happened before - take key moments from a TV show and send a simultaneous signal to make the phone vibrate. The examples given by LG include a thud as a ball hits the back of the net in football or an in-hand rumble to match whatever onscreen violence is unfolding." -- Tech.co.uk via textually
"AMPP [Media] completed a deal with Second Life publisher Linden Labs and is ironing out the logistics to sell ads in Second Life, where digital ads will appear as outdoor placements in the virtual world." -- ClickZ via Metaversed
Here's a demo of what the billboards will look like.
This is the Evolution video by Dove's Campaign for Real Beauty.
Business Week in The Coming Virtual Web article: "The Internet of the future, and the vast wealth of information and services on it, will look different: slicker, more realistic, more interactive and social than anything we experience today through the Web browser. "Three-dimensional virtual worlds will, in the near future, be pervasive interfaces for the Internet," says Bob Moore, a sociologist who studies virtual worlds at Palo Alto Research Center, or PARC, the legendary Xerox lab in Silicon Valley."
Other quotes:
"In contrast to the Web, where there's almost no assumption of a human heartbeat behind the Web page, virtual worlds are inherently social settings."
"'What missing from online shopping is the social and recreational experience,' says PARC's Moore. 'That's exactly what you get with virtual-world shopping.'"
"Avatars could be made much more expressive by mapping people's real facial expressions and body language onto them in virtual meetings."
I think it's a good time to plug my presentation from a while back on the real ROI of Second Life. It's not the press, not the stunts, it's insights into how consumers manipulate 3D interfaces, behave in the overtly social environments and interact with virtual objects.
" As more real-world brands are venturing into Second Life, it becomes increasingly harder to gain publicity by merely opening a location inside the world. When American Apparel opened its SL store last June, the news was all over the press. Six months later, many similar undertakings are recorded only by the most dedicated observers and hard core bloggers. The world of hype is moving to the next big thing.At the same time, Second Life is yet to become a suitable environment for meaningful e-commerce. The platform is unstable, and while the total population has doubled to 1.6 million from September to November, the number of simultaneous users has rarely, if at all, crossed the 20,000 mark, and the amount of time people spent in Second Life over the same period rose 29 percent, writes Reuters.
Despite the hoopla about the first Second Life millionaire, only 58 residents earned more than $5,000 in November -- a respectable number for a “game” but not the kind of market that would show up on many executive radars just yet (the numbers again are according to Reuters that has an in-world reporter).
So if it’s not about fame and if it’s not about money, why bother at all? The answer is knowledge.
Some experts predict that in the fairly near future at least part of the Internet will turn 3-D with online destinations either adopting some form of 3-D interface or expanding into the existing virtual environments (3pointD.com is one of the blogs tracking the signs of change). The argument goes that the companies that are playing inside Second Life and similar worlds today will be better prepared for tomorrow.
Besides, virtual worlds in general and Second Life in particular are proprietary, walled and self-contained gardens where the entire user cycle from shopping to private instant messaging can be monitored in great detail. In a sense, it’s like the Big Brother -- the show is currently running in Second Life too -- and it’s you who could be watching.
Here are some of the aspects of user behavior that are hard to study in the traditional web environment but that are perfectly observable in Second Life:
1. Socialization on both macro- and micro-levels. You can study the relationships between individuals and the dynamics of larger groups. Since Second Life allows cross-gender avatars (a real-life guy can play as a woman in SL, and many who do say it’s a lot of fun), a researcher can also find out how social expectations associated with a particular role influence behavior and consumption choices of individuals.
2. Interaction with 3-D objects. Manipulating three-dimensional spaces on a flat monitor is far from trivial. Observing how people navigate the space and interact with virtual merchandise will provide valuable usability clues for building your own 3-D e-commerce site one day. Amazon is already taking notes.
3. Consumption. Record how your customers see your ads, from what distance, under what angle, and for how long. Track the entire life span of a product from the time it leaves your store to the instance when it is unwrapped, tried on, worn, and given away or resold. If this sounds improbable, consider that “Procter & Gamble has created a new research facility which uses computer-generated imagery to re-create shops” (source).
4. Production. A small company called Fabjectory uses a $20,000 ZPrinter 310 Plus fabricator to manufacture real objects that were first “drawn” in Second Life. These objects may be small and crude, but if you are excited about the revolutionary power of desktop publishing today, wait till you wake up to the realities of desktop manufacturing."
A March 2007 study of 1,085 Second Life avatars by CB News / Reperes found that "brands are still far from having succeeded in exploiting all of their SL potential. For instance no RL brand introduced in SL has succeeded in establishing a strong presence in the minds of residents." The graph above demonstrates the failure of brands to build strong "spontaneous" (unaided?) awareness. K Zero comments that these low levels, especially for the brands with longer history of SL presence, may be due to the high avatar turnover and the influx of the new residents.
The good news: "66% [of the residents] believe that the presence of RL brands has a positive impact on SL", which contradicts an earlier study by Komjuniti that showed that "72% of respondents [...] as being disappointed with the activities of the companies in Second Life."
A similar report by Market Truths shows that 49% percent of residents think that brand presence in SL is a good thing. Surprisingly, however, "of the 21 brands ultimately named (unaided), four do not actually have an official SL presence. They are, however, still getting positive brand impact from their “unofficial” (or perceived) presence." (quoted from SL Communicators).
But do check out the entire report by Reperes -- it has some interesting resident insights about specific campaigns.
[Update a few hours later] Ha, another study on Second Life: The latest poll by Global Market Insite, "found the virtual world of Second Life is a burgeoning market for real-life brands and product promotion. Fifty-six percent of users believe Second Life is a good promotional vehicle. Only 16 percent say they would not be more likely to buy or use a brand that is represented in the Internet-based virtual world."
Importantly although not surprisingly, " 55 percent watch less television since becoming active in Second Life." (press release)
"Forrester categorizes social computing behaviors into a ladder with six levels of participation; we use the term "Social Technographics" to describe analyzing a population according to its participation in these levels."
Hiroshi Ishiguro, a robotics expert from the Intelligent Robotics Lab in Japan, has unveiled Geminoid, "a humanoid robot designed in his creator's image, down to the tiniest of details." -- daily mail
Having caught some Boston cold, I'm going through my 4th box of Kleenex tissues, and it occurred to me it's a perfectly contextual ad medium. The tissue sheets on the top could have some benign messages: bless you, get well. The mid-tier would promote nasal drops and cough syrup. The last few sheets could push life insurance. Call it progressive contextual advertising.
Of course, there's a company, AdPack, that already puts ad messages on tissues. Apparently, the medium is big in Japan and has its own wiki entry.
A press release that's too vague about the details and too optimistic about the numbers:
"By the end of 2011, 80 percent of active Internet users (and Fortune 500 enterprises) will have a “second life,” but not necessarily in Second Life, according to Gartner, Inc.
Gartner’s advice to enterprise clients is that this is a trend that they should investigate and experiment with, but limit substantial financial investments until the environments stabilize and mature.
“The collaborative and community-related aspects of these environments will dominate in the future, and significant transaction-based commercial opportunities will be limited to niche areas, which have yet to be clearly identified,” said Steve Prentice, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. “However, the majority of active Internet users and major enterprises will find value in participating in this area in the coming years.”
Wonder how they came up with the 80% number. The press release also offers five "laws" for corporations entering virtual worlds.
A gallery of weird technology mascots on Wired includes Adobe's Jester, Microsoft's Clippy, Ask.com's Jeeves, and Apple's dogcow (above) back from 1983 that was designed to show proper paper orientation.
If you are into ad mascots, TV Acres has lots of information on a wide variety of different ones. There will be an entire Icon Advertising Museum opening in Kansas next year, too.
Boston Globe on how advertisers use audio spotlight device: "Court TV recently installed the audio spotlight in ceilings of bookstoresto promote the network's new murder-mystery show.A voice, whispering, "Hey, you, can you hear me? Do you ever think about murder?" was beamed toward customers as they browsed the mystery section in several independent bookstores in New York."
Marc Cuban: "Remember when you would buy a new PC every couple years to keep up and you would buy a new TV every decade ? Well thats about to reverse itself. You no longer feel the need to get the latest and greatest desktop PC, but you are about to get in the habit of upgrading your TV every couple years as new and original features and applications are developed for it."
Business Week in its Web Attack article about negative word of mouth mentions a damage control company called Reputation Defender. From their site:
"First, we SEARCH. Next, we DESTROY. Our trained and expert online reputation advocates use an array of proprietary techniques developed in-house to correct and/or completely remove the selected unwanted content from the web. This is an arduous and labor-intensive task, but we take the job seriously so you can sleep better at night. "
Very reasonably priced: $30 a frag (killing and item of online content). Some insight into their methods: by Auto Admit who say they were approached by reputation advocates, and on Consumerist.
One of the new cool things I picked up from the Brand Sense book I finally got to read is the story about how auto manufacturers spray new cars with that famous new car smell that works as an olfactory signature of sorts. Apparently, you can buy the stuff by the bottle, too, although it's not brand-specific. A few related links:
A Google Earth layer (.kmz) with a collection of Spiderman 3 locations in Google Earth created to promote the upcoming movie, plus movie billboards. See if you can take a better screengrab of the Spiderman (there are a few scattered around the town but are tricky to photograph). More details on Google Earth Blog.
"Emotive's flagship product, the patent-pending "Push Ringer", reverses the common ringtone model. It enables a caller to push an outgoing ringtone to the receiving phone allowing the caller, not the called person, to set the tone. The chosen Ringer is transmitted to the recipient's handset and temporarily overrides the phone's pre-set ringer. The ringers can comprise audio, video, animations, avatars or flash files." Fortunately, only works on 3G, 4G and VoIP services. -- press release Spamtone?
SciFi Tech: "Art and design team Andrew Andrew hired a company that specializes in printing edible photographs (and company logos) onto cookies to put accurate nutrition labels onto the cookies themselves."
ProBlogger: "Google determines a quality score for every blog post you write based on more factors that most of us have ever really understood." Some of the factors:
1. Feed readership as measured by extrapolating Google Reader subscriptions 2. Click-throughs on search results in Blog Search 3. Presence on high-quality blogrolls 4. Inbound social bookmarks 5. Personal conversations (gmail, chat) ?
On a weakly related note, Google says it will introduce online presentation software to complement its Spreadsheets and Docs. Won't it be cool to be able to create slideshows that could then be incorporated into Google Widget Ads? Well, maybe not cool, but definitely easier than doing video ads.
Business Week writes about how "predictive analytics allow publishers to analyze and build a profile for each player—allowing for highly targeted marketing."
"By using the combination of statistics and data mining, predictive analytics provides an automated way to process and make predictions from the mounds of data collected, which typically can include hundreds to thousands of attributes per gamer: session activity, purchases, downloads, titles played, number of friends, genre preferences, and the list of data points goes on."
Wonder what kind of conclusions you can draw from someone's in-game behavior: playing style, chat utterings, cooperation with other players, cheating.
Billboards that listen to the conversations of people in their vicinity and displaying all the ads that fit to show, now in Second Life:
"A ContextAds board listens to the conversations of those avatars around it, displaying advertisements when certain keywords are mentioned. Advertisers can bid on keywords, with their account only being charged when their ads are actually shown. Avatars can click on advertisements of interest to them, and can be offered a website, or a teleport to an in-world location."
Not a new idea at its core -- Google shows contextual ads in GMail and there were rumors that MSN messenger was displaying ads based on what chatters typed in -- but I love the Second Life context.
New World Notes has a video. I don't know if the VW Tuareg billboard is spec work or was actually commissioned by the company (probably the former).
This is the famous Yahoo! Pyramid that represents "phases of value creation" at Yahoo! Groups as outlined a year ago by Bradley Horowitz, the company's head of technology development. A new study by Hitwise apparently suggests that the number of generators of user-generated content is even smaller:
"A tiny 0.16 percent of visits to Google's top video-sharing site, YouTube, are by users seeking to upload video for others to watch, according to a study of online surfing data by Bill Tancer, an analyst with Web audience measurement firm Hitwise. Similarly, only two-tenths of one percent of visits to Flickr, a popular photo-editing site owned by Yahoo Inc., are to upload new photos, the Hitwise study found." -- reuters via psfk
One caveat: that's percentage of visits (uniques?), not percentage of users. Anyway, to shamelessly quote myself, "the bigger force is not consumer-generated content, it's consumer-edited content."
The April issue of MediaPost's Media Magazine has an article (free reg.) about a contest by Ace Hardware with a prize that's as unusual as it is exciting: a one million dollar hardware store in Houston, TX:
"In an effort to make an impact with an advertising budget far smaller than what the big-box retailers spend, Oak Brook, Ill.-based Ace Hardware execs created a “once in a lifetime” contest linked to the company’s entrepreneurial philosophy. “[Dream Ace] is for all those who have always wanted to own their own business, but life always seemed to get in the way,” says Paula Erickson, director of advertising and brand development."
The winner Gower Talley with "The Apprentice I" winner Bill Rancic.
Check out the official contest rules: the participants had to write three short essays, take a "sales aptitude test", go to a bootcamp, submit a marketing plan, among other things. Pretty serious stuff.
TV Station Manager is an indie game of the simulation / tycoon genre that puts you in the shoes of, surprise, a TV station manager. Wonder if it can be used for training; will run it by the agency's media guys to see how accurate it is. From the game description:
"In this game, you'll take the role of a new manager, just graduated, which is appointed by an almost bankrupt TV Station, hoping that you'll be able to fix the situation and maybe even raise the TV Channel popularity.
The day starts at 5:00 pm and ends at midnight. You don't have to necessarily fill all the slots: by default the TV management will put some minor show/ads, you need to decide only the most important ones.
You'll have to choose which ads to show during a particular show. Some ads are just geared towards a generic audience, so the only important thing will be the attendance, while other ads might require a particular kind of audience, so are more difficult to put. Each ads has also a number of time to be shown, and a deadline."
Wonder if after having played this game with some success and getting the sense of the business constraints, people will be more tolerant of the real TV ads.
Apparently inspired by the successes of MTV's Virtual Laguna Beach and its own Big Brother show set in Second Life, Endemol is teaming up with EA to build Virtual Me (virtualme.com redirects to EA press room), a virtual world that will allow "avatars to compete in online versions of Deal or No Deal, Fame Academy and Big Brother." Coming soon. -- BBC. Screens and press release on info.ea.com.
More datapoints from the eMarketer study: "eMarketer projects that $295 million of the 2007 total will be spent on in-game advertising and that spending on advergaming (the creation of games for the purpose of promoting a brand) will reach $207 million. By 2011, the balance between the two will have shifted significantly. US spending on advergaming will climb to $344 million in 2011, but US spending on in-game advertising will climb faster, reaching a total of $625 million that year." -- press release
Woosung Ahn writes in response to the Mountain Dew for Gamers post to point out two similar tie-ins between Pringles, Coke and Lineage 2, a popular MMORPG, done a few years ago in Korea. Of course, there was another famous collaborationg between Coke and World of Warcraft in China that among other things resulted in this ad and this launch event (and a site that seems dead now).
NY Times on the network effect: "Conventional marketing wisdom holds that predicting success in cultural markets is mostly a matter of anticipating the preferences of the millions of individual people who participate in them. The common-sense view, however, makes a big assumption: that when people make decisions about what they like, they do so independently of one another. But people almost never make decisions independently — in part because the world abounds with so many choices that we have little hope of ever finding what we want on our own; in part because we are never really sure what we want anyway; and in part because what we often want is not so much to experience the “best” of everything as it is to experience the same things as other people and thereby also experience the benefits of sharing."
I was wondering if a big brand would ever tap into the (now fading) popularity of the Million Dollar Home Page. Axe just did, in Brazil. It's apparently part of a larger campaign that involves a webcam stripper on YouTube (NSFW and in Portuguese), a phone number, an answering machine, and one other site that isn't yet live. -- thank you, Gisele
A YouTube video by Intel showing the company's vision of the future: interconnected devices with voice recognition and sleek interfaces. (via Engadget).
A case of life imitating Second Life: "GB Glace (?) have a few high tech posters in Sweden's major cities that double as consumer surveys. On the posters you can vote for your favorite new ice-cream, just by touching them." More details and close-ups on Ad Rag. In Second Life, posters in the Sears and Circuit City builds solicit visitor feedback.
Not quite the reverse product placement, but a nice way not only to promote a game, but also to market a drink for the gamers demo. It's a Mountain Dew limited edition with Halo 3 imagery on the label. More on AdAge and Kotaku.
CNet on the upcoming report from the Metaverse Roadmap: "Within 10 years, the report suggests, people may wear glasses that record everything around them. They will likely see little distinction between their real-world social lives and their interactions in digital, 3D virtual worlds. And they'll increasingly turn to services like an enhanced Google Earth that are able to present data on what's happening anywhere, at any time, as it unfolds." Also see an older CNet article on the topic.
My friend Rekha told me about this optical shop up at Harvard Square called Eye Q Optical. They recognize that choosing the right frames can be a difficult job. They do a smart thing. They take a Polaroid snapshot of you with the glasses on so that you can show it to your friends and see what they think. Word of mouth by design.
I've always loved the Polaroid experience and how instant printing changes the entire routine and protocols of picture taking. It's a great marketing tool, too, whose novelty is based on its obsolescence. Polaroids have been used in bar promos forever, the company's site even has a Diageo case study about it. The company also sells branded instant film, in case you are interested.
There's also this Polaroid iZone camera that prints stamp-sized pictures that can be used as stickers. The iZone camera itself has been a show piece of viral marketing and is featured in a couple of books: The Art of Innovation by IDEO's Tom Kelley and The Anatomy of Buzz by Emanuel Rozen.
This Brazilian promo has been making rounds for the past month or so: Polaroids were placed in bathrooms instead of mirrors to reinforce the company's "instant images" positioning. Not unlike this photobooth that shoots scalps and dandruff.
Speaking of the word of mouth, I've just finished reading Buzzmarketing: Get People to Talk about Your Stuff that the author, Mark Hughes, had kindly sent to me. He was the one who had masterminded the renaming of Halfway, Oregon into Half.com, so besides all the good advice it contains, you are treated to a behind-the-scenes story. The book has received glowing reviews all around and was named one of the best biz books by Financial Times back in 2005 when it came out. Many popular business books today are more like over-extended magazine articles. Buzzmarketing isn't one of them: for your $15 and a few hours invested into reading it, you'll get lots of stories from across many different industries and a lot of conclusions to draw.
Finally, if the Nor'easter (?) subsides, I'll be in New Orleans for the next couple of days for a WOMMA event. Looks like it's going to be fun. Say hi if you are there.
It's one of those campaigns I wish I'd thought of first: a promo for a PlayStation 2 game "Forbidden Siren 2" last year in Germany during a game con. They have created branded snapshot cameras loaded with ghosts on a pre-exposed film that appeared on the printed pictures given away to visitors. More pictures at I Believe in Advertising (and so do I).
Paul Briant at the Reluctant Blogger came up with a doomsday scenario: if Microsoft upgraded Windows (or perhaps IE) with a text-ad-blocking feature turned on by default, it would be the end of Google as we know it. Unlikely for a variety of reasons, but not impossible, considering that a pop-up killer is a standard option on most browsers now, and that there's third-party software that zaps AdWords as well. Also see the comments on 25hoursaday: "The outrage from Google would be tame compared to how pissed off all the companies that depend on AdSense and Adwords would be." It would also put the anti-MS and pro-Goo crowd in a peculiar position of having to turn the adblocker off to spite Microsoft.
Start your own advertising agency with a set of expandable toy cubicles and life-like plastic figures. Pitches, meetings, brainstorms -- now all on your desk in a labyrinth of cubes, decorated with special stickers. On Amazon, and also on the maker's site.
As a part of the new "A Fuller Spectrum of News" campaign, MSNBC.com will launch NewsBreaker, a tricked out Break Out game where bricks become RSS news items.
SS+K, the agency behind the campaign, is also "developing a unique multiplayer version of the game to be played inside movie theaters. It is interactive and relies on collective audience participation.
Several theaters in LA, Philly and NY will be equipped with a camera that tracks the motion of the entire audience. Projected on the screen will be a modified version of the NewsBreaker game and a faint mirror image of the audience in the background.
When the audience leans their bodies to the left in their seats, the paddle on the bottom will react with their movement and move to the left. When the ball makes it way towards the right, they will all have to collectively lean to the right to keep the ball in play, and so on. Like NewsBreaker, many of the bricks will have msnbc.com headlines (via RSS) embedded in them, that fall as the bricks are destroyed." (source: email tip)
-- thank you, Sam
Update [Apr 12, 2007]: Our friends at Brand Experience Lab are working on the movie theater part of the project. Stay tuned for pics and video.
Advertising students in U of Georgia have put together a geocaching (?) campaign to promote Coca-Cola for their entry in the National Student Advertising Competition, the school's newspaper writes:
"The idea being presented by Kapa's team starts with online coordinates for 2,500 different caches on the Coca-Cola Web site. After putting in only their zipcode, a cache-seeker can find GPS coordinates for the closest cache to their position. Then, the treasure hunter can drive to the correct location and look for the cache. Once they find the cache, the treasure hunter would discover a lockbox full of Coca-Cola merchandise." -- via GPS Lodge
"Montreal-based Smart SMS Corp. has signed with mobile marketing firm MP3NY to launch a mobile Visa debit card through Columbia Card Services in the U.S. The T-Weed Wireless Visa, accessible by cell phone, PDA, computer or landline telephone, is being aimed at America’s “unbanked” consumers, small business owners, and immigrants." (Banknet360, more about the platform).
-- BBC is wondering whether the game industry is about to crash. An EA VP also says game piracy was instrumental in building the brand in Asia. For a historical perspective, check Wikipedia on the Crash of 1983.
-- According to the Gameasure (how do you pronounce it?) study by Interpret, the playing audience is vastly underestimated for ad purposes because of the unaccounted pass-along and play-along factor, writes Mediaweek. "Therefore, if advertisers want to truly get a handle on just how many folks will potentially see their ad in a game, media buyers may need to weigh how many gamers play a game per each copy sold--a measure along the lines of the magazine world’s readers-per-copy metric."
-- "Microsoft has made no bones about the fact that it is expecting a combination of ads and subscription revenues to fuel its company-wide "Live" software + services strategy. [...] Katherine Hays, a senior director with Microsoft's platform and services division — and the co-founder of Massive, told March 15 conference-call participants that her division currently has more than 200 active ad campaigns running across 53 game titles. She said Microsoft expects to have in-game advertisements in place in more than 100 game titles before the end of 2007." (ZDNet)
-- GameDaily interviews the CEO of Jogo Media, the newest entrant in the in-game advertising business who takes a swing at the more established competitors: "I look at the funding that IGA and Double Fusion have and I say, 'How are they using it?' Is it going into technologies or are they throwing out money to publishers to secure titles?" But nothing about the technology that, he says, is still in development.
-- Master New Media has a cheat sheet on a number of new virtual world offerings (via Metaversed). For more detailed reviews, go to Betsy Book's Virtual Worlds Review, though.
-- A Danish bank plans to offer services in Second Life, Reuters wrote last month: "Denmark’s Saxo Bank plans to offer Second Life residents the ability to manage their real-life financial portfolios from within the virtual world, and may eventually create a market to trade the Linden dollar against real-world currencies."
-- Lacoste is inviting (in Flash, so no permalink) Second Life avatars to try out for a fashion shoot (till May 4). Send in a pic of your avatar, tell how you dream about world peace, and you get a shot at L$1M to be shared among the winners.
-- Silicon.com asks whether 3D worlds could eventually replace call centers. Wouldn't be a bad idea, really, if you could build a large replica of, say, a computer and literally walk the customer through some upgrade. Speaking of which, Best Buy is opening a Geek Squad island in Second Life.
-- Griefers attack Scion island in Second Life, writes Info Week.
Eric Webber says he doesn't buy all this new-age transparency twittering and prefers his conversations with clients and publics fully clothed and not naked at all, thank you very much: "But it seems to me that all this talk of being "totally transparent" is overrated and takes things entirely too far. What's worse, it's just not honest." He's so getting shredded.
The one thing this whole deal about conversations brings to mind:
Perhaps because I've lived through the original perestroika (?), I'm wary about being irrationally exuberant over this one. I think the Cluetrain Manifesto and its derivatives really boil down to these few principles. My favorite one is about taking naps in the afternoon.
I started this blog as a school project while at MIT CMS and then kept it going after the graduation last August. Even though I'm still affiliated with the program, I haven't been feeling it was appropriate to use the school's name and have been slowly phasing it out, and now I'm dropping the MIT part entirely, so it's just Advertising Lab from now on. There's a problem with FeedBurner not wanting to play with Blogger, so the RSS feeds will be under the old name until I sort things out. Since I've been the lonely poster here (with the readers' and tipsters' help, of course, and a few exceptions) from the start, there shouldn't be any change in quality.
And this is probably a good time to point in the direction of the remodeled Billboardom.
Karmasheetra has nothing to do with the topic of this blog, but I thought I'd share anyway. Here's something to make this post less offtopic: Ford truck matches (source: advertka)
"Apple today announced that the 100 millionth iPod has been sold, making the iPod the fastest selling music player in history. The first iPod was sold five and a half years ago, in November 2001, and since then Apple has introduced more than 10 new iPod models, including five generations of iPod, two generations of iPod mini, two generations of iPod nano and two generations of iPod shuffle." -- press release
In a plot inspired by the Million Dollar Home Page, OurAdTV.com is raising money by selling individual frames in a TV ad they are planning to run on the national TV once all inventory is sold out, although, the site warns, "of course we will not be on prime time." Some math from the makers: the video will be 8.5 minutes long, or, at 25 frames per second, 12,750 frames total. Eight frames have been sold as of this post. You can buy more than one frame. If you buy two seconds worth of frames, you'll get to insert you own sound effect. The goal is to raise half-a-million bucks.
It looks like they will need to do some recalculation because NTSC (the American TV format, see wiki) is 30fps. The guy who's put the site together is from Portugal, which, I think, runs on PAL at 25fps. The site also encourages people to buy the frames ASAP since the first 30 seconds are probably the most valuable.
In case you are wondering, a frame in a 30-sec Superbowl ad that this year cost $2.6M is $2,889 (at 30fps, that is).
Google "is inviting U.S. callers to dial 1-800-GOOG-411 (1-800-466-4411) from any phone to test a voice-activated service free-of-charge that it calls Google Voice Local Search, which is available on its experimental Google Labs site." (Reuters)
How's Google going to monetize this? Probably the same way these Free 411 guys are doing it: contextual voice ads. Seems like another good start-up got eaten, though.
Another article promising more movies in 3-D, sooner: "A growing number of blockbuster, live-action films and animated movies are expected to be offered in in-your-face 3-D in the next few years, as thousands of theaters are outfitted with the special projectors and screens needed to show the films. About 700 theaters across the country are now outfitted with 3-D technology, with thousands of others moving to spend the $17,000 needed to install the equipment."
A couple of years ago, AdLab posted about an art installation that produced images by shooting water droplets with different frequency. Jeep has created a similar installation for its showroom, using 3000 valves programmed like ink-jet printer. Watch the video on YouTube.
Happy Easter. "A virtual Easter egg is a hidden message or feature in an object such as a movie, book, CD, DVD, computer program, or video game" (wiki). The image above is an alternative splash screen for Photoshop 6.0 that you can summon (in all other versions, too, I think) by holding alt+ctrl on PC or command on Mac and go to Help > About Photoshop in the menu. The special thanks to the customer at the end of the credits scroll is a very nice touch; hold Alt to speed up the scrolling (via Crestock who has more). More Easter eggs on eegs.com and eggsheaven.com; their lists include games, DVDs, operating systems, productivity software, mobile devices, websites. Here's a hidden page on Amazon that can only be accessed from the All Stores Directory by clicking an invisible link on the very bottom under 1996 (via). Also, check out this Easter game from Google.
These Easter eggs are like getting flowers all of a sudden. We need more of those.
"The Video Game Advertising report aggregates the latest data from a wide range of marketing and communications researchers with eMarketer numbers, projections and analysis to provide the information you need to make the right business decisions." -- via Business and Games
Wikipedia has a synopsis of the Nine Inch Nails ARG promotion of their new album. "Lost" USB drives, hidden messages that can be seen by running songs through a spectrograph (pictured), phone numbers with spooky messages. Very cool.
NY Times runs a great story (via Idea City) about 3D scanners and printers. A lot of it is about the author's experience with using different models, but he also touches upon something AdLab had posted before: the "Napsterization", as he calls it, of physical objects as they turn from atoms to bits and then to atoms again: "The legal landscape, though, may not be ready for the Napsterization of three-dimensional things. Most of the cute, small tchotchkes in my house that fit on the turntable of the NextEngine scanner I tested are copyrighted. Zapping up a new version might run afoul of the same laws being used to fight the piracy of songs."
[Update: Apr 5, 2007] Looks like it's a thesis (Diplomarbeiten) by a grad student at the University of Zurich. Here's a five-page executive summary in pdf (thanks, Stefan).
Lately, I've seen many bloggers on my RSS feed posting lists of daily bookmarks instead of more detailed posts. I understand why -- no time, most likely -- but what happens is that as more people take this shortcut, the RSS reader looks increasingly like this:
Many of the linked stories are not terribly time-sensitive, so I'd wait till I get several on a particular subject over a week or so and then put them out in themed groups. Another way is to do a deep dive and fish out several interesting stories from a single site. Which brings me to the excellent Digital Experience by the Centre for Advanced Visualization and Interaction (CAVI) at Aarhus University.
"CabBoots is a pedestrian navigation system built into a pair of shoes. CabBoots mimics the principles of walking on a path." (full story)
"The Guitar Heronoid is a human android capable of playing the Guitar Hero game for the PlayStation 2." (full story)
The Singing Sock Puppets "are equipped with flex sensors, and thus opening and closing the mouth of the sock makes the puppet sing up and down a scale." (full story)
In addition to the "consumer-generated ads" marketplaces AdLab's covered, there are few others on this conveniently compiled list:
OpenAd.net: "the world's first online marketplace for buying and selling advertising, marketing and design ideas [that has] over 7,000 Creatives in 115 countries offering their work to a growing number of international clients."
Cambrian House is not advertising-specific, but the site's visitors have come up with some very relevant ideas, such as this one about rewarding popular MySpace users for promoting widgets among their friends on per-install or per-click basis (the Tom Sawyer effect).
Bright Idea has some bright advertising ideas. And you wouldn't believe how many Web 2.o idea-generating sites are out there that produce gems like ThesaurusSaurus.com, "the world's first social synonym website." Besides, you can always count on Halfbakery to come up with things like votable adverts.
AFP: "Talking" closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras which allow operators to shout at people behaving badly are to be installed across England, the government announced Wednesday. The scheme lets local council workers in a control centre monitor pictures from the cameras and talk to them if they feel they are doing something wrong. [Britain's Home Secretary] Reid added that schools in many areas were holding competitions for children to become the "voice" of CCTV cameras."
So simple: stack the university photocopying machines with paper that has ads on one side and offer free copies. Tadacopy, Japan. Springwise says it's wildly popular.
That's an answer to the question Business Week asked ad agencies: "Appearing at the top of Google Search results is a more effective form of brand-building than a national TV campaign." True or false?
Ok, then. Next question. "Which medium will take the biggest hit in your planning in the next few years?"
Interesting. And "which medium will represent the largest percentage increase in spending this year for your brand (or your top client)?" (hint: see online and online search).
In the slideshow, you will also find that marketers are sick of hearing about buzz, buzz marketing and consumer-generated content.
Ian Bogost (game designer and researcher, bio, blog) wrote a Gamasutra feature where he talks about the cultural meanings of the branded tokens in the latest Monopoly: Here & Now edition and what lessons can be extracted by video game designers:
"If we think of brands as markers for complex social behavior, we can also imagine recombining brands’ encapsulated social values in new contexts: the Yugo stagecoach; the Preparation H-needing blood elf. These are perhaps silly examples—and some developers might fear that they represent in-game advertising’s worst threat: advertising’s colonization of even the most incompatible games. But like the creators of Monopoly Here & Now, game designers should recognize that there might be times when advertising could actually enhance a design, not just take away from it.
You can use advertising to exploit cultural preconceptions about known items that then serve as a kind of shorthand for aspects of your game world. And that sort of attitude turns the tables on in-game advertisers, making advertising a tool in the hands of the designer, rather than one in the hands of the brand, agency, or network."
Not sure if the technology works with the official BitTorrent Entertainment only or all the pirated ones as well, but check this out:
"YuMe Networks today announced it will launch the first ad campaign ever that allows a marketer to insert dynamically served video advertising within downloadable content.
YuMe’s ability to insert advertising within downloaded content and track the reach and frequency of a campaign across any device is a groundbreaking development in online advertising. It adds another monetization avenue for peer–to–peer sites, opens up new advertising opportunities for marketers, and could bring to consumers content that previously hasn’t been distributed on the Web because it was difficult to monetize.
YuMe utilizes video sensor technology to scour online video content, and then categorizes the video into customizable channels like Auto, Finance, Entertainment and Family Friendly. Advertisers can select the customized video channels that most closely match the brands, products and messaging in their advertising creative. YuMe attaches advertising to the selected content for delivery to any device – whether downloaded or streamed." -- press release
Koloroo released first widgets for iPod. Branded to follow?
Update [Apr 3, 3007] Here's apparently how they did it, iPod being a closed system: "Ok, all this is, and it's not a "program" is about 100 or so photos that are placed into iphoto or what not, and then uploaded into your ipod and then played as slideshow... kinda lame...but oh, well." (thanks, Jeff)
"Most stories, however, will never find a better medium than the paper-bound novel. That is because readers immersed in a storyline want above all not to be interrupted, and all online media teem with distractions (even a hyperlink is an interruption). People do not read fiction in order to accomplish a specific task in a limited amount of time, as they read reference and schoolbooks. Random-access dictionaries and cookbooks may be useful; random-access novels less so."
Speaking of "consumer-generated" ads and the recent rant about how they don't have to be all video: "Inspired by WIRED Magazine's July cover story on the future of personalization, WIRED Media is executing its first integrated marketing program by collaborating with long time advertising partner Xerox Corporation to offer subscribers the opportunity to put their own photo on the cover of WIRED.
The program will be announced in the April issue of WIRED and promoted on WIRED.com starting Friday, March 23. Magazine subscribers will be encouraged to go online and upload a 4x6 inch photo. The first 5,000 WIRED subscribers to participate will receive in the mail the July issue of the magazine with their image on the cover." -- press release -- thank you, Steph
Brandweek ran a story about how agencies and advertisers are using predictive markets (wiki) to forecast campaign effectiveness. To see one such market in action, check out Hollywood Stock Exchange that investors are using to estimate ticket sales (a 2005 IHT article has more).
"The mechanisms, called predictive markets, don't always exactly mirror the stock market, but they basically work like this: Employees and consultants bet money on possible outcomes. The outcome that most people bet on is considered the most accurate.
Consensus Point, a Nashville, Tenn., firm that works with Best Buy, General Electric, Nokia and Samsung, has been offering such predictive market software for about 13 years, but company president Dave Perry said there's been a big spike in demand over the past two.
Masterfoods, meanwhile, used a predictive market for a pet food launch last year, said Emile Servan-Schreiber, CEO of NewsFutures, a Baltimore predictive market software firm."
AdAge profiles another entrant in the already crowded consumer-generated ads space -- XLNTads -- that's launching in a few months. The scenario is familiar -- people go to the site, see the brief, use the assets provided by the advertiser, shoot a video, and compete for a $20K prize they get if the ad gets aired. I wonder how long it will take for an agency to use one of these sites for its spec and pitch work. Speaking of which, the rumor is that Get a Third Life piece for Kit-Kat was not an actual spot.
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