Found a small stack of PDFs of scans of old issues of Grey Matter, Grey's research newsletters the agency sent out to media ("since 1935"). Particularly cool is a 1997 retrospective (pdf) of what Grey had published about television over the years.
From a 1946 issue:
"Throughout the still-raging dispute concerning the precise position television will occupy in the advertising firmament, a point has been missed... television is just one phase of a new advertising age (we might call) the "electronic age" of advertising...
We hope we will not be charged with being anti-newspapers, anti-magazines or any of the established media... but we see a brilliant future for radio, for television, for (other electronic media). And we would be sadly remiss in our duty to advertising... to clients.. to future clients if we did not firmly resolve to explore those new media intensively and utilize them to the maximum of their potentials."
I took my first Kodak Photo Spot (wiki) pictures at my spring break trip to the Disney World in the mid-1990s, and through all these years I've never stopped admiring their genius. It's a marketing idea whose elegance has rarely been emulated. I love how organically spreadable the signs were, how they subtly nudged you to spend another scarce frame of film, and how they made people's lives a little bit better by giving their memories just the right composition.
Of course today the Kodak Picture Spot is something that could probably be built straight into the digital camera wired to recognize the subject and to statistically analyze thousands of photos taken from the same spot to recommend the optimal composition and camera settings.
"As photography became more engrossed in American culture in the early 20th century, The Eastman Kodak Company began to look for new ways to advertise photography and its cameras. With the rise of the automobile industry and the development of American highways, the company began a campaign called “Kodak Scenic Spots.” Starting in 1920, Kodak began to place signs throughout American highways that advertised both their name and the practice of photography by marking interesting and beautiful scenery.
Initially, these signs appeared on the roads outside of Kodak’s hometown of Rochester, NY in order to test the effectiveness of the idea. Within a year, they began sending members of their advertising department across the country to select the most scenic views to be awarded signs. By 1939, Kodak had placed 6,000 scenic spot signs across the country.
The exact phrases used in these signs changed over time. When the company began the campaign, the signs read: “Picture Ahead! Kodak as you go.” Eventually, the use of the work “Kodak” as a verb was stopped and the signs were changed to read: “Kodak Scenic Spot.” After the initial campaign ended in 1939, Kodak continued to place these signs sporadically in theme parks and tourist locations until the late 1980s. These signs also carried a new label, which read: “Kodak Picture Moment.”
Map of Kodak Picture Spots at Magic Kingdom (source)
One of my first iPad impressions last year was how different it felt to hold moving images in your hands: "Watching HD videos on the iPad gives a strange sensation you don’t get from TV or laptop, a feeling of proximity, almost intimacy." Adam Lisagor, in a much longer post, shared a similar feeling:
"The iPad is for the nightstand. And for the sofa, and for the places between where you stand in line and where you sit at your desk. That’s why every iPad poster and billboard features it on a lap or a knee. They’ve stopped short of showing it on a chest in bed, but that’s where mine gets its most use."
"To my mind, holding a 10” screen a foot from my face in a dark room is more immersive than staring blankly at a 40” screen twelve feet away."
"iPad. It’s TV for your chest™."
Which reminded me of an 1965 ad from Bernbach's book for the new 5-inch TV sets by Sony that had become known, likely thanks to Bernbach, as tummy TVs ("so that your wife can sleep, we also include a personal ear plug").
It's Joe McCambley, who is listed as copywriter on that very first 1994 banner for AT&T on HotWired.
According to his bio (pdf), "Joe conceived and developed the first advertising experience that ever appeared on the Internet in October of 1994. It was a banner that led to an online tour of the world’s best art museums, sponsored by AT&T and developed for the inaugural issue of HotWired Magazine."
Which also answers an old question -- what happened when people did click "right HERE".
"A new, experimental system devised by Bell Labs may make an old teaching tool more alluring. Called an electronic blackboard, it uses ordinary (and low-cost) telephone lines to send writing that is chalked on a pressure-sensitive surface to any remote point for TV-screen display. The audio portion of a lecture or other presentation can, if needed, be sent via a second phone line, using a portable conference phone available commercially. The system is being tried out at the University of Illinois."
-- Popular Science, June 1974
In 1999, a team of researchers at Accenture described what you now know as a barcode-scanning app on your phone; they called it Pocket Bargain Finder. Pocket Bargain Finder "combines the global scope of Internet shopping agents, the ease-of-input of a barcode scanner, and the portability of a PDA. The result is a convergence of electronic and physical commerce that we call augmented commerce." In their research paper (pdf), the authors have described the potentially disruptive effects such technology would have on traditional retailers: "With consumers able to find the best price regardless of where they shop, the physical retailer is left at a distinct disadvantage." (Related from AdLab a few years ago: The Future of Retail: Instant Price Check.)
This is apropos of the Price Check for iPhone, a new app that Amazon launched today that lets you scan barcodes, snap pictures or say the product name into it and it will show you product prices, reviews and ratings along with a big Buy On Amazon button.
This is a TV spot for the 1996 Chex Quest, which I think was the first time when a standalone mod of a popular game (Doom) was used to promote a product. It was distributed on a CD in more than six million of Chex cereal boxes, attracted a lot of fans, and apparently won an EFFIE for its effectiveness. I couldn't find the game on the list of winners on the official site, but one of its creators claims the game was responsible for a 248% lift in sales. The game was developed by Digital Café in Minneapolis, an early interactive agency co-founded in 1991 by Dean Hyers and Michael Koenigs. You can still download the game and its 2008 sequel here. If you'd rather watch than play, here's a five-minute speed run through the game.
So, not only was there a cell phone in a Charlie Chaplin movie, but it turns out folks in the 1950s already had Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and Skype if these vintage ads are any proof.
TRSrockin.com: "Released in 1989, the Nintendo Game Packs was a series from Topps that consisted of 60 scratch-off game cards and 33 stickers from six NES games: Super Mario Bros., Super Mario Bros. 2, The Legend of Zelda, Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, Punch-Out!!, and Double Dragon. Each of the stickers had a "top secret tip" for one of the games on the back. Each series of the scratch-off cards followed a particular game, with 10 cards per set. The goal was to uncover certain symbols while avoiding enemy symbols."
This video of Knight-Ridder's concept newspaper tablet is pretty prescient, except for the stylus and perhaps the size of the device. There's video content embedded in a newspaper page, interactive classifieds, wireless connectivity. Created in 1994, 16 years before the iPad.
- via Paleo Future
Fire up your Skype and record that interview old-school style, with a real gramophone.
The Gakken Premium Gramophone ($149) "supports all record sizes, features speed and tone adjustment, and even lets you record music! No file formats to worry about, no batteries to replace, and the warm, nostalgic sound of analog - this just might be the perfect music player."
This news clip about Compuserve's (?) experimental news delivery service from 30 years ago is a lot like the iPad coverage we have all been enjoying over the past month. "Imagine, if you will, sitting down to your morning coffee, turning on your home computer to read the day's newspaper. Well, it's not as far-fetched as it may seem."
-- via
Grey Canada took an obscure ancient device called Cardtalk -- a foldable record player made of cardboard -- and brought it back to life as a direct mail piece for Griffiths Gibson and Ramsay Productions. Jealous? Then head over to our retromedia department, there's still plenty of forgotten goodness left around. May we recommend carboard records on cereal boxes, ad games on vinyl disks, and paper ringtones.
The original tweet ads (!), shoe printers, an improved advertising brick and much, much more in this list of ten new media patented in the 19th century, for the fans of our retromedia series.
Remember Nike's cool Chalkbot (a descendant of StreetWriter) that printed SMS messages for Tour de France cyclists on the road surface? Here's a similar idea: a drum of water, a stencil, and an ad message. Done in 1930 in Spain to promote a wine merchant.
And a modern-day "sea-tagging" campaign to promote an aquarium in London through sea-water prints on pavement:
From "The Essentials of Advertising" textbook published in the 1920s:
"The latest, and by many large distributors of merchandise regarded as one of the most important advertising mediums, is the motion picture. The popularity of motion pictures as a form of entertainment or for educational purposes is attested by the statement that there are 14,000 theaters in the United States devoted to their presentation, with daily audiences aggregating 14,000,000 persons, or over 5,000,000,000 a year. The possibility of placing an advertisement of any kind before an audience of this vast size strongly appeals to the imagination of merchants and manufacturers with products to sell.
Motion picture advertising is presented under ideal conditions. In the darkened theater the attention of the audience is centered upon the brilliantly lighted screen upon which the pictures appear, as it is the only thing that can be seen. The spectators are in a receptive mood. They are there to be entertained or instructed. When they enter the theater they leave business and household cares behind and, with open minds, are ready to receive impressions from the film productions."
Raided the Modern Mechanix site to see what advertising media were budding in the 1930s.
1931: Someone had a great idea to put ads in the middle of Newton color disks (like these). Notice the combination of "high school science classes" and "package of cigarettes".
1933: Sales robots! Some guy hid phonographs behind cut-out cardboard dummies. Guess nobody could tell the difference anyway.
1934: Wow, something like this passes for emerging media even today. Person standing in front of a mirror triggers light that illuminates an ad layer behind the mirror's surface.
1936: Advertising mirror, perfected. Now with a phonograph record triggered by a light sensor.
More than a decade before the New York Times began trial of an electronic newspaper device in 2006, the Knight-Ridder's Information Design Laboratory had been working on its own prototype of the newspaper of the future. Roger Fidler, the lab's director, was "betting that a portable, battery-powered flat panel, or what he calls a "personal information appliance," will become the main vehicle for newspaper, magazine and book publishers. He says the tablet – which will be about two pounds, a half-inch thick and roughly the same dimensions as this magazine – could begin replacing newspapers by 2001 and serve half of the country's newspaper readers by 2010 with highly readable multimedia, digital displays." (American Journalism Review, 1994).
Roger Fidler, who now works as Program Director for Digital Publishing at the University of Missouri, has been working on electronic newspapers since at least 1991 when "he created the first prototype electronic newspaper designed specifically for viewing on magazine-size tablets" while at Columbia University (source). With the popularization of devices such as Kindle, he is finally seeing "the breakthrough years approaching".
An article in today's Slate examines the relationship between newspapers and electronic content delivery that goes back further than many imagine: from the experiments with faxes in the 1940s to the emerging media of 1970s -- videotex services (?). Slate writes: "So intense was the industry's devotion to videotex and so rampant its paranoia that some other medium would usurp its place in the media constellation that the American Newspaper Publishers Association lobbied Congress in 1980 to prevent AT&T from launching its own "electronic yellow pages."
New formats: In April 1984, publishing industry's trade mag Folio ran an interview with a videotex content publisher: "It is possible for an advertiser to "sponsor" information segments, which are then distributed at no cost to system operators in much the same way that broadcast radio features and television shows are syndicated to broadcast outlets. But as far as I know, no such arrangement currently exists. In addition, print-publishers shouldn't overlook using videotex to promote sales of subscriptions, books, merchandise, reprints, back-issues or special services to the videotex user.
Familiar concerns: "Quite simply, advertisers aren't interested. They would have their name and logo displayed on the bottom of pages on 'which the news might be bad, thereby associating them with something unfavorable." (Ryerson Review of Journalism, 1984)
If you are intrigued by the entire "Mad Men on Twitter" thing and the fan fiction angle of it, you'll love Hamnet, a performance of Hamlet on IRC back in the early 1990s, and an academic paper published in Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication in 1995 exploring the emerging phenomenon of online theater.
"A new weapon for sending messages behind the Iron Curtain without danger of radio jamming has been offered to the U. S. by RCA. It’s a refinement of the basic hand phonograph and could be mass-produced for 50 cents each. The little machine is in three unbreakable plastic parts—base, turntable and tone arm - and can be packed to drop by parachute." (Popular Science, Jan 1956, via Modern Mechanix).
Gartner Hype Cycles are good for at least three things: identifying technologies that are still under the radar, taking a look back at stuff that was hyped up in the past but didn't go anywhere, and explaining to your parents what it is that you do as an emerging media strategist.
Besides, they illustrate this wonderful quote from David Brooks's "Lord of the Meme" column in NYTimes: "In order to cement your status in the cultural elite, you want to be already sick of everything no one else has even heard of."
These graphs also provide good fodder for thinking about how media consumption would change if any of the pre-hype technologies reached mass adoption.
After catching the 2008 graph on Techcrunch a few days ago, I hit up Google image search for earlier versions. (You can also buy Gartner's original reports, but at close to $2,000 apiece they are beyond this blog's budget). Below is what I've found. You will see that some of the technologies don't make it into the later versions of the graph; I think it's because these are Garther's charts for different tech sectors. Click on images to zoom in.
If you have graphs for the missing years, please comment or drop me a line.
An article in NY Times about a Belgian inventor Paul Otlet who in 1930s created a proto-Web that "relied on a patchwork of analog technologies like index cards and telegraph machines":
"In 1934, Otlet sketched out plans for a global network of computers (or "electric telescopes," as he called them) that would allow people to search and browse through millions of interlinked documents, images, audio and video files. He described how people would use the devices to send messages to one another, share files and even congregate in online social networks. He called the whole thing a "réseau," which might be translated as "network" — or arguably, "web.""
***
"He hired more staff, and established a fee-based research service that allowed anyone in the world to submit a query via mail or telegraph — a kind of analog search engine. Inquiries poured in from all over the world, more than 1,500 a year, on topics as diverse as boomerangs and Bulgarian finance."
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.
"Banner ads are useful to the extent that they drive qualified users to such corporate sites, but there are many other ways of attracting traffic: a survey of people who had actually bought things on the Web discovered that only 12% of buying customers had arrived at the vendor's site from an advertisement - 88% of the shoppers had navigated there in other ways. Search engines and hypertext links are the most important mechanisms: offer content-rich pages, and other sites will link to you."
"Maybe we can forgive advertising agencies who don't know any better, but an old-media perspective is also characteristic of many so-called "new-media analysts" who take an incredibly non-strategic view of the Web and analyze it purely in terms of "eyeballs" and a television metaphor."
"We're promised instant catalog shopping--just point and click for great deals. We'll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obselete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet--which there isn't--the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople."
"The Soviet Union has signed a deal to sell advertising space—in space, of all places.
The Tass news agency said Wednesday that Glavkosmos, the Soviet commercial space agency, signed a contract with a Swiss firm that includes selling advertising space on cosmonauts’ space suits and painting two 6-by-9-foot advertising messages on the hull of the orbiting Mir space station.
Besides the advertising patches on the space suits and the outdoor space billboards, clients will have the opportunity to have a 3-minute commercial filmed by cosmonauts onboard the Mir."
Rewinding VCR tapes. Balancing the tonearm. Calling collect. Formatting floppy disks. Loading film into a camera. Numbering punchcards. Getting up from a couch to change channels or volume. Dialing. Remembering phone numbers. Using carbon paper. Rewinding a tape with a pen. Sending a telegram. Sending a telex.
"From a memo I wrote to Xerox in 1971: Though the Dynabook will have considerable local storage and will do most computing locally, it will spend a large percentage of its time hooked to various large, global information utilities which will permit communication with others of ideas, data, working models, as well as the daily chit-chat that organizations need in order to function. The communications link will be by private and public wires and by packet radio. Dynabooks will also be used as servers in the information utilities. They will have enough power to be entirely shaped by software." (more on wiki).
"The Fender Chordmaster is essentially an electronic guitar tutor, which allows the user to learn the elementary chords through listening to the correct sound of them as well as viewing how the chord is played correctly on the display. The Chordmaster works by the user selecting the desired chord by turning the chord dial, and then they simply pull down the sound lever to hear the chord." -- Museum of Lost Interactions
"Advertisements are now so numerous that they are very negligently perused, and it is therefore become necessary to gain attention by magnificence of promises, and by eloquence sometimes sublime and sometimes pathetic." -- Samuel Johnson, "The art of advertising exemplified", The Idler (a series of essays published in Universal Chronicle) # 4o, 1759 (wiki, full text).
Ninety years ago today, the Russian Revolution began. Among other things, it gave birth to one of the most formidable mass persuasion machines in the world. Here, comrades, is a collection of images I put on SlideShare to showcase some of the tools and techniques used by the Soviet AgitProp (agitation and propaganda) as well as other governments, democratic and otherwise, and how some of the imagery was borrowed by brand marketers. 50+ slides. I'll be adding captions eventually, but if you have questions, I'm leaving the comment section open.
Modern Mechanix, April 4, 1934 via Modern Mechanix blog: "The device, known as the 'radio advertising eliminator,' will operate the radio only when musical programs are coming over the air. Just as soon as any voice announcement is made from the station, the radio receiver is turned off and is not turned on again until the musical program resumes. It is believed that the new device uses a vibrating reed tuned to a predominant voice frequency to operate a relay which turns the set on and off."
