Tool: Calculate Cost of Meetings

A cool promotional device and an invaluable tool rolled in one -- the MeetingMiser application from PayScale. Enter your location and positions of the meeting attendees and push start; MeetingMiser will pull average salaries for everybody in the room and calculate the total cost of time spent looking at those ppt slides. If there is one online app that has to be a desktop widget, this is it, and it would be great to customize billable rates for more accurate estimates.

50 Game Innovations

An excellent feature (page-by-page, on one page) in Business Week listing some of the most important innovations in the video game medium over the past 30 years. Why should anyone care? Because a lot of the game innovations spill out to other media: interfaces, AI, 3D imagery are only a few such areas. Here are my favorites from the list:

"Modding is a form of gameplay; it's creative play with the meta-game. The earliest games weren't just moddable, they were open-source, since their source code was printed in magazines like Creative Computing. When we began to sell computer games, their code naturally became a trade secret. Opening commercial games up to modding was a brilliant move, as it extended the demand for a game engine far beyond what it would have been if players were limited to the content that came in the box. [...] The key point is that they enlisted the player to build content—long before "Web 2.0" or indeed the Web itself."

Smart NPCs with brains and senses. [...] Then we began to implement characters with vision and hearing and limits to both. We also gave them rudimentary brainpower in the form of finite state machines and, eventually, the ability to cooperate. Some of the most sophisticated NPC AI is now in sports games, where athletes have to work in concert to achieve a collective goal.

Adaptive music. Everyone recognizes the power of music to create a mood. In videogames, the trick is to change the music in response to game events, and of course the composer can't know in advance when they might occur. One approach is simply to play a new track on demand, but the transition can be jarring if not done well. Another approach is layering—mixing harmonizing pieces of music together and changing their volumes in response to the needs of the game."

Study: Initials Influence Decisions

"People like their names so much that they unconsciously opt for things that begin with their initials. Tom is more likely to buy a Toyota, move to Totowa and marry Tessa than is Joe, who is more likely to buy a Jeep, move to Jonestown and marry Jill."

-- Original study: "Why Susie sells seashells by the seashore: Implicit egotism and major life decisions," and Newsweek via Neuromarketing

Metaphors and Formulas

If Trust=Reliability+Delight, then Delight=Trust-Reliability? The point is, these sorts of made-up equations that look like formulas are used all the time and might be a valuable rhetorical tool, but they aren't really useful as formulas.
-- from the Brand Gap deck

Soviet Propaganda: The Art of Mass Persuasion

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.

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Animated Packaging For Hearing Aid

The Die Line (one of the new great additions on my feed list) writes: This digital hearing aid by Widex has a semi-translucent plastic sleeve around the box to create an animated illusion of a sound wave as you slide it out. (design by Goodmorning, via NOTCOT). Below is a video of the packaging in action.

Content-Filtering Technology Auto-Swaps Ad

There's a lawsuit (details) that involves a truck stop operator that used segOne technology to filter out generic ads on its TVs and replaced them with hand-picked messages targeted at truckers. Here's a blurb about this interesting tech:

"The segOne 2000 LS connects to any television. It detects when a commercial break occurs, switching channels seamlessly, playing the commercials provided by segOne. The commercials will be specially selected for the establishments in the area where you want to focus your product. The commercials last a predetermined length (30-seconds up to two minutes), then the system returns to the original program, undetected. This innovative technology is compatible with direct satellite, cable television set-ups, and HDTV."

-- via TechDirt

Automatic Ad Skipping In 1934

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."

Text-Based Pac-Man

Pac-Txt is a brilliant mix of two game classics -- Pac-Man and Zork -- in which you navigate your Pac-Man one through a "large complex" one step at a time by typing in commands while being haunted by a "faint howling of what you can only imagine must be some sort of ghost or several ghosts." As a bonus, note the site's clever integration of AdSense.
-- via Google Blogoscoped

Study: Radiohead Promotes Music with Free Music

"ComScore released a study of online sales of "In Rainbows," a new record album from the band Radiohead. During the first 29 days of October, 1.2 million people worldwide visited the "In Rainbows" site, with a significant percentage of visitors ultimately downloading the album. The study showed that 38 percent of global downloaders of the album willingly paid to do so, with the remaining 62 percent choosing to pay nothing."
-- From the press release that has more numbers about what users paid how much on average. ComScore blog defends Radiohead's business model: "for every $1 in sales coming from album downloads, sales of their [$80] Discbox generated $2."

The point of the story: the audio tracks do not have to be the merchandise, but they are a great way to advertise something else, something that is a scarce commodity and can't be freely downloaded and multiplied.

Financial Times wrote as much last month: "Radiohead's much-debated decision to let fans choose what they pay for its new album online is a promotional tactic to boost sales of compact discs, the band's management said yesterday."

Update [Nov 11, 2007] Radiohead denies comScore's numbers (MTV via PSFK).