SL: Socially Responsible Camping

I was preparing slides for the marketing 3 conference and hunting around Second Life's malls for a good illustration and by chance teleported to Caliente City Mall. Not only is it one of the more best retail environments in SL, its creators are also employing a new (to me anyway) -- and much cooler -- form of camping. Instead of sitting in front of the slots, people are actually sweeping floors, cleaning windows or playing guitars. The place looks alive, the traffic grows, and the realism is striking. Genious.

Speaking of the conference -- I'm traveling most of the week so not too many updates. I'll make up for it, though.

Eisner Museum of Advertising and Design

The Eisner Museum of Advertising and Design has some amazing online exhibits on hikifuda (Japanese ad handbills circa 1905, pictured above), ad work by Boris Artzybasheff, and history of Burma-Shave roadside signs.

Astronaut Misses First Golf Shot in Space

image: Daily Mail

"In one small swing for man, but one giant promotional stunt for a Canadian golf equipment company, cosmonaut Mikhail Tyurin set himself up for a shot that would put Tiger Woods to shame. With his goldplated six-iron in his hand, he spent more than a quarter of an hour positioning himself for the shot - not easy when half the time he was upside down. Finally he struck the ball ... and, with almost poetic inevitability, mishit it. It was what golfers call a shank - that awful moment when you hit the ball with the heel of the club and it goes off in some unpredictable direction.

The Russians, who are being paid an undisclosed sum by golf company Element 21, say the ball - weighing about 1/15th of a normal golf ball - could travel for more than three years, or 460 million miles."
-- Daily Mail

Earlier:

• Branded Spacewalks
• Raketenbranding
• Advertising (in) Space for Sale
• Space Ads: Fools Rush In
• Federal Aviation Administration Against Space Ads
• MIT Students Sell Space Ads
• Giant KFC Logo Seen from Space

Amazon's Xbox Promo Fries Its Servers

Amazon today ran first of its promotions where they offered 1000 new Xbox systems at $100 each (instead of the regular $299). The units went on sale at 11am; at 10.59pm the site was nearly frozen. At 11.01, when the page finally loaded, all units were gone. Now they have a Digg-full of pissed-off customers:

-- "On the other hand, this promo seems poorly planned. The odds were incredibly small that any single person would get one, but it did succeed in pissing a lot of people off and crashing their servers.fuck amazon."

-- "I'm not renewing my prime membership. I don't mind losing out, but it shouldn't be because their fucking servers can't handle the load. Wall Street thinks the guys behind amazon.com are idiots. I think I agree, now."

Pay To Get Dugg

This ain't gonna last long, but for now you can pay $20 set-up fee and $1 per digg to hit, with some luck and budget, Digg's front page and enjoy the traffic goodness.

Data Points: Video

-- "Most leading ad executives expect a significant portion of broadcast and cable TV ad dollars to shift to online video by 2010, with 33 percent predicting that switch will be between 10 and 19 percent." (American Advertising Federation)

-- "47% of people (down from 63% two years ago) buying a high-definition TV set in the past year say they did so looking forward to watching TV shows in HD, according to a study by Frank N. Magid Associates." (Yahoo)

-- Slate: "The battle between HD-DVD and Blue Ray is meaningless because the physical media for video are a dying breed in general."

-- Media Life: "Nielsen reports that 78 percent of all viewers in DVR households who watch recorded broadcast primetime shows play them back within two days and 84 percent in three days."

-- The Inquirer: "A Nielsen study, which monitored a panel of 400 iPod users in the US, found that only one per cent of iPod users and 2.2 per cent of video iPod users watched videos on their gadgets."

Whirlpool Offers 3D Models of Appliances for Google Earth

Press release (unearthed by Ogle Earth, via 3pointd): Whirlpool offers 3-D models in the Google 3D warehouse; architects and design professionals can now include Whirlpool and Gladiator brand appliances within their 3-D visualization designs. More than 120 top U.S. design firms currently use Google SketchUp for 3-D design and visualization. As the Google 3D Warehouse expands the number of 3-D objects available for designers, Whirlpool Corporation plans to expand its 3-D appliance model offerings to include Jenn-Air, KitchenAid, Maytag and Amana brands."

Earlier, I wrote on Brands in Games about Ikea furniture models surfacing up in the 3D Warehouse, but apparently Whirlpool either has made the official move first (Ikea's stuff could be fan-made) or has better PR people. Ogle Earth quips: "I wouldn't be surprised if you'll be able to push a "buy" button in SketchUp and have your inventory of virtual home furniture materialize on your doorstep."

More on the subject:

• Google Earth Compatible With Other 3D Environments
• Google Earth Becoming Virtual World
• Fortune on Personal Fabricators
• Microsoft Launches Virtual Earth with Billboards
• Google Earth Runs AdWords
• Google Earth Becoming Advertising Tool

Idea: How to Put Ads into YouTube

So, I've been reading Bob Garfield's article in Wired about the uneasy relationship between YouTube and advertising and how the old TV world is falling apart (the mag runs another article on the future of TV in the same issue). He talks about how hard it is to monetize YouTube's content and lists a number of challenges.

"First, there's the basic question of where, exactly, to put the ads. Prior to the acquisition, YouTube refused to sell ads appended to either end of a video – like a TV commercial – on the grounds of safeguarding the viewer experience. This leaves as available ad real estate only the space adjacent to the video window – which is great for whoever is hosting the video. But [...] a significant portion of YouTube videos are embedded elsewhere, mainly on individual MySpace pages."

Well, here's one idea:



Embed a banner into the player -- it should be technologically easy since it's all Flash. To safeguard YouTube's user experience, show the ads only when the videos are embedded into third-party sites (or on YouTube site to unregistered guests). Equip the banner with secondary controls to let the users play the video ad if they are interested. I'm guessing that animated ads here would be too distracting, but static ones should be ok. Perhaps share the revenue with creators and registered users who embed the videos elsewhere and thus increase the number of impressions.

I'd love to hear your thoughts. Comments are open, and so is my email.

Wired on Lonelygirl15, Future of TV

Wired runs a great feature on Lonelygirl15. Besides all the behind-the-scenes stuff, the article offers a glimpse into a future of TV:

"You make movies for the big screen, sitcoms for TV, and something else entirely for the Internet. That's the lesson of Lonelygirl15.

This Web series not only looks different, it's made differently than other filmed entertainment. As Bree's universe expands, each new character will have his or her own vlog. Flinders can't write and film them all, so new writer-directors have been hired and paired with actors playing the new characters. Unlike television, where writers sit in a room and come up with a single script, the Lonelygirl15 team comes up with a general plotline and then sends its writer-directors out to produce independent but interconnected videos. All the characters, in essence, have their own show."

Branded Butterfly Wings

Telegraph: "A glowing green logo drawn by scientists on the wing of a genetically altered butterfly could herald the day that the insects are adorned with adverts and slogans. A team at the University at Buffalo that developed the world's first GM butterfly has now adapted the work to create the fluorescent marking on the wings of the insect to demonstrate an innovative tool that will make it easier to find out what genes do, in this case those that play a role in making the patterns on wings, from stripes to eye spots."

Gotta give credit to the newspaper's imagination. The original article's abstract reads much more dryly: "Precise temporal and spatial regulation of transgene expression is a critical tool to investigate gene function in developing organisms."

If you are into ads and bugs, here:

• Nano-Advertising with Insects
• Advertising on Bugs
• Advertising on Eggs
• Advertising on Leaves

-- via Ad Rag; image from the provisional paper at BioMed Central