In Memoriam: Kodak Scenic Spots

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.

A Kodak photo spot, (K. Mikey M on Flickr / group)

Eastmanhouse.org:

"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)

Finally, Bookmarkable Banner Ads

The big Monday press release was about the unveiling of AdKeeper, a company whose technology adds a "bookmark" (or "keep", as they call it) button to banner ads of participating advertisers. The idea is based on the fact that people do bookmark advertising if a) it's easy, and b) there is an expectation of future value. Clipping coupons, for example, is both. Until today, banners haven't really been designed for any kind of delayed gratification, being instead all about "click here now" reward mechanism. With AdKeeper, users will be able to clip online banners into a repository for later viewing, which probably means that the creative can be updated with new offers depending on the history of interactions with the ad.

An excellent idea, which I hope takes off.

Here's the demo video:

How Men and Women Shop

I first saw this drawing, forwarded by a friend, years ago and keep coming back to it every time I read something about shopping behavior (this time it's Inside The Mind of The Shopper). Never knew who the author was, until today.

Incidentally, the graphic captures the essence of a Wharton paper "Men Buy, Women Shop" (pdf) that came out half a year after it.

Future: Cell Phones As Personal Information Filters

This article was originally written for and published by Canvas8 in November 2009.

Pay no attention to the man holding the receiver; it’s the phone itself you’ll need to impress.

A small army of editors, programming directors, critics, censors, librarians and curators have shaped choices of entire generations.   But just like factory workers of the 19th century found themselves inevitably replaced by the more efficient machines, human gatekeepers are giving way to a new breed of automated tastemakers – sophisticated software that separates the information wheat from the chaff and whose influence is growing as fast as the amount of information we produce.

That is, pretty fast.

In 2002, the amount of new information was estimated to double every three years.    Today, it is doubling in size every 18 months. IBM expects that soon the amount of information will be doubling every eleven hours.  47,000 radio stations around the world pump out 70 million hours of original radio programming; 21,000 TV stations create 31 million hours of news, dramas, and reality shows; and printing presses roll out over a million new book titles, 25,000 newspapers, 80,000 trade periodicals and 37,000 academic journals. (source)

Finding a needle in this haystack of information requires superhuman powers. It is likely that in the near future these powers will come packaged in a slick portable device that stays awake around the clock, knows your tastes, detects your mood, programs your TV, fills your earbuds with infallibly pleasing music, and instructs you what to have for dinner and where, what books to read and what clothes to buy.

It will probably be a (really) smart phone.

Timing Visibility of Display Ads on a Page

This is pretty nifty. An ad network called World Web Network created launched technology that "monitors the visibility time of each banner on a Web page. [The technology] measures the amount of time that a banner is visible on the page and the web surfer is active. Time is only tallied when the script detects a regular mouse-keyboard activity. After ten seconds of idle time, the tool will pause until activity returns, ensuring a reliable metric." (source: press release).

Try the demo and see for yourself: it detects when you are below your screen's fold and can't see the banners.

I don't know if this has any real application in ad sales -- it matters little how "visible" the ad is if the average fixation (dwell) time for a banner is about one second --but I see it being useful in page content analysis. Too bad the tech is proprietary.

Correction: The technology was created by Alenty, not WWN who licenses it from the creators.

Telling A Story With Fantasy Interfaces

Here's a recent quick interview on NPR with Mark Coleran, the designer behind FUI (fictional user interfaces) that have appeared in many well-known movies: "What [a movie character] sees on that monitor looks nothing like what you have on your home computer. That's because it wasn't designed to surf the Internet or do your taxes."

AdLab's earlier coverage of Mark Coleran's work and the subject of FUI, including an academic paper.

3D Puts Brand Placement Out Of Focus

Very interesting: the proliferation of 3D tech in TVs and theaters may threaten the current model of brand placements because of how 3D puts background is out of focus:

"One of the key characteristics of 3D, as used in Avatar, is "limited depth of field." Essentially, this means that the figure onscreen in 3D pops out at the audience while the background appears out of focus. An attempt to focus on the background causes what some call "Avatar h3dache."

For product placements though, the loss of a clear background means the elimination of countless placement opportunities for a wide range of brands. Cars logos, soda names, box graphics and any number of other brand identifiers will appear to be just a swirl of blurry color. Any attempt to distinguish them will be pointless. What good is a product placement that cannot be seen?"

- via

Glasses, Gloves Simulate Geriatric Impairments

Photo: Lauren Pond for the WSJ

Wall Street Journal writes about a sensitivity training that puts marketers in the old peoples' shoes, literally: "Before walking into a Walgreens drugstore here, Todd Vang [a Walgreens VP] donned glasses that blurred his vision, slipped un-popped popcorn into his shoes and adjusted tape that bound his thumbs to his palms."

"Current store layouts present challenges for elderly shoppers, experts say. Worsening eyesight makes finding items more frustrating, arthritis complicates browsing and reduced balance intensifies the strain of stooping or reaching for products.

Dallas-based Kimberly-Clark runs the program to let retail executives experience how difficult shopping can be for older adults."

The training kits were developed by Lee Memorial Health System for its SECURE Project for Sensitivity Training. You can order a master kit for about $500 and additional sets of gloves that simulate arthritis and glasses that simulate vision under glaucoma and other impairments for between $5 and $15.

Half of Americans have poor eyesight. Over eight percent of people are also color-blind.

Here's the Project's promo video:

Beware Trolls on Air

If the Chevy example seems too dated for your cutting-edge PowerPoint deck, here's a fresh one to illustrate the flip side of engaging people in unmoderated live content production. The teaser Tap and Take microsite for a Samsung product (camera?) asks people to guess what the whole thing is about by typing in suggestions that are posted in real time to the site, and they do.

Birthday Advertising, Updated

Two years after the original post, I'm still wondering why so few companies that collect birth dates at sign-up send a simple note on their customers' birthdays.  Of everything I'm subscribed to with my personal and test email accounts, only Cirque du Soleil and OkCupid are doing something on this unique and, I bet,  high-open-rate day. I haven't seen any company with a page or an app on Facebook doing anything either.
Chad White of the Retail Email Blog that tracks over 100 retail email campaigns commented that "birthday emails are rare among retailers as well". Is there a cultural reason behind this that I am missing?

Binge Meets Nudge

This presentation by a group of Johnson & Wales University ad students showcases some of the smartest thinking I've ever seen coming from persuasion pros of any age and caliber. It was presented at the AAF's student ad competition, whose topic this year was combating student binge drinking.

Their plan is based on a simple insight: just like you cannot scare smokers into quitting, you can't nag students into not drinking, which is the path much of the existing communication has taken. Instead, the group focuses on creating the right choice architecture that prevents unsafe drinking, the approach popularized by the recently published book Nudge: "There are subtle but effective ways to nudge the two critical elements that cause binge drinking -- how much and how fast students drink -- providing students with choices that result in safer behavior."

This presentation was the best in New England but didn't do as well in the national finals -- I am guessing because it's not exactly advertising. If for you "creative" means just this kind of thinking, then here are the names of the students on the team; many of them are still on the job market:

Juan Alvarado (who worked with us as a spring intern at the agency and who introduced me to the project and the book), Abigail Agress, Foluso Akinkuotu, Sierra Barter, Andrew Childers, Ginelle DeAntonis, Victoria Deetz, Evan Dunn, Yousef Khory, Audrey Kushner, Bruce Millard, Joseph Russomano, Jonathan Vega, Nicholas Verrochi (advisors: Oscar Chilabato, Tom Monahan, Christine Ure).

Update:
- A video of the JWU presentation can be viewed here. (Thanks, Tom)
- A competing book from University of Minnesota is here (Thanks, Erin)

Targeting Zodiac Signs

Sure someone apart from horoscope sellers has thought of segmenting people according to their zodiac signs before, right?  If they can match two people based on their signs, and since each sign has its own assigned objects (stones, amulets), and each self-respecting brand has "brand personality", why not match people to their lucky products then?  It seems like a  perfect product placement opportunity for enterprizing horoscope writers. Plus, if you know site users' birth dates, does it make sense to show custom sign-appropriate ad units?

In 2001, according to Gallup, 28% of people believed in astrology and 18% weren't sure.

Where Can I Buy a Webcam?

After finishing the post on augmented reality today, I realized that my webcam could use an upgrade but didn't know where to get one in downtown Boston. You'd expect Google Maps to know such stuff (I did, and tried "where can i buy webcam"), because it knows about other things like sushi restaurants, but it really doesn't. The closest thing was an OfficeMax ad, but Google itself gave me a listing for a Sheraton for some reason.

Yet, Google already "knows":
- my default location (it's the only part it got right).
- that Best Buy, for example, is an electronics store with an address nearby.
- that Best Buy sells webcams.

Room for improvement, I guess.

As for the camera, I did get one. When I saw the OfficeMax ad, I remembered there was one just up the street (score one for AdSense, I thought). I went there, and it actually turned out to be a Staples.

Kodak Moment for McDonald's Billboard

image source

A very interesting billboard from McDonald's in London that is designed to fit into the picture-taking behaviors of tourists. Work by Shiny Red Leo Burnett.

New Words Created Yesterday: 14.7

The English language will hit one million words in about 41 days, during which 617 new words will be created at a speed of one word every 98 minutes, according to the Global Language Monitor (BBC story, via).  Brands and fungi species are not counted.

Also, an average newspaper contains 8000 different words, incidentally as many as the King James Bible. An average person recognizes about 50,000 words.

P.S. I bet the decimal point in the title is because of all those portmanteau words .

Most Photographed Landmarks

"Mapping the World’s Photos" (pdf, researcher) is a paper based on an analysis of some 35 million photos of landmarks uploaded to Flickr. Researchers have identified popular tourist photo traps (the Apple store is NYC's 5th most popular), but also some other interesting behaviors: "Although [Amsterdam] is the tenth-most photographed city, relatively few photos are taken in its top ten landmarks." New Scientist has the story.

Also:
Brands as Landmarks (on HHCC.com)
Brandscapes: Longaberger Basket Building

Understanding Behavior Around e-Cards

An interesting, even if slightly dated (2007) data bit from an eMarketer / Marketing Sherpa study: of those people who tried e-cards as a viral strategy, there are many for whom it didn't do anything -- twice as many as those for whom it worked.

The problem, I think, is that most marketers view e-cards simply as a library of static images equipped with a send-to-friend form, kind of like this, without understanding the social protocols around card-sending.

On a related note, did you know that "the average person receives more than 20 cards per year", according to the industry org (yes, there's one for card publishers, too, and an official publication).

Study: Weather Influences Stock Movements

Good Day Sunshine: Stock Returns and the Weather, a paper from 2001, claims that there is a "strong and significant correlation" between sunshine at country’s leading stock exchange and market index stock returns (discussion ).

Canon or Nikon?

Nothing riles up photo pros on forums more than a newbie "Canon or Nikon?" question. And yet, the fact that this question is asked by so many people is an indication of a large communications inefficiency that has spawned a thriving camera review industry.

Remember how marketing textbooks always said that people don't really buy drills, they buy holes? Well, you'd imagine that when shopping for cameras, people are really buying pictures and not the expensive black boxes, but you can't really tell by the way cameras are sold today.

There are a lot -- a huge unmanageable lot -- of resources that let you compare the boxes down to their smallest and, to many, meaningless details. About the only way to compare pictures these different boxes produce is to shovel through the Cameras section on Flickr.

This doesn't make sense. I'm trying to think of another consumer electronics product that you buy for its output where you want but are unable to compare the output of different models. You can compare TV sets by walking up to the wall in Best Buy. For shredder shoppers, confetti samples are readily available on display. It might be tough to compare irons, but then I guess most people don't expect deviations in the quality of heat and steam.

I wish there were an easier way to make up my mind about a camera than trying to understand complicated reviews when all I need to know is what body+lens combinations produces nice baby pictures for under $700.

Working on an Anti-Smoking Campaign?

I'm looking at a bunch of anti-smoking creative -- from cutting-edgiest to decades-old -- and am wondering why just about all of the ads use fear to get people to quit (if that was the actual goal, that is).

Is it because fear ads are high on recall? But how many of those who remember that smoking kills (probably just about every smoker) actually take the step?

People subjected to fear ads may show higher intent to quit -- and that's how this creative is probably focus-grouped -- but do they manage to stay away?

Buyology's author Martin Lindstrom writes about fMRI scans of smokers' brains: "The warning labels backfired: they stimulated the nucleus accumbens, sometimes called the “craving spot,” which lights up on f.M.R.I. whenever a person craves something, whether it’s alcohol, drugs, tobacco or gambling."

[A piece of history trivia: ads sponsored by Big Tobacco that were designed to prevent teen smoking achieved the opposite effect (here's why).]

If you are working on an anti-smoking assignment, take a look at Allen Carr's The Easy Way to Stop Smoking, a self-help book that has been more successful in getting people to quit than many other methods. Instead of nagging the smokers or scaring the bejesus out of them, he calmly -- and at times cheesily -- explains how smoking doesn't have any of the positive effects that smokers count on, such as controlling anxieties or relieving stress. It also explains how quitting doesn't bring about the withdrawal pangs smokers dread.

A campaign based on this platform would be a breath of fresh air.


On a related note, this Halo-themed anti-smoking machinima spot is lovely: