Cleaning up an old archive, I found this. Hope the company is still in business.
Do you remember movie The Game in which Michael Douglas character participates in a game that blends with life, designed by a company called Consumer Recreation Services? Well, there is a company that provides just these kind of services. "Hire us to manipulate your or someone else's day. Using characters and scenarios designed specifically for the targeted individual, we excel in making, or breaking someone's day."
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.
If you've heard about Dropbox -- a virtual thumbdrive for moving your files between computers -- but never got to try it, you can use this affiliate link to sign up and get an extra 250MB of space on the top of the free 2GB (and so will I).
I've been using it since last winter to move stuff around between my work and two home computers, and love how it looks just like another folder and I don't have to upload anything through the browser. I can also send file links instead of emailing huge attachments. Magic.
Powered LED tags as remotely-viewed barcodes: "Let's say you're standing in a library with 20 shelves in front of you and thousands of books. You could take a picture and you'd immediately know where the book you're looking for is." (BBC story; project website)
SoundSense: "A group at Dartmouth College has created software that uses the microphone on a cell phone to track and interpret a user's activity." (Tech Review).
This Is My Process: "Somewhere along the way an idea for the design pops into my head from out of the blue. I can't really explain that part; it's like magic. Sometimes it even happens before you have a chance to tell me that much about your problem!"
NYTimes on Polyvore, the fashion collage site (very useful for passive research, too): "Online retail started around digital cameras. Now, sites are using the same engines to sell shirts, but that’s not the way they should be sold".
Here are some of the most interesting letters that arrived in my inbox over the past couple of months.
-- Interview with Alex Bogusky by Jeremy Abelson about "long term economic impact of social on traditional media."
-- Reactive advertising is a concept based on "using data and dynamic content as a creative asset, and not only as input for targeting algorithms." Agency Asia runs an interview on the topic (- Richard). Also, a slideshow and an explanation.
-- A shout-out for Underln, a very nicely designed "digg for advertising, design and marketing", now with a toolbar. (- Eric)
-- Hype around real-time search: "TrendsSpotting plotted “investment interest” (i.e. VC/self funding , acquisitions) vs proxies for “consumer interest” (i.e. Google search trends for “twitter search“) to derive an expectation indicator for the hype." (- Apurba)
-- CAPTCHA advertising: "I'm working for a company that is about to launch this kind of service." (- Roni)
-- Fluent, a report by Razorfish, "dispels some common myths about social media and influencers."
-- The Last Callwas a 100 person, pan-European 24-hour silent-disco dance-off to promote the splendid new Samsung Beat DJ music phone. (- Paul)
-- "Maybe you're interested to know that you're ranked at #7 on the Advertising blogs top 100 blogs in blogRank." There's also another ranking of ad blogs at Media Blips ("Out of 500 Adverlab is ranked # 34, nice work!")
-- The best subject line of the month, from an email from the MadMimi newsletter management service:
If you sent me something but didn't hear back: I read every email, but unfortunately can only reply to so many, and I try to reply first to those who ask specific questions or are looking for help.
The Subservient Chicken site attracts 10-20K unique visits each month.
The debate about their increasing irrelevance aside, if we are going through all that trouble to build campaign microsites, why are we always in such a rush to pull the plug on them when the campaign is over?
I've heard two kinds of arguments: (ir)relevance and cost. I can rarely agree with either.
Unless the information on a microsite is so super time-sensitive that it becomes misleading as soon as the clock strikes twelve, I don't see how an old microsite -- retired and cut off from ad budgets, perhaps, but still breathing -- can hurt anyone. Coke's brand equity hardly suffers when I buy a poster on eBay that sports "A Pause That Refreshes" tagline instead of the current "Coke Side of Life". Have Burger King's Whopperetes become so off-brand that the microsite, launched for the 2006 Superbowl, is no longer live?
And I'm not picking on Burger King; the company is better than many others in preserving its own digital ad history. Many of BK's campaign sites are no longer around -- Whopperettes, Power Sitting (blog post) that made fun of Atkins in 2005, the fictional rock band CoqRoq (blogpost, also 2005) -- but the ones still alive show that they can pull in traffic long after their best-by date. Subservient Chicken, launched in 2004, still gets a healthy 10-20K monthly uniques (the graph above) who can't be all advertising types. SimpsonizeMe, developed two years ago, attracted 30K visits last month.
Which brings us to the argument about cost. For the sites that don't need daily babysitting and are not based on a third-party technology that requires ongoing license fees, the recurring costs are domain registration, hosting and bandwidth. Here, the reasoning should be fairly straightforward: does the site generate enough traffic at a certain benchmark CPM to pay for itself in impressions? In other words, if your benchmark is $10CPM and your hosting/traffic tier costs $100 a month, the site needs 10,000 pageviews to break even. (The actual formula I use also includes time spent on site). This kind of planning for the microsite's afterlife could be done before the project even launches; it can then guide designers to include features intented specifically to generate postmortem impressions.
For decades, we've been working with media that because of their nature made advertising transient and, like paper plates, sometimes useful but ultimately disposable. With the web, we can create ads that accumulate viewership over time in a way that pre-YouTube TV spots never could, and yet we are squandering the opportunity. Thinking of microsites as an investment that pays off over time instead of an expense line in a three-months campaign budget could be the first step.
Creating branded board games -- one other flavor of in-game advertising -- has become much easier. The GameCrafter is like Cafepress for your very own board games: upload the designs, add play money and pawns, and they will print and package everything for you and put it up for sale on their marketplace.
-- via Raph Coster
"DesignBay is a marketplace for graphic design and creative services that uses a new innovative business model called crowdsourcing. We give creative people opportunities and help businesses get risk-free creativity.
Ad agencies, marketing firms and branding agencies can use DesignBay as a tool to expand their service offering to win new clients, to cut costs or to increase their capacity when they're busy. DesignBay offers a white-labeling service that lets ad agencies leverage our product as their own, behind the scenes.
An advertising agency that specializes in print and TV ad production could use DesignBay to help a client create a logo / identity for a new product it is launching. They could charge the client their typical fee, provide them with strategy and direction, present logo concepts as being developed in-house but outsource to DesignBay privately and make significant margin.
A web design firm may use DesignBay to get 20+ creative Photoshop (PSD) web design layouts while focusing on collecting requirements, functional design, coding and implementation.
A brand consultant may help create a strategy and positioning for a client and then use DesignBay to offer execution of that strategy to their client.
How we are better than other crowdsourcing sites:
Designers are better protected at Designbay.
We have a higher caliber of designers.
You do not need waste time assessing quotes.
Designers compete based on the merit of their ideas."
Since I got my webcam upgraded anyway, I thought I'd do a follow up on the Augmented Reality is The New Second Life post and spend a lunch break looking at a few recent implementations of augmented reality in promo microsites.
Here are the notes and pictures I took. If you are on RSS and don't see the slideshow, click over or see the pics on Flickr.
1. The good news: the wow factor is undeniable. I had colleagues standing over my shoulder commenting on how cool it was.
2. The bad news: it's jaw-dropping only the first time you see it. After that it quickly regresses from "neat" to "meh".
3. The usability of most implementations is pretty horrendous. You have to hold up a letter-size piece of paper in front of your web cam just so or the whole animation goes away, and then you have to peek around it to see what's happening on the screen. I suspect it works better with smaller objects (I want to try one of those Topps cards next), or with mobile devices.
4. Only Eminem's AR animation was interactive beyond simple rotation -- you have to spray graffiti over it with your mouse. Not very easy either.
5. The biggest question I had was why. For all the trouble they make you go through (download, print, and in case of Star Treck, install a plug-in), you'd expect a somehow more rewarding payoff. From the "useful, usable, desirable" list, most implementations check off only "desirable" for, like, the first two minutes.
7. The Ray-Ban's Virtual Mirror (img1, img2) was the best of the bunch. It does require installing a separate app on your machine (tech by Fitting Box), but you have a pretty clear reason, and while the app is not without its share of glitches, it's pretty entertaining, potentially useful and point at the true potential of the technology.
8. It probably makes sense to make AR experience more exclusive and tie it to purchase. According to WSJ, Papa John's will be putting an AR trigger on its pizza boxes to let users drive the company founder's Camaro. Again, baseball cards with players coming to life in AR make sense. I wish Eminem had included an AR trigger into the CD box (or maybe he did, I don't know).
It's pretty obvious that we are going to see more of this stuff, and we'll soon move beyond the disposable eye-candy toward something with a longer shelf life. I am hoping for a Rolling Stone AR cover with a band jamming in 3D.
-- Jeff Gomez (founder of Starlight Runner) is the writer of "origin myths" behind some large brand narratives, including the Coke Hapinnes Factory.
-- Google TV Ads people are trying to predict what ads to show to what audience, and are sharing some numbers. "Coke is considering using the characters in comic books, video games, and a slew of new ads." (Business Week)
-- Some 50 old ad books that are still fresh today, scanned and freely available over at Duke Uni's digital archives. The snippet above is from Advertising Sermons.
The review order (via ReviewMe) for MediaBids.com, an online marketplace for ad space in print media, caught me off guard -- print is not exactly making headlines (pun!) for the growth of its ad revenue:
I am not a media buyer and my experience with tools of that trade is limited to only occasional encounters, so I asked my media buyer colleagues (special thanks to Erica and Nicole) for guidance. Here are some thoughts resulting from our conversation.
- Even without print's decline, an online marketplace for newspapers and magazines must be a tough business to run. Consider something more esoteric, like podcasting. We don't buy a lot of podcast time, don't know too many reps, and a specialized marketplace like, say, Podtrac addresses a still rare but well defined need. It is hard, on the other hand, to be more established than print. Most of the large agencies are already using well-entrenched tools such as SRDS -- expensive services, contracts for which are made on the agency level.
- In the long term, other things being equal, it becomes the question of cost. One popular buying tool charges agencies a flat 4% fee on each media buy. MediaBids claims to be free for advertisers but takes an 8.5% commission from publishers.
- Media buyers and media planners are responsible for different parts of the process and use narrowly specialized tools. Planners need access to demo data. Buyers usually work on tight schedules and need to make direct contact with reps.
- Ad selling is still more art than science. I have a favorite quote from Seth Godin, and it is this:
"There are two kinds of advertising and this leads to two kinds of ad sales. The first kind is the rational kind. This is advertising that works, if 'works' is defined as, "pay $3 and make $4." [...]
The second kind of advertising is the glamorous kind, the kind that people think of when they think of the Super Bowl or Time magazine or of profitable ads that are worth selling. These ads don't sell because they work. They sell because they are sold."
The problem with most ad marketplaces is that they sell the ads of the second kind as if they were the ads "that work" of the first kind.
- Ad buying, too, is art. A quote from a buyer: "How do I 'leverage' my client's brand with an automated tool?" Meaning, if my client historically has been avoiding print but wants to give it a try, I am likely to get a better "trial" rate for them.
- Last but not least: will automated ad exchanges with low barrier to entry make media agencies obsolete?
Always wanted to know who was behind those portraits that contribute so much to the style of the Wall Street Journal. Just stumbled across the (an?) answer: Randy Glass Studio.
"With the PimpStar's built-in full color LED lights, microprocessor and wireless modem, you can display virtually any image, including text, graphics, logos, and even digital photos! The included software allows you to create your own images and send them to each wheel individually or all wheels at the same time as you drive! You can even pre-load up to six images into each wheel and program them to change automatically at the time intervals you select." Starting at ~$12K at CustomWheel.com.
Here's a video of the system displaying different logos, if that's what you are thinking. And a much cheaper (~$100 ) SpokePOV (persistence of vision) kit that you can put on your bike that does the same thing, sort of (see for yourself ).
Apparently, the meme of the "invisible" tattoos done in blacklight reactive ink has gone viral, but there aren't many details about the artist known only as Richie. You can see some of his work and contact info here and here.
I think I've heard about at least one billboard done in this type of ink but can't remember now.
- Juhll is the company of Jennifer Uhll, the former creative director at Lower My Bills who ushered in a new style of banner-making (NYT had the story a couple of years ago). Adverlicio.us has an entire gallery.
- What Kind of Blogger Are You? (The tool is kind of like those generic heartwarming zodiac readings that feel oh so personalized.)
- Dissecting Influence is a newly discovered blog that focuses on what's going on inside your (your!) head.
- Why. So. Serious. (in Heath Ledger's voice): "I'm not sure if this is supposed to be some sick, Brazil-inspired joke, but the "thought leaders" at Ad Labs raided the Half Bakery to come up with ten "half-baked" advertising ideas that they hope to see in the future. Ad Labs calls them "brilliant"; I call them scary, and not good scary."
Via our reader Flummox comes the word of Flogos, a company that makes machines that make clouds shaped like corporate logos. The clouds are made from "proprietary surfactant (soap) based foam formulations and lighter-than-air gases such as helium." Some videos to illustrate: Nintendo's Kirby (below) and a bunch of other samples (on Flogos' site).
Not like Pirelli Calendars (wiki), but still pretty cool, in a geeky kind of way. Calgoo: "a permission-based marketing medium that uses the electronic calendar as the delivery channel." In other words, your ad messages in other people's Outlooks and iCals via a dynamic calendar feed. See the demo to understand how everything works.
Letters to the editor from the past few weeks. Keep'em coming.
-- An Orange America: an abstract visualization of the aggregate conversation on Twitter showing frequency and context of election-related words. Simon, one of the creators (together with JESS3), writes:
"To make it work, we take a sample from Twitter every 30 seconds and analyze them in 50-result batches for associations and term matches. They accumulate for 5 minutes and then we flush sample aggregates to the database. So the database has samples from when it started through present in 5-minute granularity. As new terms trend, they begin to populate on the X-axis. The system back end will be implemented using a Java-based stack and PostgreSQL RDBMS. The presentation will be implemented using Flash targeted to Player 9, standards-compliant XHTML/CSS targeted to modern browser versions with significant market share (Safari 2+, Firefox 2+, IE 6+)."
-- Reader Lena from Russia has a question. Do you know of any now-common English words that were minted by the ad industry in the past? Or, in her own words, "I'm looking for - words that were created especially for advertising and PR, brand-names, etc. They may be quite common nowadays, but I really need to know what words appeared thanks to advertising."
-- A beautifully illustrated report from Razorfish. Tip: print the report to pdf; will be easier to read. Oh, and this: "Razorfish is strengthening its brand by choosing one of the most memorable and iconic names in the digital world. After extensive brand awareness research, we determined that the name Razorfish already enjoys powerful brand equity and best represents our evolution into the global agency of the future, which taps into the immersive and social nature of digital."
-- CellForce claims to have "the world's largest consumer database of U.S. cell phone users and email addresses", but since there was no URL in the press release, there won't be any here.
-- NASDAQ sells ad space on its website. NYSE apparently doesn't.
-- Here's a company that creates video claymation tutorials - Claytorial.
-- Roberto asks: "I would like to know if you could put a link to our web page." Sure. Here's a link to the site of a company that "offers the Bentley´s of Billboards."
