Photographing American Consumerism

Chris Jordan "looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books."

Some of his works are now exhibited in Second Life: SL URL, more info, Flickr screengrabs.
-- thank you, Francis

Screenshots: Advertising on Joost

There have been quite a few articles discussing ad opportunities that Joost will offer -- in AdAge and Wired a few months back and now in NY Times and elsewhere as Joost announced the first batch of 30 advertisers joining the three-month test. I haven't seen any screenshots, though, so I thought I'd take some of my own (Hill Holliday blog).

Earlier:
Joost's Advertising Model
Joost Runs on Apple TV

Opinion: E-Books Will Fail

Computerworld: "There is one unavoidable and fatal fact that will kill the nascent e-book market in its cradle: People love paper books.

So many predictions about the future have failed because futurists tend to overemphasize the possible over the desirable. They give too much weight to technology and not enough to human nature."

NY Times on Tom Sawyer Effect

New York Times blog writes about the Tom Sawyer metaphor of "user-generated content": "Tom Sawyer, metaphor of the digital age? Or cliché? Whichever, Mark Twain’s 19th-century sprite is being name-checked a lot lately as a handy way to describe the Internet vogue du jour: exploiting free labor and content online."

Dead Goat At Sony's Game Party

source: Daily Mail

Daily Mail: "Electronics giant Sony has sparked a major row over animal cruelty and the ethics of the computer industry by using a freshly slaughtered goat to promote a violent video game.

The corpse of the decapitated animal was the centrepiece of a party to celebrate the launch of the God Of War II game for the company’s PlayStation 2 console.

At the event, guests competed to see who could eat the most offal – procured elsewhere and intended to resemble the goat’s intestines – from its stomach."

The game is rated "Mature".

Mattel Launches Barbie Girls

Mattel launched Barbie Girls, a "virtual world" that "will allow children to create their own virtual characters, design their own room and try on clothes at a cyber mall." (Forbes.) In the same article, a company exec is quoted saying it's "the first global online virtual world exclusively for girls". The cool part is that "the doll-inspired handheld portable device will be available in July at an expected retail cost of $59.99. It is designed to unlock even more content and activities on BarbieGirls.com, like adopting a virtual pet and buying clothes using virtual money."

I barely squeezed in for a moment (the site was so overcrowded it wasn't accepting new people all morning). The experience is pretty straightforward; it's somewhere in the neighborhood of Kaneva, Coke Studios and Virtual Laguna Beach but more pink. A few interesting things I noticed:



The virtual town has a cinema that among other Barbie-related things plays spots for Mattel's products.



And you get virtual bucks for watching the spots. The B Bucks can be spent on furniture for your room, accessories, outfits -- that kind of stuff.




Apparently, other Mattel products have promo codes that you can enter to unlock more content.

Reenacting Coprorate Slogans

Think big. Think outside the bun. Come out and play. Researchers at the Institute for Infinitely Small Things suggest "how one might go about performing corporate commands as literally as possible." How can one Think Different?

- Train your thoughts to flow backwards
- attempt to use adverbs appropriately
- consciously freeassociate until mental paralysis

Earlier:
Friday Special: The Inherent Poetry of Advertising

Behavioral Targeting in Second Life

Sebastian from the German Inworld Advertising Network sends in a tip about Future Ad Park (SL URL) they have set up "to demonstrate behavioral targeting capabilities". Their blog post explains: "Depending on the interest-profile of an avatar, ads are replaced immediately on billboards to deliver a personalized and relevant advertisement. The interest-profile is not only determined on the basis of where an avatar sojourns, but also combined with inquiries-data to make a prediction what he is really interested in."

Second Life is probably the closest we are to the Minority Report kind of billboards that address you by name. I've already posted about SL billboards that look for keywords in the user chatter and display appropriate ads. You can also mine other user data for targeting purposes -- name, of course, age of account (this is already being done by in-world businesses), favorites, and perhaps clothing and attachments the avatar is wearing.

This also explains why I'm posting so much about Second Life and in-game advertising: I think these environments are the testing ground for the things to come in real life.



On a related note, Austin American-Statesman interviews Joel Greenberg, a former senior planner at GSD&M (partner of MIT C3) and now VP of marketing innovation at Electric Sheep, a company behind much of the corporate presence in SL. In the interview, Joel describes what a good SL ad network could look like:

"What we are going to do is, we are going to give ad units for free. Give ad units to people to put wherever they want, and we are going to share their ad revenue with them. So it could be a poster on a wall, [...] maybe a billboard outside, maybe a button somewhere. It may be a coaster on a wall. It may be sandwich boards on their body [...]. And people will be able to place ads in the network. The advertisers will be able to choose their criteria and where they want to place it. And the publishers will be able to say there are the things I'm accepting. Just like in a regular ad network.

We will allow anyone to be a publisher, whether they are a ("Second Life") landowner, or a store owner or just an avatar in-world who doesn't own land, they can still be a publisher. They can wear it. Maybe they want to put it on their hat; they can hold it. "

Earlier:
Ad Network to Place Billboards in Second Life
Contextual Advertising in Second Life
MetaAdverse, In-Game Advertising Agency

Bus Shelter Ad Connects People

Bus shelters in several Canadian cities were equipped with built-in two-way radios "that connect commuters between different cities, in real time, with just a push of a button." Am flying to Toronto next Friday, drop me a line if you know where to find one to test and report back.
-- core77

Update [Apr 27 2007] Nevermind. Apparently, this campaign is from last year.

Force-Feedback TV

"The so-called 3D broadcasting is so simple in concept it's surprising it hasn't happened before - take key moments from a TV show and send a simultaneous signal to make the phone vibrate. The examples given by LG include a thud as a ball hits the back of the net in football or an in-hand rumble to match whatever onscreen violence is unfolding."
-- Tech.co.uk via textually