I have spent a great many meetings and emails explaining to designers, copywriters, and creative directors what makes a good interactive (”rich media”) banner. My thesis can be pretty much boiled down to this:
a) The initial interactivity should not be a hard sell, i.e. it should not involve the user clicking through to another site, and it should not imply the user’s interest in purchasing the product (or service) being sold.
b) The interactivity should be a metaphor for the user’s presumed interest in the product. If the banner expands into a golf course for the user to play on, then it should turn out that the golf metaphor has been chosen for a reason that relates to the actual sale, even if it isn’t obvious at the time.
c) By the time the user is prompted to actually deliver the fatal click indicating that they might actually want the product, their state of mind has been changed to make them more receptive to the product than they were before. In corporate sales terminology, you might say that the purpose of the interactivity is to “socialize” the user on the idea of delivering the final click. (more…)
When before in retail history has a company released a follow-up product on the same day that they released enhancements to the original?
As I excited as I am about the increased speeds on the iPhone 3G, it feels wrong to give up my original iPhone so soon. The little guy is only a year old. Will I discard him now, at his most shining moment? Shouldn’t I give him a chance to show me what he can do with the hundreds of apps available from the SDK…with the thousands more that will surely come? And the GPS-esque self-locator on the maps feature has gotten so much better; I would have paid $100 just for that upgrade alone, but it was free.
You have to wonder what kind of use cases Apple has in mind for this business model. Is the 2.0 software supposed to make iPhone classic users think: “This is great; if only it could be faster?” Are they compromising because they don’t want to have to maintain two versions of the operating system?
When the iPhone classic came out, something we all often said (with awe): “There are only two hardware buttons. Apple could change the entire interface in an update.” It was quite something to think about, but it must be noted now that it didn’t happen, and we have to wonder whether it ever will. We’ll all be surprised if July 2009 doesn’t bring us yet another piece of hardware. How much will the interface change between now and then? Will each new version of the phone itself promise untold variations that will go unfulfilled due to additional updates? Or will all phones, no matter how old, continue to support new features insofar as they can, eventually puttering out like my housemate’s tangerine iMac?
Or will they go on living simply as phones? It’s unlikely that making a call will require more memory or hardware in the future than it does now…isn’t it?
This is a good idea…if you’re selling the TV show, or advertising on the TV show, or if you’re Google. It’s not so great if you’re the publisher, or another advertiser on the site. Here’s why.
Assuming that the show is popular (and it will be, at least initially), it won’t be long before a list of the lucky sites gets posted somewhere under a header that reads “Here’s where to find Seth McFarlane’s Google TV show.” Fans will then go to those sites and obsessively refresh the pages until they see the show. Then, most likely, they’ll leave the site.
All those refreshes that happen before the TV show loads? That’s wasted inventory. Some other advertiser paid for it, and now their branding impact and CTR will plummet while each impression lasts a fraction of a second.
And those pageviews will affect the sites’s estimates of their own inventory, which they use to sell to other advertisers. Estimates will have to be adjusted from “we get a million pageviews per month” to “we get two million pageviews per month, but only when McFarlane’s show appears on AdSense, and when that happens, half the impressions are wasted if you’re any other advertiser.” And don’t forget: If you’re another advertiser, then when the McFarlane ads are running, (more…)
Brooklyn’s Gowanus Lounge has posted an interesting series of blog entries about an outoor apartment rental ad placement gone horribly wrong.
In placing an ad for apartment brokers above a community garden, the agency clearly thought they had made a perfect match: They were targeting neighborhood-conscious people with an ad aimed at neighborhood-conscious people. What could be simpler?
And yet, the agency didn’t consider that the ad itself would be exactly the type of eyesore that neighborhood-conscious people can’t stand to have in their neighborhood.
Physicists and anthropologists like to say that it’s not possible to observe a situation without changing it. If, for example, you go to live with indigenous people in the rainforest to study their culture, you will become a part of that culture. So what you’re observing, as an anthropologist, is what that culture is like with a person from a developed nation living in it.
It’s the same for advertising. You can’t just consider the target demographic in terms of who they are. You also have to consider them in terms of how they’ll react to your ad. Not the product you’re selling, not the ad’s “call to action,” background color, etc., but to the presence of the ad itself. To the fact that it exists, taking up a certain specific space in the consumer’s line of sight. Is that okay with them?
What are some ways this agency might have presented an ad for the same service, in the same location, while avoiding the hostile reaction?
If I’m the first one to notice the similarity here, I won’t be the last. Compare Piclens, the photo and video browsing service, with the visual index of human memories that Christopher Walken browses through in Brainstorm:
I have tried to capture some of the weird similarity here:
…but you won’t really get it until you have actually looked at both the video above, and the Piclens demo.
Barack Obama is using LinkedIn’s public question/answer feature to ask LinkedIn users what they think America must do to stay competitive.
I doubt Obama is going to read all 3,000 (and counting) answers, but that doesn’t matter. The real subtext here is that:
a) He’s giving people a public forum in which to give him advice, and
b) He’s demonstrating that he knows how to use LinkedIn.
It’s also damn smart marketing, because asking a question on LinkedIn is free for members. He’s paying for the question to be “featured” and for some co-branded banners that draw attention to it. But that’s really not very expensive, given what’s going to come out of this.
Obama’s LinkedIn question, and all the answers to it, are going to just stay there, on LinkedIn, forever. People are going to read the thread, quote it, and respond to it elsewhere. It helps LinkedIn, it helps Obama, and if he becomes President, it may become an oft-referenced, or at least oft-reviewed, thread, in which case it will also be good publicity for everyone who participates in it.
Smart, cost-effective advertising, now matter what your politics are.
Ben Kunz has a nice post on Thought Gadgets about how much we reveal about who we are on Twitter, and how easily that information can be exploited by future employers, friends, clients, and brands looking for information and opinions about their products.
What’s interesting to me (and I’m sure Ben has thought about this too) is the comprehensive, one-on-one, tip-of-the-long-tail targeted advertising that is bound to come about through Twitter and similar services.
In days of yore (i.e. this morning), companies like MRI would actually pay members of the public to participate in exhaustive surveys, to be completed partly on paper and partly in person, in order to supply a massive pool of demographic, psychographic, and purchase data that could be used to target advertising.
But Twitter, Facebook, and other social apps will eventually remove the necessity for all that. For a while, the online user dealt with a simple tradeoff: get free content, but accept that you’re going to see ads.
Think about the maneuver that’s really going on here. Advertising your product, by talking only about your competition’s product, and yet not saying anything negative about the competition. It’s an ad for the other side. In a case like this, the more sincere it comes across, the better it works. Part of what’s so effective about this is how difficult it is to argue with.
Can anyone name a case of this technique being used to good effect in private-sector advertising?
Here’s a video of my various failed attempts to download Firefox 3, despite all indicators that it should be easy.
It’s worth mentioning that, most likely, this was a web caching issue. It wasn’t just my local cache, though, because I IMd a friend across town before I made this video, and he too saw the FF2 pages. Also, the map page was showing “downloads” rather than “pledges,” even while the other pages were still showing FF2 as the main download.
It may have been as simple as someone at Mozilla forgetting to clear their cache, or perhaps they cleared it too late in the day, and the message didn’t propogate to the edge servers near me until later than it should have. This is not a horrible thing, and a few minutes after I posted the video, I started to see the correct pages in my browser. (I’m typing this addendum in Firefox 3.)
My frustration at not getting FF3 as soon as it was promised came only out of the fact that I was so eager for it. Now that it’s here, I’m happy. (The download numbers still trouble me a bit, though.)
Someone at the executive level recently attempted to console me on my unemployment by slapping me on the back and exclaiming “You’ll be fine. You’re a commodity.”
This put me in the uncomfortable position of having to either a) be insulted or b) tell myself that he had no idea what “commodity” means. (I opted for both, actually. Wouldn’t you?)
A commodity, in the business sense, has two basic characteristics:
a) People want it.
b) They don’t want it specifically.
Take this barbershop, for example (in my neighborhood here in Park Slope). The proprietors put a poster in the window illustrating the various hairstyles they offer. But they didn’t make the poster. They ordered it from a poster company that got the hairstyles from a barbershop in Baltimore.
What’s interesting is that the barbershop with the poster in its window (here in Brooklyn) makes no effort to hide the fact that it isn’t their poster. They don’t care. They don’t think that their customers should care either. You want a haircut? They have haircuts. They are not trying to convince you that there is anything special about their haircuts. They are admitting that they are a commodity.
The thing about commodities is, people aren’t picky about where they come from. They get purchased from the vendor that delivers them fast and cheap. So if you’re a commodity, then you are in demand, but you are never in more demand than any of the millions of other people who are, for all practical purposes, exactly like you.
I guess there are a lot of people in the world who aspire to be commodities. But I’m not one of them. Are you?
I have spent a great many meetings and emails explaining to designers, copywriters, and creative directors what makes a good interactive (”rich media”) banner. My thesis can be pretty much boiled down to this:
Family Guy creator Seth McFarlane is making a series of cartoons 
Brooklyn’s Gowanus Lounge has 
