Media Mandible

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?

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.

One of today’s panelists was CondeNet President Sarah Chubb, whom I used to work for (indirectly), when I was in sales, and ad operations, and web analytics, back in the day. She actually gave me a nifty ’star of the month’ award once, involving an email from her to all of CondeNet about stuff I’d done, and a $1,000 prize. I remember sitting in her office as she told me about the award, and being touched by how she was sincerely giving me all her attention, even though she was my boss’ boss’ boss’ boss. It was one of the few times that I spent really talking to her directly, but I valued it, and would think back on it later when she sent out company-wide emails, or gave a speech to all 200 (or so) of us at CondeNet, talking at one crucial point about the history of the larger (mainly print-based) corporation, and how we, the online division, fit into it.

She told a similar story today, but a more complete one, with a happy ending that I didn’t get to witness myself, but heard about from old colleagues, as the sister print publications that had so long contended with their strange online sibling, gradually learned to accept its worth and to make it part of their world…or to become part of its world. And neither is my world anymore, but…why not admit this?…I still care. It thrills me to find a new feature on Epicurious, and to think about the people and the departments and the processes that must have been involved to make it happen. I care about the fate of Flip, and I wait to see what they do with Reddit. And when, after years of CondeNast controlling Wired, the print magazine, while Wired was still owned by another company….when the online publication was brought back into the fold, I couldn’t help but think, Fuck yeah. We finally got it back. Even though I hadn’t been at Conde for almost two years, and even though I never worked on either version of Wired myself.

Anyway. Other memorable moments from today’s panels included Media Kitchen’s Darren Herman noting that “A lot of people need to either step down or die,” Wendy Harris Millard (President of Media at Martha Stewart) doing an extended (loving) impression of Stewart making fun of Millard, and Edelman Digital SVP Steve Rubel comparing social media to soylent green (the substance, not the movie).

This was a good conference. Not just smart people talking about smart things, though there was plenty of that. But, unlike most trade conferences, the panelists (to a one, I think) were sincerely interested in engaging the topic at hand, instead of shamelessly using it as a jumping-off point to shill for their own commoditized business. Maybe that’s partly because the businesses in question each bring their own special value, but it’s also just about the whole spirit of the thing. It was really nice to be at an event involving hundreds of people in the same industry that was not mostly comprised of bullshit, and I bet that such events are fairly unusual even across industries.

photo (of the S.I. Newhouse School of Communications) by Benjamin I.

Emotiv is coming out with a gaming headset that reads the wearer’s mind. In the game, you levitate boulders just by willing them to move. But here’s the part that really caught my attention:

The system doesn’t just lift boulders. It can also detect some of a player’s facial expressions and emotional responses: smile, frown or wink, for instance, and an avatar on screen can do so, too. Grow bored during a battle, and the system can detect ennui and supply a few dragons, or change the music.

Imagine the implications for in-game targeted advertising. If the system can tell, based on the user’s brain waves, whether she’s interested in the game, then it’s not a big step to tell whether she’s interested in the integrated ad. Or, for that matter, whether she’s angered/frightened/excited/moved/aroused by it.

The ad could then change based on the user’s reaction. But more interesting still: the advertiser could pay based on the user’s reaction! Cost per reaction! Cost per arousal! Cost per bathos-lasting-longer-than-two-point-six-seconds!

Do you agree? How far can we take this thing?

image: A poster for the movie Brainstorm, which featured a brain-interface device that looks almost exactly like Emotiv’s.

I’ve been thinking a lot about a recent post on Creative Beef about advertising agency “characters,” along with Kristin Maverick’s discussion on bitemarks about the staff of Dunder Mifflin as they exist online: they’re on YouTube, they Twitter, they post to a company website that really exists.

There is actually a name for fictional personalities who have been aggressively integrated into the lives of those with free will. They’ve been around for a very long time, and if you were ever a role-playing geek, as I once was, you know what they’re called. They’re non-player characters.

Non-player characters are like the toys temporarily animated by the parents of small children. They are not real, and the people controlling them are under no illusions that they are, nor does their realism hold up under much inspection. And yet, without them, the game isn’t nearly as fun.

I think that non-player characters (NPCs, as they’re properly called) play an important…well, role…in conversational marketing. They give the advertiser the chance to personify itself in a way that’s more human and interactive than a logo or a mascot.

Some other examples that come to mind: those AOL marketing bots that add themselves to your buddy list and then wait patiently for you to get curious enough to strike up a conversation with them.

What others are there? Are they effective? How far back, historically, does this go, do you think?

photo by Joi

Do you spend a lot of time trying to disseminate the idea that your business is on the cutting edge of what’s going on in the online space?

Easy solution: Sponsor a Firefox 3 Download Day party.

I wish that I could have convinced certain clients of mine in the past to put even ten thousand dollars into the kind of viral, community-driven campaign that Mozilla is engaging in.

Fans are pledging their future use of Firefox 3. They were motivated to do so in part by Mozilla’s suggestion that they set a Guinness World Record. And you can download any one of many badges, like the one above, showing your support. Or you can make your own badge, upload it to the site, and they’ll encourage other people to download it. And there are lots of other ready-made evangelical activities for those who want to feel like they’re part of something special (and they are).

They even have an affiliate program, for Pete’s sake. And you don’t earn money with it, you earn prestige.

And you can literally contribute to the production, documentation, and QA process. Talk about your brand as conversation. Everybody just senses how great Firefox 3 is going to be, even though relatively few have actually used it. (Although, if you like, you can use the latest release candidate.)

The latest asshattery in the world of media planning news comes in the form of a study from Datran Media suggesting that email ads perform better than search or display.

It’s convenient to look at data like this, and to conclude that email ads are a better investment than, say, Google Adwords or banner ads…anywhere. (God forbid you consider some kind of integrated marketing effort; the sky will fall.)

But this is an apples/oranges comparison. (more…)

I’m disappointed to see that Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail, has made another post in which he completely misinterprets industry data to justify his ideas about the way online CPMs work. (See also Chris’ last post on this subject, and here’s my comment on it.)

Chris references some PubMatic survey results indicating that large websites are getting lower CPMs these days than smaller websites.

Unfortunately, he chose not to address a note from the PubMatic page: “The pricing data reflects net publisher monetization via ad networks and excludes ad networks’ share of ad spends as well as inventory sold directly by publishers to ad agencies or advertisers.”

Here’s what that means: (more…)

Fox recently announced that they will be showing fewer commercials than usual during two of their upcoming dramas. Said Fox Entertainment chairman Peter Liguori: “We’re going to have less commercials, less promotional time and less reason for viewers to use the remote. We’re going to have more character, more content, more value.”

What’s not clear is whether this shift in policy merely means fewer commercials, or fewer commercial breaks. There’s a huge difference. One way simply means more content per hour. The other way means a major paradigm shift in the way that television is written.

The plots of TV shows, both dramas and comedies, are structured according to acts, just as plays are. It’s easy to tell where one act ends and another begins: at the commercial break. Commercials are used instead of, say, curtains closing in front of a stage.

Each show has a formula for what happens in each of the acts (in the case of drama, there are usually four acts per episode). If you start to pay attention to your favorite show in terms of these acts, you’ll see the structure emerge pretty quickly. In the first act, the villain of the week often emerges. In the second act, the heroes go about fighting the villain, and fail. In the third act, (more…)

Everyone who writes for the public makes mistakes, bloggers and journalists alike. Take, for example, this article in which Marketing Vox mistakenly identifies Buzz Targeting as a Yahoo product, when in fact it’s a Google product (the Buzz Targeting link in the screenshot leads here).

It’s a fairly harmless mistake, but it’s still up on the site, about six hours after I first discovered it. Here’s why: Marketing Vox doesn’t allow users to post comments. On a site with comments, multiple users would have pointed the issue out long ago. Sure, they can still send an email to the editor, but apparently they haven’t…because there’s no glory in that. But what a great feeling to see your own name on a major site, with text underneath that makes the site’s content better. Marketing Vox also doesn’t accept trackbacks, meaning that, for example, readers of the article I’m writing about won’t know that I wrote this post unless they happen to come here for some other reason.

I don’t mean to pick on Marketing Vox specifically. I skim its RSS feed in my aggregator (which happens to be Google Reader), and often read the articles. This is a problem in a lot of major journalism websites…not just online versions of print publications like The New York Times, but also other major sources about the state of the online media industry, such as MediaBuyerPlanner (which I also read religiously).

Many companies that promote themselves as harbingers of what’s to come are themselves still afraid to embrace what is already here.