I call this photo: If you're going to park like an asshole, make sure it's not next to a spot reserved for rental cars.

 

 

A home and home series between the New York Islanders and the Detroit Lions. One game of hockey at Nassau Coliseum and one game of football at Ford Field. Since the games should be pretty evenly matched in both cases, should the series be split, a tie-breaker of Quidditch will be held at the Medival Times on Route 32.

They all have a plan to make money someday (except Twitter of course; they're just sad and confused). As I bop through these free services that I use every day, I bump into said plan every now and then, and it's totally okay.

It's fine. I'm totally cool with it. These folks are plunking down some serious cash on making this service that I'm using for free. I'm not going to complain if I have to obey a rule, or use my real name, or provide an email address, or whatever it is they need to try to make a buck. Today, when I went to change my name on  Yelp, I got this message:

See, you didn't have to do that Yelp. You could have just said, "dude, we're trying to do something here, can you play by the rules please." Instead, there's a condescending statement that insults my intelligence and is frankly, just wrong.

"I realize that Yelping under a fake name is neither useful, funny nor cool,"

Not funny? I think Brick Thickmeat, Tor Mooserod, and RearAdmiral Bumpy Molasses would beg to differ. Cool, well, who am I to say what's cool - but then, who are you to say what's cool, Yelp? (yes, I see the irony in that sentence, but you know what I mean).

The point is when designing your user interface and writing your copy, remember that your users/customers have brains, and if your service is really great they'll be cool with following your plan - just ask them to.

Sorry to single you out Yelp, most sites do this. Your service is great.

Today over at AdWeek there's an article by Carlos Ricque of Moxie Interactive called Messaging is Obsolete". While I do agree with a bit of what's said in the article regarding content production, Carlos does fall into a bit of the starry-eyed infatuation that continues to plague all things 'netty.

Primarily, the lead discussion of the Arcade Fire project as a fine example of how to use technology to generate a user experience and deliver content (which would one day be branded). While I absolutely love The Wilderness Downtown as  an experiment, which is what it was called by its creators, it wasn't, and won't be in the near future a very good way of presenting content to actual humans/customers.

First, for most of the Internet it simply didn't work. Last I checked, only about 14-17% of folks use Google Chrome. It didn't work at all for me with Firefox or Safari, so as a member of the Music and Advertising industries I downloaded Chrome for the express purpose of trying The Wilderness Downtown. It still didn't really work. I was informed that there weren't enough images of my home address to make a fully engaging presentation, and it played in a limited form. I tried my office address too with the same result. My dad's address didn't yield anything more than a quick street-view shot. The rest of my staff tried with the same results. I never was able to see the "full experience" but honestly unless it morphed my face into Darth Vader's light saber and blew up my elementary school while a 3-D image of my first-crush rode away into the sky on a golden-winged-version Shelly, my deceased German Shepherd ... The Wilderness Downtown simply wasn't worth the trouble, and quite honestly, was rather annoying.

Perhaps my staff and I were the only ones?

Not really. According to Alexa, the bounce rate for thewildernessdowntown.com was between 65% and 75% which is pretty close to my estimate of people who could make it work, even in the limited fashion that we saw. While I wasn't able to find any total-traffic or pageview numbers on the project, looking at Alexa we can make a few notes.

The first thing this graph tells me is that most visitors were impacted the same way I was. While technically cool/neat, the content itself was boring/annoying. See the big spike for one day then a plummet into obscurity? That's not the way good web content works. Generally we see a series of smaller spikes, perhaps a big one, then a drop to a steady level followed by additional spikes as the virus spreads and/or more and more people come back for more and more views.

To contrast, let's look at a  more traditional advertising campaign with excellent content that was able to capitalize on additional earned impressions from their TV buy (because I don't believe we would have seen this much success without the original TV-buy).

These are the youtube stats for the famous Old Spice Guy (Mustafa!). This line is cumulative instead of concurrent views, so we can't directly compare it to the Alexa chart above, however, you can see by the slope of the line that well after the initial spike there was a steady increase with additional, substantial spikes along the way.

Another important note is that the first, and largest, referral is on the day after the broadcast spot premiered (Super Bowl Sunday) for the search term "old spice commercial." Hence why I believe the viral/online/earned success wouldn't have been the same without the initial, titanic, television buy.

Apples to Oranges? Mules to Imperial Cruisers?

Perhaps, but let's take a look at some other, more similar, projects and see how they stack up "messaging" and delivery wise.

Music video wise, of course there is the Jupiter to everybody's Uranus ... Bieber.

This is a good argument to throw back at anyone who pitches the whole, "the Internet is the great equalizer of art.  The people will choose what they want, the cream will rise, the rest will fall and all the truly talented people will have success and get to keep all of their money and not have managers or labels."

Set. Bieber. Match. Point. Game. Suck it, that argument.

Also, see that nice, steady rise to 400+ million views? No spikes. No Drops. Just pure teen love from now until eternity (or Bieb's balls drop).

Alright, so the Arcade Fire isn't Justin Bieber. I get that. So let's look at another music video more in their stratosphere. This video follows all of the concepts that Carlos presents in his blog regarding the decreased cost of creating content.

Matt & Kim's video for Daylight:

Notice that a full two years after the release of the video, there is a spike (seen on these graphs as an increased slope). Now, I absolutely agree with Carlos that people, regular folks, are able to create excellent content that people want to watch. What I don't agree with is that the effect of that will be the deterioration of the ad-industry as we know it, or the "socialization" of content.

I also disagree with the statement that 3 months is old on the Internet as proven by the Matt & Kim video above, and also this Daft Punk video that MIchel Gondry directed when I was still sneaking into 18 and over Ska shows in Detroit. That is, they may be old to the media journalists, agency dudes, tech bloggers and myself ... but everyone else, you know, most of the world and your customers... haven't seen it yet (unless it's Bieber).

Daft Punk: Around the World Music video (unofficial)

The point here is not that there isn't a place for branded content, and fun technological games, and "neat" experiments. I generally agree with most of what's being said about all that. The point is that few people are questioning the actual value of those things. The reality is people are still hearing the world "digital" and other Internet-buzz-words and ploughing away without worrying about whether the effort is actually working.

You may be surprised to find out that a lot of the time these digital projects that are heralded on AdWeek, AdAge or other industry joints are either over-blown or simply  don't work.

So what is the solution? What is the future of Advertising/Media/Entertainment?

Anyone who claims to know is delusional. The one thing that's for sure is that every piece of marketing, every new technology, should be put under the same microscope. Anytime someone comes to you with a campaign that involves a new technology, think of this little word game: take the sentence "Google came out with this new technology; let me hook it up to your website. It will make things better," and replace the word "website" with "kidneys."

What do you say?

Four of their five predictions had to do with video-calling. Apparently the author thinks people want to see people while they speak to them. Here's the problem with these predictions, and my one, bold, retort:

People don't want that.

Most of us have the capability to video-call right now. Whether it be our iPhone 4, Skype... I mean, iChatAV has been around for five years now and Macs have come stock with built-in cameras and microphones since about then too. 

 In 2000 when my siblings and I were spread all over the country at college, my folks bought us all iSight cameras so we could video-call with each other. It was free at the time, and Santa hooked us up with free equipment. I called my sister on my iSight exactly, um... it was awhile ago so I'm not sure I can be exact... wait... Never. It wasn't just me. My sisters didn't video-call each other, and my parents didn't video-call me. They just picked up the phone and dialed.

You know why?

People don't want that.

Sure, it's a cool toy. Everyone wants video everything. The progression of information tells us that Video is the next step. First there's text, then sound then video! Newspapers, then Radio, Then Television. Telegraph, Telephone, Video Telephone. Right? I totally understand why someone would make said "Bold Predictions."

Most of you, right now, currently or with a few short, free, downloads, could be video-calling for a good portion of your communication. 

Are you? You're not. If you are, you're nerd; try asking if the folks you're calling would rather just hear your voice instead of awkwardly staring at your chubby little chin. Well, it just looks like they're looking at your chin because people look at the screen instead of the camera on video-calls. Really, they're looking at how they look on the camera-inset.