kip/bot/blog

From Clickz piece commenting on year end predictions, some unsurprising but potent stats:

‘Nuf said.

If you simply try Amazon’s revived mobile app during the holiday, Amazon will give you a $5 gift certificate at Amazon. That’s their holiday advertisement campaign.

Dominos introduced a new line of “artisan” pizza, and the ad they ran was this:

Really an anti-ad, hilariously spoofing advertising tropes while offering a discount so people would try the product.

eBay has come out of its years-advertising silence with this spot:

Why did they break the silence and run ads? To use TV for what it does best: announce something new that might not immediately be word-of-mouth. They re-designed their site, they have a mobile app, and they want to remind (or tell) people that eBay sells new stuff as well.

New ways of using (or not using) TV.

Nearly every product (or brand supporting it) lives in a category that a small, but influential, group of people wants to pursue with some extra zeal. For sports fans, fantasy sports allows a whole extra level of geeking out. For sports participants, it’s possible to geek out on equipment, training regimens, techniques, diet. For anything high price, of high consideration, or with moving parts, it’s possible to geek out.

SO prevalent is the nerdification of everything, that a more useful way of defining influencer might be: a person who geeks out in your product’s category.

GE has a new contest, inviting someone to fly out to the UK, visit one of GE’s jet engine facilities. It’s a free trip, a cool visit to see mind-blowing stuff (regardless of how you may feel about GE, especially if you went to college in the 1980s), and some exposure. To enter, you have to take some instagram pics that demonstrate the four global dimensions of GE’s work: moving (transportation), caring (health), powering (solar, wind, ocean, and yes, coal), and building (building). While these efforts are described as “turning innovative GE technology into instagram art”, they do lots of other things: 1) impress people with the complexity and magnitude of what GE does; 2) add cool factor to the work of engineers; 3) create what a client of mine used to call “party points” – data that people can drop as little conversation nuggets; and 4) focus outsiders on the innovation and invention happening at GE.

I had a chance to pitch GE once at a former agency. While I was one of those political activists in the 80′s who protested GE’s participation in Star Wars, I was so enamored of the transformative power of what they do (see their tidal power generators, for one example), that I was dying to get on the job. It was one of the few pitches that designers begged to be on the pitch. This is a different kind of cool and cultural appeal.

I was at a meeting recently where a legend of advertising scoffed at people who were proclaiming the diminishing importance of TV. In the hyper-leveraged rhetoric of the blogosphere, people will rush to say either that it’s DEAD (“dead, it’s dead Tom, nothing you can do to bring it back”) or ALIVE and bigger than ever. We seem incapable of saying the balance is shifting (an interesting irony that even people who don’t like digital seem to prefer strict binary to nuance). Anyway, this advertising person said “I’m so glad to hear someone say TV isn’t dead. Remember when people said radio was dead? Ha! What’s the first thing you do when you get in the car?” To which someone instantly replied, “plug in my iPhone.” Hilarity ensued.

SFO’s Continental Terminal often has interesting and quirky displays in the long walkway to baggage. This month, it’s about the beginning of the TV era. The opening of the exhibit was this nifty little tidbit:

I love the line from the NYT: “TV will never be a serious competitor to radio because people must sit and keep their eyes glued to the screen; the average American family hasn’t time for it.” This would be a premature death – TV will never live up to its World Fair or other hype, radio will live forever, long live radio.

And today, TV will never die because ____________. In fairness to NYT columnist, though, s/he stopped short of the binary life or death account and just talked about competition for attention and engagement.

Still, an amusing look at how people can cling to the present at the expense of the possibility of the future.

But actually as an ad:

Similar to a recent moment at WWDC where Jobs got rousing applause for saying “it just works.”

I’m told, but am still running it down, that this actually came from a Steve Jobs WWDC presentation where he was describing the project and laughingly said, “there’s no step 3″.

Getting circulated in the twittersphere is a 7 minute video displaying front “pages” of the NY Times website across 11 months. There are 12,000 screenshots, generally displayed for a fixed period of time (with some punctuation in the form of quick holds on a screenshot). For the first minute, I thought this was just another data stunt. I stuck with it, though, curious to see if anything popped. There were a handful of images that popped even though they appeared once (Obama’s frowning face the day after the election, Jared Loughner’s disturbing head shot, World Series and big sports game shots). News stories that crossed several days (the Arab Spring, Chilean Miners) created some persistence and lasting impression. The most persistent, and memorable, parts, however, were the advertisements. Brands that bought the masthead banners for extended periods of time, and take-overs just below the masthead (also for extended periods), became visual foundations for the crazy flow of seemingly disconnected stories, nuggets, and factoids racing underneath. As someone who has grown up believing that advertising doesn’t effect me and that it’s the stuff between the stuff we really want, that odd sense of solidity in contrast to the important stuff of the real world was jarring.

Google just announced the introduction of pivot tables, into its spreadsheet app.

Aside #1: Given the wonkiness of early adopters of in-the-cloud, web-based apps, this is a critical move for further adoption of apps. Heavy duty users of spreadsheets for moderately complex and mission-critical work functions can’t move to Google Apps/Spreadsheets without more of this functionality, and casual users of spreadsheets might not feel the pull of the cloud.

Aside #2: Also worth noting that the implementation looks sweet and clean. So clean, in fact, that it might turn some users on to trying pivot tables. Pivot tables is one of those counterintuitive phrases which, combined with a clunky interface might prevent people from diving deeper into spreadsheet tools. Google’s implementation of pivot tables is so clear that it almost teaches you in advance what you’re going to get. Great design.

The point: The real reason for the post, though, is the power of a short screencast. Google has the mantra that Advertising is Information. Screencasts introducing features and helping users use them, like the one for pivot tables below, demonstrates that the reverse is true: information is advertising. I’ve hit this note before, but it bears repeating. Watch the video and notice all the things it does for traditional advertising goals: shows a brand personality (friendly, useful engineering), provides value (here’s how to do it and in very clear visual and verbal language), creates awareness of the product, the suite, and the new feature. Also, interesting to note is that it warrants re-watching – not because it’s so damn funny or cool, but because the use case scenario structure that drives it (“let’s break down our revenues by region”) provides a framework in which you can show other features. The drag and drop, the clear nomenclature, the rich, but manageable number of options available are all visible. Because it’s brief (I haven’t seen a Google piece go over two minutes), you can re-watch specific sections or the whole thing to catch other features or just learn how to do it.

A screencast that lets you see how easy something is, teaches you the how and the why, and does so quickly is a very direct way of selling. Rather than talk about the emotional benefits an abstracted solution can give you, why not buy Camtasia, do some screencasts and see what that does for you? The whole thing will probably be cheaper than getting a brief written for the spot – and trying to explain how to use your product might give you insight into your customers’ experience of your product.

Just getting to an article in the NY Times chronicling how the Atlantic Monthly transformed itself from a struggling, print, money-sink, to a multi-tentacled content and idea ‘publisher’ and distributor that now turns a profit. Lots of interesting tidbits and already, single dimensions of the transformation are being meme-ified into silver bullets. Some nuggets of what they did:

- conducted thought experiments to get past sacred truths. The oft-quoted exercise was to ask what would like if they were a VC approaching the company without a care or thought for past history. (A very liberating way to find your core without going through the arduous task of defining it and expanding it and making it into a burden.)

- exhaustion of possibilities and silver bullets. The owner of the magazine tried everything for a period: “He tried going out on sales calls with his advertising staff, only to find that his presence in meetings was a distraction. He sank money into printing the magazine on higher quality paper, only to find that it was a waste. He raised the price of a subscription. He lowered the price of a subscription. ” This may be something organizations have to go through — to learn the business, to understand the urgency and complexity of the situation, and to end the fiddling at the margins.

- removal of competing channel concerns The Atlantic mixed staff in the offices and told staff “they did not have to meet separate targets for print and digital ad sales.” This is the most refreshing one for me. In the agency business, we regularly see tensions between digital and non-digital P&Ls driving design and offering decisions. Customers are oblivious to channels and location of services. Wherever they are, that’s where they want the offering. Building incentives around channel competition prevent holistic thinking about the product and the customer experience.

- created new offerings at its core One of the Atlantic‘s new revenue sources and biggest brand-builders was the creation of conferences, something O’Reilly and Wired learned long ago. The conferences earn decent fees, keep the Atlantic in the public eye as a place for intellectuals, and build out the rest of the writer network that they’ve evolved for their digital practices. I phrased this as offering at its core, because, while they avoided the exercises of finding out what their essence is and building on it, they did capture a key dynamic with readers and audience: to be smarter, more intellectual, more informed, and part of a like-minded community. Used to be that reading the same magazines and papers did that, but now you can extend that into attending the same conferences.

No silver bullets, no single lessons, no quick turn-arounds — a lot of open-mindedness, observation, reverent iconoclasm, and experimentation.