Third time lucky
Posted: April 13, 2008 Filed under: Futurama, Futurism, geeky, google, web2.0 Comments Off
Amelia’s amusing analysis of Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 came coincidentally on the same day that I was at a conference thingy and had been having exactly that discussion: what was 2.0 and how much of it was pure marketing sentiment. I couldn’t disagree more. I think 2.0 is a radical shift in society. It is, as Amelia says the shift from an internet of geeks and possibility to an internet of the mass market and reality.
What, if anything, 3.0 means is another matter. Clearly there is a quasi-technical meaning being discussed (as on the Wikipedia page), but surely we should be concerning ourselves instead with the social impact of these changes.
- Expectations about data integration will go through the roof. Just as information became ubiquitous in 2.0, the joining and manipulation of data will become so now. Brands will have to respond to this. Expect some powerful movements in traditionally data orientated services, particularly FS.
- The ladder of involvement will continue, with a new rung being added above ‘blogger’ or ‘publisher’ for ‘providers of utility’
- Concepts of enterprises and the borders of corporations will continue to be challenged
Amazon and Google (and to a certain extent, Microsoft) have clearly started their engines to take advantage of this next generation with app development, elastic computing, utility computing and so on the subject of much debate this week.
There’s a powerful version of inverted marketing too (where consumers are rewarded for hand-raising) which feels like the inevitable consequence of abstracting and linking data.
How will it impact your brand?
Corny chips
Posted: April 13, 2008 Filed under: advertising Comments OffI actually saw this a few weeks back and felt I should document it, and then it got forgotten about.
Have a look at these beauties. Presumably they were ‘targeted’ at me on the basis that I’m a male human being, or something.
The ad:
(incidentally, how many people do you think click on the ‘more ads’ link?)
The page it takes you to:
Ads themselves are uploaded to http://www.doritos.co.uk/. There have been 115 so far. None of the ones I looked at was anything better than hideously embarrassing. Here’s one at random:
And now they’re going to have to put one on TV. What on earth do they think they’re doing. Surely this is a great example of a traditional TV ad agency showing absolutely no imagination or understanding about what social media does: ‘we can’t make a TV advert? Can the facebook people?’.
Doors and language
Posted: April 13, 2008 Filed under: usability Comments OffI talked a few weeks ago about how toilets and planes are bastions of usability. Of course, I missed out the number one usability battleground. As Don Norman covers in incredible detail in the Design of Everyday Things, doors are the simplest opportunity for poor and inconsiderate design.
And, although the world remains full of terrible doors, I found a great exception in a most surprising location. And for added marks, it was a toilet again. The loo in question was in a Starbucks, and has an ingenious solution to an often mangled problem. To lock the door, you lift the handle up.
Like all good ergonomics, the solution is elegantly simple. Providing visual feedback, preventing any attempt to open the door without unlocking it and reducing the total number of controls.
Unfortunate then, that the same smallest room also offered this feat of mangling of the English language:
When I was at Bristol university, our marvellous professor of Logic, professor Mayberry once spent 10 minutes showing what distinct meanings the phrase ‘every nice girl loves a sailor’ could have – mostly concerned with how many girls there are, how many sailors there are, and who loves who, in reality or in theory.
Well without getting all ‘That’s life’, this sign suffers a similar – and frankly filthy – ambiguity: Surely other things than paper are going to go down the toilet, and surely you’re allowed to do more with toilet paper than just flush it down the toilet.
Now I think I know what they intend the sign to mean, but surely a little effort could have been put in to the language, just as there was in the handle.
One truck pony
Posted: April 13, 2008 Filed under: advertising, marketing 1 Comment »
As Gareth remarks on brand new, the follow up to the Cadbury’s Gorilla advert is underwhelming.
We all spent ages trying to work out if and why the Gorilla worked. The sales figures would seem to suggest it did work (outside of adland) although not in a big way. No one really seems to really know whether it sold more chocolate bars or Phil Collins records.
Clearly that ad made people think. The problem is, did it make them think, ‘I want to buy some chocolate’ or just ‘cute gorilla’?
The new ad has so many faults, I wonder how it got through:
- The trucks aren’t just being naughty, they’re being destructive. That tone doesn’t seem to fit. The great thing about the Gorilla was a feeling about a slightly guilty but harmless pleasure
- There’s an apparently deliberate ambiguity about whether the vehicles are real, or toys. That’s ruined when we see a driver in one of the cabs
- Again the dark, helmeted driver seems at logger-heads with the idea of innocent pleasure: what are the motivations of these shady characters?
- It just doesn’t seem like a lot of pleasure.
- Clearly the timing (the same weekend as the T5 baggage fiasco), could work both ways for the brand, but if anything it seems to add the recklessness feeling and send the mind wandering away from chocolate bars.
So the clever subtlety and counterpoint of a very human gorilla acting like a teenager in their bedroom with a dark secret about Phil Collins, gives way to a kind of big boy’s slightly destructive fantasy which seems to fit all the most irrelevant parts of the brief.
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