Scott Schiller, who has been doing unbelievably great stuff with Javascript for a long time now, built this devilishly clever test of your Web 2.0 bona fides. To purify myself of the crushing weight of the pressure to have remnents of these sites from his list in my cache, I’ve decided to print the homepages and burn them at some future date. I scored a 21%.
Archive for August, 2006
Wonk Bona Fides
Thursday, August 31st, 2006Snakes on a Plane
Monday, August 21st, 2006When I first heard about the new Samuel L. Jackson movie “Snakes on a Plane” I was tempted to never think about it again. It just sounded stupid. Snakes on a Plane. Burger on a Bun. Bored out of my Mind.
Then I caught wind of some internet phenomena surrounding the movie. You mean there’s actually buzz? Apparently there’s so much buzz-slash-commentary that the producers added scenes to the film to directly address the bloggers’ complaints:
The studio backed down, empowering Jackson and adoring online fans to complain that the film was not violent enough. Scenes were added ratcheting up the gruesome quotient. The bloggers’ victory ensured plenty of media coverage, seemingly turning the little B-movie into a preordained must-see hit.
So someone is actually listening to the little guys. How sweet. In fact, it allegedly all started with this guy, who not only sparked the internet buzz around the movie but coined the phrase “snakes on a plane” as the new “shit happens”.
According to Wikipedia:
The title inspired bloggers to create songs, apparel, poster art, pages of fan fiction, parody films, mock movie trailers and even short film parody competitions.
That’s a lot for a movie that’s just been released. And especially a lot for a movie that looks completely lame. But hey, snakes on a plane.
Bonfire of Personal Responsibility
Thursday, August 17th, 2006There’s a clever guy named Neil Boorman. He’s got a blog wherein he is chronicling his evolution into what he clearly hopes will be the amelioration of a good many wrongs in his life through brandlessness. Merely forswearing branded goods is not enough however, for Mr. Boorman intends to burn any branded items currently in his possession.
Neil seems quite earnest and genuine in his endeavor. He’s even admitted to the glaring internal inconsistency that lies at the heart of a project to create a brand around eschewing brands. When I suggested in the comments on his blog that perhaps the entire endeavor should be considered folly in light of such inconsistencies, he seemed rather non-plussed. My status as a member of a marketing firm seemed to further aggravate the discourse. He does seem to wish to provoke marketers, so maybe I’m just the kind of cat upon which he wishes to heap polemic.
Anyway, I’ve suggested to him that he need not be offended as I am trying to address what I believe to be one of his core assumptions and not his character, motives or aspirations. Hopefully he’ll take me at face value, although I’m a marketer and all, so I’m probably planning some terrifically cynical subliminal psy-op as we speak. I thought I’d spare him the horror of a pretentiously long comment on his blog and just take my end of the debate over here. This gets pretty theory-heavy, but I want to address what I believe to be a (unwitting?) core assumption of his experiment.
ASpaceCalledMine
Thursday, August 17th, 2006I don’t exactly know how it all spun out of control, but I’m fairly certain I have a Blogger and Friendster and MySpace and GameSpot and YouTube and Flickr and Technorati and del.icio.us account. In all likelihood, my username clogs the registry of another handful of community apps gathering dust. Pat Robertson, forgive me if you’re reading this, but in an effort to establish human connections online I’ve been intimate with dozens of web 2.0 communities, and the names of most I cannot even remember.
Please don’t judge me, because I cherished every one of those applications, if only for a few minutes in the parking lot behind the wi-fi cafe.
And the decision is in…
Tuesday, August 15th, 2006We had our little meeting in the corner office, compared notes, exchanged blank stares and agreed that Agency.com really took a nose dive with their YouTube.com stunt. I’m not sure what’s more suprising about this – the fact that Agency.com committed such a blunder or that our creative team, account team and sales team actually agreed on something.
I’m also not sure what I’m more disappointed about: 1)the reinforcement this video gives that agencies are full of slimey sales guys or 2) the fact that they backed their way into a “viral” campaign.
Adrant does a great job of summarizing how I feel about the first point. This video epitomizes everything that drive people crazy about agencies. I’m not trying to pretend like we don’t do some of those things, we do. And sometimes we’re probably more obnoxious than the crew on this video. I mean, we’re the ones who created a ridiculous love song for our clients on Valentines Day. We’re all for self-depricating humor.
I guess the thing that does’t connect for me is how the rollout and follow up to this video seemed so forced and unnatural. The blog wasn’t released until after the video got some attention and Agency.com felt the need to begin defending themselves. That’s not viral. All smart agency teams know that good advertising and marketing come from good plans. There clearly was no plan here. They were excited about the opportunity to create a video. They were stoked about the idea to release it on YouTube. That’s where the plan stopped. They put all of their energy into creating the video and not thinking about what would happen next or how to follow it up, etc. It’s an innovative idea – I’ll give them that. It’s executed poorly. And that’s why I’m disappointed. They had an opportunity to demonstrate how good viral marketing can work and totally missed. Sure, they can call it viral. I call it a fluke. Humorous, but a fluke.
Next time, when they meet in their corner office, they should do a little more thinking before they begin rolling the cameras.
Ad Industry Lags Behind in Innovation
Monday, August 14th, 2006There’s a lot of discussion around innovation in marketing these days. Joseph Jaffe is legitimately trying to find out who is doing innovative things in the various communication disciplines of marketing. I can’t wait to hear his analysis of the feedback he receives.
Max Kalehoff makes a very interesting point that the ad industry is usually behind when it comes to innovation. Most of the innovative ideas are coming from companies like Google, Yahoo! and Apple. He argues that it is because these companies put dollars and emphasis behind R & D along with some other interesting point. There are quite a few comments on his post worth reviewing.
My take is that agencies in general (interactive, traditional and otherwise) tend to sell what they know the client will buy (with some exceptions of course). Agencies take the fastest path to cash or the path of least resistance. Many clients want assurance that their agency can deliver results, and they generally want evidence of it. Most clients will not want to fund experimentation for initiatives or tactics that don’t have any kind of track record. I have experienced that again and again. It’s a very hard sell, and you need an incredible amount of trust and a great relationship with your client to get them to move into new space that requires significant capital with no guarantee of success.
Doing the R & D on your own dime is not very likely either. Because agencies serve their clients, and because the industry is so competitive, most agencies can’t charge enough to build the necessary cash reserve to fund non-billable experimentation.
So what’s the answer? Part of me thinks that agencies have to play a little further upstream than they are used to. They need to get back to working with clients on strategy instead of just delivering on tactics. If you can position yourself as a resource for innovation, creativity and strategy, you may be able to influence the client to go down a road not yet traveled and do something truly innovative. Often, this space is internalized, goes to the consultants or niche companies like IDEO.
If you have examples of agencies playing in this space and having success, please share. There has been plenty written about Agency.com and their poor execution of a forward-thinking approach to a client pitch, including my colleague Carrie’s post a week ago. So what else have you seen?
The Lost Experience
Monday, August 14th, 2006Turns out this whole Lost thing is bigger than I thought. Not wanting this to turn into a Lost forum (since there are hundreds of others out there with thousands of posters), I’ll keep this short and sweet. I just stumbled upon the “Lost Experience”, an interactive, multimedia experience that takes traditional TV show advertising beyond the realm of TV. Cool, huh? They have commercials that direct viewers to either an 800 number or a website with clues. There’s even a full-length fiction book penned by a ghost writer, an alleged passenger on the plane.
As stated in a CNNMoney.com article:
Whether or not these novel ways of advertising will actually work remains to be seen but it’s clear that the TV networks and marketers have to do something to combat the growing tendency of DVR-owning couch potatoes to skip ads.
“This is an attempt by media companies to grab hold of a market they are losing control of,” said Doug Ryan, chief marketing officer of Y&R Chicago, a subsidiary of ad agency Young & Rubicam.
Well done, chaps. I want more.
Feeding the Lost Addiction
Friday, August 11th, 2006Say what you will about “better ways to spend my time” and “vices that are more fun” – truth is, I’m addicted to Lost. So imagine my delight when I did a Google search (to take my obsession online) and came across this little gem. Not that it offers any sort of discussion or insight, like the forums I currently eat, sleep, and breathe on, but I thought it was a cool thing for Touchstone to do to support the show. By the design I can tell it only took about 42 minutes, but hey, it had me fooled for a few seconds.
ACK ACK
Wednesday, August 9th, 2006As the noise increases, this kind of rather presumptuous “guerrilla action” just seems to grow more pervasive. Sure, it’s clever, but I fail to see how ‘clever’ is necessarily tantamount to ‘effective.’ Perhaps I’m just a curmudgeon, but I must say, “Please do not surreptitiously affix things to my vehicle, domicile, or other effects.”
Then again, I just got a parking ticket for having parked on the wrong side of the street on the first odd Wednesday of the month, so perhaps I’m a little raw about the prospect of having bits of paper appear on my vehicle.
Out Out, Damned Excedrin Spot!
Wednesday, August 9th, 2006I appreciate reinvention as much as I do invention, so when I caught a glimpse of the newish Excedrin “Go” campaign (specifically the spot where wharfy roustabout Neptune battles a sea-churning headache), I cheered the departure from commercials past. Long gone are real folks hunched over real kitchen tables, gettin’ real ’bout heads achin’ — Boss Saatchi hoisted the headache experience into the realm of ferocious headache pain as sufferers know it: unreal.
Yeah, the commercial was a real humdinger.
I was hoping to share this Excedrin spot with you. I figured that, after viewing it, we might engage in some discourse about the evolution of brand messaging, the potency of traditional advertising in a world of 800 lb. viral guerillas, or the evidence that artistic, well produced commercials will, for another generation at least, stand on their own merit.
Yep, I was hoping to share this Excedrin spot with you, but I can’t.