Tag: brand

F**K you and your Second Life ‘firsts’ you bunch of Adf**ks

I’m glad that someone with some heritage and history in Second Life has come out and said this: Second Life Herald: Gallery of Lies. And said it very loud. I’d have loved to have written this piece, but as my Second Life consists of about 2 hours of time over 6 months (and I work on the fringes of advertising) I’d have felt like a total charlatan saying it.

One of my favourite bits:

I would say it is a case of a bunch of desperate clueless fucktards trying to show how bleeding-edgy they are, and, given that SL is the bleeding-edgy flavor of the month, they are wraping themselves in the Linden cape of bleeding-edginess.

Read it and see what anger looks like.

Interestingly the crux of the issue is not about advertising or the corporatisation of Second Life as such, but seems to be about big ad agencies claiming the space as theirs, or at least making out that they are the innovators. Maybe I’m wrong, but it seems like shops and businesses and offices are actually OK, as long as they’re done right. But the message is, loud and clear, don’t claim that you invented this stuff.

advertiser helmet second lifeI’ve got a thought. Why aren’t advertisers, or people who are trying to ‘import’ brands from their First Life forced to wear some kind of huge advertising helmet? It’d protect them from rocks thrown by irate Second Lifers as well as marking them out as advertisers.

If only my 3d modeling skills were as hot as my illustrating skills ;-)

[EDIT] – I just spotted this follow up post: http://www.secondlifeherald.com/slh/2006/10/uri_does_strump.html it’s much more reasoned and well argued, and the author has calmed down a lot. He makes some great points about the de-fantasisation of Second Life which I think is key.

Why would you want your Second Life to be just like your first? With the same brands using the same retail techniques, or spend time in the ‘bored rooms’ of big corporations. Why not meet on the deck of a pirate ship? Or in a treehouse full of penguins? Or watching underwater firework displays orchestrated by a gerbil that’s 3 stories high?

Uri concludes his piece:

In the end, I wonder if I should even care. Even as I write, Second Life residents are avoiding the new corporate builds like the plague (and who can blame them given the inferior content; do I want to drive a flying saucer or a Scion? Hmmm, that’s a tough one), and if large corporations want to pay Crayon good money for nothing, that’s fine by me. If the meat-space corporations successfully borg Second Life and suck the life out of it, we will just move on to another place, and the corporations and the PR firms will just have to breathlessly keep running after us, claiming their hollow “firsts,” while their arrogance fuels their ignorance, and they fall further and further behind.

Netflix Prize

This must be one of the most blogged about stories of the last week. But I’m going to do it anyway because I think it’s really interesting and it spans the worlds of geekery and marketing perfectly…

Netflix are offering $1,000,000 to someone who can come up with a way of improving their recommendations engine. All you have to do is increase the accuracy of their recommendations engine by 10%…

A really smart, noisy promotion. Not sure how it works in terms of driving sign-ups, but in terms of making Netflix a very very talked about (and innovative) brand it works a treat. I was thinking to myself what a Marketing 2.0 type idea it was.

But, thanks to the collective smarts of the blogosphere I’ve changed my mind a bit. As pointed out on the O’Reilly Radar, if they’d just opened up their API in the first place so that people could do interesting stuff with it, the million bucks could probably have been saved and they might already have the answer they’re looking for.

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WhenWeRollWeRollBig.com

logo.pngA response from the Agency.com camp regarding the Subway video. It’s basically saying: “we did it, we got people talking, that’s the whole point”.

I’m sure the debate will rage on around whether this is just a good piece of post-rationalisation and speedy ass-covering. Or a cunning master-plan that was in place from the start. (As an aside, if it’s the latter I think there’s a much better way of presenting this, a making of the behind the scenes video perhaps? Showing the point at which the decision was made to target the advertising community maybe?).

On their site ‘Jeff’ is quoted as saying:

“They made this for ad people to watch, think about, talk about, and spread. And that’s what we’re doing”.

But did they? I thought the whole point was that it was a video for a Subway client. Or is that all part of the subterfuge as well? Maybe they made a 5 minute boring ‘meet the team video’ and sent that to the client too? Along with a pitch based around:

“See how much noise we can generate with one video clip within the (online) advertising community, imagine how much noise we could make with 5 clips and a decent budget within the food eating community…”

If that’s the case then maybe they come out of this looking like genii…

But, based on the original premise (as we, the audience, were shown it): “we need to create a video for a client” (a private piece of communication), “let’s put it on youtube” (a very public communication channel). I think the naysayers were right to pound this tactic for it’s apparent naivety. (An interesting conversation starting tactic maybe?).

Whether they’re very right, or incredibly wrong I don’t regret being part of the spreading this meme. I called it as I saw it. I made the t-shirt, and I’ve either helped them look smart (or not). If I’ve been ‘duped’ into being part of this whole thing I’m glad, I’ve been a part of an ‘evolving, collaborative, dialogue driven online experiment’ – and that’s the kind of thing that we should all be doing. Whether I have or not, I guess is still the question.

The great thing about the web is that at some point the full story will come out. There will be winners, there will be losers, but as my P.E. teacher used to say “it’s the taking part that counts”.

In case it matters (and it probably doesn’t), the fact that the domain name ‘whenwerollwerollbig.com’ was bought yesterday doesn’t indicate all that much forward planning in terms of the meme ‘going viral’. But that might just all be part of the plot…

Oh, and I’m pretty sure that the line in the video (as pointed out to me by others) is ‘if we roll, we roll big’. So I corrected my t-shirt yesterday. On the site they feature the old shirt, with the erroneous line on the front. But their domain is “when we roll, we roll big”, so maybe my old t-shirt was right after all. Or maybe we’re all as confused as each other?!?

Ultimately whether this works or not depends on how you measure the value of conversations and noise. I’ve seen a few comments where people have said things like “it’s better that people are talking about you than not”, but I don’t buy that. And I can think of a few examples where brands would probably agree. Coke with their Desai water launch ‘conversations’ in the UK. The noise around Hoover and their Free Flights offer. The awareness driven by Mercedes and their rolling cars. These are much more serious examples than a pitch video on YouTube. But you get my point.
I’m going to stop now. This is way too meta for me.

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A Wee Bit of Advertising

Saw this in a gents loo yesterday. It made me chuckle a tiny bit. Then it made me feel sick. A small goalpost drenched in mens’ wee. Not something I’d want my brand to be associated with. But then I’m not advertising pissy goalposts (yet).

I Hate Viral(s)

I’ve grown to hate the term viral:

  • I hate the fact that it’s overused.
  • I hate the fact that it’s misused.
  • I hate the fact that ‘viral’ appears as a line on media plans.
  • I hate the fact that people now call them virals. With an (s) as if it’s a genre of film like westerns.
  • I hate the fact that clients can be fobbed off with “if we add a ‘send to a friend’ link to it, that’ll make it viral”. Not all of them. But watch out for it, you can spot it.

star wars kidA wise man (Rei Imamoto from AKQA in San Francisco if you must know) said in a meeting: “Viral is a consequence”. A truer 4 words have I rarely heard spoken.

Of course you can do things that might encourage people to talk about something. Or even send it on to someone else. Or blog about it. Or anything else that ‘spreads it’. But that’s just about making something that’s relevant. Something that I want to share because I love it. Something that ticks the right psychological boxes. It’s not about sex, or shock, or violence, or any other crass ‘too hot for tv’ tactic.

Make something entertaining (sure, it could be stupid, sexy, whatever…), something thought-provoking, something that makes someone’s day in a small way. Just make something good. Your audience are the ones who decide if it’s ‘viral or not’. They’re not dumb carriers of your disease. They’re willing participants in the distribution of your content.

Right, what got me started on this little rant? Oh, that’s it. I saw this: TIME.com: Viral Videos that Swept the Nation. And you know what. They’re right, these are viral videos. Videos that ordinary people have decided are great. I would talk about some of them. Others leave me cold.

But the interesting thing is that only 1 out of 8 of them has any (real) connection to a brand. (I’m not including Star Wars Kid as I don’t think Lucas would have signed that one off).

I’ve changed my mind. In the spirit of positivity I like viral. I like the notion of people sharing great things with each other. As long as we never forget that the audience are the ones who decide what is, or is not, viral. 

Netvibes Rocks – Harder

Netvibes (my favourite Web 2.0 personal homepage maker) has just added a whole raft of brand new features and enhancements. The most significant of which is a whole new ‘community site’: eco.netvibes.com

It’s like a feed directory, but it also gives you the ability to add groups of feeds as handy tabs. So you could add a whole, pre-made, news tab (for example) which would group together a load of news feeds in one convenient page. The site also features widgets, events and podcasts. In true Web 2.0 style you can rate, share, blah, blah, blah…

And if you’re feeling like being a creator, you can add your own feeds, tabs, widgets, events or podcasts to the library.

If you’re a Netvibes user you can easily add Crackunit to your start page just by clicking the button below. If you’re not a Netvibes user, click it anyway, it’d be a great way to get your page started ;-)
Add to Netvibes

Bonfire Of The Brands

burning sneakers.jpgNeil Boorman (ex-editor of ex-Sleazenation, Shorditch Twat and other titles I’m sure) is writing a book called: Bonfire Of The Brands

As part of his experience he’s burning all of his branded goods in a big bonfire as part of re-evaluating his lifestyle. If you’re thinking ‘Oh no! Another Adbuster/No-Logoist’, don’t. You can tell that Neil has a lot of love for brands and that he’s going to find it quite hard to do this. In his own words:

Brands are wealth creators; they provide employment across the globe, and ultimately they make our lives infinitely more comfortable. So I have been keen to avoid the No Logo supporters’ calls to ‘bring it all down’. Yes, I am burning all my own branded possessions, and I will be attempting to live my new life brand-free, but the book is really an experiment to see if it is actually possible to disconnect from branded consumerism.

The blog he’s running is really interesting. His view of the world seems to be considered and realistic (in spite of wanting to burn £1,000s worth of stuff).

Eau De Play Doh

Play Doh FragrancePlay-Doh Fragrance – pretty much everyone loves the smell of Play Doh, don’t they? I know I do. But does that actually mean we want to smell like Play Doh? Well if you do, you can. Thanks to this limited edition cologne.

Even if they don’t sell any of these I think this is a really smart thing to do. Create a product that in itself will create buzz and interest. Nostalgic journos and bloggers are bound to pick up on this and talk about it creating interest in the wider Play Doh brand.

And you know what, I might just have to buy some to see if it really does smell properly like Play Doh.

Via PSFK.

Run London – RouteFinder

run london

Funnily enough a second post about an AKQA piece of work in one day, they must be doing something right. And in this case they really are: Run London – RouteFinder. An extension of the undoubtedly great brand property Run London, this time a trendy mash-up with Google maps.

But this isn’t just a fashionable me-too, this is a really really smart utilisation of Google’s mapping API. It allows users to overlay and share their running routes. You can search for routes by postcode, type of terrain, whether it’s well lit at night and more.

Nice work.