…is that (unfortunately) they don’t resonate with the majority of the North American audience.

Now, a few points I need to clarify here:

1) I’m in North America.
2) I’m not calling the general public a bunch of morons. … …
3) I’m not under the impression that this is a ‘new’ idea.

I’ve been going through the archives at http://www.ibelieveinadv.com/ and I just started to notice that whenever I’d smile and nod, savouring that “a-ha” moment that really good ads are known for inducing, it would be due to one of the non-North American teams at BBDO, Publicis, Oglivy etc etc etc… Seldom were those moments the result of an ad that was grown and cultivated here on this side of the pond.

This post however, is not about the differences between the North American market and… pretty much the rest of the world. I just wanted to make a few observations about ads that make me wonder about them for a little while after I’ve seen them, and the effect that has on the brand the ad is trying to represent. It tends to be the rule rather than the exception, that advertisers want their customers to “get it” immediately after they consume one of their ads. Sometimes, that actually works:

There’s an instant connection/spark/kick to the groin upon delivering their message. However if this fails, well then you can always resort to plan B; play the ad 10-15 times an hour, plaster it within view of any moving organism with a pair of eyes and shove it in every paper publication available on the news stand in order to beat your message over the heads of the public.

Or… you can do something like this (click the image to go directly to the IBIA site):

Now I’m completely open to the fact that I may just be obtuse and I didn’t “get it” instantly. But those of you that (like me) looked at it for a bit and went “…what?” will know what I mean. The internal monologue in my head switched on, and I started to wonder about what exactly was going on here.

There’s a shirt, a tie… a rather extreme closeup of said things. Hmm… It’s for Clearasil. They’re an acne cream. There’s not much of the guys face in the ad. “Say hello to the mirror…” What does that mean? … That guy’s collar’s kinda weird. You’d think he would ha-…

Now here’s an ad that just got me to stare at it for about the same length of time as an average television spot, and all it had in it was a picture of a shirt and a tie (and some stubbly dude). Is this going to have the same effect on me as an ad that repeats… *ahem* ad nauseum (sorry), or one that appeals to my sense of kitsch like a cute ol’ grandma wondering about the location of misplaced beef? Perhaps, perhaps not. I suppose the real question is, what kind of brainpower does one need to apply towards perceiving an ad (active or passive) before that ad becomes ‘effective’? Further, if both types of perception result in increased sales, does it really matter?

As usual, leaving you with more questions than answers,… cheers.

I noticed that TechCrunch picked up a story today about how FriendFeed launched it’s real-time search feature. Now, you can get search results based on constant stream of incoming data from various FriendFeed blogs.

I’m wrestling with just how useful this feature is. Given Twitter’s recent spot in the limelight, just about all of the other big names in technology have been adopting Twitter-like behaviour in order to stay relevant. So is this in fact like Twitter? Twitter’s main function is to serve out real-time updates. FriendFeed is all about aggregating social network information, so there’s potentially some overlap there.

BUT,… there’s still this question of usefulness. Nearly every successful search paradigm starts with envisioning a use case. “What’s the user trying to do, and how can we make that thing easier for them?” That’s where this whole real-time search results thing kinda falls flat on its face, as far as I can see it. I tried to noodle some scenarios that have a heavy search flavour to them, hopped over to FriendFeed, to see what happens. (http://blog.friendfeed.com/2009/07/real-time-search-we-have-it-its-here.html) These are the questions that I attempted to find answers for:

1) What kind of pizza is there around Toronto? (It’d be interesting to see what ‘Za joints people are talking about, no?)
2) How was Transformers 2?
3) What’s this whole thing about the Mythbusters and a Twitter account?

Now, the results are impossible to replicate (*ahem… real-time results and all*), but here’s what I discovered.

1) For the pizza scenario, on the first page of results, there was a small note about Pizza Libretto, and numerous other posts that contained the words “pizza” and “Toronto” without any real… relevance. Still searching for ‘Za.

2) A plethora of links to various Transformers 2 F.A.Q.s hosted on other sites, and a healthy smattering of “Transformers 2 sucks balls” comments. Alright, that was moderately helpful, but it doesn’t take much to get me to avoid the movie theatre these days.

3) The first time I entered “Mythbusters” and “Twitter”, I got jack. I got a few posts that had references to one or the other, but nothing that gave me any real answers. Then I figured I might do the same search over again. THIS time I got 5 posts in a row that all explained the issue.

The thing is, if I want to “search” for something, I’m not prone to sticking my head amongst a group of people so I listen for certain words, which is exactly what FF’s real time search attempts to do. It is sometimes interesting to see what people are chattering on about, and you can accomplish this quite well just by letting the stream update itself as new posts come in. But in that case you’re not really searching for anything, so much as you’re merely people-watching.

The first thought from many of you is going to be “Yup, he’s on the sauce again.”

10am Drambuies notwithstanding, hear me out on this. I was thinking about the way technology is moving forward and how we’re all collectively responding to our innate need to find stuff. The internet is built on a system of requests and responses. The very first “computerized” searches came in the form of relatively crude algorithms that were designed to brute force their way through reams of information to return the closest match to a given query. Present day search systems are much, MUCH more sophisticated. Predictive algorithms, organic search mechanisms, and multi-modal search engines (voice search for example) are just some of the ways that we’ve attempted to make “finding stuff” easier.

There’s just one problem. Finding stuff isn’t really easier because overall, people still don’t know how to search. Think about it. There’s still a massive disconnect between the way that the average person thinks, and the mindset that’s required to search for something “properly” online.

Take for example, a question that’s the de facto litmus test for a search scenario; “Where should I go for dinner tonight?” Now, if *I* were to start searching for the answer (and yes, I am somewhat snobbishly excluding myself from the general public in that I think differently when it comes to online searches), I would go to Google, make sure I’m cookied for Canada by signing into my Google account, and then I’d type something like the following into the query field:

The first result is a rather simple site, but it’s a list of lots of restaurants with links to their website. For a general query, it’s not that bad. However, if you type in a much more natural query like: “Where should I go for dinner tonight?” (still signed into my google account mind you), the results are markedly different. The first result is a Yahoo Answers page from Australia:

http://au.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20071130191037AAZmpb2

Now, there are of course some very valid reasons for the differences between the two sets of results. My question is a qualitative one, for starters. By asking a natural question, I wasn’t explicitly asking for a list of restaurants. How would the system know which restaurant I “should” go to? It doesn’t necessarily know what I like (yet). The system also doesn’t really know where I am unless I tell it (either through the query itself or via GPS if I’m using a mobile to execute the search). There are in fact a lot of variables that make “natural search queries” quite difficult to handle by a system that doesn’t know who you are.

A ha. Therein lies the reason why the current method of search engine optimization (from the search engine’s perspective) is flawed. It starts off by assuming that the system is completely disconnected from the person asking the question. The goal is to provide enough information to this blind user in order to make the search result more relevant. Queue meta-tags, content strategies, and any other number of mechanisms to make this happen, and make “possibly relevant” results float to the top.

Well, why bother with that assumption in the first place? The only other activity that rivals searching online, is social networking. Ok, fine. It’s actually porn, but we’ll just assume that’s a given and continue on with the story. You’d be hard pressed to find anyone with access to the internet that didn’t have some kind of profile or identity online. Between Facebook, Twitter, … and all of those other communities, nearly everyone is linked to one of them. Everyone’s got some kind of profile online, and most of those will continue to evolve as they accumulate history. Now, before I go on I’d like to clarify that I know the reasons why profile-related search results are perceived as a scary concept to some. Regardless of the fact that many are quick to enable things like search histories and information-sharing between websites, there are some that focus on the potential dangers of doing so. There is merit to these concerns, but it also represents a whole other series of potential material to cover. So for now we’ll move forward.

Think about it like talking to your Doctor or your Lawyer, your Accountant or even your friends. All of these people could be considered systems which are profile-aware. They know you in some specific context and as a result, they can provide you with answers to pretty vague questions (“I’ve got like…a thing on my arm, and it hurts. What’s wrong?”). With the exception of your friends, they’re legally bound to keep your information private but if you think that they all adhere to those regulations 100% of the time, I’m sorry but you’re fooling yourself.

Now think about how this translates to an online search. All of a sudden, “Where should I go for dinner tonight?” doesn’t seem all that unreasonable, does it? If there is a shift in focus from making disconnected information “possibly relevant”, to making relevant information accessible, the way we all “find stuff” could drastically change in the next few years. All of the pieces are already there. The same sophisticated search mechanisms I mentioned above wouldn’t have to change at all. Social networking is already set up to gather information about us. The only bit that’s left to do is to connect the two properly.

Though, I guess the whole thing is really going to get weird when you start seeing stuff like this in response to a dinner selection query:

Thoughts?

The only thing that’s missing from that title is some reference to the Swine Flu and the NHL playoffs.

But, SEO-friendly titles aside *ahem*, I just wanted to fire off a quick post about a group of people that decided to say and do something about a recent article that made it’s way into the limelight:

This article was quite typical of those that most certainly got parents everywhere ready to voice their discontent at yet another evil demon of the internet.

However, as reported on Apohenia, this was merely an example of the media grabbing a snippet of information and running with it in order to garner more readers/consumers. Not really a shock there, hm? Anyways, if interested, be sure to check out the article in the Apophenia post which provides data that contradicts the study that the media latched onto initially.

In the last post, I attempted to guess at the future of advertising with respect to the gaming experience. I suggested a scenario whereby you’d be able to order a pizza while playing a game, without ever having to leave the gamespace. Well, it turns out that this was in fact attempted (sort of) by Sony and Pizza Hut back in 2005. While playing EverQuest II, as a player you could enter a command into the system which would then bring up the Pizza Hut website.

This is not exactly what I had mind, as all this really does is launch a web browser which is outside the game world. But it was certainly a step in the right direction. Merging elements of real life into the game environment is something that’s evolved over the last few years, and it’s been met with equal amounts of positive and negative feedback from both consumers and game developers. The major concern amongst the gaming community is that the inclusion of marketing material into a game detracts from its creative value; if you put an ad for Coke or Pepsi into a game, the entire game essentially becomes one giant advertisement. On the other hand, the industry has to be open to different revenue models that will allow it to remain competitive. At the end of the day, someone has to get compensated. So where’s the middle ground?

Well, there are some companies that have been trying to strike a balance. IBM, SonyBMG (there’s that name again), and Nike among others have all set up permanent residence within SecondLife, an online world which has been eluding a specific definition since its inception in 2003.

Once a brand makes a transition like this into a virtual world, it changes in a way that marketers and gamers don’t fully understand yet. If you walk into a store “in the real world”, you interact with a brand. It’s the goal of advertising to make this happen (in order to facilitate a transaction). If you “walk” into a store in SecondLife, the distinction between marketing and brand-interaction becomes blurred. If you end up making a transaction, the experience is really no different than if you walked into a physical store.

The difference between SecondLife and other online worlds however, is that SecondLife has no inherent storyline. There’s no plot distract from, which makes advertising seem less intrusive. It’s almost part of the experience itself. The open ended nature of many modern online games allows for the same kind of “freedom” when it comes to in-game ads. As players find themselves in between a particular set of tasks within the game, they usually congregate in common areas, which provide prime opportunities for advertisers to engage them. At this point, it’s merely up to the advertisers to do what they’ve always been tasked with doing: Provide consumers with an engaging message that persuades them to [trans]act. This doesn’t mean billboards and banners, which seem to be the predominant form of IGA (in game ads) right now. This means being as immersed within the game world as the gamers are. This means understanding their behaviour, and responding to it in a way that is as engaging as the game itself.

An example of such behaviour involves something as simple as traveling within the game world. One of the more tedious aspects of online gaming involves plodding/flying/otherwise moving from place to place. Such a thing can take several minutes, hours, or in some cases, days. So what if a company like RedBull offered an in-game service that would take the player to their desired destination (giving them wings as it were… sorry) for a nominal price (real or virtual)?

Makes sense, no?

From Wikipedia:

LiveJournal was started on April 15, 1999 by Brad Fitzpatrick as a way of keeping his high school friends updated on his activities.

Today, some 10 years later, it boasts some 10 million users (with the usual percentage of duplicate/inactive accounts being taken into consideration). It’s an established platform with a rich community, and a feature set that lets you choose your level of involvement. I remember when it was released, it wasn’t met with an incredible amount of fanfare, but it got enough attention to grow into a pretty sustainable organization. It played in a space with few competitors, each of whom managed to carve out their own niche in the marketplace. It predates MySpace, Bebo, Orkut, and many of the other global players in its space.

There aren’t that many celebrities with LJ accounts (I’m informed that Dave Coulier may have had one at one point, but he’s the most *ahem* famous one that I’ve heard of). I’ve never heard of it making the news. In fact I think it’s safe to say that there just aren’t that many people that know about this service and it’s lovable, pants-eating mascot.

Enter another mascot. Except this time it’s not a goat. It’s an unassuming little blue bird that represents the most talked about phenomenon in social media since Facebook and MySpace. Just this past week, the battle over who was to be crowned the “Twitter King” took place. I’m not sure who won that battle aside from Twitter itself, which got more free publicity than they could have afforded on their own. Which brings up another point; Twitter has no business model, or at least not one that’s apparent anyways (they’re largely funded by venture capital).

What’s more, is that Twitter does less than LiveJournal. Much less in fact. It’s limit of 140 characters per post aside, if you actually look at what Twitter does, it’s hard to fathom why this thing has soaked up so much of the limelight. Well, maybe it’s worth asking other Twitter users just why this thing is so useful. The Twitter site features a rotating set of testimonials that should shed some light on the issue:

“If you aren’t familiar with Twitter, it is one of those things, like MySpace, that sounds totally ridiculous and stupid when you first hear about it. But once you start using it, you realize how much fun it is.” – Eric Nuzum, Author of The Dead Travel Fast

“Twitter is the first thing on the web that I’ve been excited about in ages.” – Jason Kottke, Blogger

“Incredibly useful.” – Wired

“When I first started doing it, I thought, ‘geez, not another website to worry about updating and checking’, but now I’m glad I did it.” – point_chevalier, livejournaller

… Alright. So I’m gathering that its immediate benefit is unclear, but it’s fun, “incredibly useful” to all of Wired, and exciting? Further, the point of testimony from the apparent LJ convert “point_chevalier” seems questionable at best. There’s got to be something more to this. I mean, if the US Prez and Britney Spears are on the trolley, then surely I’m missing something no?

Perhaps it’s got some indefinable charm. Something that’s uniquely Twitteresque. … Something that Pownce and Identica don’t?

Now, those who know me often suggest that I’m a naysayer when it comes to new technology like this, but that’s not entirely true in this case. Firstly, it’s not new. The technology has been employed in the past to do exactly what Twitter is doing. And secondly, it’s not that I’m saying Twitter is bad per se. I’m just trying to understand exactly why it’s been the one to receive so much attention when it really isn’t any different from existing platforms.

For the record, I’m neither a “Tweeter” nor do I have an actual LJ account. It’s just not my particular brand of vodka.

I am now going to have a sandwich. Ham and Swiss on white. I may also have a drink. Or not. Stay tuned for more.