For the ordinary couch potato, “Godsend” was just another episode of the TV series Heroes. But for vigilant viewers, the three-second glimpse of a business card from shadowy Primatech Paper was an invitation to step into the show’s universe. If you called the 800 number on the card, you quickly found yourself headed down the rabbit hole of Heroes’ first alternate reality game. Those who made it through learned a secret about a key character in the show.
I think the concept of ARG’s that run parallel to, and extend the traditional narratives are fascinating, rather than being just a marketing tool they are actually extending the art of the narrative and engaging people’s creativity, curiosity, and skill. In many ways the ARG’s that run along side shows like lost and Hero’s are a distinct kind of ARG, kind of like a Meta-Game, or Meta-Narrative.
The extraordinary net radio service Pandora has made an announcement called “Pandora Everywhere”, has partnered with Sprint to deliver a mobile version of Pandora. So Pandora Everywhere is only available in the US and only on sprint phones? That sucks balls. Theoretically Pandora is just a flash app so there is no reason that it shouldn’t just work using the regular n95 browser, except when I go there I get a nice message saying come back with a sprint phone. I wonder if Pandora is going to squander a some of the amazing goodwill it’s built up over the last year by making it’s service available free on the web. My question is why would such a universally appealing application tie itself to a US carrier with such limited reach?
I am a huge Flickr fan and have used it for years, but the launch of a new version of Zooomr points out how no company can rest on it’s laurels. The most important take away here is:
If the majority of a companies value is derived from its users ala 99% of social media/web2.0 sites, then the companies that best motivate and compensate their users will win.
So after my panel at Ad:tech I just got another opportunity to speak, this time on the topic of video games and social media at the LA Games Conference (a smaller more intimate E3).
What’s interesting to me as I move from one O’sphere to another ie. the marketing O’sphere to the video game O’sphere is that social media as a topic is increasing in intensity and importance. It’s really interesting to see, especially having participated in the blog O’sphere for several years and wondering if we were in an echo chamber. I guess not, anyway, this is just a brief note, as I’m waiting for the conference to start.
This is a brilliant commercial/parody produced by a marketing manager at microsoft to help communicate the current state of the relationship between advertisers and consumers. The projects blog is called bringbackthelove.com. This is an inspired production and an excellent communication tool. It was inspired somewhat by David Armano’s bit in Business Week titled It’s The Conversation Economy Stupid.
Crocs are of course the ubiquitous rubber clog that seem to be in every mall in the country and do seem to be on everyone’s feet in starbucks. As with many super popular trends there are often detractors, often counter culture-ists who like to ridicule the fashion/trend victims who are following the trend. Ihatecrocs.com falls into the counter culture category and is also a lot of fun with videos of Crocs getting cut up and burnt, I of course found out about them because they have a t-shirt. I really like this fake ad as well:
But Crocs are getting some really bad publicity, ranging from a story on boingboing about a Swedish hospital banning Crocs, to a blog that is dedicated to documenting Crocs accidents with some horrific pictures. As it turns out Crocs rubbery texture makes them more susceptible to getting caught in escalators. This may be just a small niche right now, but if this turns out to be another blogstorm like the burning laptop, and the pictures are more dramatic, then Crocs will need to address this issue. Ihatecrocs.com is already the number 4 result on google for a search on the term “crocs”.
Jeffrey Veen mentioned earlier on Twitter that he was making a big announcement at the Emetrics summit, and there it is, Google has redesigned Analytics, here’s a good little video intro to it and a great write up on the app here.
Jeffrey went to google when they purchased Measure Maps from Adaptive Path, the user experience consultancy, i’m glad to see they contintued to invest in that, as opposed to what happened with Dodgeball. I guess analytics is much more aligned with their business of helping people get the most out of advertising. I’ve been using google analytics for a few years and it provides great value, I can’t wait to try out the new design, although you really need to be selling something to get the most out of google analytics and not just waxing poetic about marketing or t-shirts.
There’s been lots of talk on the interwebs about Ben, the 8 year old who totally nailed a Guitar Hero song on hard mode without missing a note. Jeremy at Livedigitally suggested that the game developer should hire Ben to use him in their marketing campaigns, which I totally agree with, except he’s already marketing them. His “perfect song” video has been watched close to 250,000 times.
Even more interesting, if you calculate the number of views for the 20 related guitar hero videos that youtube places beside this video you get a total of: 6,376,714. So that’s 6 Million plus views of user generated videos of Guitar Hero, wow. Very exciting, but I guess not every game can be as fun to video as Guitar Hero
I have to plug one of my fav t-shirts from Tcritic, it’s called Cowbell Hero, now that game is going to rock!
