Tay Zonday of the original Chocolate Rain has done such a brilliant job of selling out here with Cherry Dr Pepper with his new song “cherry chocolate rain”.
This is in many ways the new celebrity endorsement ad, and quite a good strategy, but requires companies or agencies to keep their fingers on the pulse of the internet zeitgeist. Probably a much more reliable approach than companies trying to make their own “viral” videos.
hat tip to Steve at Adrants
Update: in the week since I wrote about this about 30,000 people have watched the video, that is 30k people voluntarily watched an AIRLINE SAFETY VIDEO! Wow.
I wrote about my Virgin America experience a couple of weeks ago and the one thing I searched for was the safety video, but I couldn’t find it anywhere. Well Chet Gulland at their agency Anomaly just put it on youtube and sent me a link so here’s the update. Airline safety videos generally make me want to poke needles in my eyes, so it’s refreshing when a company tries to do one a little bit differently, and tries to make it a bit more bearable.
The message that they manage to get across here of course is “if we tried harder to make this video bearable imagine what we’ll do to improve the rest of the experience”.
The interesting thing about this as well is that i’m sure no one has ever complained about the safety announcements, most customers have probably accepted that they have to be boring and mundane. What Virgin has done here is make something better that you never expected, and that is even better than improving things that everyone already knows need improving. The other side effect of this amusing video is everyone actually watched it and who knows maybe even remembered where the life jacket is.
and of course Cory Doctorow in an Information Week article:
It may not happen today, it may not happen tomorrow, but inevitably Facebook will experience a great big sucking sound as everyone moves on to the next big thing, it happened to AOL, Tribes, Friendster, and even to Myspace. The point is yes develop strategies and tools for leveraging Facebook, but as the old saying goes “don’t put all your eggs in one basket”, and don’t stop scanning the horizon for new and interesting ways to connect and more importantly empower your customers.
I’ve thought for many years that web design emerged from an awkward pairing of software design and print/magazine design. Practitioners have certainly moved it along but it still boggles my mind how badly some agencies screw up web design, and how some “award winning” designs fail in so many real world ways.
Anyway, I don’t have an answer but I can tell you this article Understanding Web Design from my old friend Jeffrey Zeldman is probably the smartest thing I’ve read on the topic of web design in the last couple of years.
A couple of gems:
and on a related note Joshua Porter on “do canonical web designs exist”
Both of these wonderful articles were lifted from the always fun and memorable Daringfireball.net
I made an effort this weekend to sort out my apartment, reorganizing closets, going through paperwork etc. Then I came across a couple of unopened Amazon.com boxes which I new contained a couple of “productivity books”. The first book was Dave Allen’s book Getting Things Done and the other was The Now Habit. After opening the box I took a look at the receipt inside and discovered that I had ordered both these books in March, and it was now mid November. I feared I may disappear in an ironic singularity, but unfortunately I stayed around, put the books to one side and posted the story to twitter.
The flow chart via Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century
I think this is quite a fun little video that someone at Nokia has created, and as they say web 2.0 is about connecting people as it always has been. Found this via TechCrunch and Arrington thinks it’s ‘aght.
Eyelesswriter.com called up Verizon 56 times to ask two questions about their data rates and recorded the conversations. Only 1 out of 56 reps got both questions right.
It still boggles my mind how many startups think that advertising is the monetization vehicle of choice. Didn’t we already do that during web 1.0, eyeballs are not the be all and end all.
IBM just completed a survey called “the end of advertising“, and in it Read/Write web reports that 11% of users say they would pay for a “youtube premium” account to avoid advertising. This would yeld 100 million in additional revenue.
I’ve always thought the Flickr “pro account” idea was one of the best and simplest examples of monetization in web 2.0 - provide something of value that your most passionate users will pay for, let them subsidize the usage by more casual users. This is of course in direct opposition to most product strategies which take the “safe” route and create a product for the “majority” of their users, which as Seth Godin will tell you is the risky thing to do.
I had written previously that Guiness had hidden an ad online that people could find by picking up clues from various online videos. Well this is the commercial that everyone was looking for and it’s a fun ad for sure, by the same director that did the Bravia Balls commercial.
I’m sure it cost Guiness quite a bit more to create this competition to find it’s ad, but I think the payoff is they engaged a lot of people in the puzzle, which gives a good basis for sharing this ad above and beyond the cool ad itself. They have succeeded to some extent in turning this ad into a social object by imbuing it with some extra context, in other words something to talk about… which is what i’m doing now.
It shouldn’t be underestimated the amount of activitiy a challenging game can create. I followed it quite closely because I was actually linked to in the “trailhead” post on the ARG aficionado web site Unfiction. It’s a facinating read if you want to see how the clues were uncovered and the arc that this puzzle took, there are about 1500 posts on that one thread of people trying to figure out the clues. Even better you can go the the Juan Ramon wiki where they have documented a walkthrough of the game. Great source of information and ideas if you’re interested in starting your own game. The one take away, you can not make these difficult enough 
Well I just got back from a weekend in Las Vegas and after 4 days there I have a much deeper understanding of the fear and loathing aspect of it. Believe it or not one of the high points of the trip was the flight on Virgin America, who just blew away all my expectations of what a short haul domestic flight can actually be. I travel a lot and have the same opinion about domestic airlines as I do credit card companies, and cell phone carriers, they are a necessary evil and the company, its policies or its employees will ruin your day on a regular enough basis to keep you just on the edge of cutting them off but you stick around for the points or because you know no one else is any better.
Now first off, let me just say, they have a regular 110 three pronged outlet on every seat, I could actually just stop there, they already blew me away. I sat on the plane with my cell phone charging while watching Battlestar Gallactica on my nicely charging Mac Book Pro, Hallelujah, but it doesn’t stop there.
Virgin has implemented some pretty amazing technology in the computer that is in the back of every headrest, and yes, it is a computer. I know because mine crashed and the flight attendent had to restart it. As it bootstrapped I felt like the girl in Jurassic part who’s looking at the computer screen saying “I know this, this is UNIX”, well actually it was Linux, but each one is it’s own terminal I guess. Yes it crashed, yes it’s beta, but things are looking great.
There are tonnes of things to explore like maps, movies, tv shows, music to select from, and even a “login” option so your preferences and playlists will follow you from plane to plane. The thing that I thought was totally cool was a whole rake of chat options. You could IM seat to seat, you could go in a chatroom for the whole plane, or a chatroom that was along side a tv show, totally awesome. Kind of helps alleviate the classic “seat lottery” of it being dependent on you actually sitting next to someone interesting, or yes hawt, with the chat hope springs eternal that you can find someone else interesting to talk to.
So not only can you chat with hotties through the computer, you can also order drinks, I’ve always hated it since they started charging for a drink on the plane the whole rigmarole of digging through your pockets for the money for a beer, and the attendents never having any change, or not able to take your credit card. Through the screen you can pick your beverages or snacks any time, slide your credit card through and your icy cold beverage or snack is there in two minutes, sure you pay a bit more, but your not dependent on the dreaded cart coming by on one of its slow circuits.
Oh and don’t let me forget the safety video… yes, the safety video, ever hear peals of laughter burst out on a plane during the safety briefing? I thought not, I’ve done a thorough search and I could not find it on youtube but it will not be long. I don’t know how long it will be funny for, but for the first time i was again, blown away.
These are some of the technological highlights if you like, the shiny bits, but the thing above all that set the Virgin experience way above the rest was the people. Every interaction I had with every member of staff was excellent. Yes they are new, and the staff are keen, but it’s obvious they are hiring for personality above experience, you know staff are empowered when they put their own spin on each interaction. When we were boarding the plane in the usual groups, in between groups the attendant said the next person to guess his age could get on
Even more extraordinary, the person sitting in the seat in front of me and my buddy was a one of Virgin America’s pilots. We had a very good chat with him, talking about the planes and the business, and asked some questions about the reward program. I asked about signing up for the rewards program after the fact and how to get credit for this trip and he said we could just use our boarding cards, then he gave us his business card with his email “in case we had any problems”, wow.
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