This week my colleague Andrei Gheorghe launched a pretty neat thingy using Twitter, a small website you might have heard of
Andrei thought of giving users something too do while not blabing around about their lives and proffesion: play.
“Quizoo is a highly interactive trivia game build on top of the Twitter API platform. It asks a question every few minutes and the first twitter user to reply @quizoo with the correct answer wins the round and the point. Daily rankings are available at www.idevelop.ro/quizoo. Plans for the near future are to include more complex quests and tasks that need to be accomplished in order to find the correct answer” said Andrei.
Where is Quizoo going? I don’t know. What I do know is agencies around the world have not yet tapped into Twitter communication.
Last night I was invited to debate weather online advertising is overrated. Two people representing conventional agencies (some of the best) and two representing interactive agencies. Things got a little heated, we’ve got a little carried away (Latin characters, you know…) but in the end we had not reached our conclusion.
I couldn’t help think about it all day and reached some conclusions of my own
All media serve one purpose: communication
In the end we must see the holistic view: we do it for the client. And the client has separate objectives from the agencies’ . These objectives don’t really depend on GRPs or CTRs. They depend on keeping the business growing, having a larger and more satisfied customer base and others.
We can do this for the clients using our tools. Interactive agencies work with some tools, classic agencies work with others. In the end it’s the result that counts.
All media are not created equal
TV is more popular than Internet. So are newspapers. Radio used to be there too. Therefore they get more viewers and advertising.
TV also gets more money, more influence bla bla… you get the point.
However… rarely has human kind adopted anything as fast as it did adopt the Internet. As you can see here Internet has been adopted faster than automobiles, air travel, television, cell phones … well – everything.
This has caused quite a commotion with business in general. “Man, we have this new thing, the Internet”. “What does it do?”. “Well…I am not quite sure. But everybody’s doing it”.
Companies are not yet sure of what to make of it. Should they use it? Should they ignore it? Is this “Internet Advertising” thing good or bad? What is it with this “bloggers” and such? And how come all this Google-Doogle companies are making so much money – they have no product.
But they are there. Real or not their services are accessed and used by billions. They worth billions. Media companies are shifting to internet based, on demand services. Paid or not. News Corp invested 600 millions in something it’s yet to understand and monetize.
Advertising is a concept. Subject to change.
What Ogilvy invented might not last beyond the next 50 years. What Burnett used in the eighties might not have any kind of relevance for iTV or something similar to Apple TV.
What happens when written media is electronically updated, kind of like your RSS reader? Syndicated too, just like it. What happens then to the old-school ads?
What happens when people start being the advertising agencies? Think about it. Things like affiliate marketing take out the agency and connect the publisher directly to the client.
And in the end – what if … just saying … what if someday there will be no advertising left. Just information. Created, organized, consumed by the masses?
Several years ago, before the iPhone was launched I was thinking about the current man-machine interaction methods. Most of them are built around touch. Buttons for example or the latest trend – the multitouch interface popularized by Apple.
But is this as good as it gets? Probably not. Enter motion detection and processing.
1. Motion detection and processing
Imagine having a huge screen in front of you. How would you interact with it? With a remote? Pressing buttons? Why not waving your hands around?
Funny? Maybe. Easy to use? For sure. We use gestures to communicate. Actually nonverbal communication amounts to almost 60% of meaning. And most of nonverbal communication is based on gestures. So why not really talk to computers?
About 3 years ago I was building a team focused on the study of video interaction based solely on gestures. The project was meant to run on Flash platforms and later used on mobile phones as a revolutionary way of interaction with mobile devices. Remember – that was previous to the iPhone. The project got canned due to lack of finance and I moved on.
This year I was thrilled when CamSpacelaunched. The technology is simply amazing not only by what it does but by what it can do. Imagine interacting with any device without keyboard, mouse or even touch. Here’s a quick demo:
I expect this kind of interactive processing mainstream in the next 5-10 years, used in entertainment, advertising, communication and even home appliances.
2. Brain to computer control
Throughout the centuries mankind has learned to control animals, tools and the world around it with physical gestures. Means of control got restricted to push, pull, touch etc. The time has come to redefine that.
Scientists and technology companies are working on developing brain-to-computer interfaces. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, we are working on the mind-reading computer. Better yet – the device that lets us communicate to computers in a way we could not before.
What you have there is one way we can use this. This man was paralyzed from the neck down. He managed to get 90% of the tasks he was supposed to correctly. Using only his brain. This kind of technology can offer paralyzed people, people that are trapped in their bodies the freedom they’ve once lost.
But it can do much more. Using it we can one day achieve instant connectivity to anyone on the planet. We can drive complicated machines without any prior training. We can communicate like never before with computers and humans and much more…
…But that will take time. My bet is the close future belongs to touch. And for those embracing this new interaction method – here are a few tips on designing touch user interfaces.
I can safely assume that advertising as we know it is bound to disappear in the next 10-15 years. Why? Because it’s loud and boring. Useless most of the time.
The internet, our fastest media yet is a conversation. People talk, discuss and engage one another just like they do in the real world. The best online advertising does the same thing. Once in a while something, which I would define as conventional-to-online advertising comes in and bothers them. Screaming. Waving hands. Going all “look at me, I am here!” on the users.
Just like TV. Just like print. Just like outdoor advertising. All of them scream. I belong to a generation that was born with advertising in its current form and that can’t be tricked into “seeing” ads. We want what we want.
We will google before buying, read reviews, ask friends and google again. We need to trust a brand before engaging it. We need to bond with it. We need to know this brand gets close to us and has a chat whenever we feel like.
The advertising as we know it can’t provide this. And it goes beyond advertising. The changes companies need to make to survive are also in their marketing department, in their management attitude and just as well in the R&D department.
The death of advertising is coming. Long live the brand conversation.
