The Best Thing On The Internet Right Now

flash

The Best Thing On The Internet Right Now

So after a particularly frustrating day of having Flash-based content crash my browser, I finally buckled under and succumbed to the recommendation of my old business partner Tim Smith and downloaded a little, free Mac Safari plugin called "ClickToFlash".

ClickToFlash is a simple tool that blocks Flash content in the Safari browser and replaces it with a pleasant, ignorable graphic.  And if you choose to click the ignorable graphic - the Flash movie loads normally.  Simple.

But why would the average person want it?  Most advocates will tell you because it will significantly reduce browser crashing.  Which it does.  But there is something else.  Something I found infinitely more satisfying.I'd resisted ClickToFlash previously because I thought, at the time, I wouldn't want to miss out on all those cool experiences, those grey boxes would probably annoy me, and any extra clicking would degrade my experience.

Was I ever wrong on all counts.

ClickToFlash has made surfing the web a pleasant - no, a delightful experience.

The surprise came when I landed on my first page, a news site, which I was fairly sure had no Flash content on it anyway.  Naturally when I landed I saw the article, but what surprised me was what I didn't see.  What I didn't see - were ADS.  Just a nice clean page and the content I wanted.I went to another site, and another, and the obvious realization kicked in that most of the prominently positioned, above the fold and therefore expensive to place ads on the web today are Flash-based (read: sexiest and therefor deserving of being in the expensive locations).

At that moment, with great thrill, I realized ClickToFlash might just as well have been named "ClickToBeAnnoyedByAdvertising."Ah… control.  This is what Interactive media is supposed to be!  In an instant I had muted the visual screechings of thousands of uninvited, self-important, flagrant 1st-Axiom-of-Interactive violating Advertisers.

Of course this will all end come the day that the engineering teams relegated down the food chain to advertising agencies finally fire their Flash developers and start focusing on the emerging web spec HTML 5 as a platform of choice.But don't worry - that's not going to happen anytime soon.  The spec is only partially deployed, and fortunately for me, advertisers love Flash.

Way behind the curve, agencies are still staffing up with Flash developers as though the technology can replace creative ideas, as though that one technology can pull them out of the ad industry's chaotic spiral, as though it were - "the future." To them, Flash is still cool.Such is the state of creative teams in most ad agencies.  These poor guys are literally just starting to feel solid ground under their feet after a decade of "viral this" and "social that".  The desperate wishing that TV spots would just stay important forever has finally waned and most agency creatives have finally, grudgingly, begun to accept interactive media as the centerpiece of their campaigns.  See, advertising creatives don't like it when the medium carpet is pulled out from under them.  It's only happened once before and it took them over a decade to accept it;  It's hard to develop creative solutions when your palette changes so fundamentally everyday.  If technology is not in your blood - you struggle trying to track the advancements and incorporate them into something resembling a mature creative execution that doesn't smack of novelty-chasing.  So now that Flash has been embraced ubiquitously by advertisers, it will take quite a lot to move that big ship off the Flash gulf stream.  You can rest assured that advertisers will still be using Adobe's somewhat clunky tool for a long, long time.

And that suits my ClickToFlash self just fine.  That's right boys.  Graphic banners are boring.  And what the heck is Ajax or JQuery anyway?  HTML 5 (or 6?) couldn't possibly kill Flash.  Because with Flash you can create "experiences!"  Who knows maybe it will go "viral" or even better, "social".

Just you keep spending your clients' money on really humongous, big Flash campaigns.  Buy up all the available ad space for that gorgeous, experiential, Flashtrubation.  Please, I'm begging you.

And the rest of you Mac users - download ClickToFlash.

Internet nirvana awaits.

The Myth of Viral Marketing And The Rise Of Status

The Myth of Viral Marketing And The Rise Of Status

"Viral Marketing" is a myth. Always has been. It never existed. And as you'll see, even if it had, you would want nothing to do with it. "Word of Mouth"? Less toxic, but critically, equally incomplete. Social Network Marketing? Swarm Marketing? Mobile Marketing? Just more opaque containers. In a revealing display of the industry's ongoing struggle with interactive, none of the terms in use today comes close to illuminating how an advertiser can approach inspiring that Holy Grail of interactive marketing, a User-distributive spread...  Until now.

The term Viral Marketing (or "v-marketing") was coined by Harvard Business School professor, Jeffrey Rayport, in a rational December 1996 article for Fast Company The Virus of Marketing. Rayport is a passionate, engaging public speaker, and a brilliant thinker. And in 1996, a time when ad agency executives were still uttering the words, "...'new media', huh?", "Viral marketing" might have resonated for some and brought an easy mental image to this strange new behavior of consumers online. Unfortunately, Rayport's metaphoric, arm's-length reference to the term "viral" was almost immediately shortened to nil and ham-fistedly adopted as the all-purpose agency weapon of choice, it's obvious limitations unrecognized by over eager marketers, desperate for answers.

Despite Rayport's loose analogy, the fact of the matter is that there never was a practicable connection between a virus and any form of legal marketing that any of us have employed in the last 15 years. And yet - walk into any ad agency in the country today and say you want a "viral campaign", and they'll smile knowingly and give you the thumbs up.Before I go further, we've got to do this, here's the definition of "virus", really, humor me here:

virus |ˈvīrəs| noun• Any of various simple submicroscopic parasites that cause disease- unable to replicate without a host cell.• An infectious disease caused by a virus.• A harmful or morbid corrupting influence on morals or the intellect. Something that poisons the mind or the soul.• (also computer virus) a segment of self-replicating code planted illegally in a computer program, that has a detrimental effect, such as corrupting the system or destroying data.(from the Latin "virus" meaning "toxin" or "poison")

...that, plus "Marketing".

You can see why marketers loved this term. Seriously. In the face of a strange, new medium, where content was suddenly, confoundedly, intertwined with a rapid stream of complicated, new technology, where audiences had become vapor- diffused, elusive and unpredictable, behaving nothing like the reliably passive, pre-aggregated viewership that marketers were so used to, the "there" no longer being there, where virtually none of advertising's old skills and tactics got traction - and ultimately, where an utter lack of control hung thick in the air of every ad agency conference room across the country, "Viral Marketing" brought an immediate sense of relief and comfort, because "Viral Marketing" seemed to promise control.

To a population of office workers suffering under an ongoing reign of computer viruses, where the viruses were clearly a type of offensively potent "winner" over the Internet-connected masses, this term brilliantly dovetailed two perviously disparate data points, and in doing so, created the first sensation of power any advertiser had ever had relative to Interactive.

Just imagine, being able to create an ad that you could literally unleash on unsuspecting Internet consumers - one that would spread surreptitiously and offensively mind you, "infecting" vast multiples across the consumer population- powerfully, virilely, unstoppably changing brand preferences as it devoured it's unwitting hosts, until the World succumbed to the disease of your clients' brand positioning.

That's admittedly extreme, but never-the-less it is "Viral Marketing"'s clear linguistic suggestion. And too many advertisers allowed this not-so-subtle suggestion to color their unconscious hopes and expectations, falling victim to one of advertising's own superficial methods of persuasion.

The Myth Persists

Ultimately, it was to the decade-long (and still running strong) detriment of advertisers who eagerly drank this infected kool-aid. The true virus is the subconscious subtext that Viral Marketing is some sort of actual deployment tactic that gives advertisers control over the medium or their audiences. Or a valid deliverable an advertiser might offer a client. All of which placated advertisers, pulling their innovative attention away from the real challenges.  This was the critically destructive impact of the misnomer. Such was the perfect storm in advertising then that virtually no one questioned or challenged the term, rather it was fervently embraced and espoused across all levels of the industry - despite the fact that no one really knew what to do with the idea.  And so it remains, for good reason.

A vast majority of advertisers who still use the term today, have probably not read Rayport's article and recognized it's undercurrent of proposed misrepresentation and unintentional User behavior, which just doesn't ring true today.  Wish as marketers might.  And ultimately it's this suggestion of power and control that is the concept's undoing.Some have had to learn the hard way, that "Viral Marketing" isn't really. Today, when the term is spoken, advertisers now in the know experience a reflexive double-take that "Viral" doesn't mean "Viral" at all, it means "...something cool... that will hopefully be embraced by Users and shared".

A lot of terms have been employed over recent years to try to explain the nature of such a spread. At Red Sky in 1996, we called this phenomenon (the sudden user-distributed spread of a piece of content or an ad)  "Friend to Friends Marketing". If unwieldy, to this day I think that name rings truer than "Viral", because "Friend to Friends" connects, if ever so naively, with the actual, functional, activity that causes such a spread.

Today the term "Word of Mouth" is often used in place of, or in addition to "Viral". "Word of Mouth" is generally considered an advance in the thinking, and different than "Viral" to the extent that WOM perhaps is not dependent on a distributable digital item, but rather a good impression of a product or brand that can be communicated through the users' network, both in, and out of the medium. WOM never-the-less does not sufficiently suggest any actual strategy or tactic that an advertiser might use to market in a way. If "Viral" is the worst offender, grossly referring to the mere spread of a meme via an inaccurate functional metaphor, Word of Mouth comes in second revealing nothing but a past-tense condition, void of an approach to marketing. Then there's "Swarm Marketing". Do you see a pattern? A swarm may be an interesting behavioral metaphor with respect to users' interconnectedness, perhaps more accurate in its distantly observed behavior than a mere "social network" but again, it does not illuminate a direction, a plan of action that marketers can act against. Just another coat of paint on a box we've never figured out how to open.

Ultimately, each of these terms only do service in assessing a previously generated condition, what happened - after the fact. Long after the campaign ran it's course, long after the planners and strategists and creatives did their work, and after the media buy, after, by some stroke of good luck, some critical mass of users saw fit to share the thing or idea with their friends and connected networks, only then do these terms find any relevance. Advertisers step back, and look at what happened, and where it happened and announce that it spread "virally". That it was spread, and consumed through "word of mouth"... by a swarm... in a social network.  ...via Mobile.

And all of this matters to those of us who wish to understand and recreate the phenomenon.  To work in front of, and through the opaque walls of those terms.  If you're like me, you want to know what you can actually do, proactively, to make that kind of spread happen.

Peeling Back The First Layer

I've heard a lot of smart people opine on this subject. And I have not liked their answers. The more naive answers have centered around facilitation of a spread, such as variants from adding "a send to a friend button" to "seeding communities". But clearly these do not inspire a user to send a piece of content to his friends. Others circle around the idea that the content (the ad) must be "relevant". As you have probably seen in other posts on this site, I agree with that premise. However, again, in terms of inspiring a "Viral Effect", a successful Word of Mouth campaign, it is incomplete. Relevance to the target User is unquestionably necessary, but let me draw a distinction, it must be relevant for an individual User to adequately consume and positively regard a piece of content. But that does not reveal why a user will pass it on in multiples.

Inspiring Distribution

To understand, facilitate the creation of, and incidentally perhaps better label this type of marketing, one must first understand the psychology that drives this kind of interaction at all, this kind of content and meme sharing. One must understand the psychology of communication.Human beings are story-telling animals. We are, at our core, communicators. Always have been. This core need to communicate spans cultures and time. It’s how we survive as a species. As members of a society we are constantly measured against others; where communication is our primary tool for managing that measurement. Look at communication behavior closely and you will see that we do not communicate with altruism. We have a goal. Our goal is the increase of our individual status compared to others in the society.

Within Maslowe's "Esteem Needs" (the level it's safe to assume most Americans experience most of the time), literally all human interactions are governed by the continuous adjustment of status. Status is the very currency of human communication. Status, in one form or another is the basis for all communication. Also note that status is a relative measure - to gain higher status I can either increase mine or decrease everyone else’s. Most people are constantly and unconsciously engaged in ongoing status battles. You see this dynamic being played out in virtually every conversation. In virtually every exchange. It is universal in our society.

And folks - therein lies the answer.

The distribution of digital content and communication by an interactive media User can be interpreted as an attempt on the part of that User to increase His social status within the online society.

When a User's recipient responds with any level of praise-- "That was hilarious, Dude! Thanks!" (I say "Dude"... sue me) an increase in status is confirmed. Conversely consider the deflation that accompanies the reply "Yeah, I saw that last month, you just saw that now?". The user's status has lowered. And pray the recipient is so kind. Even a lack of response is the tactic of some for managing status. The range and subtleties of these interactions, and the emotions they impact are powerful evidence of Status jockeying.

Now, we must take this insight one step further, we must bring "Status" into the advertisers' toolbox, and identify our role, as the creators of ideas, of content- of relevant value. As I hope you can see, it is not enough merely to provide relevant content or a relevant experience. Let's connect this insight to the first rule of Interactive:

Interactive AXIOM #1: The User Is Your King, & You, The Content Creator, Are A Subject.

What does it mean then, to serve our King if we now know that the King, confronting communication in this medium, is in point of fact, always engaged in a war for status? That when he considers sending a piece of content, or sharing a view, or even responding to someone else's blog (hopefully with our marketing message), his primary goal in doing so is that it result in an increase in His status and/or a decrease in his recipients'?Got it?  Clearly our role, as the creators of content that we hope He will send on, as the creators of positive brand memes that we hope He will share, is to provide our King with content or ideas that will, as He perceives it, raise His status.I call this proactive planning approach to inspiring the User-distributive spread of an ad, or a meme, "Status Marketing".

Status Marketing

Status Marketing is a proactive strategy that results in positive "word of mouth", that results in a "viral effect". Status Marketing must be the foundation of every online marketing campaign being planned today.

This is a very different exercise than merely attempting to create a "powerful brand message", "relevant content", a hilarious ad, or seeding a swarm or mobile network. These approaches, these types of marketing, are simply lacking in the direction necessary for motivating audiences who are entirely in control.If you look at the main components of every single successful online campaign throughout the life if the commercial Internet, you will find effective "Status Marketing" plans at work - not "Viral" marketing plans, not "Word of Mouth", and not "Social Network Marketing" or any of the other after-the-fact or container observations. You will find Status Marketing strategies and executions that either intentionally, or unintentionally, tapped into this single powerful principle.Conversely look at those campaigns that failed to achieve wide-spread, "viral" distribution, and you will see an utter failure to acknowledge the Status concept, or you'll see an ineffectively executed attempt to raise the target audience's status among their peers. Either way, this is the key, folks.Identify what will help your King raise His status among His peers and network, what kind of content, tools,  images, ideas, and data, will provide Him with that result, should He send it, and you will have discovered the Holy Grail of online marketing.

Status Factors

In a bit of an arm's race, the form of ideas and items that are going to raise a user's status will change over time, based on numerous dynamics.  But there are a number of basic factors that will enhance the likelihood that your User will subconsciously perceive the potential for an increase in His status.  To wit, one might argue that what's important is not whether an ad actually does raise the User's status, but that the User believes it will, if only He sends it on. That said, if the belief isn't paid off, your brand may not get another chance with that User (see: AXIOM #2 - section: Branding the Promise).  Here is an admittedly incomplete short list of status-enhancing factors:

1)  Relevance - I give you permission to say: "No Duh".  And while critical, this topic, alone, is usually the extent of the discussion in other Viral Marketing / Word of Mouth circles. The distinction in this context is that relevance will be measured by the User not necessarily just on whether the item resonated with Him, but how He feels it may resonate within His network.  Remember you are providing tools for the user to, Himself, enhance His brand. It's a skew that should dramatically change the way you approach the subject of "relevance" for your audience, and the creation of your marketing plans.  Typically, this topic relates to the perceived value in the offering.  If it's a joke - how funny is it?  If it's news, how timely is it?  If it's a tool, how useful is it?  But in this context, most importantly - how valuable will He feel His network will feel it is?

2)  Discovery - This is key.  The User must have the sense that He discovered it. That He has unearthed the find.   On the contrary, are you likely to share an item or idea if you feel it is commonly known or previously distributed?  Will you send it, or announce it if you feel it may have already been "discovered" by your network?  What would that do to your status?  To honor this factor on behalf of your User, consider what it means to make your ad/idea appear to be rare.  To have it, in fact, intentionally appear largely unknown or previously unseen.  A piece of work that appears to be well travelled or well marketed - will that help, or hurt the likelihood that your User will send it on?  Consider executions like "Subservient Chicken" and the ancient "Blair Witch Project", the grandfather of "look what I discovered" viral marketing.  These arguably "best of class" executions well demonstrated that items need not be polished and "professional" in the graphic sense, and in fact, the raw, unprofessional aesthetic of the work rather enhances it's "unlikely to have been seen before" perception.  Conversely, pieces that are beautifully polished and appear to be the result of large, well-funded teams, may not hold the same knee-jerk sense of scarcity (and therefor value!) that something appearing to have been created by teams of one or two people do.  Consider that strange little one-man video clips on YouTube achieve a critical mass of sheer distribution that any Fortune 100 Company would kill for.  It's about relevance, but it's also about your User believing that "it probably hasn't been seen before".

3)  Own-ability - The Users' brand must be allowed to dominate the "conversation", and own the exchange.  This critically applies any rise in status to Him.  Items that allow the User to customize content, create, and exert His creativity are powerful examples of "own-ability".  Excellent examples include OfficeMax's "ElfYourself", and Burger King's"SimpsonizeMe".   Further, when a user espouses His own thoughts, he entirely owns that exchange.  Thus providing him with data, or information that He feels confident will make him appear smarter, righter, funnier, etc, can be effective.  Conversely, items that are too-heavily branded with product logos and messaging or too thick with brand or product references can undermine this factor, wresting perceived shares of status away from a User and minimizing the likelihood that He will wish to share or send it on.

4)  Control - The User must feel He is in control of the content, His actions, and His status.  Prescriptive marketing distribution tactics ("send this ad to a friend!") can actually weaken the likelihood that the User will comply.  Give up- the User is in control.  You're not.  The User must be allowed to "invent" the idea to send something on or share an idea.  This runs to the heart of what so many comedians will tell you is a critical component of comedy - trusting the intelligence of the audience.  Similarly here, we must trust that the User will a) invent the idea to send it along, and b) know how to send an appropriately designed item on- should He decide to.  On the surface, this means that some items should appear to be for the User's sole enjoyment- even though it is hoped that He will forward the item.  Facilitate the downloading or saving of the item for the User's "personal use".  Post it in a format that interfaces with popular social networks - without "suggesting" what to do with it.  He'll know what do do after that.  To a degree these tactics, and the extra effort that may be required by Him to distribute an item, can also enhance the perception of its scarcity.  Which can be a good thing.This is nowhere near an exhaustive list, nor must all of these factors be in place to their full extent to generate sufficient distribution.  But it hopefully illuminates some of the most basic principles impacting Users' perception of Status-Building.

The term Status Marketing reminds us what ultimately drives the distributive online interaction that our Users engage in every day, and further, what our job is, as servants to our interactive Kings.  Ultimately we must empower Users to be smarter, funnier, more insightful, talented, and connected, in their battles, amidst their societies, for Status.  This is the one and only engine that drives online distribution.Take Status Marketing to heart - no matter who your target User is - and your campaign will succeed.

HP PONG: Advertising's Atom Smasher

Sorry this used to be animated and fully interactive. Thank you, Digital Dark Ages!

HP PONG: Advertising's Atom Smasher

In 1996, at Red Sky Interactive, in partnership with a rebellious band of talented individuals, I developed the HP PONG Banner Ad: the first interactive banner ad on the net, and the web's first example of "rich media".  But behind the scenes, that banner was an atom-smasher, revealing the very principles of interactive advertising- and sweeping industry changes yet to come.    

The HP Pong Banner was created in service to Hewlett-Packard's campaign at the time: “Built by Engineers, used by Normal People” (by Goodby, Silverstien & Partners). As you can hopefully see, it was a full-working version of the classic video game Pong, coded into a banner. GS&P's campaign was smart and put the focus on the brilliant, if often eccentric, HP engineers, and as represented, the Pong banner was created by an Engineer named "Jerry", after drinking quite a lot of coffee.

But GS&P had only hired Red Sky to do what everyone else was doing at the time - create static and, if we could manage within the budget, animated banners (GIF 89 files).

In those days Red Sky Interactive was a little like Fantasy Island, you know, you came in thinking you wanted "X", and Mr. Roarke sent you off with what you needed - usually not "X".  That was Red Sky's DNA. And the HP PONG Banner was one of those instances. Actually, it wasn't an easy sell. No one had done anything like it before, and if you are in anyway involved with deploying ads online today, then you know how restrictive the media owners can be with regard to formats and "unusual" technology.  None of which helped us in making the case to Goodby and HP.

Ultimately, Goodby and HP bought the idea - and together we all fought the fight to strike agreements with the media owners to get it posted.

By video game standards, the banner was mildly entertaining, it was only Pong after all. But after it’s release MSNBC and CNET both reported that it had the highest click-through of any other banner on the Internet for it's three month deployment (Yeah I know - that's back when we measured click-through, sue me). It’s admittedly possible that a good percentage of those click-throughs were merely users confronting banner interactivity for the first time, but it was nevertheless considered a success for those involved.

I don't think this banner does much eyebrow raising today, but at the time, it seemed as though few had considered degrees of interactivity within a banner. My argument in defense of the model back then had been that a longer, narrower stage didn’t mean a user couldn’t have a deeper experience that lasted as long as the user wanted. I am surprised that the creators of banner ads today still have yet to take this basic conceit to it’s most valuable extreme.

After the Pong Banner’s initial attention, we assumed that was about as much as we would see from that.But what happened next was a turning point for those of us at Red Sky.

We began to see the Pong banner stolen. No kidding, users were digging through thier cache folders, copying the .dcr file (Shockwave) and posting it to sites outside the media buy. And maybe more profoundly, they were attaching it to e-mails and sending it to their friends. Keep in mind - this behavior wasn't easily done - it took some effort and technical know-how. There was no such thing as "viral marketing" in 1996 (actually, there still isn't - that's another posting). Nor was there such thing as "Word of Mouth" as in today's popular online nomenclature. No one put buttons on web sites that said "Send to a friend". No one was making games-as-advertisements; this was before all that. Or rather, this revealed all that.

Not entirely unlike it’s contemporaries of the time (and boy am I dating myself), the “Dancing Baby”, or the “Nieman Marcus Cookie Recipe” (told you) the Pong Banner spread. Not because it had a funny tag-line, or the HP logo, but because it provided value to an online audience. Was it a novelty? Absolutely. But it was novel enough to want to share.

It's important now to stop and talk about value.  I'm not talking about the kind of value you get from finding a good sale price, I'm talking about something that's either: entertainment, information, or a service.

Let me further qualify those words with the following semantics: a feature film is "entertainment", a dictionary is "information", a cell phone is "a service".  Where does traditional advertising sit on that spectrum?  Well, it sort of doesn't.  And that's the point.

In answer to this question, more often than not, advertisers will tell you that advertising is entertaining.  Hard-core advertisers will tell you it's a mixture of all three.  And while the case can be intelligently argued, that ads are entertaining, and /or that they provide information and that in doing so provide a service, let's draw a relevant (if my own bias) distinction:

Ads may be "entertaining", but they are not "entertainment".

Before you go there, I've probably heard it. That "lots of people read the fashion magazines for the ads", that "so many people watch the SuperBowl for the spots", and that "people in Europe go to the movies early for the commercials". These are memes that have circulated the ad industry since before the dawn of the commercial Internet.  Old industry lore, a small collection of unscalable, partially true, case-studies that serve to keep a lot of industry executives and creatives engaged everyday while they generate a bell curve that rather doesn't reflect these stories.

For better or worse, interactive media and the audiences that wield it, don't hold any respect for our sense of self-worth and the selectively adjusted context that we, as an industry, have constructed to nobelize our efforts. In fact, for the most part, we are in interactive audiences' way.

Those of us in advertising today, now more than ever before in our industry's history, have the sober responsibility to shake off any ancient, self aggrandizing dust, stare coldly at our body of work, and remind ourselves of this basic conceit:  That advertising, for all it's creativity and arguable value, serves a master other than our audience, other than the creative muse, other than  our King, and is therefore starting from a deeply compromised position, where we must wield our very best creative powers just to make up the deficit.

Nowhere is this more urgently drawn than online, where the User is King. Where an interruption of any kind in our King's desired path, be it a timed delay, or an occupation of screen real estate that might have otherwise been filled with His chosen content, is utterly, patently inauthentic. This is, in part, why we must compensate the King with such excessive value.

And here's the main argument of this section: set against a traditional media landscape of pre-aggregated audiences and interruptive tactics where we'd become an industry of messagers- of communicators of value, that now, with the advent of interactive media, with the ubiquitous penetration of audiences in control, have no choice but to become an industry of value creators.  To cease merely communicating value, and to actually, honest-to-goodness provide it.  To start creating the kind of value that audiences will seek out. More than that, to start creating value that audiences will pay for, short of it being funded by an advertiser.

More specifically, and with respect to my semantic comments earlier, this means that successful interactive "advertisements" must take the form of content, products and services.

In contrast, over the years since Pong, our response to the amazing potential of interactive media has been incremental. Our ways are well traveled, and as an industry, due to size, maturity, experience, training, and so many other factors, we are loathe to rethink such sweeping, integral components, though everyone I know says they are.

Traditionally, advertising's creative bar has been set at a level that requires creative teams to produce work that, at its base, will keep audiences from looking away. Our audience has always been collected for us. You might say we've been spoiled by that. The very existence of "art director & copywriter" teams, by definition, are in place to produce messages that meet this bar, not reach the greater value we're contemplating here. Soon, this team structure will change. And so will many other elements, including our relationships with media owners, clients, our compensation models, our planning methods, deliverables, our training and staffing. And this must seem daunting. But the other side of the coin is exciting.

If you do this right,  you will find that you are no longer in the business of highly-creative communication, if you do this right you are in the business of entrepreneurialism. You will develop valuable offerings that squarely compete in an entrepreneurial landscape.  You will be creating products that compete, side-by-side, against the product companies.  You will be creating service-oriented businesses that effectively compete in the service industry.  And yes, you will also create content that competes with for-pay television, movies, books, etc.

And this (not messaging) is the future of advertising.

This doesn't mean we cease to employ any of our existing skills, really, it's a different type of communication.  Remember the old writers' adage, "Show, don't tell?"  This new era in advertising will be "Be, don't show."

The art of advertising at that point will be in conceiving business propositions that, through their very existence, stemming from the very process and product of this parallel business, will embody the client's brand values while measurably expanding it's business, and even forming new profit centers. Profit centers that the agency would most certainly be justified in participating in.

I call this type of value-based ad a "symbiotic business unit" (SBU).  A fully functioning business proposition that integrates at some level with the client's core business. Funded by ad dollars, these executions will be particularly well adept at attracting the target audience digitally, and then dovetailing them into the advertiser's primary offering.

MOVING FORWARD

If you're an agency - start thinking in terms of building a start-up team, staffed with strong business minds, consultant types with a background in launching products and services of their own. Don't wait for your client to request this- charge this new team with developing the odd SBU proposal for the right clients, unsolicited, in addition to your current deliverables. Based on their concept, consider what the agency is willing to invest in the SBU, and contemplate contracts in advance of the proposal that either:

a) procure some ongoing percentage of related new revenue,

b) retain ownership of the underlying intellectual property (software, systems, etc),

c) retain a degree of non-exclusivity such that you can redeploy the SBU on behalf of other clients, or such that you can take the product straight to consumer after some agreeable period of exclusivity,

d) consider filing patents - I doubt many ad agencies have actually gone to the effort of writing a patent for anything, but it's a key part of operating any newly invented business. Be aware of the recent availability of "Business Method Patents", a relatively new but highly relevant tool within the landscape of sweeping new technologies and their application to new businesses and innovation.

As you determine pricing for your client, do so such that you are indifferent as to which option the client agrees to (buy Vs lease for example). And if you're walking in the door with a sound business plan, that shows skin in the game and tells a story of growth and expansion, they'll agree.

Yeah, HP Pong was just a banner-based game, but I can report to you with sincerity that this vision is what it showed us all, with vivid clarity, back in 1996.

In case you were watching.

The Digital Dark Ages

The Digital Dark Ages

I have been developing Interactive work for over 15 years, and sadly, my son may never see any of it. That's because we are living in what future generations will undoubtedly call: The Digital Dark Ages.

This all came to a head with renewed force for me a few weeks ago, when an interactive agency contacted me as part of a vendor pitch. They were very proud of themselves for having "innovated a brand new kind of banner ad". One that allowed the user to interact with the brand/store/product within the banner itself, all  without leaving page the banner was on.  They went on to imply that it was the first time this had ever been done, and wasn't it a brilliant solution.

I generally agreed with it being the right direction - well, righter than the static alternative - except that it had been done before, and frankly, many times.  I know because, my old company, Red Sky Interactive, did it, to name one.  A lot.  And as far back as 10 years ago.  And it worked then.

This isn't the first time I've come across such a disconnect from past efforts.  Especially in advertising.  It seems to me that advertisers "discover" the same basic, big ideas, a couple times each decade.  And each time it's hailed as a "truly innovative solution" all over again, as if it hadn't happened the first time.  This doesn't just happen with banner ads either, but all sorts of basic interactive principles, interface techniques, and solutions based on newly observed user-behavior.  I honestly don't think this is a case of selective memory, to their credit I think they truly believe they invented the idea.  In part because they probably had to.  Redundant though it may have been.

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Many years ago I was working on a project and needed to reference what I recalled was some aesthetically innovative interactive work in its time.  I had the CD-ROM on my bookshelf - "The Dark Eye".  It was an awesome piece of work, created by animator Doug Beswick and featured really ground-breaking components including beautifully designed stop-motion puppets.  The packaging still looked awesome.  Looks innovative even still by today's standards.  It was created in 1995,  and when I attempted to run it, ..."the application that created it could not be found".  I realized with some degree of concern that I had created a fair number of projects around that time, and before.  I saved those old interactive projects- all manner of files, dutifully copied and transferred and burned, from machine to machine over the years- because they represented the bulk of my own body of work, and contained ideas and experiences that I wanted to keep for posterity.  Many were first of kind innovations that won coveted awards and in some cases set industry bars.  

I held my breath and double-clicked one of the pieces I was most proud of, and discovered that neither could it's application be found.  I tried every way at my access to open it, and only then fuzzily remembered that I'd created it with a program called "Video Works II" - long before its name was changed to Macromind Director - which was incidentally before the company changed it's name to Macromedia, before the popular Internet, most certainly before Shockwave plugins, not to mention the arrival of Flash, and it's subsequent acquisition by Adobe.  Needless to say, I no longer had the tools that I'd created the piece with. 

The implications slowly setting in, I rapidly double-clicked, and watched in breathless horror as project after coveted project sadly faded into digital abstraction- unreadable data- like film trapped on a reel.  That the only way they might see the light of day again is if I went to tremendous effort to, technologically, go back in time and bring them forward with me, version-by-version, adjusting code along the way.  The most recent of the "lost" pieces were roughly 5 years old.  

That's the day I decided I lived in the Digital Dark Ages.

I believe that future generations will look back at these days, and except for those few who are trying to "archive" portions and thin, top layers of the Internet, will have little idea of what was actually happening in Interactive media today.  There will simply be a hole in our history, and no physical artifacts to remember it by.  Lessons will be lost, only to be relearned.  When you consider the mass of interactive work being created daily, it's virtually unreasonable to think that all of that innovation will be effectively captured en-masse and stored in a form that can be meaningfully revisited across a changing medium.

Our language, messages and artwork, are only made possible through tools and platforms that will relentlessly evolve out from under our work.  Confronted with this scenario, a surprising number of people have suggested "video taping my work for posterity".  But to me - an Interactivist, that entirely defeats the purpose.  This is interactive work.  You haven't experienced it unless you interact with it.  Frankly, at the moment, it's interactive work that requires a mouse and keyboard.  But even this hardware- the mouse- is on its way out.  If we don't purposefully pursue a solution, we will need to admit that it's okay to let our place in History diminish with our work.

When I created it, I had imagined, years from now, finding myself contemplating my waning life, but being able to look back at the great work I'd created. To show my son.  I'd hoped naively, that like the painters, sculptors, writers, film-makers of the past, that perhaps my work would persist for future generations, and maybe even serve as a touch point in instances.  I see now that that isn't likely for any of us.

There are a few possible solutions to this issue:

1. Update.  Commit to regularly upgrading work, advancing it into new platforms.  This would require a scheduled effort, and will require re-coding as a frequent measure.  As platforms change, creators will have to rethink interface elements.  Admittedly, this solution becomes exponentially more difficult over time. 

2. Emulate.  It may yet be possible - and hopefully will be in the future- to load any OS and software configuration from the past into what will undoubtedly be very capable computing environments.  Hardware will have to be emulated as well... which poses some interesting design challenges, but hey - I can run Windows on my Mac, so maybe this isn't too far fetched. I expect this is still a way off however.

3. Museum.  A museum of old systems/platforms could potentially display key work to future audiences.  And I'll admit, that's how I view some of my work today.  Unfortunately this does not extend well, and is restricted by physical limitations.

4. Let go.  It now appears to me that, as Interactivists, we may be working much closer to live performance than we had ever imagined.  Technology is merely our stage.  Perhaps we need to cozy up to that idea, and walk in with our eyes wide open.  The illusion of "persistent content" comes with the ability to "Save", "Duplicate" and "Burn". But in fact, Interactive work rests on a flowing stream of technology - a stream that ultimately carries it away, even while traditional media persists.

5. There is a 5th option.  Development of the Human Computer Interface Preservation Society.  This effort is underway, and we will announce details as they become available.

In the mean time, interactive media, and more specifically, the language of interactivity, is still hovering in this awkward adolescent stage, a position it's been in for over a decade.  The most expedient way that we'll move beyond this state is if the innovative efforts of our current crop of talent, industry creatives and engineers, more decisively builds off of what was done before - not replicate it.  

My advice to younger Interactive developers: find and interact with a seasoned mentor(s).  They're out there, and I'm sure you'll find them willing to recall hidden efforts.  Unlike any other "recorded medium", the Charlie Chaplins, the Leonardo DaVincis, the relative "masters" of Interactive media are still alive today, and for better or worse, the best, most complete source of information on the subject rests with them, not on the net in circulation.  At least in the short-term it's the only way we can effectively build off the innovation and invention that came before us.

INTERACTIVE AXIOM #1: The Grand Interactive Order

INTERACTIVE AXIOM #1: The Grand Interactive Order

THE USER IS YOUR KING.  YOU ARE THE SUBJECT.

Like it or not the User is in control. The User is the ultimate master. The User is King.

Those of us who create interactive experiences must accept our lowly positions in the Grand Interactive Order, serving, amusing, and satisfying; ready and able to wield every ton of technical prowess and creative ingenuity we can muster to completely conform to each user’s unique interest, desire, whim and disposition. To delight the user when she grows bored. To shuttle the user to the very thing she needs or wants instantly- with nary a second spent indulging interests of our own. Don't bow to this Axiom, and you will fail...

No matter where you sit on the Interactive Content Creator’s side of the table, be you a writer, programmer, advertiser, financier, artist, producer, or huge, really important fortune 500 client who receives deep, humble, bowing greetings from your ad agencies; it doesn’t matter- you beggingly serve the User. You serve your King before all else.

This fact is well understood in certain circles.Entrepreneurs, video game developers, film-makers, writers, product developers, inventors – anyone whose customer is the general public, they tend to understand this rule – even if they don’t fully grasp it’s primal gravity in the Interactive space.

In my experience, the least versed, of course, are advertisers and marketers. For reasons that go to the heart of advertising’s very existance, this mammoth industry struggles to comprehend this most basic of constructs; unthinkingly breaking the rule with virtually every execution.

The servant who commits the sin of indulging himself, of misdirecting the King even for an instant to satisfy his own “business objectives” or “marketing plan”, spends that instant in polar opposition to the Masters’ interests.

It’s simple, don’t do what the Master wants, and your user will simply dismiss you and choose the next servant in line, hoping that this plebe will recognize his true place in the unspoken pact of the Grand Interactive Order.  Interactive Developers and Marketers are servants, jesters, and monkeys performing for change.

We may have no pride or motivation of our own unless we are willing to narrow our Users’ embrace.

Take the classic example of a DVD.  Do you remember those? If you ever used one you had this experience - you insert the DVD, you sit with the remote waiting for the start of the movie, then, uninvited, an FBI Warning appears.  You hit the "skip" button.  ...and nothing happens.  You hit it again to discover that your skip functionality has been silently disabled, forcing you to sit through the entirety of the static segment.  It's happened to you dozens of times, and yet I'm sure we'll agree, it nevertheless has the effect of raising your blood pressure.  That's because the 1st Axiom was broken.  You sit there with the unspoken promise of control - and yet that control was wrested away from you - that promise was broken - broken by your servant.  You, the King, were denied, you were forced to submit, to mutedly concede.  And no, yelling at the screen doesn't count.  Though it's what I do.

 I do the same thing today when YouTube shows the utter audacity to trial those un-skippable ads. And sometimes they try to post more than one.

If get annoyed at Youtube when that happens you are right to feel that way. It’s the correct feeling.

Because YouTube has broken this first rule of interactive.

While the feeling is fresh, I would encourage every content developer to consider what promises of control you have broken with your audiences.

The biggest problem with conventional interactive content, the reason that so few interactive pieces satisfy their users and thus ultimately fail to meet business objectives, is that content-creators unthinkingly break this rule every day. Every banner ad, every interstitial, every linear intro, every presumptive registration page, slow download, low resolution video clip, cookie request, pop-up newsletter ad, virtually everything that we regularly hear users complain about are immediately traceable to a breaking of the Grand Interactive Order. For each of these, in one form or another, represents an action or admission the user must make to conform to the Developer, the Content Creator. And this is the opposite of Interactive truth.

Further, every disruption to the Grand Interactive Order typically falls into one of two categories:

• Those that demonstrate that the developer is selfish, too directive or self-indulgent. This is commonly the result of traditional, interruptive advertising tactics like banner ads, interstitials, etc. and all ranges of registration barriers, or

• Those that demonstrate that the developer is weak. Often through experiences marked by low technical quality, poor design and poorly engineered systems resulting in slow processing, slow downloads, poor resolution, confusion etc. Or related, those that demonstrate that the developer is cheap, as through low economic investment resulting in limited user options and insufficient depth and breadth.

As you will hear me repeat in future axiom posts, any of my axioms may be broken- even the Grand Interactive Order- but one must know when one is breaking a rule- especially one as fundamental as this. In this instance, a developer must seek out ways of achieving his objectives even as he pays respect to the developer's natural, subservient position. Far too few developers acknowledge, let alone respect, the Grand Interactive Order, a mistake that has become the greatest single offender, under the developers' control, in negatively impacting the using-audiences' embrace of the Interactive medium at large.