It was awful, it was offensive, it worked.

EA has been promoting their new videogame, Dante's Inferno. But instead of giving out demo copies, or contra merch or even paying bloggers to shill for them, they've decided to take the left-hand path.

At a recent industry trade show anti-EA protesters were out in full force, carrying placards that included such wonderful missives as "EA = electronic Antichrist". Makes you think that Christian groups are against the game right? Not so fast there. Turns out that EA hired the protesters to generate some publicity. They got caught, and made a lot of Christians angry. Whoops.

Then, because too much controversy is never enough, EA promoted the new game at Comic-Con. They invited people to "commit acts of lust" by taking photos of themselves with the EA booth-babes. Winner gets a date with two models, a limo for the night and hopefully a poke in the eye with a very sharp stick. In a biblical demonstration of irony, the supposed randomly chosen winner turned out to be a writer from GayGamer.

And on it goes. Really. They're doing more. Because if there's one thing boneheaded publicity does well, it's generate press. Ever wonder what it's like to screw up so badly that you actually go in a complete circle around to success?

Why yes, I do work in an augmented building

Don't you?

Tokyo is saturated with billboards and electronic outdoor advertising, but the N Building has taken the concept, married it to augmented reality and upped the bar for out-of-home display.

In essence, the entire facade of the building is a QR code. Users with a custom iPhone app will be able to scan the building's front and interact with the merchants, extract relevant data and generally know everything they need to know. Augmented reality and architecture, it's cool.

N Building from Alexander Reeder on Vimeo.

No, the other colour, no, the other one...

Ever see a colour you like? Ever had to describe it after? Yeah, almost impossible. Sure you could take a picture of it with the camera on your phone but odds are you'll wind up with something in a different shade. Until now...

The brain trust at Benjamin Moore has an app for that. The ben color capture app allows you to match the colour you see to a shade on the Benji Moore database. It's not quite a substitute for myPANTONE but it's a neat direction. Now if they'd come up with a font recognizer...

A spot of the old ultra violence then?

This would make for an interesting concept to pitch to your clients: new research shows that adverts in violent video games are subject to better recall than ads in more non-violent video games.

Here's the article from the MIT Technology Review.

Now I'm off to find a way to work some Laura Ashley ads into Grand Theft Auto.

Users, users everywhere

but not a click to be had.

Facebook now boasts a user base of 350,000,000 people. More than many countries. That's a pretty large market.

Now the problem is how to monetize them. Sure there's advertising on Facebook but how many people actually click through those tiny little things?

Not too many.

Silicon Snake Oil

(with apologies to Clifford Stoll)

Here's an interesting article from Businessweek that advocates exercising a bit of caution before you jump on the tweeting/blogging/facebooking/tag clouding/microsite/ bandwagon.

Everything comes at a cost, and so-called experts might not be as learned as they claim to be.

Caveat Emptor as they say.

Maybe if Newegg had been a bit more aware of consequences and paid attention to what they were doing, they wouldn't currently be known for this great tag cloud generated from their own in house customer support forum...

Your facebook profile is the real you.

New research from The University of Texas at Austin about people's Facebook profiles...

Facebook profiles capture true personality, according to new psychology research

Online social networks such as Facebook are being used to express and communicate real personality, instead of an idealized virtual identity, according to new research from psychologist Sam Gosling at The University of Texas at Austin.

"I was surprised by the findings because the widely held assumption is that people are using their profiles to promote an enhanced impression of themselves," says Gosling of the more than 700 million people worldwide who have online profiles. "In fact, our findings suggest that online social networking profiles convey rather accurate images of the profile owners, either because people aren't trying to look good or because they are trying and failing to pull it off.

"These findings suggest that online social networks are not so much about providing positive spin for the profile owners," he adds, "but are instead just another medium for engaging in genuine social interactions, much like the telephone."

Gosling and a team of researchers collected 236 profiles of college-aged people from the United States (Facebook) and Germany (StudiVZ, SchuelerVZ). The researchers used questionnaires to assess the profile owners' actual personality characteristics as well as their ideal-personality traits (how they wished to be). The personality traits included: extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism and openness.

In the study, observers rated the profiles of people they did not know. These ratings were then compared to the profile owners' actual personality and their ideal-personality. Personality impressions based on online social network profiles were accurate and were not affected by profile owners' self-idealization.

Accuracy was strongest for extraversion — paralleling results of face-to-face encounters — and lowest for neuroticism. Those findings were consistent with previous research showing that neuroticism is difficult to detect without being in person.

"I think that being able to express personality accurately contributes to the popularity of online social networks in two ways," says Gosling. "First, it allows profile owners to let others know who they are and, in doing so, satisfies a basic need to be known by others. Second, it means that profile viewers feel they can trust the information they glean from online social network profiles, building their confidence in the system as a whole."

Gosling recently co-authored a study on how first impressions do matter when it comes to communicating personality through appearance. For his latest personality research, he focuses his attention to personality in relation to online social networks.

Findings will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. Researchers include: Gosling and Sam Gaddis (The University of Texas at Austin), Mitja Back, Juliane Stopfer and Boris Egloff (Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz, Germany), Simine Vazire (Washington University in St. Louis), and Stefan Schmukle (Westfälische Wilhelms-University Münster, Germany).

The ultimate handheld content platform

Version 4.0, with fully licensed content, 26" four colour media display that can be rotated, built-in games, and you can share it without signing a 5,734 page long end-user license.

What a magical age we live in.

You're not as popular as you think

So you've gone and set up a Facebook page for your client. Good for you. Everyone else is, so you should get on that right away. But at the end of the day. How many people have you brought over to the brand? How many of them are going to be influenced by it?

Well, if you're part of the 77%, less than a thousand.

Sure you've got fans but how many and how often do they see you?

Take peoples money...

then scam them.

Great way to foster that consumer relationship.

From The Huffington Post.

Here's what's happening. Well known e-commerce companies have been sending post transaction marketing offers to consumers immediately after something is purchased. Consumers are offered cash back if they simply click a confirmation button. When they do, their credit card information is automatically passed on to a marketing company that signs them up for a credit card subscription for a package of useless services. The rebate is rarely paid. The U.S. Senate is not impressed.

Sounds dodgy doesn't it? Really unethical. The kind of thing only a really sleazy company would do, not a well known one like say...1800Flowers.com, Fandango, FTD, Orbitz, Priceline, Shutterfly, Buy.com, Barnes & Noble, Expedia, as well as many more.

It's kind of like the death of a thousand cuts. If so many well regarded and well known companies are out there finding underhanded ways to score a few more pennies from their customers, customers are going to migrate back to personal shopping where you see the person you're handing money to and have more control over your own data.

Google: not evil, has deep pockets

Google continued its march towards global domination this week. First they upped the PR stakes by allowing their potentially sentient AI software to seek and destroy ads on Google servers for tooth whitening and weight loss products. Given that both these products are, shall we say, less than legit, yellow-toothed overweight people everywhere will rejoice.

Then, just the other morning, the board at Google found some money under the couch in reception. So they went out and bought an advertising technology startup.

So, essentially, Google is slowly but inexorably moving into being more than a search site/email/collaboration/chat/image/voice/data/cloud/keyword/hosting company. Nope, they're moving into pretty much everything.

I for one welcome our new Menlo Park overlords.

User-unfriendly design

The curtain was recently drawn back at the U.S. Patent Office and one of the gems it was hiding was an application from Apple. Nothing new there right? Those guys must patent more stuff by breakfast than most people do all day...

But wait, there's more. And more.

The geniuses at Apple have applied to patent a some 'warez that force the user to comply with a preset set of demands. Like viewing an ad. None of this waiting for the ad to finish before you watch nonsense, oh no, this is much more interactive. You have to pay attention and then click a button or answer a question to continue.

Kind of like that whole answer three questions right or you can't cross the bridge scenario in a certain movie.

I guess 1984 won't be like 1984, it'll be a hell of a lot worse. If I don't want to watch an ad, I don't. Being forced to watch an ad will only serve to promote a rather visceral reaction. Companies don't endear themselves to consumers by effecting "enforcement routines" and making users jump through hoops to get to content.

Unfortunately this application is for more than just online usage. Mobile, TV, consumer electronics in general will soon be as petulant and demanding as a roomful of two year olds.

Great.

Gorgeous outdoor projection

It's got artistic merit and heavy outdoor promotion potential.

It's 3D projection and it's gorgeous.

Projection on Buildings from NuFormer Digital Media on Vimeo.

The market demands media

And Demand Media has met the demand for media in a most industrial fashion.

Content is king, or key or something. Either way, it's important. With so many sites, and so many people looking, you have to stand out. Templates and colour schemes are nice but if your content ain't relevant you might as well go back to being a shepherd or selling decorative shoe horns.

Enter Demand Media. They've streamlined content generation and acquisition, industrialized it and designed a Just-In-Time delivery system, with up to 4,000 unique pieces of content coming out daily.

Using proprietary algorithms and other top secret methods they're poised to revolutionize content for other sites.

As to whether or not speed to market creates a bias in the content or generates content that doesn't stand up to scrutiny...well time will tell. It does make for an interesting study in collectivization of labour in the digital economy though.

John Mayer "Heartbreak Warfare" - Official Augmented Reality Music Video

Studio B teamed with Adobe and John Mayer to create the worlds first Augmented Reality music video.

Whose tweets are being twittered?

In the all out stampede to embrace new channels of communication things can get missed. When websites first began sprouting many companies were slow to understand what they were and even slower to register domain names. The resulting litigation was an interesting application of international and intellectual property laws.

Now it's happened again.

Nike, GM, even WalMart have been beaten to the tweet. The companies, amongst others, neglected to set up corporate twitter feeds. And now someone has done it for them. Some accounts are being handled by fans of the brands but other accounts aren't as fawning.

Those who neglect history are doomed to repeat it or so I've heard.

In other news, Big Ben tweets.

This is how the future looks

At least for outdoor, interactive digital advertising.

Waterloo Station in London is the site of a very cutting edge piece of outdoor media. When the landscape is saturated with media, only the best media will stand out. This is one of them.

It's your birthday.

If your name happens to be online advertising. Commonly know as 'Banner' to your friends and revenue-stealing piece of flash animation to those who work in the newspaper industry.

Either way, happy birthday digital advertising.

Online ad spending. There's money to be made.

And if AT&T is reading this, we are very open to negotiations, and our prices are so low you'll think we're crazy.

Different sites get different traffic, and different traffic attracts different advertisers. Here's a delightful little infographic that outlines who is spending what and where they're spending it. Online-adwise that is.

Seems to me like Facebook could become bigger than the GDP of many countries by sometime in November.

Electronic paper in the world of the Kindle

Great article from New Scientist on the present and future of e-paper or e-ink or whatever the hell it's called this month.