This is where Augmented Reality is going to tip.
Not in the wild, not in HUD-emulating applications that add an information layer to everything you see and interact with. No, AR is going to become commonplace in exactly this way, in controlled environments.
This is an overly simplified system, but there’s no reason looking at a page would limit you to links. It could immediately pull up animations, video content, and audio track narrating the shoot, etc - while keeping a tactile object that responds to multiple types of interaction (not just finger-on-glass), and that isn’t limited by the dimensions of a smartphone screen.
A QR code fails because it’s a voluntary interruption model - that is to say, it requires too many barriers, first one needs to see the page the code is listed on, then they need to care about the code, then they need to have an application to scan it, then they need to do the actual scanning, then the page needs to load.
An AR model goes “This magazine has an augmented mobile experience. Open this app to see all the extra content on each page” and leads into an ongoing experience, one that can very easily add value. There’s not a series of decisions. There’s a series of discoveries.
Do I want HUD style AR? Of course I do, I grew up reading science fiction. But do I think that we’re going to head directly there? No. It will first be applications like the one above. After that, retail applications (point your phone at any item for sale in our store, we’ll recognize it and serve you unbiased reviews, pricing info, and further details, as well as the ability to purchase via mobile, and pick it up at the door on your way out). After retail applications, expect it to graduate to wikipedia / serendipitous search (point at something, we tell you what it is. Without asking or clicking. Just hold the crosshairs on one item for too long, and image recognition does the rest).
But it starts here. With a removal of the ‘take a picture and see what happens step’, and its replacement with continuous passive content offerings, layered on top of the everyday world.
Calling Bullshit on ‘Gamification’ as a Buzzword.
I resolve to stop being impressed by comments about gamification unless we all agree that games need more than points and a leader board and awards.
Points are great for tracking progress, but the number in the corner of my book goes up the closer I get to the end. A book isn’t a game, regardless of that rising number.
A leader board is a great way to tell who’s winning, but the NYT best seller list is a very well respected and highly monitored leader board - and a book STILL isn’t a game.
You get awards for doing things. You get rewards for doing hard things, or thankless things, or valuable things. I used ‘award’ because most gamification consists of stuff like badges (like foursquare), that acknowledge action, but not necessarily accomplishment.
People play games for the challenge, for the narrative, for the thrill of accomplishment, for entertainment, avoidance, escapism, and action.
Gluing points to a social network isn’t a game layer - competition is not inherently gaming.
I’d argue that gamification requires the introduction of (at least some) the following elements into something that doesn’t, by its nature, need to posess them: narrative*, skill development, challenges, a managed and intentional learning curve, fun, and a sense of interaction.
The last one requires some explanation: I don’t mean social interaction - games can be played alone. I don’t mean interactivity, a game need not react to you. But games need to ‘force’ you to react to what happens in them, whether by narrative, by emotional appeal, or by pure irritation. The elements that people call gamification, including awards, rankings, and points, are ways to encourage interaction, to keep you playing; they are the carrot and stick of a game, they are not the essence of a game itself.
*By narrative, I don’t mean a conscious story. But, for example, in a game of tic tac toe, there is two players, conflict, a goal, rising action, victory, and denouement. Same deal with solitaire, to a point. Special status for repeatedly using an application isn’t a narrative, it’s a trackable history. Narratives attach emotion to action. Games, in my estimation, always have the possibility of narrative.
QR code in an ad, on a subway. I’m not the first person to point out how dumb it is to put this somewhere without internet access, but I can’t resist mentioning it again.
Fail.
how to take a tv network online, today, for cheap.
Television sells two things: collected content (DVD box sets) and eyeballs. The eyeballs are generally sold through a series of half-truths and guesses, known collectively as ‘Nielsen Ratings’.
What I don’t understand, is the inability of television to monetize ‘piracy’, because they aren’t selling content, primarily. They sell eyeballs and packaged collections. Those things can’t be ‘stolen’ online, really. In the case of eyeballs, piracy is literally just another market. Here’s how you take advantage of it, in a reasonably simple way, at a reasonably low cost.
Make every show you air available online, at the time of release, via bit torrent. Host the tracker on your own servers, so you can monitor the downloads of each individual show. Make it all you can eat, relying on bit torrent distribution to make sure you don’t get killed with bandwidth costs.
Geo-sort your traffic. Create localized versions of your tracker by country, or by timezone, or by town. Track the volume of each episode, and each show, downloaded by each area. For greater segmentation, ask users to create profiles that collect their information - incentivize this by letting them comment on each individual series or episode. Attach a wiki to each series or episode, and let users discuss and argue about plot lines and potential direction.
With these collections of geographical, demographic, and viewership information, reach out to advertisers, on a national, timezone, local, and hyper local level. Instead of selling ad space by show and timezone, sell it by city. All this costs is in sorting, and in editing the right mix of ads into the show, for each of your potential markets. You can price individual shows up, or down, based on the demographics and viewership information.
This doesn’t include potential membership or sponsorship revenue for the online forum created around the tracker. This also lets you sell ad space in the same show multiple times over, and reach out to hyper local businesses - a niche that Groupon has proven can be particularly profitable.
This is all existing content, and a more or less existing sales framework. This is LITERALLY just updating the TV monetization model in the most obvious way, with existing technology, at minimal cost.
And no one is doing it. Who is going to be first?
There’s something to be said about ballsy marketing from a position of power.
A giant, full homepage advert, for an announcement. This provides zero benefit to those who visit the site, but sure as hell builds up an expectation for tomorrow that Apple has to deliver against.
The impressive part is that the minimalism of the page isn’t sacrificed around the ad. Stays true to the visual philosophy, even when it reduces utility. I’m not sure if that’s a good or bad thing. But it’s a very Apple thing.
Wow.
Scribbles.
I love it when a campaign takes the shape of a documentary. When I see a commercial or video that is expanding on, explaining, or celebrating an action, rather than just an idea or an association, it tells me something meaningful about what a brand stands for.
My mother always told me that change and growth are shown, not told.
This doesn’t just mean campaigns focused on social responsibility, or the narrative of a specific spokesperson. Show me what you do, and make me care about that. What you do, not who you are or how you want to be interpreted.
The easiest narrative to create is one that is focused on practices, on actions, rather than on associations. And in the current, authenticity-obsessed environment, an action-focused narrative confers a sense of honesty and ‘realness’ that is hard to achieve with even the most well-produced montage of sports heroes being victorious, or attractive young people looking cool.
Great ad, via PSFK.
This reminds me very directly of Paul Arden’s ideas regarding exaggeration - they work in reverse, too.
One day, not long from now, people will look back and this is what they’ll say:
“Can you believe how stupid we were back then? All we cared about was “pageviews, pageviews, pageviews;” full stop. And all the while, we never really gave much of a damn about the quality of those views— or of the person doing the viewing. I don’t know how we could have been so stupid. And for so long.”
Here’s hoping this applies to click rates, as well. The scariest thing? This is still a step up from the generation of media when guesstimated viewership / readership was literally the only metric that anyone cared about.
And those were apparently the good old days.
Short Version: Ancillary Revenue Streams.
I have no numbers to support this, but here’s the short version of my latest theory:
For every ancillary revenue stream (ad, etc) that interrupts or detracts from the experience of your product, there is a reduction in future users / customers that invalidates the profit from said ancillary revenue stream.
An example is pirated film downloads as a response to unskippable DVD adverts.
I have no proof. But it definitely feels like I’m on to something here.
