If you read a site and care about its well being, then you should not block ads (or you subscribe to sites like Ars that offer ads-free versions of the site). If a site has advertising you don't agree with, don't go there. I think it is far better to vote with page views than to show up and consume resources without giving anything in return. I think in some ways the Internet and its vast anonymity feeds into a culture where many people do not think about the people, the families, the careers that go into producing a website. People talk about how annoying advertisments are, but I'll tell you what: it's a lot more annoying and frustrating to have to cut staff and cut benefits because a huge portion of readers block ads. Yet I've seen that happen at dozens of great sites over the last few years, Ars included.
They also ran an interesting little experiment: for those running ad blockers, they also blocked the content.
I was watching The Perfect Storm on The Weather Channel the other night and witnessed the worst cut to commercial in the history of television.
If you're not familiar with the film, this is *the* scene in the movie, the climax...when this huge wave overwhelms the Andrea Gail and all souls are lost at sea. Bravo, Weather Channel. Next time, have somebody view the movie before you chop it up randomly for ads.
Update:This one might be worse. With about two minutes remaining in extra time of a 0-0 match between Everton and Liverpool, ITV cut away to commercial and back just in time...to see the players celebrating the winning goal. I think "wankers!" is the appropriate response here.
This cut to commercial during Battlestar Galactica (spoilers! or so I'm told) is pretty bad as well. (thx, michael & gerald)
The banners, measuring just a few centimetres across, seem to be causing the beleaguered flies a bit of piloting trouble. The weight keeps the flies at a lower altitude and forces them to rest more often, which is a stroke of genius on the part of the marketing creatives: the flies end up at about eye level, and whenever a fly is forced to land and recover, the banner is clearly visible. What's more, the zig-zagging of the fly naturally attracts the attention because of its rapid movement.
One marketing creative's stroke of genius is another person's animal cruelty.
Update: The audio clip used in that commercial might not be Whitman after all. From the inbox:
The Walt Whitman recording that is being used by the Levi's commercial that you posted on the 28th is actually not Whitman, and is now considered by most audio archivists to be a hoax.
More information about this most interesting recording can be found in Vol. X, No. 3 of Allen Koenigsberg's Antique Phonograph Monthly magazine from 1992, pages 9-11.
Among things pointed out, one is that the speech on the soundtrack ends with the quote, "Freedom Law and Love," whereas the original printed version of the poem ends with "Chair'd in the adamant of Time."
Koenigsberg also points out that Whitman's last years were chronicled on a daily basis by his personal secretary, and being wheelchair-bound, such a visit for Whitman would have been difficult, unprecedented, and undoubtedly noted.
The MTA is trying to sell the naming rights to the Atlantic Ave subway stop in Brooklyn to Barclays, a London bank. If approved, other rights may be sold as well. Yes, let's make the NYC subway even more confusing than it already is, although I'm sure the MTA will come up with some reason that cramming "Domino's® Breadbowl Pasta™ Station" onto a map makes more sense than "23rd Street".
On the other hand, a casual study of the NYC subway map reveals the following brand names already in use:
Rockefeller Center
Columbia University
JFK Airport
Museum of Natural History
Lincoln Center
Hunter College
Yankee Stadium
Aqueduct Racetrack
Times Square
Herald Square
NY Aquarium
World Trade Center
Brooklyn Museum
Mets
But, without exception, station names are derived from nearby landmarks: streets, airports, schools, stadiums, squares, parks, etc.
Usually when you belong to some kind of ad network, you're eventually asked to pester your readers with some sort of survey that attempts to gauge what sorts of eyeballs are reading your site. The Deck has never asked me to do this and still hasn't...but I ran across The Deck Ad Network Readership Survey on SimpleBits this morning and if I were you, I completely wouldn't mind taking it. The survey questions include:
7. If you were to become romantically involved with a typeface, which one would it be? 15. Where are you, emotionally speaking? 24. What would you say is your greatest weakness?
How to look at billboards, a commentary on outdoor advertising by advertising man Howard Gossage from Harpers magazine in 1960. Gossage thought of billboards as an invasion of people's privacy.
Outdoor advertising is peddling a commodity it does not own and without the owner's permission: your field of vision. Possibly you have never thought to consider your rights in the matter. Nations put the utmost importance on unintentional violations of their air space. The individual's air space is intentionally violated by billboards every day of the year.
Eno is an antacid produced by GlaxoSmithKline. It's globally distributed, mainly across South America, India, and the Middle East, and it's available as sachets and tablets in both Lemon and an ambiguous "Regular" flavor.
Ogilvy & Mather produced a stunning print advertisement for the company, featuring a gun made of food. Quite an improvement over Eno's commercial from the 80s, although if the packets made me seem as effervescent as the actor, perhaps I'd take some on my down days.
In sponsoring the feed, you get the chance to promote your company or product in a short post that will appear in the feed. A sponsor "thank you" note will also be posted to the front page of the site. Your message will reach an estimated 110,000+ RSS subscribers.
One of the oldest jokes in the business is that when a studio head takes over he's given three envelopes, the first of which contains the advice "Fire the head of marketing." Nowadays, though, former marketers, such as Oren Aviv, at Disney, and Marc Shmuger, at Universal, often run the studios. "Studios now are pimples on the ass of giant conglomerates," one studio's president of production says. "So at green-light meetings it's a bunch of marketing and sales guys giving you educated guesses about what a property might gross. No one is saying, 'This director was born to make this movie.'"
I've seen similar articles in the past and the thing that always strikes me about the people who make movies is a) how much they love movies and b) how little they care about actually making good movies that people will love. So cynical.
All humans are 99.9% genetically identical, so don't even think of ending any potential relationship begun here with 'I just don't think we have enough in common'. Science has long since proven that I am the man for you (41, likes to be referred to as 'Wing Commander' in the bedroom).
Update: There's an entire book of personals from the London Book Review called They Call Me Naughty Lola that the Guardian writer didn't mention. (thx, rj)
Go on, see if this T-Mobile commercial doesn't make you smile. They did a good job in making it look organic and building to greater and greater coordination. Great commercial...it shows exactly what mobile phones are for.
Come to think of it, it's amazing that nobody's made a major documentary about the advertising business before. Are some phenomena just so powerful and ubiquitous we stop thinking about them? Now acclaimed doc-maker Doug Pray goes inside the ever-revolutionary world of post-'60s advertising, profiling such legendary figures as [Dan] Wieden ("Just do it"), Hal Riney ("It's morning in America") and Cliff Freeman ("Where's the beef?") and inquiring where the boundaries lie between art, salesmanship and brainwashing.
Somewhat related to that is The September Issue, which follows the creation of Vogue magazine's September issue. You know, the one packed with hundreds of pages of advertising.
You-are-there documentarian R.J. Cutler ("The War Room," etc.) takes us inside the creation of Vogue's annual and enormous September issue, which possesses quasi-biblical status in the fashion world. Granted full access to editorial meetings, photo shoots and Fashion Week events by Vogue editor Anna Wintour, Cutler spent nine months at Vogue, documenting a monumental process that more closely resembles a political campaign or a sports team's season than the publication of a single magazine.
"Don't forget..." is a street art project that consists of Photoshop palettes pasted over heavily airbrushed advertising in a metro station in Berlin. (thx, phil)
Sea Orchestra is a nice animated commercial for United Airlines done by Shy the Sea. As lovely as it is, the "making of" video -- which reveals reference materials, initial sketches, and storyboards -- might be even better. (thx, dave)
And then there's the self-created interview ad that is a product of recent advances in technology. Camcorders that can be taken anywhere. We've seen self-reporting from the Iraq War and video diaries created by soldiers. The photographs and videos from Abu Ghraib are part of this phenomenon. Ultimately, video-blogging and self-reporting finds its expression in campaigns like the "Joe the Plumber." As I understand it, the McCain campaign has posted on its Web pages a request for people to film themselves and discuss why they are Joe the Plumber or Hank the Laminator or Frank the Painter. The intention is to collect these testimonials and then cut them together for a tax revolt television ad.
Hear ye! I'm trying something new on kottke.org. Sponsorships of kottke.org's RSS feed are now available on a weekly basis. Sponsorships are exclusive and begin next week. If you're interested, check out the sponsorship page for details and get in touch.
P.S. The feed sponsorship idea was borrowed from John Gruber's Daring Fireball. I'd urge you to head on over to check out his sponsorship opportunities, but the DF feed is fully booked through the end of the year. (!!)
P.S.2. Advertising on the site proper continues to be handled expertly by The Deck. If you'd like to advertise on the site, read up on your options there.
From The Living Room Candidate, a site which houses presidential campaign commercials from 1952-present, comes a 1960 commercial for John F. Kennedy. How the ad positions Kennedy reminds me of the delicate fusion that Barack Obama is attempting with his relative newness to politics and readiness for the job.
Do you want a man for President who's seasoned through and through but not so doggoned seasoned that he won't try something new? A man who's old enough to know and young enough to do...
What a great ad...I wish they still made 'em like this. You may remember seeing this on Mad Men.
After a couple of teasers starring Jerry Seinfeld, Microsoft is airingsome new ads that take Apple's "I'm a PC" out into the real world. So instead of John Hodgman's dorky PC character (who is parodied in one of the new ads), they've got all sorts of people -- basketball players, actresses, scientists, fashion designers, etc. -- proudly declaring "I'm a PC". As Michael Sippey mentions, the ads do communicate a "message of joy and abundance and widespread use of Personal Computing", but they're not "great".
I briefly worked for a design firm in the late 90s that did a lot of advertising work. One of the hard and fast rules in the office -- which was taken from a book written by a successful ad man whose name I cannot recall -- was that if a company was #1 in a certain space, their advertising should never ever mention the competition, not even in an oblique fashion. And even if a company was #2, they should do the same and act as if they were #1.
That's the problem with Microsoft's ads. They're still #1 and the bigger company, but by referencing Apple's successful ad campaign, they're acting like Apple is #1. (John Gruber made this same point the other day.) The ads fail because they serve to remind people that Apple comes up with good ideas that Microsoft then takes and shapes into something that so-called "normal people" can use or understand. Except that this isn't 1993. With the iPod, iPhone, iMac, OS X, the Apple Stores, and the iTunes Store, Apple has their finger firmly on the pulse of what normal people want and Microsoft's recent attempts (the Zune, Vista) to keep up by emulating Apple have failed. If MS had created the "I'm a PC" message on their own, the ads would be great, but these copy-and-paste ads lack soul and are merely "eh".
What's interesting is that with the I'm a Mac/I'm a PC ads, Apple mentions Microsoft explicitly, over and over, proving the old adage that rules are made to be broken. What works in Apple's favor is that they are the #2 company and were clever about how they attacked #1. Microsoft's hamfisted ads are almost saying to Apple, "nuh-uh, my mom thinks I'm cool" while the image of Hodgman's frumpy PC is hard to shake and makes Windows seem lame without being overly insulting about it.
But perhaps most rare for fashion photography, Teller's pictures are absolutely never retouched. "I'm interested in the person I photograph," he says. "The world is so beautiful as it is, there's so much going on which is sort of interesting. It's just so crazy, so why do I have to put some retouching on it? It's just pointless to me."
And then there's this anecdote. After a bad encounter with a subject who didn't like how old she looked in Teller's photographs, he went to see his friend Charlotte Rampling.
Despondent, Teller called his friend Rampling, who offered to cook him dinner. They talked about how it feels to be photographed, and how it feels to age. "I just thought, Fuck this, I'm going to photograph myself," he says. And then there the two of them were, in the Louis XV suite of the Hotel de Crillon, with Teller way too fat to fit into any of the Marc Jacobs samples save one terribly shiny pair of silver shorts.
"I thought, Fuck," Teller says, "I don't even fucking fit into these clothes. I'm really fucking stuck now."
So he pulled on the shorts in the bathroom. "I came out and I had my socks on and I had these shorts on and no top, and I just said, 'Ta-da!' And she said, 'Oh my God. What are we going to do?' And I said, 'Well, I don't know. But really, honestly'-and I could hardly bring it out of my mouth-I said, 'I just want to kiss you and fondle your breasts.' And she didn't say a word. She just leaned back in her armchair and went into her handbag and got a cigarillo out and lit it and the air was thick and I was mortified. And then she sort of dragged on her cigarette and said, 'Okay. Let's start. I'll tell you when to stop.'"
We're going to begin this project with a look at the country's golden age of book advertisements, which ran from roughly 1962-73. Why those dates? The books - and the ads for them - were terrific: fresh, pushy, serious and wry, often all at the same time. There was a new sense of electricity in the culture and in the book world.
The authors featured include Alice Walker, Cormac McCarthy, Joan Didion, Toni Morrison, and Susan Sontag.
Then the CEO [of Krystal Restaurants] turns to me, ignoring everyone else, and asks me to take out my wallet. He asks me how much money I have. I count about $150, and tell him so. He smiles, looks me squarely in the eye, and asks: "Would you spend your last $150 on this shit?"
The rest of the story involves me telling him to take out his own wallet and me swearing I'd spend not only my money but all of his. And we did. We spent all of Krystal's money, millions of dollars. We made second-rate advertising, and they had second-rate stores with really second-rate hamburgers. We deserved each other.
Jesus God in heaven! Not until I know I'm not wasting my time! From the minute Don launched his this-meeting-is-over bluff, I was on the edge of my seat, and my lovely wife Dorothy will tell you that I literally clapped my hands at that line. For me, this sequence is as close to pornography as I ever get to see on basic cable.
Alright, uncle, I give, I give. I will try and find some time in my schedule to watch this show.
Last night I was watching a rerun of Family Guy on TBS and right before the show went to commercial, this happened:
See what they did there? They paused the TV show, ran a little mini-commercial for some show that no one cares about, and then returned to the last two seconds of the segment before going to commercial. Jesus Christ. I realize that Time Warner doesn't actually care about the people who watch their shows and that television programs are just the networks' way of getting people to watch advertising, but this is too much. Do these things actually work or just piss people off in droves? Is there some marketing hot dog at Time Warner who thinks that Family Guy viewers want to watch the blue collar comedy stylings of Bill Engvall? I'm sorry that the DVR is ruining your business model, but can you kick the bucket a little more gracefully? (Digg this?)
In commercials for Domino's Pizza, the chain's employees wage a never ending battle against the Noid, a gremlin who delays deliveries and carries a gun that can turn a pizza ice cold. Many viewers are amused by the Noid, Domino's says, but one of them took the advertising campaign personally. Last week Kenneth Noid, 22, walked into a Domino's Pizza shop in Chamblee, Ga., with a .357 Magnum revolver and took two employees hostage. When police arrived, he demanded $100,000 in cash, a getaway car and a copy of The Widow's Son, a 1985 novel about secret societies in an 18th century Parisian prison.
All Noid got was the pizza he ordered. After a five-hour siege, the two employees slipped away and Noid gave himself up. According to police, Noid has "psychological problems" and believes that he has an "ongoing dispute with Tom Monaghan," the head of the Detroit-based Domino's chain.
Fashion photo retouching (i.e. high-brow Photoshopping) gets the New Yorker treatment with this story on retoucher Pascal Dangin, one of the best in the business.
In the March issue of Vogue Dangin tweaked a hundred and forty-four images: a hundred and seven advertisements (Estée Lauder, Gucci, Dior, etc.), thirty-six fashion pictures, and the cover, featuring Drew Barrymore. To keep track of his clients, he assigns three-letter rubrics, like airport codes. Click on the current-jobs menu on his computer: AFR (Air France), AMX (American Express), BAL (Balenciaga), DSN (Disney), LUV (Louis Vuitton), TFY (Tiffany & Co.), VIC (Victoria's Secret).
The article touches too briefly on the tension between reality and what ends up in the magazines and advertisements. As Errol Morris points out on his photography blog, it is often difficult to find truth in even the most vérité of photographs. Even so, the truth seems to be completely absent from Madonna's recent photo spread in Vanity Fair that was retouched by Dangin, especially this one in which a 50-year-old Madonna looks like a recent college graduate who's never lifted a weight in her life.
The uncanny valley comes into play here, which we usually think of in terms of robots, cartoon characters, and other pseudo anthropomorphic characters attempting and failing to look sufficiently human and therefore appearing creepy and scary. With an increasing amount of photo retouching, postproduction in film, plastic surgery, and increasingly effective makeup & skin care products, we're being bombarded with a growing amount of imagery featuring people who don't appear naturally human. People who appear often in media (film & tv stars, models, cable news anchors & reporters, miscellaneous celebrities, etc.) are creeping down into the uncanny valley to meet up with characters from The Polar Express. I don't know about you but a middle-aged Madonna made to look 24 gives me the heebie-jeebies. Perhaps the familar uncanny valley graph needs revision:
The Deck is a smallish ad network that handles the advertising for kottke.org, which consists of an unobtrusive high-quality advertisement in the sidebar of each page of the site. The Deck recently moved to a spiffy new domain and is no longer so smallish; the network now includes 29 sites.
The idea for SA is to move beyond an increasingly commoditized blog publishing software business, and into adding advertising, design, implementation, development and site optimization services to bloggers and companies.
The Droste effect is when a product's packaging features the packaging itself.
At my grocery store I could only find three examples: Land O'Lakes Butter, Morton Salt and Cracker Jacks. These packages each include a picture of the package itself and are often cited by writers discussing such pop-math-arcana as recursion, strange loops, self-similarity, and fractals. This particular phenomenon, known as the "Droste effect," is named after a 1904 package of Droste brand cocoa. The mathematical interest in these packaging illustrations is their implied infinity. If the resolution of the printing process -- (and the determination and eyesight of the illustrator) -- were not limiting factors, it would go on forever. A package with in a package within a package... Like Russian dolls.
At first, the idea was to shoot on different mediums -- camera phone, 8-millimeter, 16-millimeter (the eventual choice), security footage. My idea was the city was watching me. The genesis was a lot of people film me or take a picture of me in the city on cellphones. If it's such an appetite to see me do normal things, it was an idea to do something people like.
The NY Times launches TimesMachine, an alternate look into their vast online archive. It's basically an interface into every single page of the newspaper from Sep 18, 1851 to Dec 30, 1922. The advertising on these old pages is fascinating.
Update: For whatever reason, the Times has taken TimesMachine offline.
I'm not sure that the graphic design community as a whole is paying any attention to this. I don't see very many speakers from the advertising community invited to speak at design conferences (except for the very few who lead branding groups at agencies and in some circles they are still considered the enemy). I don't read about it on design blogs, and I'm not seeing books published about it. I'm not seeing advertising, in any form, turn up in any design museum exhibitions, not at the Modern, not at the Cooper-Hewitt. The Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum has an annual designer award category for Communication Design and I've never seen an advertising person nominated since the award's inception.
"If society is ready to embrace a trend, almost anyone can start one--and if it isn't, then almost no one can," Watts concludes. To succeed with a new product, it's less a matter of finding the perfect hipster to infect and more a matter of gauging the public's mood. Sure, there'll always be a first mover in a trend. But since she generally stumbles into that role by chance, she is, in Watts's terminology, an "accidental Influential."
Perhaps the problem with viral marketing is that the disease metaphor is misleading. Watts thinks trends are more like forest fires: There are thousands a year, but only a few become roaring monsters. That's because in those rare situations, the landscape was ripe: sparse rain, dry woods, badly equipped fire departments. If these conditions exist, any old match will do. "And nobody," Watts says wryly, "will go around talking about the exceptional properties of the spark that started the fire."
Gelf Magazine, curators of always-entertaining Blurb Racket, list their picks for the worst blurbs used by movie advertisements in 2007. For instance, in reference to Live Free or Die Hard, film critic Jack Mathews actually said "the action in this fast-paced, hysterically overproduced and surprisingly entertaining film is as realistic as a Road Runner cartoon" but was quoted by 20th Century Fox as saying that the movie was "hysterically ... entertaining".
Advertising will get more and more targeted until it disappears, because perfectly targeted advertising is just information. There's little point in saying something until the time is right, then you just have to say it once, and the idea takes over and does all the work.
That sounds overly optimistic to me but there's definitely something of substance there.
Remember Dove's Evolution video of a fashion model going from drab to fabulous with the help of makeup and Photoshop? They've got a new video out called Onslaught in which we see the barrage of images that are directed at young girls each day. BTW, Dove's parent company makes all sorts of products that may contibute to the problem that Dove is attacking here. (via debbie millman)
No more Times Select. The NY Times finally admits what everyone else knew two years ago and stops charging for their content. Additionally, all content from 1987 to the present and from 1851 to 1922 will be offered free of charge.
What changed, The Times said, was that many more readers started coming to the site from search engines and links on other sites instead of coming directly to NYTimes.com.
How did that change not happen for the Times when it happened to the entire rest of the web 3-4 years ago?
Digg policies from Lifehacker and Gizmodo, which state that the only Digg-worthy posts of theirs are those with "original content, new reporting, treatment, or photos" because "it's not fair when we get the Digg for someone else's work." This seems inconsistent on the part of Gawker Media. One of their main innovations (if you'd like to call it that) regarding the blog format was the idea of linking to things in such a way that readers don't need to actually leave the site to get the full (or nearly full) story. Why let all those readers (and the associated ad revenue) go to some other site to read the story...they might never return. Due in part to Gawker's influence as first mover in the pro blog space, this practice is unfortunately standard procedure for most similar blogs.
Big-seed marketing. Instead of relying purely on viral marketing or mass media marketing alone, big-seed marketing combines the two approaches so that a large initial audience spreads the marketing message to a secondary audience, yielding more overall interest than either approach would have by itself, even if the message isn't that contagious. "Because big-seed marketing harnesses the power of large numbers of ordinary people, its success does not depend on influentials or on any other special individuals; thus, managers can dispense with the probably fruitless exercise of predicting how, or through whom, contagious ideas will spread."
I really like those UPS whiteboard commercials. Turns out the actor is the creative director for the campaign, Errol Morris directed them, and the music in the ads is by The Postal Service.
Hip-Hop Pop-Up combines pop-up web advertising with product mentions in hip-hop songs. "For example, at 2 minutes and 38 seconds into the song Big Poppa when Puffy asks Biggie, 'How ya livin Biggie Smallz?' his reply, 'In mansion and Benz's Givin ends to my friends and it feels stupendous' would then pop-up the URL www.mercedes-benz.com." To try it out, be sure to disable your browser's pop-up blocking first. (thx, jonah)
Chicago chef Homaro Cantu talks a bit more about his plans for edible advertising. "You open up a magazine, there's a small plastic thing in there, and you rip it open. It looks like a cheeseburger, tastes like a cheeseburger, it's made from all organic ingredients." The ads will also be allergen-free and may contain a bit of fluoride to help keep your teeth clean. (via seriouseats)
Interview with Gretchen Ludwig about her dressing room photography. She started the project after she noticed her anti-advertising, anti-corporation self buying a lot of clothes from big corporations that advertise a lot. "The dressing room is not only a very private space, but it is also a space where consumers make most of their decisions. And it's also mostly void of extraneous marketing 'noise.' You don't have the trendy atmosphere, you don't have the pressure of others watching and judging you."
On the gentle art of selling yourself, confidence, and first impressions. "It is said that we are all three different people: the person we think we are (the one we have invented), the person other people think we are (the impression we make) and the person we think other people think we are (the one we fret about). You could say it would be a lifetime's quest to reconcile this battling trinity into a seamless whole."
Daniel Gilbert on the annoying new practice of advertising objects that cry wolf. "In an advertising campaign that began last week, Nissan left 20,000 sets of keys in bars, stadiums, concert halls and other public venues. Each key ring has a tag that says: 'If found, please do not return. My next generation Nissan Altima has Intelligent Key with push-button ignition, and I no longer need these.'" How long before these ads train us not to do anything nice for anyone for fear of being messaged at?
Update: Additional information from my inbox: "Thank you for pointing out that Food Network one frame commercial! They do this _all the time_ and the technique was driving me batty: not only is it annoying, I didn't know if anybody noticed/cared. There is at least one other channel (either HGTV or TLC) that does that exact same thing." (thx, alex)
Update:Michael Buffington writes: "You sure the single frame ad isn't a case of local market cable ads getting dropped onto the national feed? When I had cable, I'd see this all the time. A single frame for some well known brand suddenly hijacked by Cal Worthington and his 500 used cars."
More on the craptacular "Our Country" Chevrolet commercials. The new ones, not mentioned in this article or on Slate, with images of exclusively white, male, heterosexual truck lovers, are possibly even worse. "This is our country...no chicks, homos, Mexicans, or black people welcome."
Fuck, this pisses me off: the New Yorker is splitting up their longer pieces into multiple pages (for example: Ben McGrath's article on YouTube). I know, everyone else does it and it's some sort of "best practice" that we readers let them get away with so they can boost pageviews and advertising revenue at the expense of user experience, but The New Yorker was the last bastion of good behavior on this issue and I loved them for it. This is a perfect example of an architecture of control in design and uninnovation. I want the New Yorker's web site to get better, not worse. Blech and BOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!
Every week, I get 3 or 4 inquiries from people looking for jobs in the web design/technology area or for employees (happily, it's more the latter than the former these days). When I hear about someone who needs some work done and I have a friend or friend of a friend who's available, I'm glad to make the connection. For the past couple of years, I've wanted to build a job board for kottke.org to make more of these connections possible, but I never got around to it. So when Jason Fried asked me if I wanted to put a link to the simple, focused 37signals Job Board on kottke.org (you'll find it on every page of the site, below The Deck ad), that seemed to be the next best thing to building my own. I've been referring people there anyway, so a stronger connection makes sense.
Clever McDonald's sundial billboard. "The billboard features a real sundial whose shadow falls on a different breakfast item each hour until noon, when the shadow of the McDonald's arches are dead center."
Marketing can be a double-edged sword. The companies who manufacture these products have done a fantastic job in marketing these products, so fantastic in some cases that the brand name is in danger of becoming a genericized trademark. From the list above, I routinely use Ziploc, Kleenex, WD-40, and Windex to refer to the generic versions of those products, even though we sometimes use Glad products instead of Ziploc, Puffs instead of Kleenex, or another glass cleaner instead of Windex. If the companies on this list aren't careful, they could lose the trademarked products that they've worked so hard to market so successfully.
Here's a list of American proprietary eponyms, or brand names that have fallen into general use. Some of the names on the list are so old or in such common use (escalator, popsicle) that I didn't even know they had been brands. Two current brands I can think of that might be in danger of genericide: iPod and Google. (via rw)
Spotted this on my walk to the office this morning:
If you can't tell, it's a bus covered with laundry. This had to be an advertisement for something (MTA employees aren't that eccentric) and after a little poking around online, I found out it's part of All's "Spot the Bus" sweepstakes:
From May 15th to 26th, two all small & mighty buses covered in clothes will cruise the streets of New York City. When you see one, send a text message of the time and location to 96787. You'll be entered in the Spot the Bus Sweepstakes.
If you'd like to take part without actually spotting the bus or even living in NYC (and have a chance at winning $5000), I took the above photo at 10:41am near 14th Street and 10th Ave in Manhattan. Good luck!
As part of their "simplicity" ad campaign, Philips is paying Time Inc to put the table of contents in some of their magazines on page 1 (the TOC is typically further into the magazine in a more irritating position). It's funny that there was concern about this type of advertising affecting the layout of the magazine (in the editorial/sales wall sort of way) when the whole idea of pushing the TOC to page 10 or 20 is to accomodate advertising in the first place.
Functionally, this means that a small ad (120x90 pixels) accompanied by a bit of text will appear on (nearly) every single page of the site beginning May 1. If you've been paying any sort of attention over the past few years, you know I'm not a big fan of advertising and putting ads on kottke.org was almost the last thing on my mind. From the perspective of the reader/viewer, ads are often pushy, irrelevant, redundant, deceitful, insipid, or just plain poorly done. But advertising can also be useful when it communicates clearly, is relevant to its audience, doesn't attempt to mislead, and lets the product/service in question sell itself. An artfully done advertisement can raise the boats of all concerned: the advertiser sells more products, the reader/viewer is informed of useful or appealing products and services, and the content provider is able to feed and clothe her family.
In the past few years, mechanisms for the delivery of advertising have evolved outside the purview of traditional advertising agencies. Two of the better efforts I've seen are Google's AdSense (simple, straightforward, highly relevant (most of the time anyway)) and small ad networks like The Deck (high quality, considered, relevant). For instance, here's The Deck's policy on accepting ads:
We're picky about the advertising we'll accept. We won't take an ad unless we have paid for and/or used the product or service. Sell us something relevant to our audience and we'll sell you an ad.
That's a pretty sweet deal for advertisers and readers alike. In the past, I've dismissed advertising without experiencing it from the perspective of the content provider. By giving The Deck a go on kottke.org, I hope to gain a better understanding of the issue and fulfill my desire to keep doing kottke.org as a (nearly) full-time endeavor.
The delicate marketing of Brokeback Mountain. In Manhattan for example, analysis of the city's various social microclimates was used to select the opening theaters to de-emphasize the art-house aspect of the film. (via dj)
Very high on the list of things that don't need to be advertised is Tetris. Chances are you remember this Tetris commercial from the 80s anyway. "Use your thumbs, use your eyes, find yourself Tetrisized!"
I was wondering much the same thing as Michael re: iTunes phoning home with your listening history. Isn't that what we want? Our software watching and making recommendations for us...isn't that helpful? Providing better, more targetted advertising (if we have to have advertising, it should be useful)? There are privacy concerns and companies should be clearer about what's going on, but I don't mind if the software I use is a little smarter.
What business are movie theaters in? The fast-food business, the advertising business, or the movie exhibition business? All three, but they take the movie exhibition business the least seriously.
Dooce puts ads on her site to feed her family (she's supporting them *entirely* by writing her personal web site) and gets an earful of complaint in return. Thought this was particularly insightful about why no subscription fees or donations instead: "By using ads I'm making my livelihood my problem and no one else's." I'm not sure if that's strictly true, but it resonated a lot with me.
The Army's Be All You Can Be ads don't really work all that well, despite being the 25th largest advertiser in the US. Recruiting is actually correlated more closely with the economy...the economy goes bad and the number of recruits goes up. Here's a better way to spend that ad money: give it to incoming recruits as bonuses...the same strategy Amazon uses in offering free shipping to customers rather than spending that money on TV ads. (thx garrick)
I quite enjoyed Sagmeister's presentation on happiness...where else but a design conference would you find a talk on that topic?[1] Early in, he suggested that visualizing happiness with design is easy (photos of someone laughing or a smiley face will do it) but that creating design that provokes happiness in the viewer is something else entirely. He then shared three designs that have made him happy recently:
Omnivisu. Richard The and Willy Sengewald constructed a kiosk in Berlin with video cameras inside. When you look into the kiosk through the viewfinder (very much like peering into a pair of binoculars), the cameras record your eyes and beam the video to a nearby location where the images are projected onto a building which rather looks like it's got a head. When you blink into the kiosk, the building's head blinks also.
Ji Lee pastes empty speech bubbles over advertisements on the streets of Manhattan, people often fill them in, and Lee returns to photograph the results.
Sagmeister wrapped up his talk with a list of things he has learned and how he's used that list in a recent series of projects:
"everything i do always comes back to me"
"trying to look good limits my life"
"everybody thinks they are right"
"money does not make me happy"
"thinking life will be better in the future is stupid. i have to live now"
"complaining is silly. act or forget."
"having guts always works out for me"
"Complaining is silly..." is my favorite, both as advice and his implementation of the design. A few of these are in this video shot by Hillman Curtis.
One of the pre-conference events was a talk at Fenway Park followed by a tour of the ballpark. Janet Marie Smith, VP of planning and development for the Sox, kicked things off with how the team (especially the new management) works really hard to preserve the essential character of Fenway while at the same time trying to upgrade the park (and keep it from getting torn down). She talked about the advertisements added to the Green Monster, which was actually not a purely commercial move but a throwback to a time when the Monster was actually covered with ads.
Lots of talk and awareness of experience design...the Red Sox folks in particular kept referring to the "experience" of the park. One of the speakers (can't recall who, might have been Jim Dow) talked about how other ballparks are becoming places where only people who can afford $100 tickets can go to the games and what that does to the team's fan base. With Fenway, they're trying to maintain a variety of ticket prices to keep the diversity level high...greater diversity makes for a better crowd and a better fan base and is quite appropriate for Boston (and New England in general), which has always been an area with vibrant blue collar and blue blood classes.
Janet also referred to the "accidental" design of the park. Like many other urban ballparks built in the late 19th/early 20th centuries, the placement of the streets constrained the design of Fenway and made it rather an odd shape....these days larger plots are selected where those types of restraints are removed. And over time, the game has changed, the needs of the fans have changed, and the fire codes have changed and the park has changed with the times. In the dead ball era, the walls of the stadium weren't for hitting home runs over; their sole function was to keep people on the street for catching the game for free, so the Fenway outfield ran over 500 feet in right field -- practically all the way to the street -- where there's now 30 rows of seats. Jim Holt observed that American butts have gotten bigger so bigger seats are called for. Fire codes helped that change along as well...wooden seats, bleachers, and overcrowding are no longer a large part of the Fenway experience (save for the wooden seats under the canopy).
The design talk continued on the tour of the park. Our guide detailed how ballparks are built around specific ballplayers. Yankee Stadium was the house that Ruth built but it was also seemingly (but not literally) built for him with a short trip for his home run balls to the right field wall. Boston added a bullpen to make the right field shorter for Ted Williams. Barry Bonds does very well at PacBell/SBC/WhateverItsCalledTheseDays Park. And more than that, the design of Fenway also dictated for a long time the type of team that they could field, which had some bearing on how they did generally. Players who played well in Fenway (i.e. could hit fly balls off of the Monster in left) often didn't do so well in other parks and the team's away record suffered accordingly.
Dear The Onion, please stop paginating your stories. I know you're trying to increase your ad real estate, but it's annoying to have to click to read more, especially on shorter stories. From now on, when I link to stuff like this excellent Errol Morris interview, it's going to be to the handy one-page print version with zero ads. NY Times, Salon, WaPo, Wired News, that goes double for you.
A list of cliches in advertising, including "tortilla chips are the most exciting experience any group of young people can experience". The list is UK-centric, but still pretty good.
Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and the other big search engine companies aren't public utilities - they're money-making, for-profit enterprises. It's time to stop thinking of search engines as a common resource to be nurtured, and start thinking of them as just another business to compete with or cooperate with as best suits your individual needs.
I love the idea that after more than 10 years of serious corporate interest in the Web that it's still up to all of us and our individual decisions. The search engines in particular are based on our collective action; they watch and record the trails left as we scatter the Web with our thoughts, commerce, conversations, and connections.
Me? I tend to think I need Google to be as good a search engine as it can be and if I can help in some small way, I'm going to. As corny as it sounds, I tend to think of the sites I frequent as my neighborhood. If the barista at Starbucks is sick for a day, I'm not going to jump behind the counter and start making lattes, but if there's a bit of litter on the stoop of the restaurant on the corner, I might stop to pick it up. Or if I see some punk slipping a candy bar into his pocket at the deli, I may alert the owner because, well, why should I be paying for that guy's free candy bar every time I stop in for a soda?
Sure those small actions help those particular businesses, but they also benefit the neighborhood as a whole and, more importantly, the neighborhood residents. If I were the owner of a business like O'Reilly Media, I'd be concerned about making Google or Yahoo less useful because that would make it harder for my employees and customers to find what they're looking for (including, perhaps, O'Reilly products and services). As Greg said, the Web is still largely what we make of it, so why not make it a good Web?
Ok, bad first question since it seems unlikely that Nelson and Google would write up this application just to have a few laughs. So here's a better question: where's the prior art on this? The patent was filed on 12/31/2003. I floated the idea of embedding advertising into RSS ads in October 2002 and there was prior art then. But Google's patent application covers "targeted ads" in a "syndicated, e.g., RSS, presentation format in an automated manner". Curiously, I believe this is already covered by an older Google patent, filed in 12/2002:
The relevance of advertisements to a user's interests is improved. In one implementation, the content of a web page is analyzed to determine a list of one or more topics associated with that web page. An advertisement is considered to be relevant to that web page if it is associated with keywords belonging to the list of one or more topics. One or more of these relevant advertisements may be provided for rendering in conjunction with the web page or related web pages.
That's Google AdSense in a nutshell: inserting targeted ads into web documents in an automated manner. So what is it about RSS/Atom files that make them different than plain old web pages and hence not covered under the 2002 AdSense patent? Nothing. This vocabulary of "feeds" and "syndication" is still misleading. RSS/Atom files, especially as they are described in the 12/2003 patent application, are XML files that sit on a web server waiting for someone with a web browser to come along to read them, just like XHTML files:
So, people access documents written in a markup language that have been published on a Web server with a software application. If this seems familiar to you, it should. It's called Web browsing and has nothing to do with syndication. RSS readers and newsreaders are just specialized Web browsers...
The 12/2003 application tries to explain the difference between HTML pages and "syndicated content formats" thusly:
Syndicated content, unlike web pages which are normally stored in an HTML format, are often stored and presented in what may be described as a syndicated content format. Syndicated content formats are often XML (eXtended Markup Language) based and include structured representations of content such as news articles, search results, and web log entries. Syndicated content formats are primarily intended for providing syndicated information, e.g., news headlines, weblogs, etc. in a structured format such as a list of items, with another device, e.g., a user device, usually controlling the ultimate presentation format of the items in the list. This is in contrast to HTML which usually includes a fair amount of presentation and formatting information within an HTML document such as a web page.
That's a pretty weak explanation and sounds a lot like what a web browser (the "user device" that controls the presentation) does with XHTML files (XML-based files without a "fair amount of presentation and formatting information"). It sounds to me like Google already has this covered with their previous patent.
[Long aside: Does the prior art of embedding AdSense ads in XHTML files invalidate this patent? Patents are tricky because they don't cover ideas, they cover specific implementations of ideas. While the 12/2003 application states that "said syndicated format is an XML compliant format" it also specifies that "said syndicated format is a format for listing items corresponding to a channel, said received information including a listing of at least two items and including for each item, a title and a link". That is, the XML files they're talking about have to be RSS/Atom-ish in nature. This doesn't rule out XHTML files in theory, but it does rule out many of them in practice.
But the really tricky part with these software patents is that the implementations of ideas are written so broadly that they might as well be patents of the ideas themselves. If you look at it that way (the patent-holding companies certainly seem willing to litigate on that basis), Google has already embedded automated, targeted advertising into XML-based files. According to news.com, Google launched their AdSense service in June 2003. When the first AdSense advertisement was embedded in an XHTML file soon after that, well, there's your prior art on the very thing that Google attempted to patent 6 months later.]
Delettering the public space. "In a remarkable display of cooperation for the sake of art, every store on a popular shopping street in Vienna allowed their signage to be masked in yellow fluorescent foil."
On the art of the movie trailer. "There are few more cynical forms of art, or of advertising. Trailers are full of deception. Because what they want you to do is to see the movie they want you to see, not the movie that it is."
Is persuasion dead?. "Persuasion just isn't relevant to delivering elections or eyeballs. Pols have figured out that to get votes you don't need to change minds. Even when they want to, modern media make it hard."
Does advertising still work?. "In 1965, advertisers could reach eighty per cent of their most coveted viewers -- those between the ages of eighteen and forty-nine -- just by buying time on CBS, NBC, or ABC." Now it's a lot more difficult and expensive to do so.
