Finally a reason I might buy an iPad: Flipboard. Billed as your own personalized, social magazine, it gathers all of the social web content you care about into a single, pretty slick-looking application. Here’s an overview video.
Kind of a creepy video, though. Particularly when the half-asleep hipster dude tells me that Flipboard knows who my friends are. Reminds me of this.
You can download the app here. (P.S. Thanks to the nice people at Flipboard for sending me some press pics.)
A friend emailed me about an article entitled “Closing the Digital Frontier” in The Atlantic and wanted to get my reaction. Here’s what I wrote back:
I still believe the web is the modern day Wild Wild West; in fact, I call it that around the agency. What we’re seeing now is the adolescence of the Information Age. An equally awkward time for those who create content and those who sell it.
Here’s my take, from a media standpoint: the media (newspapers, magazines and to a much lesser extent broadcast) didn’t take the web seriously enough in its infancy. It was something “they” didn’t understand, and it was thus cast off. To be nice they called it “added value” to their offerings. Content was free, because that was fair market value for online content. Now they are trying to move to charge advertisers more and creating paid content sections for visitors.
The real problem is: how do you shift from an environment in which the content is free to one in which you charge for it?
Meanwhile, companies like Apple and Google were visionary enough to understand the coming seismic shift in consumer behavior. Apple and Google have figured out how to monetize the web, and it isn’t magical–they each basically framed a conduit to corral and distribute the massive amounts of content in an orderly fashion. This creates value. If I want a song, I go to iTunes. If I want anything else, I go to Google.
The move from free to fee is going to be interesting to watch. I suppose you could call the last fifteen years or so “product sampling,” but that’s probably a stretch.
Our pals and sometimes partners-in-awesomeness, Struck/Axiom, recently helped Gatorade with its new social media command center.
The mission-control-like room features large screens with various social media visualizations, such that Gatorade marketing pros can monitor real time conversations not only related to the brand but its competition, sports nutrition, athletes and other popular culture topics its consumers care about. Here’s a YouTube clip overview.
Carla Hassan, Gatorade’s Sr. Marketing Director, says the goal of this project is to “take the largest sports brand in the world and turn it into the largest participatory brand in the world.”
What Hassan is really talking about is an unprecedented level of brand engagement. Brands by their very nature are participatory. After all, brands are merely the aggregate of consumer perceptions, and these perceptions are shaped by consumers’ interactions or participation with a given brand.
The difference today is that people have social media which acts as an amplifier. Anyone can be a media source and build an audience. Smart brands understand that and embrace engagement.
Congrats to Struck/Axiom and Gatorade.
I don’t have an iPad yet. Reason one: Apple develops product in market. So an improved iPad will be out in a few months and will cost less. Reason two: I can’t figure out where it fits into my digital life. I have a MacBook. I have an iPhone. Why do I need an iPad?
That being said, Apple sold about 700,000 units yesterday when the device made its debut. So a few people, who presumably have laptops and smartphones, felt the device serves some purpose.
From the half dozen reviews I’ve read, iPad isn’t any good at making stuff. But it could change the way we consume stuff: books, magazines, newspapers, music, TV, movies, photos, the web and email.
There’s something innately attractive about the tactile nature of the iPhone and now the iPad. That, along with incredible industrial design and user interface. WSJ technology guru, Walt Mossberg, points out:
It could even help, eventually, to propel the finger-driven, multitouch user interface ahead of the mouse-driven interface that has prevailed for decades.
No question, media consumption will continue to evolve. And people who make media content, including advertisers, had better pay attention.
Just a heads up.
UPDATE Monday 4/5: Adweek ponders the iPad this morning. As does AdAge. Both good reads.
A small crew of Red Square kids hit San Francisco this week, and among other business, we had the good fortune to attend and participate in the 4A’s Transformation 2010 Conference. No question communications is experiencing a renaissance, as Arianna Huffington stated on the first day of the conference, “we are living in the golden age of engagement.”
Nick Brien, soon to be head of McCann Worldgroup, gave a great presentation that I feel sums up where we stand as an industry. Bottom line: it’s still about the big marketing idea, but we’re going to have to become more adept at executing concepts across multiple emerging platforms.
I’ll share more thoughts and take-aways from our meetings soon. Oddly, no one from Rice-a-Roni spoke at the conference.
Today, I read about Square. In addition to the name, which I obviously like, I’m blown away by its ingenuity and simplicity. What is Square? TechCrunch writes:
The idea–let people quickly and easily accept physical credit card payments from their mobile phone. A small device attaches to the phone via the headset/microphone jack. The device gets the power it needs to send data to the phone from the swipe of the card, and sends the information over the microphone connection.
Think paypal, but anyone can now accept physical credit card payments, too. With no contracts or monthly fees. People are sent receipts by text and email.
This is a perfect example of how the iPhone (fine, Elena, all smartphones) is changing the game. The peripheral market created by these devices is huge. Rubber, meet road. In other words (and this is where brands need to pay attention), the technology is merely the means to an end. It is the conduit, the feature. The real gold is buried in its application. How does this stuff affect how I work, operate, live? Why do I care?
Square answers this question instantly. The first frame on the web site reads: Accept payments. Everywhere.
Good stuff–definitely one to watch. It also doesn’t hurt that its founder started another little venture you may have heard of, Twitter.
Shortformblog astutely points out, like Twitter, it’s dead simple. Unlike Twitter, it’s not a super-esoteric concept at the out set, begging people to figure out why it’s necessary. It just makes sense.
I’m just happy their logo is green. Otherwise, we would’ve had to throw down.
Okay. As a follow up to the last blog post lamenting the lost art of the mixtape, here’s something that was passed around the agency yesterday: the Mixtape USB stick.
Street cred for your digital music, I guess.
With social media and interactive, it’s very easy to get caught up in the technology. Let’s not forget that the idea is still what counts. Rather than rote utilization, how about injecting an idea and pushing the boundaries of what can be done? (Chuck Yeager meets the Internet.)
Take a look at the Coke Zero Facial Profiler. Here’s the campaign idea. Coke Zero tastes so much like Coke that “we should sue ourselves.” Maybe you’ve seen the spots with the Coke brand managers asking lawyers to help them sue the Coke Zero brand managers. Amazingly simple, on strategy (it tastes just like Coke) and funny.
The Coke Zero Facial Profiler asks “if Coke Zero has Coke’s taste, is it possible someone out there has your face?” The application matches and connects people via Facebook. It’s a social experiment via social media.
Is it as buzz-worthy as the Whopper Sacrifice? Nope. But it’s still conceptual. And these are the projects that get the public’s attention, which is definitely not a coincidence.
UPDATE: Here’s something that I cannot believe I didn’t catch. One of our copywriters pointed out that the Coke Zero Facial Profiler site uses the line Find the Other You. Well, we produced a campaign several months ago that uses a similar line. There are social media plug-ins here as well–and, the coolest feature in my opinion, is the ability to receive text updates from the other you.
How did I not notice this?
When news of Michael Jackson’s death broke yesterday, the Internet nearly broke with it. People flocked to their computers, if they weren’t already in front of them, to share their thoughts and feelings on the passing of a true music icon. Everyone had something to say, at the same time, giving the Internet’s infrastructure a thorough testing. All of this illustrates a fundamental change in how we experience events collectively.
According to The New York Times, “Ethan Zuckerman, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, tweeted that Mr. Jackson was a more popular topic on Twitter than the Iranian election or the recent flu outbreak ever were.”
Mr. Zucker’s quick research shows that approximately 15% of all posts on Twitter last evening mentioned Michael Jackson. The percentage may seem small but considering the sheer volume of tweets per day, which some estimate to be close to 20 million, the statistic is amazing.
What does this say about how we communicate as a society now? Major pop cultural moments in our country, and around the world, used to be passive events. The Kennedy Assassination. The Lunar Landing. The Challenger Explosion. The Fall of the Berlin Wall. Even 9/11. We watched as history was broadcast into our homes, and we discussed the significance with our friends, family and co-workers in our communities. Now, with pop culture episodes like Jackson’s death, we actively share the experience and participate in a larger collective conversation via the web.
Here’s an interesting and very debatable question: is the new shared cultural moment more meaningful than the old?
What’s not debatable is the breadth of Jackson’s career. At Red Square Agency, we are paying tribute to the “King of Pop” with an all-day MJ Marathon on our Internet radio station, WRED–visit our web site and click the link in the upper right.
We’re big fans of inventing new ways to utilize media. Taking something to which people have become accustomed and shaking it up is a good way to stand apart from your competition. Do what gets talked about, right?
I think there’s a natural progression pattern in media: introduction > early adoption > maturity > manipulation. It’s kind of a Darwinian way to look at things. Now that YouTube has reached maturity, emerging are several creative examples of its manipulation. Here are two that have done so beautifully.
First there’s Yooouuutuuube. It allows you to watch videos frame by frame simultaneously. Why? Because it’s awesome, that’s why. Here’s a screen shot of one of my favorite spots, by Sony:
Another site, which can be filed under “wish we’d done that,” is for Charlotte, North Carolina, ad agency BooneOakley. Rather than the typical drivel most agencies litter the web with, this site tosses convention aside. Instead, it’s built entirely in YouTube. There are not enough superlatives to describe it. See for yourself.
Intelligence (or what many label too often “genius”) is merely looking at things differently. Come on kids. Let’s invent.
