On The Ground Looking Up

Monday's Questionable Advertising

Another installment in the annals of bizarre advertising. I think I am glad I can't understand what it says.

Even (Yawn) More Random Acts of Dancing

Hot on the heels of the Beyoncethon last week, we have this 'guerrilla' action involving 200 dancers performing in the Central Station in Antwerp. They are doing a Sound of Music performance to raise awareness for a TV show that is looking for a lead actor for the show. These are getting a little tiring, while still fun to look at.

 

What Is Right And Wrong About Twitter

I have been thinking about Twitter a bunch recently. I have started to recognize that I know this feeling that I have about it. It really clicked with me last night, at around 2:47am. I realized that it reminds me of the pre-bubble burst dotcom era. I had experienced it first hand. Having been a part of the management team of a hot 'dotcom' agency during the late 90s we worked with dozens and met with hundreds of the hottest internet properties around. Back then you had companies that people could not help talking about, who thought they were going to be the next change the world type of thing. Companies that were worth basically nothing, made their founders and investors into millionaires in months. The buzz drove them, the product did not. The main thing you saw in these properties and utilities was the lack of any real sense of how they were going to make money, survive and in the end, add value to our lives.

Working on behalf of brands and over committed to user behaviours, all the Twitter chatter amazes me. The buzz about it amazes me. The valuations being thrown around amaze me. The talk of Twitter being THE new defining medium amaze me.

So in my late night obsession, I started to break down what I thought was right and wrong about Twitter and about why I think in the end, Twitter will ultimately fail.

What is right:

• Twitter has the buzz and is leveraging that for talent, attention and investment.
• Twitter is addictive and fun and plays into the Social Currency model that media and storytelling is evolving into.
• Twitter has some powerful names engaged in it and supporting it.
• Twitter offers value in the nature of immediate customer service, reputation management, unvalidated search, trendspotting and conversational media. 
• They allow third party software to integrate with their service, helping the open source/transparent nature of today's communications.

What is wrong:

• Twitter has no business model.
  
  • If they start charging for use, their general audience will leave.
  • If they start advertising on the site it will not generate enough revenue to make the investors happy.
  • If they start advertising in the Tweets, they will get serious backlash.
  • If they charge superusers or corporations for use they will probably not pay or a newcomer will come in and undermine them.

• Twitter is a platform, it is not content. Facebook, Flickr, Linked-In, etc. are all 'Social Media" that have content attached. They can sell advertising or give tangible benefit for upgrading to a 'pro' model. To have Twitter users pay for use, would uncover that you are basically asking users to pay for their own conversations. 
• Many of those that are the uberusers on Twitter (celebs, early adopters, evangelists) are doing a lot more broadcasting than engaging. If you are following 20 of these people, who each post 30 times per day, that is 600 tweets alone to get through. And if they do not follow you back/ do not engage when you engage them, you start to wonder why you are reading them at all. As a service that was meant to be a way to share the minutea of your day with your friends, it starts to lose it's shine when you are just reading and don't feel the opportunity to participate. 
• Let's be honest, Twitter is one big chatroom, the more followers and those you are following, the bigger your personal chatroom. Chatrooms were one of AOL's most popular features, until they realized they could not monetize them and they started to try and figure out new ways to make money. At least on AOL, if the chatrooms got people to join, they could then try and convince those users to try new things, buy new things, click on ads in other places. Twitter has none of that.
• By allowing third party software to access the system, it takes valuable traffic away from Twitter.com and therefore means they have to create value in the Tweets themselves, which has problem written all over it any way you look at it. Also, who owns the content of those Tweets?

None of this is meant to mean that people/companies should not enage on the service. It is intrigueing and gives us a sense the changing nature of conversation. It also can create some interesting relationship dynamics between user-to-user and user-to-company and these should be explored.  But I think that what Twitter starts, it will not finish, it is a step in the digital evolution. Look at Second Life, it got buzz, people flocked, companies bought in and in the end, I think it wasted away. But Second Life did give rise and attention to the popularity of virtual worlds, being used successfully in arenas like WOW, Club Penguin, Habbo and even the Wii.  So there is a huge amount of expected value out of what Twitter is doing and how people are reacting to the service, I am just not sure that it is worth all the hype.

Amazing Art Using Old Cassette Tape...Tape!

I simply love when people use the mundane and make it into the magnificent. An artist named Iri5i has made these amazing portraits of celebrities out of old cassette tapes. The results are pretty astounding and really change my perception of these old items that have virtually been forgotten in today's digital economy.  Look for yourself. <via>

Hendrix

Tom Waits

Dylan

Squeezie Bacon

A most amazing fictional product which actually exists! You can buy Squeeze Bacon @ ThinkGeek. I don't really think there is anything more I can say on this one, it simple says it all for itself.

 

Random Acts Of Beyonce

In the latest Improv Everywhere inspired guerrilla action, 100 women form a kind of flash dance action and perform Beyonce's Single Ladies in the middle of Piccadilly Circus in London. The event was created for Trident and announces their private concert with the singer that you can win tickets to. I can't lie, after watching this, I think I may chew more gum.

One Of The Best Things Of The Week

Happens when you click this.

Whose Cutting Their Budget, For Realz.

Nobody is cutting their costs like Scott Campbell. In this amazing interpretation, artist Campbell laser cuts imagery and words into stacks of dollar bills. The results are pretty spectacular and inspiring as you will see below. I think there are amazing opportunities for brands to use this technique for marketing purposes, though we may want to wait until the stimulus days are over before we defame US currency.

More here.

 

Random Images From My Desktop 5

Smart Brands React Quickly

Smart consumer brands are nimble enough to take advantage of positive value situations. They look at the world around them and seize opportunity when it presents itself to both integrate into the current cultural climate and as well too try and create a relevant brand experience within it, hopefully to their profit.
Take Topps.  First they come out with their Augmented Reality set, and now, they launch their Greatest Hoaxes set.

Seeing as how much the world has been talking about Bernie Madoff and his Ponzi scheme for months now, it is quite clever that the card company would pick up on this and issue an entire set based on the "world's biggest hoaxes, hoodwinks and bamboozles". Who wants to collect hockey cards when you can collect and learn about the biggest scoundrals and grifters the world has ever known?