On The Ground Looking Up

GE's Twitter Windows

As part of our new push into integrated marketing/technology concepts, we have been playing with the idea of live visualization of talk and the associative value of such chatter. Out of that mantra, one of the concepts we have been working on is how the variety of conversation on Twitter relates a certain industry or topic. GE Healthcare was good enough to get behind the idea for their recent Healthymagination showcase that occurred last week at the old Bank of New York space at 44th and 5th ave in Manhattan. Hence Twitter Windows. over 1400 sq feet of window space covered in word clouds. About 50 of these words were connected to some Arduinos and Laptops and were reading Twitter in real time, looking for anyone using the word in a tweet. When the word was used, a light next to the word flashed. So you could watch how often people were mentioning a word vs. the other words on the windows. The interesting part for me was to see how the flashes related to each other. How was cancer charting vs cure? Fear vs hope? In the end it was a microscosmic real-world realization of the sentiment around the subject. I feel there is much farther we will go with this idea, but I am very happy with the initial execution. Rain has hindered all of our photoshoot days, but here is a video from GEReports to check out. And hopefully we will update with some photos soon.

Mad Men Muppets

It's just like Mad Men, with no drinking or sex and everyone is fuzzy.

Interference/Lit Studios @Gizmodo Gallery This Week

Hey now! Our Interactive Mirror was recently added to the Gizmodo Gallery that is going to be going on tomorrow through Sunday at 267 Elizabeth St in NYC. Come through and say hi, touch some stuff and see everything from Tesla Coil rock, the largest Beatles Rockband and an automatic pancake machine.

There is some very cool stuff there and worth a peek from any and all tech, gadget, nerd,alt-culture types.

For example:

Thrillerific headphones!

So come through to the

And find us, we are right next to the Pac-Man ghost mood musicinator thing.

New Media Channels Open To New Forms Of Sabotage

UPDATE: It seems the boards were not hacked, but were rented. Which makes mr Skullphone much less Alternative in his media activity.

As media companies spend more money to develop new products, they have to start taking into account that those products become targets for people who may try and exploit them. Take Clear Channel's new digital billboards in LA. 10 of them were hacked by an artist named SkullPhone who replaced adverts with his signature image all across southern California. It seems that more people are taking it upon themselves to "improve" current advertising. 12 Monkeys anyone? Thx to the Cowboy for the tip.

Shirky On Social Media

One of my old workmates Clay Shirky recently released his book Here Comes Everybody. Clay has long been a prognosticator of social behavior in the on-line space and his book is a good read for those interested in the the social media space (and all other's who realize that the social media space is pretty much the entire civilized world these days). His blog sums up a bunch of his thinking and I found his primer on What Business Need To Know About Social Media particularly informative and relevant to marketing in today's consumer centric world.

This nugget was especially interesting as this is what we have been saying to clients for a few years and finally it is starting to take hold.

The old model of engaging with your customers involved two modes -- en masse and personal. Messages were sent out over mass media, in hopes of affecting the behavior of individuals.

Now, thanks to social media, customers are part of active groups, groups that form and dissolve quickly in response to people's interests or needs -- most messages in this media flow within social groups, rather than from businesses to individuals.

So creating experiences that can give fodder for this message flow is the new black in the current marketing behavior and must be central in current planning and design.

Read Clay's blog here.

Media Ideas For The Sake Of PR

I am torn on the use of 'media innovation' as a thinly veiled pr stunt. I love The Simpson's but I think this one kind of sucks and is meaningless.

Snack Advert To Be Beamed Into Space

Media Stats - TV Effectiveness On The Slide

The Hollywood Reporter reported that 62% of marketers believe traditional television advertising has become less effective in the past 2 years.  A quick search revealed that according to TNS Media Intelligence, in Q1 2007, Television advertising accounted for 44.6% of all media spent. That showed a decrease of 2.7% from the previous year.  So if I am reading this correctly, roughly 2/3 of marketers thing TV is not doing the job, yet almost 50% of ad dollars is going into the media channel and even with these feelings, the decline from the previous year is significant but small. I know that this is not a direct comparison 1-1 on percentages but when reading between the lines this is what I take out of it. Marketers can be lazy. They stick with what they know, and do not challenge themselves or their brands. I remember meeting with a media director a few years ago who I met at a conference. She had told me that the agency wanted to start offering non-traditional but her clients (Fortune 50 types) were reluctant. "Why do you think that is so?" I asked. Her reply was very revealing. She commented that there was no line item for non-traditional (at the time) and that frankly if the tactic did not merge into their reach/freq spreadsheet, it was a hard sell. My take-away at the time was that they did not understand the power of non-traditional media and what it can do for the brand and as well, were reluctant to break from their set media ideas. Keep in mind that if 62% of marketers are not feeling that TV is effective, what percentage of the public is guiding that decision? When it comes to consumers being influenced by television advertising, the numbers are probably much worse.

In poker, we call this negative expected value. A strategic concept  that boils down to the following: -EV = putting your money in when the percentages bare out that the fruit of putting such money in will not allow for winning enough to cover the investment in the long run. Flipping it around, positive expected value (+EV) means getting some money in, albeit with chance, when there is the possibility of a big payoff over the long term. It feels like TV is running in the negative these days. That can be blamed on the sheer amount of it and the often poor creative that we are seeing. There is no medium better at getting your brand out to a large audience at a low cost per touch but...the creative and placement has to work that much harder to get it done.

Fast forward a few years from my conversation and the non-traditional/experiential/guerrilla concepts and rfp's are coming in more than ever. Many companies are interested and experimenting with new forms of media, on-line and off (it is important to look at the TNS #s linked above and see that the segment with the largest growth percentage wise was online). Their is a lot of buzz in the alt world but I would not hazard to guess that it still represents a tiny percentage of overall ad spend. So my real follow-up question to the Hollywood Reporter stat is this. If 62% of marketers believe that traditional television advertising is less effective now, what are they prepared to do about it?