Hasta La Creative!

I took my first Kodak Photo Spot (wiki) pictures at my spring break trip to the Disney World in the mid-1990s, and through all these years I’ve never stopped admiring their genius. It’s a marketing idea whose elegance has rarely been emulated. I love how organically spreadable the signs were, how they subtly nudged you to spend another scarce frame of  film, and how they made people’s lives a little bit better by giving their memories just the right composition.

Of course today the Kodak Picture Spot is something that could probably be built straight into the digital camera wired to recognize the subject and to statistically analyze thousands of photos taken from the same spot to recommend the optimal composition and camera settings.

Eastmanhouse.org:

“As photography became more engrossed in American culture in the early 20th century, The Eastman Kodak Company began to look for new ways to advertise photography and its cameras. With the rise of the automobile industry and the development of American highways, the company began a campaign called “Kodak Scenic Spots.” Starting in 1920, Kodak began to place signs throughout American highways that advertised both their name and the practice of photography by marking interesting and beautiful scenery. Initially, these signs appeared on the roads outside of Kodak’s hometown of Rochester, NY in order to test the effectiveness of the idea. Within a year, they began sending members of their advertising department across the country to select the most scenic views to be awarded signs. By 1939, Kodak had placed 6,000 scenic spot signs across the country.

The exact phrases used in these signs changed over time. When the company began the campaign, the signs read: “Picture Ahead! Kodak as you go.” Eventually, the use of the work “Kodak” as a verb was stopped and the signs were changed to read: “Kodak Scenic Spot.” After the initial campaign ended in 1939, Kodak continued to place these signs sporadically in theme parks and tourist locations until the late 1980s. These signs also carried a new label, which read: “Kodak Picture Moment.”

(source)

Three reasons not to tell people NOT TO REPLY TO THIS EMAIL. First, CAPS are annoying. Second, the whole thing is kinda rude. Third, people hit “reply” anyway, and if you have “…@donotreply.com”, it actually ends up in the inbox of the owner of donotreply.com domain and the greatest misdirected hits end up on this blog

“Instead of letting people just hit reply to these support mails, they make the customer click on a link,” Faliszek said. “It’s sad, too, because I’ll get these e-mails from people and they’re like ‘Oh, man, I really wanted to grill, but it’s not working.’ Sometimes they’ll even send pictures of their grill, too.” (from Washington Post)

Last week’s news about Rolling Stone and Men’s Health running promos where readers are invited to snap images of ads and send them in reminded me of a draft that I’ve been kicking around for a few months about bookmarkable advertising. It’s not finished or polished but, I hope, useful for something.

Also, between now and when I had first started writing this, I heard about a “grabbable” banner format offered by one of the large networks. I couldn’t find any references or samples, but if you know something, please drop me a line.

Oh, and I’m on vacation this week away from all things broadband so this blog is on autopilot.

People bookmark ads. They circle ads with red markers, cut them out, paste them on the fridge, carry them inside wallets, give ads away, put ads on the walls. Given the opportunity and a good reason, people archive, manage and retrieve ads. Naturally, it is in advertisers’ best interests to encourage this behavior because bookmarking gives the ad another chance to do its job, which is why we often see the dotted “cut here” lines around ads.

The “dotted line and scissors” bookmarking/clipping metaphor has been extended online (source).

As a theoretical side note, “bookmarking” is used loosely here and refers to any activity of storing an ad for future reference as close to its original form as possible (writing information down doesn’t count). Some activities are physical (clipping, putting away, sorting, retrieving), others are also mental (remembering where to look, creating an arrangement system, evaluating).

WHAT ADS GET BOOKMARKED?

In order to be bookmarked, an ad needs to satisfy two conditions:

1. It needs to carry a promise of some future value. Coupons are an obvious example of an ad type that gets bookmarked often. Look at how people manage their coupon collections and you will find that the complexity of some systems is as mind-boggling as Yu-Gi-Oh. Which is why there are coupon organizers for sale (do they offer coupons for coupon organizers?).

The value doesn’t have to be monetary, however; it can also be informational or social. For example, a classified ad for a plumber whose services you know you’ll need when you move in two months is more likely to be saved than an ad for a wedding dress you see a week after the event.

2. It needs to be easy to bookmark.

The problem with advertising on the web is that while the digital medium itself provides almost unlimited mechanisms for archiving, manipulating and retrieving the information, most online ads have all the fleeting properties of a TV commercial.

Let’s look at other media.

BOOKMARKING OFFLINE

Print ads are bookmarked more than any other type in part because print in general is easy to archive. You open a newspaper, see an ad you like, and you can either put the entire issue away, tear the page out, or cut out one particular ad. Print is also easy to annotate — you just write on it.

Magazine ads are bookmarked too, although often for a different reason — they are cheap and pretty dorm room decorations.

Magazine ads are bookmarked and used as wall decorations. See annotations to the original image on Flickr.

Billboards and TV ads are usually bookmarked through a secondary medium: billboards are photographed, TV commercials are DVRed. Some are saved for their social value (look what a cool billboard I have found); other purposes might have nothing to do with the ad itself and are just part of the scenery. (Billboards can also be bookmarked with cell-phones if they sport an advanced bar code.)

Some outdoor ads are designed to be bookmarked.

Other offline media are even harder to bookmark. External devices have been invented for bookmarking radio songs (and many have flopped); you don’t hear a lot about people bookmarking radio ads. Locations can be bookmarked through some kind of mechanism that involves a cell phone, such as mobile post-its by Siemens.

Generally, the more bookmarking options for content a particular medium provides, the easier it is to save advertising messages. Not so online.

THE WEB

Historically, the web medium has offered multiple ways of easy content archival, from copy/pasting to complex social bookmarking tools. Online ads, however, are not trivial to bookmark at all. Not only are they largely impossible to store for any extended period of time, but they are also difficult to go back to within the same user session. In 2003, Jakob Nielsen wrote:

Many a time we’ve been working on a site and noticed an interesting, relevant advertisement. This typically happens in the dead time between clicking a link to follow some item in depth and getting a refreshed page. So, we make a mental note to return and follow up on the ad. Oops, we can’t. When we go back, there is a different advertisement, breaking one of the oldest principles of interaction design: stability.

Technically, there are ways to save an online ad. You can make a screenshot of the entire page and then cut out the relevant parts, or you can save the page on your hard drive, but I haven’t met many people collecting online ads this way so that they can reference their sales message at a later date.

How to save an individual ad depends on the ad’s type and your tech savvy.

Sites that compile online coupons usually offer some way to save and group them within the site itself. These coupons are also designed to be be printed out. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a coupon-type ad on a third-party site that could be clipped from the site itself.

Image ads can be saved as regular images but will lose any link information, and the context they provide is often insufficient for the ad to be used effectively at a later date.

Flash ads, including video, can be downloaded using browser plug-ins with the link information retained, but these tools are not widespread.

Text link units are not really ads but rather pointers to ads.

Finally, text ads can be archived, arranged and retrieved with third-party tools such as del.icio.us. This method presents a different problem — that of click fraud. Someone can easily collect a dozen of links from AdSense ads on this site and click AdLab (and perhaps the advertisers) out of this particular business. Also, after the links expire, the bookmarks will not be pointing anywhere because the ads are not archived.

WHAT IS TO BE DONE?

Advertisers could equip their ad units with a clipping mechanism — a small scissor icon that, when clicked, would produce a printer-friendly stand-alone version of the ad with extended information for future reference.

Online ad networks could offer a repository of all offers they serve and a link that says “view more offers from this vendor” or “view similar offers”.

An ad repository could be offered by ad filtering services such as AdBlock Plus, which may work out well for all parties. (See? Ad filters may turn out to be a good thing.)

… to be continued

A fascinating reading for experience designers comes this week from The New Yorker that has obtained and published time-lapsed security camera footage of a man who, in 1999, spent 41 hours stuck in an elevator, and accompanies it with a detailed feature about the history and specifics of the “vertical transportation” industry. The article also has a few great paragraphs of observations on human behavior and how elevators are designed to accommodate for it:

“Smart elevators are strange elevators, because there is no control panel in the car; the elevator knows where you are going. People tend to find it unnerving to ride in an elevator with no buttons; they feel as if they had been kidnapped by a Bond villain. Helplessness may exacerbate claustrophobia. In the old system—board elevator, press button—you have an illusion of control; elevator manufacturers have sought to trick the passengers into thinking they’re driving the conveyance. In most elevators, at least in any built or installed since the early nineties, the door-close button doesn’t work. It is there mainly to make you think it works. (It does work if, say, a fireman needs to take control. But you need a key, and a fire, to do that.) Once you know this, it can be illuminating to watch people compulsively press the door-close button. That the door eventually closes reinforces their belief in the button’s power. It’s a little like prayer. Elevator design is rooted in deception—to disguise not only the bare fact of the box hanging by ropes but also the tethering of tenants to a system over which they have no command.”

A heat map of Google clicks and attention distribution on a Google search results page from a 2006 eyetracking study. Useful for making PowerPoints more dramatic, but beware of the methodological limitations.

Rewinding VCR tapes. Balancing the tonearm. Calling collect. Formatting floppy disks. Loading film into a camera. Numbering punchcards. Getting up from a couch to change channels or volume. Dialing. Remembering phone numbers. Using carbon paper. Rewinding a tape with a pen. Sending a telegram. Sending a telex.

More in this great list of obsolete skills.

— via textually

Adlab’s reader Doug writes: “Sawyer’s Nickname Generator seems like a great, but missed, opportunity to gather data on ABC viewers and users. ABC just needs to add a few other variables like age, sex, and income.”

My nickname? Speed bump.

A couple of years ago, I posted a small blurb on Fast Company’s blog about how customer expectations of offline retail are being shaped by their online shopping experiences. Last month, Business Week published an article pretty much to the same effect:

“The Internet hasn’t destroyed brick-and-mortar retailing, as many once feared. But has it ever changed consumer behavior. Across the U.S., stores are playing catch-up with shoppers habituated not only to the speed and convenience of purchasing online but also to the control it gives them.”

Here’s my in-store experience wish list:

1. Cross-selling of relevant and complementary products (if you like this, you will also like that and that)
2. Customer reviews. Somewhat counterintuitively, many product categories will benefit from negative reviews just as well as from the positive ones. Negative reviews help buyers overcome the “paradox of choice” and make up their mind faster instead of abandoning the purchase altogether. Plus, less post-purchase remorse and fewer returns. I would especially love a way to check GameSpot reviews before plunking another $50 for a game.
3. Online ordering + in-store pick-up.
4. Full product info look-up, including the manuals.
5. Bookmarking / “save for later” functionality.

Retailers gotta act quick if they want to have some control over the converging experiences. In a few years, people will be carrying web browsers in their pockets and won’t be needing all this retail innovation. Then they would go to Barnes & Noble to browse books and order the ones they like on Amazon right from the store.

On a related note, I really like the idea behind Target Lists.

Color wheel as seen by a red-insensitive protanope.

To test how your ads are seen by the color-blind, you can use Vischeck, an online tool and a set of downlodable Photoshop filters for PC and Mac.

More tools. A color-blind-friendly interface on Summize.

Earlier:
Advertising for the Color-Blind
Tool: How Color Blind People See Text
Advertising in Braille
The Robotic Shopping Assistant
Playboy in Braille

A regular color wheel (source).

While the translation bots are not famous for understanding human speech with great accuracy, one thing Google’s bots get right is swearing.

Google has just released a series of language translation bots that you can invite for a chat and that would act as simultaneous interpreter when you have a conversation with another foreign-language speaking human.

You probably don’t want to use it for important conversations: Israeli journalists recently got themselves into a diplomatic scandal when their translation software misfired and one of the questions to the Dutch Foreign Minister resulted in”The mother your visit in Israel is a sleep to the favor or to the bed.”

So. Google’s English to Russian bots translate “Let’s go drinking” as “Let’s find potable” and “Shipping up to Boston” as “Navigation to Pskov“. But swearing? Dead on.