Hasta La Creative!

Do banners that allow standard right-click navigation options — “open in new window” and “open in new tab” — have higher click-throughs, other things being equal?

Big news today, if you haven’t heard already: Google released a 3D chat app called Lively. It’s the same thing that was being tested at a university in Arizona last winter, and probably the same thing that was rumored about in January 2007 and anticipated as early as 2006.

In a nutshell, it’s a 3d chat app where users can customize avatars and create environments (rooms) with stuff they pick from a product catalog. You need to install a browser (FF, IE, Win-only) plug-in to participate. And while it is not exactly an MMO, it is more similar to Second Life than early commentators admit.

First impressions:
1. While object creation is a process open only to participants hand-picked by Google (see a press release by Rivers Run Red, a creator of Second Life presence for many companies), Lively seems designed to be integrated with SketchUp and 3D Warehouse at some point. This would open doors not only to user-generated stuff, but also to branded objects (such as virtual Whirlpool appliances).

Rivers Run Red has a room in Lively, and so does Linden Lab.

2. While all of the stuff I’ve seen in the catalog is free, the very fact that there’s a price tag at all hints at a potential marketplace for virtual stuff.

3. The integration with the “flat” web is pretty tight. Each room has a “real” URL (here’s Google’s), each room can be embedded on other sites (and viewable with the plug-in), some objects can play YouTube videos and show pictures hosted elsewhere.

4. Characters can be equipped with animation scripts.

5. Similarly to Second Life, Lively allows movement around the environment and camera manipulation, and like in Second Life, the controls are not terribly intuitive.

6. Objects can be fitted with hyperlinks to “flat” web pages, just like the lava lamp on the screen cap below pointing to AdLab. This could probably result in some sort of on-the-spot transactional activity: you click on the lamp in my room and a window pops up offering you to buy the real thing.

7. There are half-rumors half-expectations that Lively will be somehow integrated into Orkut, which seems possible since Lively uses the same system-wide Google login.

Lively, of course, will become more, well, lively when Google integrates it with SketchUp and allows user- and brand-generated assets to become part of the marketplace. It could also be hypothetically integrated with Google Earth so that Lively “rooms” become inhabitable interiors of the 3D models on Earth or maybe in the sky.

A lof ot related links from AdLab’s past years here, so I’ll just give a couple of broad pointers:
Google and virtual worlds
Virtual worlds in general
Posts related to Second Life
Advertising in games

– objectgraph via idealist

I once wrote about how one possible way to make money off YouTube was to add some call-to-action interaction to the last frame of the clip; this space is currently occupied by the promos for related videos. A new start-up called Involver has brought this model to life:

“Involver’s unique vision is to provide more than just “video with a buy button”, creating a tool for marketers that does more than deliver millions of impressions with no way to capture the audience. The platform uses a rich set of video plug-ins to allow the campaign owner to capture email, offer quizes or surveys, even take orders or donations – all within the framework of the video, never forcing the viewer to browse to a new Web page.” (– StageTwo).

You can post Involver-powered videos to a whole bunch of social networking sites, although not to YouTube.
— thanks, Jim

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

What would happen if you tried to scan a pdf of your boarding pass on your iPhone? It would work!

If Peekaboo ever goes through with its idea to create a dance pole connected to Wii, how would it actually work as an input device? Would it come with a piece of apparel that detects your body movements and positions, kind of like Wiimote does now?

Sometimes, Google can be really difficult.

Is the recent ad by Welch’s for its grape juice the first one to incorporate the sense of taste? No:

• Flavored Magazine Inserts
• Pork-Flavored Stamps
• Haagen-Dazs Launches Flavored Stamps

Is it the first one to incorporate First Flavor’s peel-and-lick technology? No. Last September, there were alcohol flavored ads in Rolling Stone for a TV show; here’s First Flavor’s press release on the subject (and a brief mention on AdLab).

You could never tell, though, if you searched Google for “lickable ads” this week. Even First Flavor, the company that creates the strips, is not on the first three pages of search results. But all those blogs that regurgitate the same news piece are, in abundance:

Can the results that are obviously similar — and derivative — be grouped and collapsed, just like all related news are collapsed in Google News? Look at this mess:

YouTube has this nifty alternative video browser interface called Warp Speed. I think the lines connect related videos or responses, and groups of similar clips are color-coded. For a similar interface but with products, check out BrowseGoods.com.

Brand Experience Lab shares some results from the in-theater games they did for MSNBC (The Newsbreaker) in the US and for Volvo in the UK (video below).

For the Newsbreaker:

78% played the game
93% want more games in cinemas
86% prefer a game to an ad
71% unaided MSNBC brand recall
75% more likely to use MSNBC

Definitely one of the coolest ad things from 2007.