Hasta La Creative!

Une vidéo servant d’exemple et destinée au live, construite sur le base de l’outil vvvv servant pour la synthèse de vidéo en temps réel. Un travail conçu et généré également avec Blender, MeshLab et Fraps. Le tout sur la musique de Clark “Growls Garden”. A découvrir dans la suite.

Previously on Fubiz

• Le Creative Sweatshop
• Ithaa Undersea Restaurant
• Off the Wall

How much would you pay to use Twitter? How about Facebook? Gmail? Would answering a simple “How much would you pay for it?” question help us to understand how the valuable is perceived differently from the disposable?

I was going through a credit card bill and among the usual sad thoughts the activity conjures there was one relevant to this blog.

There are a lot of online services out there, and I’m actively using a fraction of them. I pay for some, but many are free. The question is, why am I paying for the ones that are on my bill even though there are free alternatives, and which free ones would I pay for if the free ride abruptly stopped, and it was either-or?

I’ve never bought a ringtone and am not planning to, but I think I’ve spent around $100 on similarly ethereal Second Life objects over a few months.

I pay for Skype and for Rebtel (very convenient VoIP for cell phones), two cell phones, but (or, perhaps, hence) no land line.

I used to pay for Angie’s List but don’t have any need for it after moving to a managed building. (Besides, their monthly subscription model feels wrong — I don’t need to fix my plumbing every month. Plus you need to call them during office hours to cancel.) I would pay for Craigslist if I had to. I’d rather pay on demand than monthly. I think between $5 and $10 for a week of usage is about right. I would also pay the same amount for a “pro” version with better search, even if a free standard version was available.

I gladly pay for Flickr not because I can’t live without the service, but because, like many Mac users, I think that the attention that goes into designing a flawless experience deserves to be rewarded. I’m sure a part of the fee pays for the “pro” next to my name, too.

To be visually entertained, I pay for the basic cable, broadband, and a Netflix-like subscription from Blockbuster. I’d drop Blockbuster and pay the $20 monthly bucks for a Hulu-like service with a decent library of streaming movies and shows. I have never bought a movie DVD from a store or a TV show from iTunes. (Do people with large DVD collections watch each movie at least four times to justify the $20 instead of renting it at $5 each time? I know it makes sense to buy DVDs for kids since they can be entertained by re-runs forever.)

Out all the free stuff I use, I’d pay for Google if it suddenly made all of its services paid. Depending on the price structure, I’d rather be paying for a subscription to everything than piece-meal for each service. If I had to pick piece-meal, I’d pay for search, Gmail, maps and reader. I am among those Blogger users who’ve been demanding a paid service for years in exchange for a hint of customer service and advanced features. (To its credit, Blogger has significantly improved over time.)

I would pay for email in general if it suddenly stopped being a free utility. Unfortunately, there isn’t much room for price elasticity there.

I wouldn’t pay for Facebook or MySpace (especially if I were already paying for email), but probably would for LinkedIn. Probably not, or very little each time I need something, for YouTube or other similar sites. Not for Twitter or any of the instant messengers (assuming I had a cellphone or email).

I’d pay for an RSS reader (Google’s, especially if it had an offline client), but don’t know whether and how much I’d pay for individual blog subscriptions. Maybe it would be a buck for any ten — so, $10 for any combination of 100 feeds a month, pro-rated weekly, with the money distributed back to publishers by the aggregating service. If it were a universal model, I wonder which blogs would end up with most subscribers.

There is, of course, a difference between paying for a service in the sense of a general set of functionalities (email, social networking, photo-sharing) and a paying to a particular provider for the service (Gmail, Facebook, Flickr).

Which sets of functions that are free do you think are worth paying for? I included a quick poll below; if you are on RSS and don’t see it, please take a minute to come over and submit your answer.

P.S. There’s a lot of talk and an entire upcoming book about the business model of free. I recommend F’d Companies, a book about similar models that tanked during the dot-com boom, as a fair-time reading.

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 work-related question that turned out trickier than it looked: where do you start searching for a company that provides search engine optimization services if you are not familiar with the SEO space?

Here are a few tips by Aaron Wall back from 2004 — search SEO forums, read ClickZ articles, get recommendations — but this is not very helpful for someone who has never been exposed to SEO before. You could probably try looking at the highest-ranking competitors then seeing if their names would come up on some SEO company’s client list, but again, this involves some understanding what to look for and I’d imagine this method is not horribly reliable either.

But then, how about typing “search engine optimization services” or a few similar combinations into Google and work your way from the top down? Doesn’t it make sense? Do companies that rank higher charge more? I see a few results that apparently have been pushed up by Google based on my Boston IP address – even better.

What do you think?

It’s been more than a year since the post about in-video banner ads, an idea that YouTube eventually implemented and that has become a standard offering on other video sites. Here’s one other thing they could try: ads on the interactive last frame that, on YouTube, promotes related videos.

Most of the existing video ad formats have their problems: pre-rolls are annoying, in-video banners are rarely relevant to the content, and post-rolls have nothing to click on. Last frames could work because they are not interruptive and offer users something to do after they are done with their primary activity — watching the video.

Earlier:
Idea: How to put ads into YouTube
Follow-up: Embedding Ads into YouTube Players

Does it count as engagement when people are blogging about your art dept’s Photoshopping blunders? Can you claim that these errors are in fact Easter Eggs?

Also:
Ads in Game Easter Eggs
Easter Eggs in Products

So, you are launching a new web business and your main business model is selling advertising space, at least until your customers start paying up for your services. It’s likely that you will have to deal with an ad agency at some point, and here are some thoughts from the buying side of the table.

1. Demographics. Your site’s demographics (or, lovingly, the demo) is what you sell to the agency. Not features, not good design, not your management team. It’s the demo. Currently, there are two major ways to present a demo. One is through its descriptive characteristics: “our site is designed to attract people of such and such gender, age, occupation, geography.” The other way is through the audience’s collective behavior: “our site is for people who are in the market for computer peripherals”; “our site is for the die-hard ice-cream fans.”

There are other ways to describe your audience. Psychographic description (“our site is for very honest people”) is an interesting approach, but it is yet to be widely adopted.

If you don’t have a large audience already — large enough to register on Comscore’s radar — I think you are better off with pitching the behavioral traits of your audience. This will narrow the number of potential advertisers, but the advantages of advertising on your site and not someone else’s are more obvious, and you can command higher CPMs.

2. Build your site with advertisers in mind. Very often, site designers focus on user experience but forget that advertisers, too, are users who have their own goals and needs. (Oh, look, we have some space left here — let’s slap a placeholder for banners.) Audience planning should be among the first steps in designing an ad-supported site, not an afterthought. Generic media kits behind email forms frustrate media buyers who are juggling multiple plans under pressing deadlines. And if the ad unit placement is such that it doesn’t generate interactions similar to the rest of the campaign, your site will be “optimized” off the plan

3. On the other hand, don’t let the ad greed cripple your design. CPM ads tempt designers to add extra steps to even the simplest processes for the sake of page views. You’ll have to weigh the benefit of every extra page view against the risk of having the user leave the site in frustration to never come back.

4. Allow standard IAB ad formats on your site. You’ll never guess how much overhead goes into banner production, and budgets have their limits. Plus, resizing banners is no fun.

5. But custom high-engagement formats can sell for more. Think of Facebook that sells branded pages for $300K/3 months.

6. Allow enough technological wiggle room to accommodate for ad formats the demand for which may come up in the future. Yahoo bought eGroups email list service in 2000, it is ad-supported, but I think you still can’t target the banners by group categories, not to mention insertions at the individual group level. Also, create the most precise targeting mechanism possible — you’ll make more money. If you collect users’ age, gender and zip code during the sign-up process, there’s no reason why you can’t allow targeting by any combination of the three, at a premium.

7. Allow low-cost test drives. Agencies would love to be able to incorporate new interesting media into their plans, but they can’t sell them to their clients without solid numbers upfront. The only way to get solid numbers from a new medium is to test it at a cost that is not prohibitive.

8. You can’t overmeasure your audience. Offer metrics that go beyond the basics of impressions and clicks. CNet’s sites put a link to a feedback form under each banner (I wonder if they share results with the advertisers).

9. Make data PowerPoint-friendly. An intelligent good-looking graph goes a long way.

10. Media buying cycles are always longer than what you’d prefer them to be. At least online, media buying is rarely reactive — every new opportunity will be evaluated and filed in an appropriate folder to be pulled out at the beginning of the next cycle.

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.