Digital Prolixity
"There is no real life; you're either online, or AFK"- Ramzi Yakob
Optimus Prime!
May 13th
So this is what the bad boy is going to look like in the new Transformers film. The question is – is it going to be another Pearl Harbour or another Rock? With Michael Bay’s shaky film history… its anyone’s guess. But I’m guessing its going to be pretty shocking in comparison to the original Transformers animated movie.
What do you reckon?
Do services like 4oD work outside the UK?
May 9th
I just had a bit of a useless rant at abc for not letting me watch their programs for free because I’m outside the US and thought I’d share my frustration. It would be interesting to see if people outside the UK are able to watch 4oD or the ITV on demand service which is coming out soon. If you’re not from the UK, or know someone who isn’t and would be able to help out – would appreciate knowing if they can get our VOD services to work.
*grumbles* Stupid American broadcasters…
-tobeconfirmed-
*update – thanks for all the feedback guys – I realise quite a few people end up on my blog looking for solutions. It seems you’re able to get around some VOD services by using a proxy. Check the comments to this post for a simple explanation of how to use 4OD from outside the UK*
So… how many people play Second Life?
May 9th
Well, according to the website homepage, there are over 6.1 million registered users, of which, 1.62 million have played in the last 60 days. Thats almost 4.5 million people who registered to see what all the fuss was about, who then realised it was a rubbish ‘game’, logged out, and uninstalled the software.
Linden Labs accepts that only 10% of its users still use the service 3 months after registering. A blog on Information Week suggests there were less than 320,000 active users at the end of March 2007. Anyone who has logged into Second Life will know why so few people play the game – mainly because its hard to get to grips with all of the various options, and once those have been figured out, the game isn’t actually any fun.
So why has there been so much publicity for a game with so few users? Bear in mind this 320,000 is dwarfed by figurs such as the 8.5 million people who not only play World of Warcraft, but pay about £8/month for the privelage to do so. Well the only real reason I can think of is due to the gimmick of having an in-game currency which has an exchange rate with real-world currency, allowing the game to have a legitimate economy. This is the only news worth aspect of Second Life… and the rest of the hype.. with big agencies and advertisers trying to ‘break the space’ has simply been to get their name in the papers as far as I’m concerned. Thankfully, this has been done so many times now that an advertiser creating a presence in Second Life will probably find that no one cares anymore.
People who have spent time playing games like World of Warcraft, or any other MMORPG will already know there is nothing special about the economy in Second Life anyway… we’re used to being sold, or even selling in-game currency or characters for real-world money… even if somewhat less legitimately.
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4OD – feeling the love from its users
Apr 30th
When I first downloaded 4OD, I have to say I was impressed by the service. Easy to set-up, and easy to get going and nowhere near as confusing as the Sky Anytime program (I still can’t figure out how to actually watch something on it despite being a Sky subscriber).
However a couple of months on, I now come home from work and find that I can’t actually use 4OD because the only thing it can manage to produce is a message telling me that “4OD is getting a little too much attention at present”. From the post above taken from 4OD’s user forum, its evident that I’m not the only person frustrated with the product.
Its things like that error message which will lost Channel 4 money. Lets presume there is a large market out there for paid for on demand Channel 4 content – potential customers logging on for the first time to be told they can’t access the service because it can’t deal with the traffic load isn’t the best first impression. Bells in the distance remind me of so many ISP’s which haven’t been able to cope with demand or MMORPG’s which don’t have enough servers for the 8.5 million and growing player base.
How many of those potential customers are going to drop off after a first failed attempt? The real question however is how many of those potential customers are going to drop off after the 3rd failed attempt? I’m gussing most. For the tech savvy amongst the potential customer base.. it might just be enough for them to go to a torrent listing site and download an entire series for free. The vast majority of torrents may be illegal.. but at least they work.
Joost has the right idea with the p2p aspect of its delivery system. As the network gets busier it increases performance rather than crippling it and turning away eye balls which will be watching the plethora of ads which it will serve up to an audience happy to see the ads for the free content. When comparing that to a service you have to pay for AND doesn’t work 9 times out of 10… its pretty easy to work out which one will last the ‘test of time’.
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We like Wii.. or do We?
Apr 29th
Well apparently yes.. we do like Wii. Our friends over at Ars Technica have let us know that Nintendo is going to be upping their production of the console units as almost half a year on since their launch in the UK – Wii’s are still extremely hard to get a hold of.
However as I already have a Wii.. the burning question I have for Nintendo is.. “When are you going to make some decent games for it?”. Despite the Wii being a phenomenal success for Nintendo in terms of it attracting a much wider audience than typical gaming consoles do – I have a sneaking suspicion that the majority of the Wii’s being sold are being sold as Wii-Sports machines. Indeed Wii Sports is a great game and encourages if not requires multiplayer fun and also helps people lose weight.. apparently – but seriously… there are still only about 3 games for the Wii worth having despite the console being almost half a year old.
This is typical of Nintendo – release a console with fantastic potential and then fail to produce games with substance. Zelda, the standard Mario game and Wii Sports are really the only decent games available. Every Wii review I’ve read since the release of the console has read along the lines of “This game isn’t great.. but it shouldn’t be too long before we start seeing some phenomenal games using every inch of the Wii potential”. The problem is.. is that I’ve been reading reviews saying that for the last 5 months.
Those who doubted the longeivity of the Nintendo DS are now eating their words considering its on-going success. However the DS actually has a plethora of games worth playing whereas the Wii doesn’t. It won’t be too long before people who have a Wii finish playing Zelda, get bored of Wii Sports and then put away the console in a cupboard… never to be played again and Nintendo really have a narrow window of oppertunity before the people who got the console at launch realise that the PS3 is already coming down in price and that since they recently got a new HD TV.. why not get the cheapest blu-ray player on the market and see if it can occupy the Wii shaped space next to their TV.
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Wired.com catches up!
Apr 29th
A blogger for Wired named Michael Calore has re-iterated what I said in my post about social networks needing to evolve. It looks as if my ‘anecdotal group of people’ who are beginning to realise that the likes of MySpace are a waste of time is becoming more substantiated.
His post is more succinct than mine was… but I feel my verbosity provided some better depth to the thoughts.
Check out his post here.
Then check out my original post here if you haven’t already read it.
Word of Mouth Digital Marketing
Apr 23rd
One acronym… WOMDM.
One idea… Commission based pay structure for digital agencies.
One conclusion… The above statements don’t go hand in hand.
Digital media agencies are hesitant to take up a form of marketing which was originally the basis upon which the internet was formed. The sharing of thoughts, ideas and opinions. Why are they hesitant? Well for some good reasons really:
1. WOMDM is still and will always be experimental. The reason for this is that no two brands, products, audiences, or contexts will ever be the same. The tipping point in a word of mouth frenzy will always be different in any given situation and as such trying to use case studies to base future activity on would be extremely short sighted.
2. ‘Doing word of mouth’ in any situation is extremely labour intensive in the planning, implementational and the reporting stage but with minimal if any media spend. As a result agencies make no money from it as generally they work on a commission basis and without media spend.. there is no commission.
3. The potential backlash from trying to use WOMM is vast, permanent and if it gets linked to heavily – you risk people finding that bad publicity in natural search listings when they search your brand or product name.
4. WOMM actually relies on people to a) like your product or c) agree with the message you are trying to spread and find it moving/touching/funny enough to send on to other people. A lot of the time.. marketers are trying to promote a product which genuinely isn’t fantastic and isn’t worthy of such praise from people that they feel the urge to tell others about it.
At this stage a lot of people might be asking… “So if this is a faffy path with a lot of potential downsides.. why are we even talking about it?”.
Well for one… the term ‘viral’ is so badly used these days, if anything it would be good to remind us all that viral implies the natural spread of a message or idea by people who all become brand advocates by passing on information – unprompted by a marketer asking them to. By this I mean that putting a video on YouTube and then spending tens of thousands of pounds on media to drive traffic to it doesn’t count as ‘viral’. No more than having media spend being used to drive people through to a website directly counts as ‘viral’.
The word ‘viral’ has been bastardised so much from its original meaning that it is now nothing more than a buzz word that marketers consider ‘so 2006′. In my opinion this really is a shame. For products which really are amazing like 16 meg broadband for £10/month if you already have Sky… this is the sort of thing people should be bragging to their friends and don’t necessarily need homepage takeovers or the sides of buses to be plastered with the news. Indeed the launch of Sky broadband was great news… but people would have figured that out for themselves I reckon if you told a handful of people and let them get on with what people naturally do… talk.
The biggest advantage to this drip feed of information outside of the obvious savings on ad spend would be that the uptake of the service would be slow enough for their resources to grow over time to cope with increasing demand rather than risk hiring lots of extra staff and find that people don’t want the product – or even worse – face the problems which Carphone Warehouse had with having too many people wanting the product all at the same time and them not having the resource to connect the people. All this resulted in was bad PR followed by more bad PR for months as the news and indeed the people who had subscribed to the Talk Talk package slammed Carphone Warehouse for poor customer services etc.
So which advertisers should be looking to WOMDM to spread the good word about their good product? For a start… the ones who actually have a good product and not just one that ‘they’ think is good.
I think WOMDM isn’t used well enough, often enough. If people know of instances where it has been done well – please let me know so I can have a read. Even if case studies don’t serve to help plan future campaigns – no doubt there are some obvious ‘do nots’ which could be widely applicable to help me on my way.
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Social networking needs to evolve or die
Apr 22nd
I’ve decided that ‘Social networking’ is pretty boring. Just like with YouTube.. it might have been good once.. but now it feels stale. I’ve evolved past YouTube to desiring a similar site where the 100 most popular video aren’t Naruto episodes. In fact.. I’m on to the point of needing professionally produced video clips.. or as some might say.. television.. but when I want it. I’m sure theres a good name for a service like that… how about “TV When I Wants It!” or TWIWI?
Anyway – I digress. Social networking is being used as an overly glorified IM service (but without the ‘I’ part) with more than one picture and where more than two people can be in a conversation. If I was suspicious, I might even call them glorified, socially acceptable bulletin boards. However bulletin boards remain consigned to the depths of ‘internet nerd’ domain – especially when said bulletin boards focus on a particular topic such as an online game or some such thing.
The irony is that bulletin boards have a purpose and genuinely bring people from every walk of life into a shared environment where they have something in common to talk about whereas social networks are artifically created bulletin boards for people who already know eachother and want to get some bands to add them as their friends too. Why be in a social network with people you already know? Why not just e-mail people you already know? If you want to share photos – then use flikkr. Or.. why not just create your own social network using Ning – and allow only people you know and want in it to join as a place for sharing information and photos etc?
For whatever reason people seem to love social networking… I have a gut feeling that people will soon realise how empty social networking in the form of MySpace is. Hopefully bulletin boards will become socially acceptable when people realise that talking about stuff you’re interested in on the internet doesn’t make you a loser.
For the moment I’m in a statistical minority as social networks are still growing every month. However anectodely… I’m in a growing group of people who have realised that social networking is rubbish and is at best somewhere to put up photos for free for our friends to see after a night out.
I wonder if anyone else is starting to feel that social networks have had their day and that that day was a Tuesday in the middle of August 2006.
Almost a year ago
Apr 19th
I posted about a relatively unknown phenomenon called YouTube. Little did I realise just how much the likes of YouTube and MySpace would change the digital media industry and spawn more 2.0 names than I care to count.
With a year of experience as a digital media planner – I hope to use this blog as a meaningful way of informing people about things I think are interesting.. just as I did a year ago. But this time i’ll update it and be able to comment on such things from a media perspective when suitable.
Hopefully see you soon.
The phenomenom of the YouTube celebrity
May 10th
YouTube for those of you who are pretty slow in the world of “what’s hot on the net”, is a website that allows its members to post video blogs which are then catalogued for the entire YouTube going community to see.
Along with some really useful videos on there (such as the recent E3 videos that have been posted revealing information about the PS3 and Nintendo Wii) etc; there is also a host of videos made by randoms across the globe (and by globe i mean “usually America”) for one of a number of reasons.
Some use this powerful tool as a way of keeping friends up to date with whatever is going on in their lives; almost like sending out a ‘what ive been up to recently’ email, but with a much more personal touch.
Some use it to share things that they have found, seen or done, which they find amusing and wish to share with the world at large along with their friends.
And some… use it to become internet celebrities. After the likes of ‘Fat Star-Wars Kid’ and the ‘Numa Numa Kid’ who stumbled quite accidentally into the limelight of popularity in a huge way; influencing the world media at large even to the point of a satirical inclusion in an episode of the Simpsons – It appears that in this day and age of celebrity gossip, which in its own right has spawned talentless celebrities who are famous for being famous and nothing else; a new Internet sensation has come about.
What is it?… The Internet sensation of which I Speak is none other than “I want to be an Internet Celebrity”. YouTube allows the average Joe to share whatever it is they think is special about them with the rest of the internet going world, hoping to find approval, or in some cases, hoping for a fight.
FilyWhore is the username of a person who posts on YouTube – and she is what i would call the first purpose-built, self-made Internet celebrity. Thousands of people every day log into YouTube to watch her video blogs which contain nothing more than her ranting at other bloggers, and occasionally teaching people some sign language. Granted she is a bit hot… but other than that i have no idea what exactly draws people to watch her video blogs every day.
http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=filthywhore
This form of self made internet celebrity was in the pipeline the day that msn spaces, myspaces, hi5 etc etc ad infinitum first became popular as people raced to add as many ‘friends’ as possible to their list. From a real life popularity contest, we now have an online popularity contest where people actively try to make as many ‘friends’ online as they do in the real world because any random and his internet savvy dog can browse your page and see how many ‘friends’ you have.
Creepy…
Weird…
Wrong…
-insert word suggesting something negative here-…
No doubt YouTube will be copied soon in the future by someone who would like to make more of a profit from advertising than YouTube apparently does (as it only allows google adwords at the moment) – the market will fragment if the competition is strong – and the fad will die out because no one will spend the time searching 3-4 different video blog services and thus the self made talentless Internet Celebrity will die out.
