Adver-Whatever

...What??

Today I saw what may be the strangest thing ever. People are watching less television. Of course they are - they've been DVR-ing and watching their shows online for a long time now, but with the writers' strike, there's nothing new for viewers to even make an effort to record. I haven't watched TV since the season finale of Heroes, and I probably won't watch it again until the start of LOST (If LOST starts). So, if people aren't watching television anymore, why are advertisers going crazy buying ads there?

According to the New York Post, ad prices on network TV are soaring. As the audience shrinks, advertisers have to buy more ad space to reach their target number of viewers, and this elevated demand for commercial time is driving up the cost. Advertisers paid on average 18% more in the fourth quarter for primetime spots, and the ratings they are paying for are down 14% from this time last year. What's even better: it's not looking like there's going to be any improvement next year. As I read this article half with amusement and half with utter horror, I just kept asking, "why?"

For god's sake, why are advertisers still buying television spots? The audience obviously isn't there, so why are they wasting their money? It's not like the audience has gone anywhere - they're still out there. They're just not watching television. I thought advertisers were supposed to be a little more creative than this. Hey guys, instead of buying up more and more ad space trying to reach an audience that has moved on, why don't you, I don't know, follow them?! I still listen to the radio whenever I'm driving, I still see billboards and bus-shelter posters wherever I go, and I go online for entertainment more than ever before. It just seems silly for advertisers to keep scrambling at this one medium when there are so many possibly more effective ones out there. I suppose it's okay, though - I'm sure the audience will come back when there are new programs for them to watch. 

The Sprite-inator

Ahhh! So many things I've wanted to post about, and haven't had time, and it makes me sad...

I have finally seen someone do advertising on Facebook right. The Sips application for Sprite has been out for a while now, and I've just finally had a chance to play around with it for a bit. It involves building your own little yellow and green robot character thing and then name it (mine is The Sprite-inator). The character then seems to have varying opinions about you depending on what you do with it. Like all other applications on Facebook, you can invite your friends to build their own and join the fun.

I found out about it through small ads they placed in the News Feed, which seems to be the way for everyone to be advertising at the moment. What I appreciated about this one, though, was that it wasn't just an ad taking the space in my news feed which is intended for me to be able to see what my friends are doing at all times of day. It actually contributed some fun content to Facebook. Now, if everyone did this, it would get really old really fast, but I thought it was cute.

This is how word of mouth should be manufactured in Facebook - not by cyber-stalking the users. Thank you, Sprite.

The Harry Situation

So, during the first free time I have really had in the last two weeks, I stumbled across L'Oreal's new online viral campaign done by one of my favorite agencies to follow: Avenue A/Razorfish.

It basically consists of a television producer who is angry because the show he created, called "The Harry Situation", has too much product placement. He has created a blog ranting about the legal proceedings and the whole process that lead to his beloved show turning into a 30-minute horribly innuendo-ridden commercial for Garnier Fructis Style Bold It. The blog contains clips of the show and some footage of the taping, showing one of the characters getting hit in the head with a light, which I found funny.

But how well will it work as a viral campaign? As an advertising student, I thought it was hilarious and wanted to show every last one of my friends. But not only do I not count as a normal human being by virtue of being an advertising student, but I'm not even the target market. Sadly for me, it's a men's product. So really, I'm probably not the best judge of whether or not it will catch on.

What bothers me a little is that it's just so obviously an advertisement. The blog is very obviously fake, and the show very obviously never existed. The people they're targeting know when they are being advertised at. I don't know how well this kind of fake communication will go over. Maybe if they just released the clips by themselves on youtube, without giving them the elaborate back story, or actually made an entire episode of the show, they would have more success.

Also, where's the follow-through? Guys like humor - everyone knows this. But the Garnier website doesn't mention anything about their little side project. The characters from the show should be on the site along with the products. I can imagine someone checking out the website because they saw the viral thing, and then immediately being turned off by the lack of funny. It won't hold their attention - the brand as a whole doesn't meet the viral campaign half-way.

Still, it kept me entertained for a while, and It seems like a good start as far as catching the attention of young men. I'll have to watch to see if it really catches on.

Rescheduled

I've been crazy busy this week with finals coming up, but don't think I've disappeared.

I just wanted to make note of some news - the Age of Conversation Bum Rush is being postponed due to some technical difficulties with Amazon. It is now going to be held January 5th. It's still an awesome idea, and a great way to promote a really good book, so mark the new date!

The Suicide of Gamespot

The recent firing of game reviewer Jeff Gerstmann from Gamespot has been the center of quite a bit of controversy. (If you don't know, he gave the new Eidos game, Kane & Lynch, a score of 6.0 out of 10, and was promptly fired. Gamespot claims it had nothing to do with his scoring, but the fact that Eidos has since pulled several hundred thousand dollars of future advertising off the site seems to say differently.) Questions about the future of gaming, and especially the future of game reviewing sites that rely on game advertising for revenue, are flying. My favorite analysis of the story comes from Wagner James Au, who provides yet another tale of doom for hard-core gaming. However, despite the fact that I've come to expect him nearly always to judge every news story as the one that is going to end gaming as we know it, he does bring up some interesting points about what all this will mean. 

This may be the beginning of the end for Gamespot. But really, it serves them right for creating such a conflict of interest. This is site that is supposed to be dedicated to providing honest reviews to gamers - providing a really valuable resource, and becoming a widely popular and respected space. However, when they set up a business model that required them to be entirely dependent on the advertising of these same games that they are reviewing, they made it impossible for themselves to provide truly honest reviews. This leads to review inflation and angry gamers - never a good thing. Au argues that the only way for gaming sites to survive is to consolidate with sites that don't rely so heavily on game advertising. Sites such as Penny Arcade, or Joystiq have much more diverse advertising networks, and therefore are able to provide honest reviews, and maintain loyal readers. Really, it just makes sense to do.

What may seem less obvious, however, is the impact that this will have on the entire gaming industry. Games are expensive to make, and they're getting worse all the time. This makes them expensive for the consumer as well. In addition, really hard-core gamers make up a tiny fraction of the total population, so only so many of these highly expensive games are going to be sold. This makes game reviews unbelievably important to sales. People simply aren't going to spend $60 on a game that they aren't reasonably sure that they are going to like. If the trust is broken between gamers and reviewers (which, on sites like Gamespot, it probably has been), then gamers are going to be considerably more cautious about how they spend their money. This much I can agree with.

Au then goes on to argue that it will lead to game developers backing out of an increasingly risky market and the eventual world domination of more widely-accepted casual games. I think that the hard-core market will always be there, and there is no reason to predict its doom just yet. Especially because sites such as Penny Arcade, which do not rely solely on game advertising, still exist for gamers to put their trust in. But I do think that game reviewing sites are going to become less plentiful in the future, and people may be wary of the motives behind extremely high scores for some time to come.

Crazy, Crazy Facebook

I've been using Facebook pretty much since the beginning - it was created for the class one year ahead of me. I have loved it these last 3 years as a way to keep in touch with my friends back home, and make plans with friends at school - and the best thing about it? It wasn't Myspace. That obnoxious social media site that allows people to make their pages sparkle-y, loud, and unreadable, and then heaps so much spam into your inbox that it makes your afraid to even look at what's in there. Add to it the fact that it is hard to find the content of any given Myspace page because it is hidden under the ads, and the fact that anyone can have a page, and that their privacy controls are limited, and you basically have the worst thing to ever happen to the internet.

So back to Facebook. Over the last year, they have slowly added more and more of the things everyone hated about Myspace. It was created for college students. Now, everyone can join - including your boss, your family members, or any number of other people who you'd really rather keep separated from your social life. They have added the infamous news feeds to let you know exactly what every single person on your extended list of friends is doing at every moment of every day. And then, there's the latest disaster, which really just takes the cake.

It's been out now for almost a month, so anyone with a Facebook account knows about it, but I'll describe it briefly for anyone who might not have heard. Their Beacon project has partnered with 44 websites to track things that you are doing outside of Facebook, and post it to your news feed. Heartbreaking stories of ruined Christmases aside, anything that you buy on one of their partner sites is shown to every last one of your friends, which can now include your boss, your family members, and any number of other people who you'd really rather keep separated from your social life. It's a form of word of mouth advertising, and Facebook promises its clients deep integration within the Facebook community. That's all well and good, but they could have warned their community first...

Now, over the course of the last month, over 50,000 users have come together to protest this blatant invasion of privacy, and one group, MoveOn.org, has even circulated a petition to put a stop to it. All this time, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has claimed that people can opt out of this application whenever they choose. But this is extremely difficult to do, as opting out of one site does not opt you out of all of them, and the option to do so is not easy to see.

On Friday, the long awaited announcement came, stating that they will make  sure users agree to be followed around the internet before having all of their activities posted on the News Feed - or at least make it easier to opt out. However, it's still not completely opt-in, so I doubt it will be enough to call off the protesters.

The reason why I felt the need to recount all this history is that I'm actually rather surprised that it took Facebook so long to respond, and I'm even more surprised at the relative weakness of their response. When the News Feed was enacted, there was also a large protest against it, and within a few days, Zuckerberg had apologized for the screw-up, and updated the privacy settings, so that you could pick and choose what showed up on your feed. This time, it took much longer, and there still hasn't been an apology. In fact, nothing at all has been said to the very ticked-off users. They have had to find all of this out in the press. Facebook seems to be forgetting the very people that make these advertising scams possible, and I know at least one person who has begun thinking about canceling their account because of it.

People like you, Facebook - don't screw it up!

Finally - someone logical

Lately I've been hearing an awful lot about how video game advertising is the next big thing. Revenue forecasts just keep skyrocketing, in-game ad agencies keep being bought up, and experimentation on how to measure the results of these ads keeps getting more advanced. However, I've always questioned how all this could ever happen. After all, relatively few games are conducive to advertising (tell me where to put a billboard in Zelda, or even Halo), and gamers are very sensitive to ads in games that they have had to pay $60 for - it's enough to take a person completely out of the experience if not done carefully.

Well, I've finally seen something to reassure me that everyone in the gaming business is not completely insane. John Riccitiello, CEO of EA Games has come forward to say the the estimate that in-game advertising will become a $1 billion industry by 2010 is wildly optimistic. He cites a lot of hype created by a few start-up companies in 2006, as well as Microsoft's purchase of in-game ad group Massive and NBC                                                              Universal's investment in Massive rival IGA Worldwide as the main sources of this overly enthusiastic embracing of a revenue system that simply isn't going to work right away.

However, he does admit to believing that in-game ads will eventually become a very important revenue source for publishers, and why not? It's an interesting way to get people who are really involved in their medium to see and even interact with a brand. But before this industry can take off at the rate that has been predicted, the entire structure of gaming is going to have to change. Games that can support ads or product placement in their story lines will need to be developed, and the over-all price of games will have to decrease, as very few gamers are going to accept being charged the traditional rate to play games in which they are being advertised to the whole time. Unfortunately for some, there will need to be a trade off.

I'm just glad to see someone with a cool head talking about the future of gaming using a little logic.