I was reading about a touring attraction called Luminarium in a magazine called InTents… I may have mentioned that magazine before. It’s all about events in tents (which sounds Seussical, doesn’t it?). Apparently Luminarium has been touring Europe mostly for years and it keeps getting better and better. According to the article, Luminarium is the brainchild of architect Alan Parkinson.
This environment is about as cool as it gets. It’s loaded with color and high technology lighting, and it should inspire tons of ideas for exhibits and transitional environments for events.
I do not know if you can hire them to support a large corporate event, but it would make a great outing or special part of a product launch.
Slidecasting, an elegantly simple method of synchronizing a slide show to an audio file using tools from Slideshare, is the latest in an overabundant array of online slide presentation tools. Now you have more flavors of online PowerPoint presentations than there are flavors of toothpaste at the local supermarket. You’ve got your plain paste, minty gel, tartar control, tartar control gel, tartar control whitening, tartar control whitening gel, tartar control whitening breath-freshening enamel-strengthening paste, tartar control whitening baking soda gingivitis breath-freshing sensitivity spicy cinnamon sparkle pearl, and all natural organic sand mixed with milkweed ooze. Multiply that times the number of brands and you have a full aisle of tubes that all say “do not swallow.”
Oh, wait - this is about PowerPoint presentations. So, like toothpaste, there are loads of options. You have your slide shows, your animated slide shows, and your animated flash embeddable slide shows. You have your slide shows with audio, your slide shows with video, and your slide shows with video, flash animations, Q&A, polling, downloadable white papers, quizzes, interactive games, and audience sleepiness sensors that alert the speaker to be less boring. And then you have degrees of slide show psychosis - presenters who try to use slides as book pages and ask us to read while they talk - a truly annoying form of multitasking.
So, if it isn’t obvious, I’m a little skeptical at yet another me-too slide show tool. In fact, I’m VERY skeptical at another tool coming from Slideshare - a site I never understood. People upload PowerPoint presentations - WITHOUT the audio. I suppose you could design a slide show that stands alone, but most of the presentations I saw on Slideshare were slide stacks from presentations that needed the audio from the presentation to make sense.
But Slidecasting from Slideshare isn’t bad at all. They have created an elegant tool, and a nice embeddable slide show player to go with it. Plus, the community at Slideshare makes it easy for anyone to store and share presentations. This is actually what Podcasting on the iPod should have been. Surprisingly, they do not have a way to export a Slidecast to a video iPod for a Splodcast.
If you have a need for a little multimedia on your blog or if you have some simple presentations you want to archive and distribute, you may give this tool a try. As a sample, see below. I would say this tool is roughly the slide show equivalent of Crest Whitening Expressions Tartar Control Lemon Ice.
The blogs are busting about a pair of new cameras from Sony. These new teeny tiny digital cameras have several remarkable things going for them. First, they sport giant wide-screen touchscreens on the back for easier camera control, photo manipulation, and custom focusing. If you’re a gadget freak, you may find it amusing that Sony would be early to market with a touchscreen camera when they couldn’t manage to place a decent touchscreen experience into their phones, music players, or hand held game consoles. Instead, they let themselves get flogged by the likes of Apple and Nintendo. But Sony clearly has something here.
These cameras are beautiful. Sleek, tiny, and well-designed - clearly a sign that manufacturers are taking design more seriously now. By adding a touchscreen, Sony has managed to pack incredible features into a tiny device without the typical “button overload”. This is especially helpful if you’re looking for a special gift this holiday season as it looks like these devices will not only be attractive, but they should be easy to use by anyone.
The most innovative feature, and the reason for my posting it here, is the smile detection system. Face detectors have been present in cameras for a while, and they help the camera decide what type of exposure and flash to use in many situations for optimal pictures of people. This camera builds on that facial recognition technology by actually detecting when people smile. The camera can be placed in a mode where it waits for a smile to appear then it quickly snaps a picture. The skeptic in me thinks that simply advertising this feature will sell cameras, even if it doesn’t work well - and Sony knows how to market useless features better than anyone (disclosure: I own two Sony TV’s, a Sony monitor, a Sony camera, and a Sony Playstation2 - I may not appreciate Sony’s method of foisting proprietary storage formats like on us consumers, but I admit they make great stuff). If this feature works as advertised, however, it should make these cameras incredibly fun to use.
And there’s also one or two business uses for smile detection I might mention. The first is obvious - on an event, when you’re taking candids, you’re more likely to catch those elusive smiles that make an event more appealing when looking back at the photos. The second is a little more “out there”. Smile detection cameras would be great at customer service points as a way to measure the friendliness of the service team. You can set a measurable goal of “smile percentage” and have a camera snap pictures only if it detects the customer smiling on the other side of the counter. It would encourage, if not demand, service reps to be friendly and strive to make the experience enjoyable for each customer. A camera never lies.
I guess you could also use this technology at a Registry of Motor Vehicles, a passport office, or at a warehouse club whenever an identification photo is needed. It could save time by snapping the moment it detects a smile, reducing retakes. The problem is, it can’t seem to make sure your eyes are open (that has to be easier than detecting smiles, Sony!) and it can’t save your hair.
I may have mentioned this before: I’m a fan of video games, from casual to hardcore, and I have been since I was struggling to write my own games on little Commodore computers back in the early 1980’s. So I delight in bringing you marketing stories that pertain to gaming.
According to this article from GamesIndustry.biz, online games continue to be more popular than video sharing sites like YouTube and social networks like MySpace. The new Parks Associates study referenced in the article can be found here.
The study only included people 18 and over, so it’s a little misleading. I would expect the statistics to be very different in the teen demographic. Regardless, this should give marketers something to think about before investing in YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, or even that desolate metaverse called Second Life.
Spending money on YouTube, MySpace, and Facebook is certainly easier than spending money on casual games. There is no shortage of video production companies and college kids who know how to pimp out MySpace pages to exhausting degrees. Making games is a little tougher.
Alf Nucifora, noted marketing consultant, points out that games are relatively inexpensive to make, and they work. He sites a couple of powerful examples including M&M who enjoyed 14 million plays of a casual game in a 12-month time span. That’s a lot of brand interaction and a good amount of traffic to their website.
Of course, these seemingly competitive forms of entertainment don’t have to be mutually exclusive. A good MySpace or Facebook page, for example, can contain a great YouTube video, or a great viral game.
Marketing guru Seth Godin created Squidoo, now he has created one of the best lenses found there - a list of the most overused business cliches. A good list to remind us all to find better ways to communicate.
I just learned about kameraflage, a company/technology/technique that creates images that can only be seen through digital cameras. This has some very interesting applications for marketing, communications, and exhibit design.
For starters, check out their applications page, which covers some great ideas right off the bat. In this section, they illustrate how to use the hidden messages as captioning for the hearing impaired. This way, no special devices need to be handed out. The drawback of having to watch through a camera may be acceptable for short presentations.
They also illustrate hidden billboards - an idea I once had using lasers and special filtering paper glasses. This one is far cooler since it relies on technology that almost everyone carries with them. You can use this to create hidden messages that act as billboards, as shown in the illustration below, or are used as part of a scavenger hunt for kids at a theme park or grown-up-kids at a corporate outing.
And finally, they illustrate garments with hidden images or messages that only appear when shot through a camera.
Not shown is a sort of copy protection, which would prevent people from videotaping or photographing a movie, exhibitor or concert.
I also wonder if someone will use this for some dirty fun by projecting images on a stage at, say, a political rally that can only be seen by the thousands of digital cameras in the crowd.
I’m not sure how available this technology is or, for that matter, how proprietary it is. Regardless, the idea of projecting images that can only be detected with a camera phone sounds pretty cool to me.
My favorite visualization blog has found another gem: Information Aesthetics points us to this wonderful diagram illustrating uses of the phrase “is the new” as a marketing term over the past few years. Some of my favorites:
Cheese is the new morphine (I need to find that cheese!)
Television is the new reality
Yellow is the new red is the new green is the new pink is the new black is the new blue
Getting pregnant is the new Yoga (what?)
4 kids is the new 2 (oh god, please no….)
Bono is the new Pope
The award for most thought-provoking goes to “oil is the new slavery”
If you are interested in the application of social networking and social media for events and conferences, you might like this article of mine published last week in Mass High Tech.
In the latest Archi-Tech magazine, a small photo of some really cool bumpy plastic caught my attention. It turns out that Acrylex has been busy with several new products:
Acriglo, a new alabaster-like material for lighting panels, will continue to glow blue after the power is removed due to photoluminescent goo buried within the material.
Brushed Metallics create the look of brushed metal laminates in an easy-to-manipulate acrylic.
And Impressions, the bumpy plastic I mentioned, is a new line of textured acrylic sheets. Since everyone knows the best bumpy plastic can’t rival the visual quality and variety of the best bumpy glass, it will be interesting to see what they’ve come up with here. You can’t have enough varieties of bumpy see-through stuff. Shine your laser pointer through it and play some Pink Floyd.
They have more new products worth a look - frosted materials, glitters - all interesting looking stuff if you’re into materials.
Candystand, one of the web’s most popular and long-lived casual game destinations, is also one of the web’s most popular and successful pieces of fully branded content. Operated by the Wrigley Jr. Co. Candystand is chock full of fun games that all feature their various brands.
Many of the earlier games were fully immersed in the Wrigley brands, such as Boardwalk Bowling (Skeeball) which requires you to bowl little virtual balls through giant lifesavers rather than the familiar rubber-coated skeeball holes. As they add more and more games, they have relaxed the brand immersion in favor of greater game creativity and quality. For example, the popular Billiards game allows you select from three pool table designs: Orbit, Big Red, and Lifesavers. The brands are embossed on the felt of the pool table. Otherwise, it is simply a quality billiards games with lots of fun options.
Over the past five or six years, the traffic patterns at Candystand have dropped, according to Alexa.com, but that’s relative to the millions of sites on the internet. I don’t have any real numbers from Wrigleys, but while their traffic rank has dropped over six years from around the 500th most popular website to the 3,500 range, I would still wager that their real traffic volume has never decreased. According to a quote pulled from Ad Age by this site, Candystand was pulling in four to five million bored office workers a month (which probably references their entire audience, including bored housewives, bored teens, and dorms rooms chock full of bored future web designers)
There are around 150 games currently listed on the site. A remarkable achievement for a casual games site, and a monumental achievement for a branded content site. They’re clearly doing many things right. One of those things done right is their blog, which grants users access to one of the long-time employees associated with the site. He doesn’t identify himself by name but the idea is a good one, and fans who find the blog will enjoy the opportunity to learn about new games before most of the Candystand users.
They recently launched a special portal for users of the mega-popular Nintendo Wii Console. Using the Wii Internet Browser, which was free until recently, users can navigate to the portal and play several of the Candystand games that work very well using the special Wii controller.
I love games. I love seeing companies willing to invest in games as a way to get people to interact with their brands. Despite the fact that the connection between games and candy may seem a bit obvious, it works for almost any brand. People who interactive with brands while having fun tend to appreciate those brands, right? I have personally seen this work wonders for big consulting firms, makers of medical diagnostic equipment, and computer manufacturers. These days, we really appreciate getting something in return for our attention - such as a really useful widget, branded desktop application, or a fun game.
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