A Wider Net

Big3D - the big, er, 3D people famous for 3D motion lenticular billboards and soon-to-be-famous for delivering printed video clips have launched their 3D motion cups.

Big3D has been able to produce high resolution (9600dpi) lenticular 3D and animated posters and cards for years now, but they have managed to get the material thin enough to wrap around a drinking cup. They also, of course, have managed to handle the hairy math of creating a 3D illusion printed on 2D paper laminated in lenticular lens sheet and wrapped around an almost-cylinder. Part of me thinks it should not work - it’s just too many transforms from 3D to flat to cylinder. It’s as if they’ve created a perpetual motion machine or a time machine.

Unlike the perpetual motion machine and time machine, these things are real, they’re real cheap, and they’re real recyclable. Yes, these cups may appear to be wrapped in plastic, and they sort of are wrapped in plastic, but these are recyclable - unlike other lenticular cups. They even have a green statement on the page. Bravo.

I forgot to ask them if anyone has played the practical joke of creating a 3D virtual “mug handle” sticking out of the side of the cup.

EDIT - I stand corrected - the cups are made from polypropylene lens material with the printing directly on them - there is no paper, and the whole thing is recyclable. Slick.

Are the Tour de France sponsors taking notice of this? Tech blog Everything USB highlights a Japanese website offering a programmable device that you clamp onto the spokes of a bicycle wheel. When the wheel spins, a row of LED’s displays a rotating message for all to see.

Idea: At your next big offsite conference, schedule a bike rally for the attendees. Outfit them with rental bikes and have them ride through the city sporting these LED message boards. They get team-building and energy-building exercise and your company or organization gets splashy promotion. Throw in a charity contribution for everyone who rides and you have headlines, tax benefits, and a noteworthy “green” activity.

This devices is technically ready for purchase, but you’ll have to navigate a rather insane (to my American eyes) Japanese website that features bizarre videos of the product being demonstrated by a guy wearing a horse head mask to hide his identity. I guess. If you want to make your own, these are even better.

The Doritos Unlock Xbox game creation competition reached a critical and exciting phase this week with the release of playable demos of the five finalists.

For those of you new to the contest, Microsoft’s Xbox division teamed up with Doritos to create a one-of-a-kind game creation contest. It launched back in in June. The rules were simple - submit a Doritos-brand-inspired game idea, and the winning entry will see their game produced as the worlds first user-generated Xbox Live Arcade Game - available for play to 12 million Xbox 360 console owners.

The contest appears to be enjoying great success. First, their microsite reaches a large gaming audience where they collected 2,314 game idea entries. That’s 2,314 ideas. For free. From that list of ideas, the judges pared it down to 5 finalists, and created five playable demos, again accessible through their microsite (no Xbox required). They even produced documentaries about the finalist teams and posted them on the site.

That’s where they are today - down to the final five. And everyone gets to play the demos and vote on which game will make it to Xbox Live Arcade.

Doritos gets tremendous exposure into the gaming market - both casual AND hardcore, which amounts to over 100 million people in the USA alone. They also get gamer-cred. (provided the final game doesn’t suck like the Yaris disaster). Xbox gets ideas - and a game - and a perhaps a small torrent of people buying Xbox’s to play “Dodgeball” or whichever title wins. The winner gets fame and opportunities.

And you get to play five demos of up-and-coming Doritos-branded games right now. It’s win-win-win-win.

The winner will be announced on November 19, 2007. The winner of the contest that is. The real winners appear to be Doritos and XBox.

Michael Arrington at TechCrunch reported about a new ad model created by instant message chat aggregator Meebo. Faced with an interesting problem that their average user sits on the site for 2.5 hours without a page refresh, Meebo realized that the typical method of selling ads by impression was never going to work. Instead, ads are treated sort of like skins, where the users can add them to their backgrounds, create icons, and access related content. They can also deny the ad. They push a new ad during the session - up to five times per session.

This is similar to a promotional model in place on Microsoft’s popular video game platform XBOX Live. Through the XBOX 360, users can download free themes and gamerpics (like big buddy icons). When applied, a theme changes the background image of every page (called a blade) in the XBOX Live interface. I have seen movies, tv shows, and products promoted this way. Missing from this mode,l but present in the Meebo solution, is the path to click through to the product site or download additional content like MP3’s and videos.

This approach is intriguing to me because, unlike a traditional ad, this has the potential to give the user something in return for taking their time and attention. If they can manage to target the ad well, so a fan of hardcore punk music isn’t fed a Beonce’ ad, then the users may come to appreciate what would otherwise be considered an intrusion.

And it’s a boatload more appealing than those annoying AOL ads or AOL popups. It may explain this trend:

The trick behind car sales has always been to put the prospect in the car. Even if that meant taking a picture of them and photoshopping them into the car so they could visualize themselves driving it. Now, Toyota and Microsoft have taken it to an odd extreme. They have released a free game on XBOX Live that puts you in one of several models of Yaris, the hip series of customizable cars they hope will be popular among gamers. It puts you in the car - virtually. I seem to recall this being done very poorly with the Ford Focus in an online Alias-themed game, after that car was awkwardly thrust into the popular spy series (like, spies would drive a Focus?)

The difference here is that they haven’t placed you in a regular Yaris - this is a Super Yaris. Is it false advertising when you virtually place someone in a virtual car that, unlike it’s real world counterpart, can scale walls, collect weapons, and blow up enemies?

I like this a lot more than the crappy and intrusive product placement of the Nissan Rogue in the latest season of Shark. I wish I could see which one ultimately realizes the best ROI

Update: I noticed comments like this in the forums: “It is absolutely horrible. This made me hate the Toyota Yaris, a car I had no opinion on before today.” Sure, awareness is part of the sellingprocess, but if you’re going to appeal to a gaming market and try to influence them to buy your car, you may want to make the game not suck.

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.

Now you want to play…. I can tell. Here you go:

Games House

Candystand

Pogo

Knibble

WildGames

Zylom

Orisinal

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”

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.

According to Joystiq, there will now be sponsors attached to certain XBOX 360 achievements. An achievement is awarded to a gamer when they accomplish a specific task, such as beating a team, taking out enough bad guys, or winning a certain number of races. The “rewards” of earning achievements is typically limited solely to bragging rights - he who has the most achievements is the better (or at least, most committed) gamer.

Now sponsors are starting to claim naming rights for achievements. One example from the arcticle was the “Pontiac 4th Quarter Comeback” from an upcoming football game (see image below, from the Joystiq post). It’s nice name placement, but I think they’re still missing a really interesting opportunity.

Right now, as I mentioned, achievements are effectively worthless. Attaching a sponsor to it makes them worth money to the game publisher, possibly to Microsoft, and of course to the sponsor, but the gamer gets nothing from being assaulted by the ad. Why not provide more value to achievements and the user by turning that achievement into a true reward through the sponsor? So, instead of unlocking the “Pontiac 4th Quarter Comeback” achievement, you get money off a Pontiac? Unlock the “Warner Music Finger Twister” achievement on Guitar Hero 3 and get a free music download for your Zune?

They’re driving awareness through branding - which is as clever as it is annoying. I think it’s time to add customer value and drive them to the next step.