Preposterous Marketing

Following on from my earlier post, Room Service? Send Up A Larger Room, more on Preposterous Marketing - and Preposterous Consumption. Companies are giving it away and consumers are giving something for nothing. And everyone's happy. It's a mad world indeed.


Companies are giving it away

Radiohead did it last year with their pay-as-much-or-little-as-you-like album Rainbows. Paulo Coelho is doing it with his Pirate Coelho website, linking to free pirate versions of his own books. Many newspapers have been available for free online for some time.

CBS has just uploaded the entire original series of Star Trek, which can be viewed for free on its Audience Network. The network's new strategy is to encourage viewers to upload CBS clips to their blogs and profiles. To help them, the company has already brokered deals with a host of Web 2.0 companies, including social network Bebo, Joost Internet TV, slideshow creator Slide, which allows you to create personalised frames round YouTube videos and widget providers like Clearspring and Goowy Media. Instead of swimming against the tide, CBS is joining the shoal of file sharers.

Virgin's Delight rewards programme in Australia gave loyal customers an unexpected, no-strings-attached thank you, such as magazine subscriptions or tickets to music festivals.

This week's Wired article talks about a system of 'freeconomics' being driven by the technologies powering the Web, which are halving in price at least every 18 months, as Moore's Law predicts. When businesses move from human economics, which typically inflate costs year by year, to software economics, which have the opposite effect, this allows companies to offer things for next to nothing.

So, for example, the low cost of digital distribution will eventually make movies free, while theaters make money from concessions and selling premium experiences. Hoyts in Australia are already offering corporate packages and La Premiere exclusive cinema lounges where wine and food are served.

From a consumer's perspective, The New York Times recently observed that the work hours people need to put in to acquire technology has diminished substantially, for example the work time for a cellphone was 456 hours in 1984, compared to just 4 hours today.

Apart from relying on technology, some free business models are ad supported, while some use a tiered system, with the majority of the service free and some premium offerings. For example, volume 1 of Nine Inch Nail's 4-volume Ghosts album is available free on BitTorrent sites, the whole compendium can be downloaded for $US5 on the band's official website, while CD boxed sets and a limited edition deluxe version go for $10 and $75, respectively. You can even knock yourself out with the ultra-deluxe $300 package.

Some models rely on user collaboration to create value, e.g. Google's 411 directory service assistant, while others write off giveaways, as a way to offer great customer service and recoup goodwill, e.g. Amazon's free delivery.


Consumers are giving something for nothing, sort of

They're offsetting their carbon footprints with the help of airlines like Virgin Blue that help customers pay for the privilege of carbon neutral travel. Apart from a desire to save the planet and a modicum of guilt, it seems likely that consumers' willingness to part with extra cash is partly due to the falling cost of air travel, thanks to technological developments, enabling people to travel more and to feel they have cash to spare.

An initiative by The Good Project invites people to buy a house and give one free (Springwise). By buying an eco-friendly home, people automatically house families in Africa's Burkina Faso. The Good Project enables this by funding the training of an African builder for every house they sell.

By playing an online word game - and at the same time viewing a few ads - consumers are donating rice to starving people through the UN's Free Rice initiative.


Preposterous - and Good

The most preposterous thing, on the face of it, is that this new philanthropy in marketing is often ostensibly just that, philanthropic. It's not based on recouping the cost of the giveaway somewhere else - at least not in an underhand, or forced way. But, these strategies do manage to be commercial. This is because companies gain in goodwill, which is showered upon them in sales. Radiohead got next to nothing for Rainbows, but got extra sales of their Discbox, while Coelho's hardcopy book sales have soared.

Rewarded consumers say thanks for the freebie, thanks for not judging me as a freeloader, thanks for understanding that times have changed and well, you should get some things for free these file sharing, collaborative, digital days and, occasionally, I'll even give something for nothing, if you make it easy enough. And they buy more goods, particularly given the degree of loyalty to online vendors.

The old adage was, Sex Sells. The new one is Goodness Gives - to both seller, customer and beneficiaries. The former was a one way street. The new model is symbiotic.

Throw away the rule book!

(Watch the video Throw away the rule book! or read on...)

The instruction book for PacMan was around 10 pages long. The user manual for the MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role playing game) EverQuest is around 300 pages long. No wonder kids today have thrown away the rule book!

But it's not just pragmatism that has caused digital kids to turn away from unwieldy manuals, it's a shift in attitude and behaviour that favours experimentation and short-cuts. While their parents may extol the virtue of putting in the hours to know what you're doing before you set about it, kids think that's dumb. So this is also a values shift, not just a behavioural one.

Young people think it's smart to find a quicker way - whether it's knowing the keyboard shortcuts, or quickly sourcing information online for a project, or appropriating existing online content and reinterpreting it as 'original' work (otherwise known as a software 'mashup'). Older generations might interpret it as laziness, even plagiarism. For the Web 2.0 generation, it's just life.

Online, who's the Daddy?

Girls are the primary content creators online, they're more involved in the blogosphere and social networks, while boys exchange funny videos, recent research suggests. Online behaviour may reflect offline tendencies, with males seeking to impress quickly and females more likely to gradually build relationships, creating a deeper impression of their 'true' selves over a longer period.

Girls are designing free widgets, such as horoscopes to embed in your blog, layouts, icons, graffiti image generators and 'glitters' (shimmering animations) to help others customise their social network profiles and blogs. Ashley Qualls, creator of Whateverlife.com, which became the authority on customising MySpace, was a teen millionaire in the space of a few years.

Girls are podcasting their own music and entertainment shows from their homes. Emogirltalk.com by 17-year-old Martina Butler is attracting serious audiences - and corporate sponsors.

Research by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, released in December 2007, indicates that US teenage girls are significantly more likely to be content creators than boys. 35% of online girls aged 12 to 17 (vs. 22% of boys) create Web content. Girls are more active in the blogosphere, 35% maintaining a blog, vs. 20% of boys.

Females display different online networking behaviour. Among 15 to 17 year olds, both sexes engage in social networking, but girls are more active, 70% creating their own profiles, vs. 57% of boys. However, Facebook executives have said that males have more Facebook Friends - 150 on average - while girls tend to be more selective.

Not just teenage girls, but women, are actively fostering online communities. Women's community sites, such as Glam Media and iVillage.com, along with politics sites, were the fastest growing websites in the US in pre-election year 2007, each experiencing 35% growth, in terms of total unique visitors (ComScore). Women's community sites in total had 69,854,000 unique visitors, as of December 2007 out of the total US online audience of 183,619,000, up 5% vs. 2006.

While females are investing more time in creation and in developing relationships online, when it comes to posting and viewing videos on YouTube, males are the dominant players, according to the Pew study.

Recent research by MSN and MTV's Circuits of Cool also indicated that YouTube is used more by males. Globally, the use of online video is widespread, with 87% of males and 74% of females using video sites. But 40% of males aged 18 to 21 visit these sites regularly, compared to 24% of females of the same age.


What's really going on?

The reasons behind the differences in male and female usage of online content may lie in their motivations to impress others, versus engage others emotionally in an ongoing dialogue, with boys inclining towards the former and girls to the latter.

It's by no means a clear-cut distinction. Girls also want to impress their peers, but seem to be going about it in a different way, through creating something unique that expresses their personality. Boys also want to chat, but seem to value more instant exchanges and fast gags. Forget painstakingly building their credentials, boys may be more prone to 'bragging' with new sites like Bragster dedicated to just that - challenges and trash talk. It evokes fond memories of Jackass.


The MSN/MTV research points to the importance of humour and peers in sharing video content. Passing on funny content and, in particular, humourous content that they think will appeal to their friends, was identified as a primary motivation.

Data from eMarketer shows the popularity of humourous content, indicating that the second most viewed online video content after news is comedy - jokes/bloopers/funny clips - watched by 57% of Internet viewers at least monthly in 2007. Most of what's viewed is short - an average of 2.8 minutes, with US viewers consuming 72 online videos a month, according to ComScore - making brief, funny clips ideal.

Professor Palfrey, executive director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, believes that males may be more likely to post videos as a way to impress others. Skateboarders or snowboarders can demonstrate their athleticism, through posting videos of their masterful skills, for example.

Girls, on the other hand, he suggests, are more interested in creating content on websites to show their individuality. And they're fiercely protective of the identities they create for themselves. Palfrey points to girls' strident criticism of online imitators. Speaking to the NY Times, he likens an online copycat, who outright steals another girl's Web page layouts and graphics to someone who turns up at a party knowingly wearing the same dress as another girl.

Girls' desire to cultivate a dialogue is evidenced by the popularity of problem-solution sites by girls for girls, such as Agirlsworld.com. Girls are drawn to emotional sites and 'confessionals', like Postsecret, which ranks among the top 10 favourite websites of female US college students (eMarketer). The new teen version of Postsecret, Alykatzz's I've got a secret, attracted over 425 postings of secrets in less than 48 hours, according to their press release.

So, online, who's the Daddy? It depends on your perspective. My favourite fictitious guru House says, "Work smart not hard," which would tend to favour the impress quickly approach. But he's also creatively brilliant and easily bored, so whatever you post, make it not boring.

Champ or Chump

The social Web has made fans of consumers. They have to fight their corner to get others to pay attention to the online content that most interests them. They post content online - a funny video, a thought-provoking article - and they encourage others to comment and vote for it, so 'their' material becomes popular. This means it's more likely to be picked up by other Web users on social media sites. As a result, Web users have become instigators and agitators, advocates and dissidents. This is the age of the digital provocateur and her committed supporters, who help spread the word.

In my last post I observed how fans of TV shows are taking direct action to save their programmes. But fan culture extends way beyond that. Everyone has a passion of some kind, big or small, be it a life changing idea, a preference or peccadillo. It may be a predilection for post-it notes, a passion for The Dark Knight or an affinity for teaching parrots to talk. Whereas once this may have gone unnoticed, now thanks to social media, it's all out in the open (some for the better, some for the worse).

Communities like Squidoo enable people to quickly build Web pages on topics they're passionate about. Part of the site, Hey Monkey Brain! is dedicated to arguments. Anyone can pick a fight on any subject whatsoever. Recent top arguments include 'Boxers of Briefs - Which is sexier?', 'Is Time Travel Possible?', 'Making money online is easy', 'Obama vs. Clinton' and 'PCs are better than Macs'.





Bragster is a new site dedicated to brags and challenges. There's a monthly league table and all your dares ever are documented for posterity. So if you can eat more peanuts than was thought humanly possible, or catch the most M&Ms thrown from a distance of 10 feet, this is the place for you. Talk it up.

Sometimes brand fans create entire sites dedicated to their favourite brand. Ikea hacker is one. The blog invites anyone to send in their Ikea tips and shortcuts, from how to pimp a klippan sofa to how to stop forby stools from wobbling. A recent post shows how to create a shoe rack for narrow places from siljan bathroom mirror cabinets. The community is all about re-purposing content, a real world 'mashup' - that's so 2.0.




The significance for brands is clear. Movements are on the up. Brands need to keep track of them and where appropriate, encourage them. Last year, Apple picked up on Nick Haley's unofficial YouTube tribute to the iPod Touch. Instead of condemning the student for copyright infringements, they remade it high definition.

Brands can also champion movements. Take, for example, Dove's Campaign for Real Beauty, or Trinny & Susannah's crusade to 'dress the nation'.

You don't need to be a charity to lead a cause - although a number of charities are doing very well by treating consumers as fans. Greenpeace's campaign to get people to name a whale prompted the online community of social news site reddit to lobby for 'Mister Splashy Pants'. And, having named the whale, people are more inclined to look out for Mister Splashy Pants' wellbeing. So, not only has Greenpeace generated interest in its campaign, by creating a celebrity whale, it has fostered loyalty.

Passion is contagious and spreads rapidly online. People are drawn to passionate people. They love champs. With the rise of fan culture, now more than ever, if you're not a champ, or a passionate supporter of one, you're probably seen as a chump.

I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!

Howard Beale (Peter Finch) in Network - image from wikipedia


To coin a phrase from the classic 1976 film Network, fans of soon-to-be-cut TV shows are 'mad as hell, and they're not going to take this anymore!' Just as fictional TV presenter Howard Beale galvanised audiences to voice their frustrations in Network, online agitators are persuading fans of shows with dwindling ratings to make their voices heard.

While Beale's followers resorted to shouting out of windows, thanks to Web 2.0, today's protesters have more outlets to disseminate disapproval, although they're also going old-school, sending TV executives stuff in the mail!

In the US, followers of the high school football drama Friday Night Lights have clubbed together to save their show. They've been sending NBC executive Ben Silverman lightbulbs, marked with the message 'LIGHTS ON'. An exuberant prank, notwithstanding the danger of broken glass and mutilation.




Viewers have been egged on by entertainment website Best Week Ever, which has drawn up an online petition.

Meanwhile, Cavemen fans are engaged in mass action to Save Cavemen, the sitcom about Cro-Magnon men adrift in the modern world. Whipped into a frenzy by New York Entertainment's Vulture, viewers are shaving their heads and sending in their locks to ABC.



The US writers' strike means that fans' patience has been wearing thin. After weeks of anticipation, the news that their favourite shows are not long for this world is clearly too much to bear.

Time Merge

As people make choices in life, trading off their time, energy and money, time is emerging as perhaps the most important commodity. Visualisation tools are becoming more sophisticated, so we're now able to analyse people's movements through time and space more effectively.

There's a growing trend in time-merge media, in other words, cool ways to manipulate spacetime:



www.recreating-movement.com




Run Lola Run Lola Run Lola Run Lola Run from shiffman on Vimeo.


There are many applications of time merge media, from art installations to filmmaking to visualising user activity in websites. The consequences of different choices can also be observed, as in the video of one player's multifold attempts to reach the next level in a version of Mario World, depicted simultaneously.

For more examples, check out Kottke's post, or Split Screen, a blog dedicated to multi-layered visuals.