The computer world is all about manufacturing personalized, high-end desktop PC’s – and that’s the marketing message that HP (Hewlett Packard) is touting in the release of their first gaming PC. In an effort to reinvent their brand and to gain important insight into a market that’s been dominated by other gaming PC manufacturers like Alienware (which was acquired by Dell in early 2006), HP is releasing a specialty desktop PC called the Blackbird 002. This elite PC costs about $5500 without a monitor, which is more than 7 times higher than the average desktop price (according to IDC; 2005). This hefty price tag clearly demands a unique buzz-generating strategy and that’s exactly what HP trying to achieve.

Why the Gaming PC Market Means “Cha-Ching” for HP

The gaming market is a unique, yet financially lucrative niche for computer manufacturers. PC gamers like to “mod” (that’s lingo for modify) their computers by installing ultra-high end processors and video cards, scribing or cutting intricate designs into the sides of the PC case, and adding neon lights to show off the components. Since PC gamers spend a considerable amount of time in front of these machines, they typically splurge on multiple, large-screen LCD monitors, high-end keyboards, and mice that can execute a sequence of keystrokes at the click of a button, allowing gamers to easily slay their virtual enemies. These add-ons make gaming machines more expensive than a standard home PC – these machines regularly cost $3500 or more (normally MUCH more) which translates to higher profits for shops that build these PC’s.

While HP is using the standard microsite with cool Flash to show off and sell the Blackbird, they are also leveraging non-traditional advertising vehicles to attract gamers. The marketing campaign includes:

• Tapping personalities that gamers identify with, including Kevin Rose, front-man for the web 2.0 site Digg, and Morgan Webb, a co-host of the popular a gaming show X-Play.
• Promoting the Blackbird using video podcasts. Both Rose and Webb used their independent podcasts to discuss the pending release of the Blackbird via a short “advertising” segment.
• Setting up a wiki and driving user generated content (feedback) using the podcast segments. In the spots, viewers are challenged to visit the wiki and weigh in on what they want in a gaming PC.
• Further leveraging the wiki by giving away 3 Blackbird desktops to visitors who write an article on the wiki.

As a backup, HP is also relying on essential gadget-focused and computer news sites to get the word out, including engadget, pcmag.com, joystiq.com et al.

Where’s the Payoff for HP?

While this has the makings of great marketing campaign, it appears that the execution strategy didn’t work for the podcasts and wiki. For instance:

• The videos on the wiki do not promote the Blackbird. For example, Joi Ito talks about using his MacBook Pro to play World of Warcraft. While he mentions that he had folks that use a Windows-based PC, like the Blackbird, he says that he “doesn’t really feel like learning.”
• The user generated feedback in non-existent. There are a limited number of comments on the wiki to the segments that Rose and Morgan produced. The comments that do exist are primarily focused on the high price tag of the Blackbird (no surprise).
• Users are not creating worth-while articles for the Blackbird giveaway. Most of the article posts are composed of two to three lines of absolute gibberish, including my favorite “it would be freaking sweet to win a blackbird!!! I really need a new desktop!”

And since reviews at traditional websites couldn’t justify the purchase of such high end machine, the early buzz for the HP Blackbird is slowly dying down at this point.

So What’s Next?

While HP only offers a pre-configured system at this point, HP will enable ordering of fully configurable systems in early October but that won’t correct the situation in time. Since only a limited quantity of pre-configured Blackbird desktops have been produced (only 518 PC’s), it is likely that HP will sell their minimal inventory and scrap the concept of a high-end PC under the HP brand if this campaign doesn’t pan out. At the very least, HP can still count this as a win since this product adds another facet to their new “The Computer is Personal Again” marketing efforts. Unfortunately, measuring the impact of this branding campaign will be tough.

Here’s to hoping HP strikes gold (in the future)!

Reduce, reuse, recycle. Three little words that most everyone is familiar with. Like many other people, I feel that I do my part. I have a little recycling bin at home that I fill up each week and I carpool to work. However, I recently went and took a quiz on Earth Day Network’s website to tell me what my ecological footprint is. Yikes! To my surprise, my lifestyle is not as eco-friendly as I had hoped.

If everyone in the world were to live to my lifestyle, it would require 3.7 planets to sustain us. When I read further my footprint of 16 acres of biologically productive acres is actually less than the average footprint of 24 acres per person used by most Americans. Although I may be comforted by the fact that I am not as wasteful as many Americans, my 16 acres is still drastically more than the 4.5 per person that the world has to offer.

After the quiz, I was taken to a form that helps you set goals to reduce your footprint. The categories that are listed include food, mobility, and housing. That is great, but what about all the time that I spend at work each week. That was not even accounted for and it left me wondering what else I can do to help the community and our environment at work.

When Spunlogic recently took a step back and looked at how we stand as a company within the green movement and the global community, I was eager to participate. We identified many ways that we can improve as a company and I volunteered to lead up the recycling efforts. After all recycling is easy. It is such an easy and impactful way to help the environment, there should be no reason why anyone wouldn’t want to recycle. Well, so I thought.

There are many details that go into a recycling program, the biggest hurdle being logistics. What do you place the materials that you are recycling in? Where do you place the collection bins in the office? Who will take the materials to the recycling centers? Do you use volunteers or do you pay a service to empty the bins? How often do the recycling bins need to be emptied? Where are the recycling centers located? What type of materials does each recycling center accept?

I am happy to announce that Spunlogic is now recycling paper. After much research, I discovered that our building offers a service that provides bins and collects them at your request. In one day, the bins were placed in our office and we officially started the Spunlogic recycling program. It’s so convenient, but we never utilized the service before because it was not publicized or even known by many of the building’s tenants.

The main point is that while recycling and many other green efforts are easy to do, they do require some thought and effort. I challenge everyone to think of just one thing that you can do differently. No matter how large or small, I would love to hear what your personal or company goal is.

Next on the agenda for the Spunlogic recycling team: aluminum and plastic!

As more and more companies adopt a user-focused approach, those who are new to the field often interchange terms that sound alike, but are really different. One might argue that it’s just a matter of semantics, but when talking with a user-experience professional, semantics can mean a great deal.

Here’s a quick guide to make sure you are using the right terminology:

Usability
Often times people will say we are working on a “usability project”. This could mean a wide variety of things. Is it a usability test? Is it a website re-design focusing on improved usability? Is it a review of an existing site to identify usability issues? “Usability” has become a catch-all phrase, but it simply refers to how “usable” a function, feature, or entire website is.

User Experience
Now the user “experience” of a website or product is a much more holistic view of things. It’s much more than how easy something is to operate. When you “experience” something you are taking in multiple stimuli, all of which impact the initial and final impression of a user.

This honeycomb diagram probably explains it best. Originally developed by Peter Morville of Semantic Studios, it provides an overview of the different facets of a user-experience.

Useful - Ensuring the solutions and features help users achieve their objectives.

Usable - How intuitive the interaction is based on proven theories and design principles (and validated through testing).

Desirable - The website’s balance between efficiency and aesthetics - how well the site utilizes the power of perception, image, identity, branding, and other elements.

Findable - Designing navigation, content, and page layouts so users can easily find what they need and be confident that they’re on the right path.

Accessible - Ensuring that everyone (including those with disabilities) can access the features without problems.

Credible - Designing elements that will influence whether users trust and believe what the site tells them.

Valuable - Ensuring that what we are creating delivers value to the user.

When you examine the many facets involved in creating a good user-experience, you can easily see that it’s not just about usability. So, if you decide to launch into a re-design because you are trying to fix “usability problems”, take a step back for a holistic view of things. There may be other areas that, if you focus on them, can result in not just improved usability, but a dramatically better user-experience.

“Complexity Kills” is a maxim that can never be overlooked by organizations that create software. Ray Ozzie, chief software architect at Microsoft, elaborates:

“Complexity kills. It sucks the life out of developers, it makes products difficult to plan, build and test, it introduces security challenges and it causes end-user and administrator frustration.”

The New York Times recently ran an article focusing on the pitfalls of software systems that have grown too complex. As we demand more from any given software system, it necessarily grows more complex. Paradoxically, this ever more complex system can suffer from these increasing demands, becoming less useful (and perhaps more dangerous) due to problems arising from complexity. These frail applications shut down; travelers then wait for hours at airports, phone systems vanish, vast power outages cripple major metropolitan areas. All the while, our way of life is becoming more dependent on complex software applications.

What are we to do?

The demand for more productive software will never cease. In order for software companies to continue building successful (and profitable) software, they must adhere to processes that mitigate the evils of complexity. Care needs to be applied to how all stakeholders in a project communicate and contribute, from the client to management to development. Developers need to focus on techniques that slice a difficult problem into smaller, more manageable components.

In the second part of this article, I’ll focus on specific ways that complexity can be managed. We’ll examine Google Maps as a case-study of an application that is both complex and successful.

This really annoys me (that sound you hear is me stretching to get on my high horse) - here is a picture of the US Soccer team’s away jersey from just a few years ago: 

Here is the away jersey the women are now sporting in the current world cup:

Notice anything peculiar?

Reminds me of an informal survey someone I know either took or told me about wherein an email went out asking, male and female alike, given a choice between two potential people to date, and both are equal in all ways - attractiveness, intellect, sense of humor, interests, income, articulation… loves puppies, remembers birthdays, can cook, never dated Lindsey Lohan or Brody Jenner, etc. – but the main difference is that one would call themselves patriotic, and the other would not. Resoundingly, by a wide and long margin, the un-patriotic person was preferable.

I don’t know why, as I would not label myself patriotic or unpatriotic, rather “adequately patriotic”, but maybe my reaction to the above (or that it elicited a reaction at all), sways me in one direction or the other.

The net here (requisite marketing spin): consumers typically associate your brand or product with the colors you’ve invested time and energy to make them build an association with. No need to over think.

Maybe the uniform “deciders” didn’t want possible negative global reaction to US Foreign policy to affect the good and talented women in the tournament.

However, replacing it with a color (GOLD!) that possibly represents the most negative world perception about our domestic policy (namely, that they think we are all rich and lazy) is just maybe short sighted.

We might as well play in Cowboy hats.

The actual cowboy kind, not the Bon Jovi kind.

I’m currently in the process of watching The Sopranos from beginning to end. We don’t have HBO so I missed out on what I now know is a great show. I’m just starting season 4 and there are some classic quotes I’ve heard so far. Although from a quote perspective I have to say it’s no “Fletch” (”it’s all ball bearings these days”, “I’ll have a Bloody Mary and a steak sandwich and… a steak sandwich”, and “The lob is a very important part of the game”, to name a few).

But there was something that Silvio said in the last episode that I watched that got me thinking about the interactive industry. In the scene, Tony is laying into his captains about their inability to produce revenue during the current recession. He then asks Silvio to “break it down for ‘em”. It goes like this:

Anthony ‘Tony’ Soprano Sr.: Sil, break it down for ‘em. What two business have traditionally been recession-proof since time immemorial?

Silvio Dante: Certain aspects of show business… and our ‘ting.

Classic, right? And it got me thinking. There’s a lot of talk right now about a perceived bubble that we’re in and that at any moment things might start to crumble as they did in the early 2000’s. And that might be true. But I’m starting to think that online marketing might become recession-proof. Or at least that it should be.

As we know, online marketing is still only around 6 - 8% of typical Fortune 1000 advertising budgets (at least that’s the latest figures I’ve heard). Online marketing also easily outproduces traditional advertising in terms of ROI. “Reach” is still something that online can’t compete with against traditional advertising (long live the 30 second spot), but from a pure measure-ability standpoint, nothing beats interactive.

I’d argue that if/when the bubble might burst, advertisers should increase the percentage of their budget that is attributed to online marketing. The ability to say we spent $X and received $Y in return becomes even more valuable when budgets are tight. Maybe then we’ll start seeing some of the TV advertising getting whacked.

How often have you gone to the store for a quick purchase that ends up taking hours due to so many options? Finally a book which speaks to something that seems to be so true: More options – an excess of choice – is not always a good thing! Everything was easier back when we had fewer things to choose from. The author, Barry Schwartz, speaks about the over-abundance of choice in Schwartz’s talk at Google or in this shorter TED Talk.

The gist of the message is this: We have always been under the impression that it is better to have more choice since it gives us more freedom, which in turn gives us more happiness. In reality, choices tend to inundate us with so much information that it can be overwhelming and detrimental.

“There’s no question that some choice is better than none. But it doesn’t follow from that that more choice is better than some choice.” Some of the examples he gives are:

1. Shopping: There are at least 75 bottles of salad dressing in the supermarket at a given moment. Do we really need so many?

2. Healthcare: Every ailment now has multiple numbers of treatments. Drugs are now being marketed directly to us because we are now consumers of our own healthcare.

3. To Work or Not to Work: Modern technologies (laptops, PDA’s, blackberries) allow us to work at anytime, anywhere. This causes us to always have to choose whether or not to work.

Obviously, choice is a wonderful thing. But at a certain point choice can actually be a hindrance. People agree that there are too many choices in every category of consumer good – from clothes to washing machines. According to Schwartz, “People have more decisions to make than it is worth their time and trouble to be making.”

Too much choice can have detrimental effects:

• Choice can lead to paralysis – too many choices cause you to actually choose NONE!
• Overabundance of choice can cause you to make the wrong decisions since you end up selecting based upon one parameter (i.e. looks) over a more meaningful parameter (i.e., quality). How many of us have selected a sub-par bottle of wine due to its snazzy label?
• Choice can lead to regret. If something isn’t perfect, it is easy to imagine that an alternative would have been better. Regret reduces the satisfaction you get from good choices. Anticipated regret prevents you from making choices at all – you are so sure you are going to make the wrong choice that you don’t make any choice.
• We evaluate our experiences based upon what we expect them to be. More options raises our expectations – causing us to expect perfection. These high expectations ultimately lead us to less satisfaction with results, even if they are good results.
• The longer we mull over a decision, the more we comprehend the pros and cons to every option. This knowledge makes us more likely to suffer from our choice after it has been made.

So what does this mean for creators of interactive products? We should always be mindful of the perils of abundance. Interaction designers are essentially “choice architects” since we provide users options to navigate to different places and execute various actions. Therefore, we should always keep in mind that choices can have a negative effect on our users. Within reason, we should try to anticipate what is best for the user rather than inundate them with options. Since choice can cause paralysis leading users to actually choose nothing, we should organize options so that if users do nothing, they actually get what is in their best interest.

Behavioral Research gets to work on some pretty exciting projects. Here’s a sneak peak of our in-world User Experience testing.

1. We study how users search for islands …

Click:

2. We test what users think they can do…

Click:

3. We test user expectations…

Click:

We’ve discovered some amazing things. Marketing in world is not just about design. It’s about optimization with your target audience in mind.

I read an interesting article over the weekend that answered the question: why is sports journalism so much better than the general media? (which I agree with) The author had 3 reasons:

1. You keep score, which makes reporting clear outcomes the goal.
2. Your reader base has a near expert understanding of the topics (ever meet a fantasy geek? If not, come see me).
3. There’s a monopoly in the trade (sure, there are tons of blogs, local papers, etc., but really, it’s ESPN, SI, and then Fox and CBS for NFL and NCAA basketball respectively).

I have a fourth – sports lends itself beautifully to literary metaphor, so writers can use exquisitely crafted language and not be penalized for lack of objectivity or pithiness.

So I was weighing this against why the ad trades are so poor (how many years in a row can this be the “YEAR OF MOBILE!!!”), given very similar circumstances? We do keep score (wins/losses, campaign outcomes, ratings, etc), the readers are all in the industry - for the most part - and there is an absolute monopoly on the reportage: Adage and Adweek (and their sister pubs) are the major filters for what we understand to be going on in the ad/marketing fields. We’ll here’s a stab – let me know what you think:

1. They don’t really keep score – they’ll only tell you who won and lost specific pitches, not who is really losing business, staff and rep. CP+B does some wonderfully executed creative, but how many accounts can they lose, win, lose, win, lose, win, win, lose, before we start asking about results (agencies don’t just walk away from beer and auto accounts, mind you). The pubs also play it pretty straight by NOT predicting how effective ad campaigns or agencies will be - what was the over/under on how many weeks Bud.tv would be live? You can’t grade ads if we can’t grade you, Barbara.

2. Here’s the important one: the readers of Adweek and AdAge are nowhere near as expert in advertising and marketing as a typical sports fan is about the sports world. Really. Walk through any agency – large, small, digital, traditional, other - and ask a typical AE or production coordinator who Jack Connors is, and you’ll get a blank stare. Ask even the most seasoned Art Director what AOL’s announcement that the future is in ad networks means to their world (answer: an awful lot). Net/net: we’re all in the weeds of our own businesses, clients, and agencies, and don’t really have the time to invest in anything outside the four corners of our immediate concern. The CPG cos. read about other CPG cos. and move on. The telcos read about the telcos and move on. Moveon reads about moveon and moves on. I read it all, but I’m a nerd.

3. Lastly, there’s too much of a monopoly, and it’s too geographically considered – The Wal-Mart/DraftFCB/Roehm love tryst was the biggest story in the industry… for about a month. The pubs of note don’t have the deep bench of reporters nor the long term interest of their readers to really dig deeply into a really compelling “human interest story”. Plus, who knows where Roehm will land? Who wants to be shut out of news concerning the largest retailer in the world? They’re too big, and too dependant, to mess with the hands that feed them - news and ad revenue.

Just some thoughts. I’d love to know who you think the Beli-cheat equivalent is in the ad world. Which agency is the Delmon Young of the ad industry?

I’ve always had a bit of a sore spot for the Anti-Smoking campaigns. Don’t get me wrong, smoking among kids IS a problem: at least 4.5 million U.S. adolescents are estimated to be cigarette smokers and nearly 6,000 children under 18 years of age start smoking every day (American Lung Association, 2003).

My contention is this: I don’t believe anti-smoking ads are effective.

Let me back up a little bit … as a part of the Master Settlement Agreement with “big tobacco“, millions upon millions of dollar$ were given to states to create anti-smoking campaigns. However, according to a recent study conducted by the University of Georgia, the ads “do very little to dissuade middle school students from smoking—in fact, they increase the likelihood of teens picking up the habit.” The idea simple: teens don’t want to be talked down to, and as a result won’t respond to these ads. The study’s lead author suggests what I’ve always suspected, that the ads “inadvertently encourage rebellion.”

This leads me to the real purpose of my post … a recent campaign produced for another organization (that doesn’t work off the $$ of Big Tobacco), The National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign’s “Above the Influence” campaign. Above the Influence is a result of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, and is aimed at youth aged 9-18, especially the vulnerable middle-school adolescents.

The specific campaign I have isolated for this post is called STONERS IN THE MIST. And it’s cool. Stoners will love to play with this site. No, really. They will. Maybe even some young person who has only toyed with the idea of using marijuana will finally be swayed by this cool site. The site is led by Dr. Bernard H. Buck, a white-bearded explorer, complete with funny accent and safari suit. The entire interface is neat… there’s tons of funny video clips that “explore” the life of a stoner and a map users can click to see even more about the social life, health and fitness, and activities of a stoner.

I’m so confused. What’s the point of these anti-drug campaigns? Is it to create fun, flashy websites for kids to play with, or, are we trying to convince them they don’t need drugs?

I guess, who am I to judge? Perhaps the greatest challenge in advertising is to develop an effective anti-drug ad.