Take a quick look into the past of some of the best and worst social media has dished out. From our friend and prankster Nalts to Mentos, this video shows just how fast this landscape is moving. Buckle up for a great synopsis and get ready for a terrible rendition of Billy Joel’s - “We didn’t Start the Fire” by Cakke.

Forget having to have a multi-million dollar budget to make it onto the big screens. For a mere $20,000 and 3 years, you can land yourself in movie premier at the Sundance festival. Did I also mention that you can do this in the comfort of your own room? That is exactly what former Web Designer Michael Belmont did.

The outcome is a 1hr26min hypnotic and berzerk film called “We Are the Strange”, which utilizes a technique that Belmont dubs Str8nime, which is a combination of strange + 8-bit + anime. Wired.com recently wrote an article about him and even listed the steps to making a DIY Str8nime movie on your own. Check out the trailer for We Are the Strange.

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.

Since the beginning of the month, I’ve been reading up entranced by the bitter fight between NBC and iTunes, which had been well covered by Phill Ryu. This is an interesting case where someone at NBC sadly thought that this was a good idea but have clearly miscalculated.

Basics of What Happened

This case can be summed in 5 basic steps:

1. NBC’s sells shows on Apple’s iTunes Store at $1.99 per episode; contract comes up for renewal
2. NBC tries to re-negotiate with Apple asking $4.99 per episode; Apple refuses to budge on price
3. Negotiation goes public; NBC hoped “the people” would side with them, forcing Apple to concede
4. Negotiations goes nowhere; NBC switches to Amazon’s Unbox service for Tivo
5. Wheels fall off the bus!

So who’s the Biggest Loser?

I think that NBC will lose because:

Reason #1: People will buy the DVD

NBC is operating under the assumption that people are willing to pay $5 per episode. Considering that a typical television season has 21 - 23 episodes (according to Ryan Tuttle, who is an avid TV watcher), I’m calculating that viewers of shows like 30 Rock, which had 21 episodes, will shell out almost $105 based on the new price:

21 episodes/season * $4.99 per episode = $104.79

That’s a fair sum, considering that you can buy the 30 Rock Season 1 DVD for less than $50. If viewers paid $1.99 per episode, they would be shell out a more reasonable $41.79:

21 episodes/season * $1.99 per episode = $41.79

Reason #2: People will steal download shared episodes for free

In comparison to movie downloads, shared TV episodes are more popular. It seems that while only a small fraction of shared files, or torrents, are TV series, 50% of all download activity is focused on grabbing these shared files. And at $4.99 an episode, downloading these for free would be a steal.

Reason #3: iTunes is FREE while Tivo’s are not!

You can download iTunes for FREE but the barrier to entry for Amazon Unbox Service is a Tivo box. While there are potentially 1.5 million broadband-ready TiVo boxes that can take advantage of this service, it seems that Amazon is tight lipped about how many subscribers are currently purchasing movies through this service. Even if you estimate that 2% of subscribers, that’s only 30,000 potential customers, which will fetch about $150k per episode which seems a bit on the lighter side.

Reason #4: People will opt for cable/satellite TV

Many of the folks that I’ve known who buy episodes do not have cable. They buy episodes from iTunes because it is more cost effective. If you assume that a viewer watches three TV shows and there are 4 episodes a month (one per week), a typical viewer would pay much less than a regular cable bill:

3 shows * 4 episodes * $1.99 per episode = $23.88 per month

When you compare that to a normal cable/satellite bill (approximately $30 to $60 per month), viewers can save a ton of dough. But when you price an episode at $4.99, a viewer will now pay $59.88 per month and at that cost viewers will likely opt in to cable TV.

Reason #5: People will Tivo the episode

One of the reasons that people have Tivo’s is that they can digitally record shows. The benefit of having the Unbox service is that you can access movies, and that is worthwhile if you are a bare-bones cable subscriber. A typical Tivo subscriber would “Season Pass” the show and enjoy the show at their leisure.

Final Marketing Pressure

To makes matters worse, Apple is considering a more aggressive marketing strategy for the TV episodes, with rumors swirling of a price cut to $0.99 per episode. When you consider that NBC had a 30% market share of downloads on iTunes, I see NBC really taking it on the chin.

Oh well, hope that you don’t own any GE stock shares (GE is the parent company of NBC).

Okay, maybe communication never truly left … but our awareness of it has grown keen as we shape effective customer experiences in interactive media. Recently, Donovan (Director of User Experience) gave a presentation about web 2.0’s impact on the landscape of user (customer) experience.  He convincingly described how web 2.0 capabilities evolved as a response to user needs and allow the web to become, among other things, the communication medium people envisioned 10 years ago.

In this changed landscape of customer experience, what is communication exactly?  How do we ensure customers not only get our messages but also find them relevant and convincing?  How do we coordinate messages across multiple channels to deepen our relationships with customers?

As a start toward answering such questions, I just published “Rediscovering Communication“ for the online magazine UXmatters.  Please add your insights as we journey through this exciting landscape together.

Back in June, NBC’s dotcomedy.com launched The Lunch Break Show, a new diversion for those of us that eat at our desk to save time during the day. Arby’s was the sole sponsor and the site is plastered with Arby’s branding and links to their TV commercials. Although it seems to have hit the news release channels back in June, I only recently stumbled across it and found it interesting enough to share the links and some thoughts for any of you who might have missed it the first time around.

The Concept:
The top of the original press release states quite obviously where the idea came from: “According to a recent survey by Kelton Research, nearly 60 percent of office workers in the U.S. spend their lunch breaks at their desks looking for distractions.”

So, it seems that NBC and Arby’s decided to go after this target market by throwing together a 30-minute collection of short segments taken from the previous day’s comedy shows on NBC and inviting office workers to ‘tune in’ between 12:00pm and 2:00 pm to watch the show while eating lunch at their desk.

The Experience:
Open http://www.thelunchbreakshow.com/ in a browser outside the time of 12:00pm - 2:00pm and you will see a page that explains quickly what the show is about and a form to register for email alerts each day before the show begins that only requires a Zip Code and an Email. There is also a countdown to the next show.

Open http://www.thelunchbreakshow.com/ in a browser between 12:00pm - 2:00pm and you will see the video which loops through the 30 minute segment repeatedly, along with a funny little PANIC button.

Thoughts:
I love the idea, it got me interested enough to try it out, but I had some problems with the experience.

Design - I enjoyed the website design and loved the funny little Panic button that pops-up a screen with numbers and lines all over it to make it look like you are doing something important.

Email Reminder - The email comes at 9:30am for me, and there is no way that is going to help me remember the show at lunch. It is buried in my email by that time, and I have to consciously think about the show and go and dig up the email to find the link. (If I haven’t bookmarked or tagged it already)

The Video – The video has some great spots in it each day, and I can always find something to chuckle at. However, you can’t pause it, rewind it, or skip ahead. Here comes the rub. I get what they are trying to do. However, I find it hard to believe that the same people who are clicking around online for entertainment at lunch can’t pause and rewind TV at home with some sort of DVR. I found it very frustrating. A colleague came up to me and asked a question during the show, and I missed something I wanted to hear, and couldn’t pause it or rewind it and I wasn’t about to wait another 30 minutes to catch that segment again.

So to wrap things up, I enjoyed the website and the video, but ultimately got turned off by the lack of ability to interact with the video. I wonder what their drop-off statistics look like because it feels as if they missed the mark a bit on how their demographic would want to interact with the site once they actually got there.

Links:

• To give credit where credit is due, I stumbled across it here at MediaPost in an article that gives a few facts about the campaign.
• The original press release
• Lunch Break Show FAQ

Or Fox River Penitentiary, because I think I know a way out.

This video about a Filipino prison was passed to me by frequent comment poster TS aka Brian Westbrook aka Steve Wilson, and because he suggested I spread the word on this thing and because I just can’t believe it really happened, I had to post it. This again falls in that category of “how do I tie this in to interactive marketing”. I mean, its an online video and without Youtube I doubt we’d ever get to see things like this, but as with my last post I’m not going to try too hard to tie it in. As JJ (another appreciated, frequent comment poster on this blog) pointed out in my last post, it’s not always critical to make sure that my posts tie directly to the company, so I’m going to roll with that mentality.

So basically, just check out these crazy Filipino inmates re-enacting Thriller. I wish things around here were that organized - jeesh.

Not since David Hasselhoff joined reality TV have two of my favorite things come together like this. R.E.M. has embraced Web 2.0 with their recent R.E.M. in Dublin website. In a recent concert there they actually encouraged people to bring video cameras to record the concert and put it on Youtube and other social networking sites. They’ve got Flickr photos, a blog, tags and even RSS feeds. Might Athens, GA be the next Silicon Valley???

PS - for those of you that don’t know me, I was kidding about “the Hoff” being one of my favorite things. He’s barely in my top 10. Again, kidding.

Design and usability are to many “form and function” - the chocolate and peanut butter, and also the difference between an amazing product and a soon to be forgotten one.

I would like this blog post to be Round 1 of the debate over the design interface, the overall product design and its usability among the public. What this is not is a place to complain about Apples’ battery life issues from previous technologies or how Apple will be creating yet another design movement that will effect everything from toasters to toilets. (see iMac)

(Enter and exit Ring Girls and the sound of the bell)

iPhone Advertisement (use in action)

Product Shots:

Can you develop Frito-Lay’s brand and produce their “Mockumentory” ad campaign? Of course you can! With the power of social-media and a bold “hot dog” flavor, you can not only do these things, you also have the chance to be one of the lucky winners to have a year’s supply of Doritos . . .

So why my sarcasm? Other than the fact that social media is by far the tastiest spice currently being traded in the marketing world, I believe that social should be social. Can you still taste that “social” football-flavor left over from the Doritos’ SuperBowl campaign? Do you think that engagement with your community/customers betters your brand online?

The one great thing that Frito-Lay has done is understanding that the online channel is a viable one, and that consumers have no problem going from offline to online. Now let’s see if they will really ever get social.

Check out the Dorito’s X-13D Website.