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Bottom line: This is one we’re still on the fence about. Sure, we get a big thrill when science fiction latches on to an idea and people set about making it real—video conferencing, mobile phones, GPS, what have you. And the idea of Augmented Reality (AR) is about as yummy as they come, with information, animation, video, graphics, etc., overlaid atop views of the real world. Take for example, this AR game demo HP did a couple of years back. Brilliant, right?
Unfortunately, this demo is total vaporware, not even remotely possible given current technology. Instead, the early AR applications we’re seeing tend toward the banal. The AR for the Harry Potter attraction at Universal Studios might entertain kids for a minute or two, which is much longer than the time necessary to get the thing up and running. Paramount’s Transformers 2 AR app, which “allows you to wear a virtual Optimus Prime mask, watch footage from the film with a mini-virtual Bumblebee, and more”… OK, that’s fun for, well, not that long, really. The McDonald’s-Avatar collaboration is marginally better, but note how even the promo video spends more time on the install than the experience, a sure sign that the cost-benefit scale isn’t where it needs to be.
The promise of AR is still largely in its potential. But you can begin to see hints of where it could go in applications like the Layar Brower, and Mobilzy’s Wikitude and games like Arrhrrr! from Georgia Tech’s Augmented Environments Lab. We can imagine marketers hiding things in plain site, and then revealing the secret in a dramatic way for those who know where to look—with virtual 3D models jumping off of billboards or embedded phrases like ”We see things nobody else does…” with embedded glyphs in physical objects that reveal, well, something really cool when viewed with an AR-equipped device.
On the flip side, there will surely also be a raft of totally practical uses of AR, and that’s sexy in it’s own way. Things like AKQA’s Virtual Box Simulator for the U.S. Postal Service, which let’s you figure out what size box you need for whatever it is you want to mail, and Zugara’s Web Cam Shopper, where you can (kinda sorta) see what you would look like in different outfits.
Clearly, we’re still at the “look at this cool technology” phase with AR. But get it straight: AR is a tool. Like the fisheye lens, computer generated imagery, bluescreen, to become truly valuable, the technology needs to move out of the spotlight and become part of the storytellers toolkit. Hopefully, some creative types out there have become so worked up by the phrase we used earlier (“not even remotely possible given current technology”) that they’re already well on their way to proving us wrong. We sincerely hope so!
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Though we hesitate to add to the deluge of commentary about Apple’s forthcoming iPad, there are a couple of quick points that feel like they need to be thrown into the mix sooner rather than later. First, we want to gently remind those hyperventilating commentators of the old saying, “anything is possible when you don’t know what you’re talking about.” That is to say, when you’re commenting on a device that’s not yet actually in public hands or fully realized, it’s okay to have fun speculating, but, you know, take a deep breath before drawing those firm conclusions.
So… Yes, we like the look of the thing. A lot. But two immediate concerns trouble our sleep:
1. The Return Of The Walled Garden. The device fairly well screams “paid content” and that’s understandable. But swell as the platform must seem to those with something to sell, walled gardens (AOL, anyone?) require us to give up much of what made us come online in the first place–the open-ended internet with its browser uncontrolled by anyone but the end user. As one of our team members put it, “It’s with a bittersweet sense of awe that I look on the iPad, in the same way one might be impressed with the technology of a Blackhawk helicopter, but terrified of what it means when used as designed.”
2. Flash appears to be MIA. We didn’t get caught up in the Apple-Flash fracas when it was restricted to the iPhone/iPod Touch, since those small screens are ultimately meant for snacking on the web. But when Mr. Jobs calls the iPad “the best way to experience the web” and then shows a demo clearly lacking Flash support, it feels like we’ve dropped into some alternative universe. Whatever your feelings about Flash on the web, the reality of it is that millions of sites, and some 75% of online video, rely on it. No flash = no Disney, Hulu, Farmville, ESPN, etc. And, as our friend Ian Shafer points out, online ads are “almost 100% rendered in Adobe’s Flash.”
Something’s gotta give, right? The idea of going back to the bad old days of having to build out every digital asset six times to get them to work on various and sundry proprietary platforms is in no way appealing, not to the marketers and creators that have to pay for it, the agencies and studios that are always expected to do more for less, or the consumers who expect their goodies to work whenever and wherever.
Okay, deep breath. It’s early days. Much remains to be seen. Perhaps David Pogue said it best in his New York Times blog when he described the iPad as “a 1.5 pound sack of potential.”
We’ll have more on this as the story develops.
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If there was one thing shouted repeatedly from the rooftops at CES 2010, it was surely “3D TV!” Which, much like “HDTV!” ten years ago, seems to us to be, well, still ten years from really being a big deal (find good perspectives at Gizmodo and the NYTimes).
While there were any number of big, thin, sexy hi-def TVs on display, the emerging ebook-slate-tablet-netbook scene struck us as more newsworthy. It remains to be seen which combinations of design, form factor, and interface will win the hearts of the crowd, especially with Apple’s entry still a semi-mystery. But here’s a look at some of the promising early entries:
Skiff e-Book Reader
Plastic Logic Que Reader
Nokia Boolet 3G (one of our fave netbook designs)
Lenovo IdeaPad hybrid tablet…thingie
nVidia Tablet
Sony’s Dash
HP Slate
Dell Slate
For sheer futurific wow-factor, it was hard to beat this prototype laptop with a transparent OLED screen. Of course, the odds of getting your hands on anything like this soon are plenty slim.
The “connected” TV was also fairly ubiquitous. We doubt these hybrids will kill the PC, but some services are no brainers, like the Skype TV touted by Panasonic. Of course, as TV’s get more sophisticated, something’s got to be done to improve their interfaces and input devices. Today’s remotes won’t fly, but something like this from Sling (via from your cable or sat provider) or this remote/interface combo from Boxee could provide the missing link.
The cultural and commercial impact of the iPOD and IPHONE revolution was fairly obvious on the convention floor. In addition to endless cases, carriers, earbuds and headphones, skins, and the like, we particularly liked these clever i-extenders: the Evenno Fingerist, a sharply designed “guitar amp,” and the iDiscover keboard/music studio.
For just-plain-fun, we found the AR Drone, a cool copter with an onboard camera remote controllable via iPHONE, to be hard to beat—if they can really get the thing mass-produced and delivered for Xmas like they promise. (Honest-to-God quote from a guy demoing the thing: “Some Hollywood guy told us he HAS to have this before anyone else, no matter what the cost.”) Failing that, we may have to settle for the faux x-wing Striker fighter, if Lucas doesn’t shut them down first.
Lego is a quality company showing plenty of imagination, and we loved their demo reel for their upcoming Lego Universe MMOG (“launching in 2010″), another great example of how brands can now live online and offline and every dimension in between.
Last, but not least, was a little trend we think has big potential: the mini projector. The ShowWX was one memorable examples; roughly iPHONE sized, this class of device could provide a bridge connecting the personal and public possibilities of all those portable media devices already referenced.
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Here at Stradella Road, we prefer looking forward to peering back. So rather than recap 2009, we thought we’d end the year with a peek into our crystal ball for 2010. And guess what? We’ve got nothing but good news, at least from our perspective as marketers (some media conglomerates may beg to differ, surely).
1. The Rise of the “Read-Mostly” Devices.
Kindle, Nook and Sony eBooks, the JooJoo Tablet and maybe even an Apple Tablet will all be bumping and bubbling up to find their place in the market. Credit the iPhone and iPod Touch for creating the “Read-Mostly” devicea tool that mostly consumes media but is also capable of creating it to a limited extent (photos, tweets, short videos). These devices are suitable for snacking on media; immersive and interactive experiences will remain the province of computers, game consoles, and televisions.
2. Dataphones Finally Get Serious.
Texting doubled in the USA over the past year or two, and cell phone call times decreased to 2.3 minutes. Which is to say… the death of the “minute” is coming down the pike, and we can expect to see more and more phones sold with plans measured in Gigabytes rather than minutes. Buy a 5GB plan and do what you want: VoIP? Texting? Whatever. Expect Sprint and/or TMobile to kick in with a plan like this in the coming year.
3. The Al La Carte End Run.
Like a cool breeze on a late summer day, there’s a sense of a change ahead. Some of the signs are here already: Netflix Instant Watch surpassed DVD rentals, according to Feedflix, and rumours swirl that Hulu and YouTube are moving to pay-per-view offerings. Remember that recent seismic shift in the music business, where iTunes is now the largest music retailer? In 2010, we’re finally going to see what “A La Carte” video means to companies like Comcast and Time Warneras well as HBO, CBS, NBC and all the others. Sure, the politicians in the hip pocket of the cable industry don’t like it but the harsh reality is that IP delivery of media over relatively “dumb” pipes is where we’re going.
4. More Decoupling of Budgets and Outcomes.
In 2009, we saw two movie-making extremes. On the one end, we got Avatar for a reported half-billion dollars in production and marketing expenses and Transformers for not too much less. And both of those made out okay financially. At the other end was Paranormal Activity, reportedly made for $15,000 and raking in more than $100 million. The former outcome has been the norm for a while; the latter phenomenon tends to be more rare. But in 2010, largely thanks to the pervasive use of social networks and an increase in paid digital distribution channels, we look forward to seeing more low and micro budget films attaining a higher degree of financial success.
5. Facebook Levels… and Maybe Even Contracts.
The huge run-up in Facebook membership fundamentally altered how we use the internet. At 350 million members, it has over 10 times more users than AOL did at it’s peak (26.7 million), and, in the same way AOL brought the Internet to the masses, Facebook has mainstreamed Social Networking. That said, in 2010, Facebook will finally start to get some competition in the English-speaking world, with a consolidation of smaller players as they align to draw the inevitable disenfranchised former Facebookers into their webs. Remember, nothing goes up forever.
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There’s a good reason why many a marketer has doubts about the ways that focus groups tends to be used to test creative and campaign concepts these days. Rather than seek directional insights from consumers, we too often lock a bunch of people in a room and pester them for answers about things they don’t really understand or have the tools to explain (“Is this good creative?” “What could we put in an ad that would convince you to buy our product?”).
It’s no secret that some of the greatest successes in media and entertainment tested “poorly” (Seinfeld) or were never focus group tested at all (iPod ). And we all know of many cases where the tests were great, yet the results were horrible (too many movie titles to mention, New Coke, etc.) or the tests were challenging and the results were just fine (the GI Joe movie, just one recent example, grossed $301MM worldwide).
So why do we persist? Sure, no one likes tossing piles of cash in the rubbish heap. Taking risks is scary and potentially job-threatening. But let’s be honest about it. Most focus groups—rooms full of people enticed to participate by some combination of cash and donuts—are about as scientific as reading goat entrails to forecast the stock market.
Marketers often convince themselves that this type of testing is a necessary evil, required to assess creative output before committing to delivery. It’s not. Especially not in the day and age of social media. Whether or not this was ever valid, the approach proves way too static for a communications space ruled by social media. In this brave new wired world, we get instant evidence that something is working or not.
With digital media, the best approach is to expose as many creative ideas as possible and let the market pick and chose what wins, continually optimizing and evolving the idea even after it is deployed. The real test is in the doing, not the testing.
Amusing case in point: Perhaps you missed it when Stefani Germanotta performed at a talent show in 2005, at New York University. She performed solo piano renditions of three original songs, and one of the judges said, “Nora Jones look out.” She came in 3rd place. Now imagine testing the persona that Stefani Germanotta created soon afterward—the pop star known as Lady Gaga—against a group of other solo female vocal performances in the “Nora Jones” style back in 2005. The echo chamber of focus groups and market research would likely have produced another Hansen or M.C. Hammer, and Ms. Germanotta would never have had a chance to emerge and evolve into a delightfully over-the-top performance artist musician, perhaps this generation’s David Bowie, with a huge online following.
Focus group testing of marketing concepts represent an understandable attempt to gin the system for success. Done and used correctly, they can provide value. Yet despite consistent evidence that testing with sample audiences helps more with positioning insight than in generating strong creative, we still ram materials through inappropriate ”research” filters, generating watered down, uninspiring campaigns as a result.
It is high time to acknowledge the new world, and to understand that the test market for Lady Gaga is the actual audience, and not a so-called representative sample. Whether it’s video plays, mentions in Twitter, parody videos, blog posts, sales, clicks, fan sites… we now have near-instant access to good, hard, empirical indicators of success.
Terrifying as it may be, especially to marketers used to intangible measures like awareness, intent, and consideration, we no longer need the security blanket focus groups are frequently used to provide. You don’t need a massive budget to find out whether your precious idea is really promising: There are a billion socially-networked people online every day who are quite willing to give you all the feedback you could ever require.
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I travelled recently to Australia to speak on emerging digital marketing and distribution channels at The Screen Producers Association of Australia (SPAA). Our focus was on how to map asset strategies from the early stages of production to best leverage the new channels and distribution across multiple exploitation windows.
A fascinating theme that emerged during the week centered around the old art vs. commerce brouhaha. It seems that Australian audiences do not attend Aussie-made cinema in any significant numbers, while American movies have posted strong gains in the market. Why is that?
Certainly Australia’s moviemaking heritage is strong. And the industry is in a unique position, with substantial government subsidies for filmmakers that should allow for more personal—rather than strictly commercial—visions to be developed.
The debate at the SPAA gathering centered on whether this situation, ironically, serves to create a sort of artistic inbreeding, combined with an unhealthy filmmaker distain for audiences. Certainly the local ‘majors’ like Village Roadshow seek commercial product for a global audience, but my impression from conversations on the ground was that the majority of the local industry either does not know what their audience wants, or that they do not care to deliver it for them.
This is not to say the U.S. studio system’s slavish devotion to commerce is the answer (Saw 6, anyone?). But it does speak to the value of having some idea of why people go to their local theater. As we found in our recent MovieGoers 2010 report, age, life-stage, and (for younger audiences) peer groups, all have significant impact on the decision process for movies.
While I do not believe that filmmakers have an obligation to speak to the widest possible audience at all times, they do have a responsibility to keep their costs in a scale related to the potential audience. New digital marketing and distribution channels will provide new opportunities for both art and commerce, but, ultimately, Australian filmmakers will do themselves no disservice by better investigating their audience, the stories that inspire them, the worlds they live in.
They may even find they like some of them.
For an audio overview of insights from the conference, click here.
And if you’re looking for consumer insights, here are three resources we like:
1. Pew Internet & American Life Project
2. FEED: The Razorfish Digital Brand Experience Report
3. Nielsen Media & Entertainment
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