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This is the personal blog of John F. Morton. It's where I talk about the stuff that interests me. Primarily technology, marketing and pop culture. If you are looking for my portfolio of work, visit johnfmorton.com. Thanks for stopping by!

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Filtered by Category: Trends

Parody Ads Tell You A Lot About Your Brand

Last year Tom Ford released a fragrance for men that has received less than stellar reviews. A friend showed me the parody of the site. If you want to see them both, do so at your own risk. They are not what I’d call “safe for work”. Click here for the original site. Click here for the parody. I can see why someone did a parody of those Tom Ford ads. They are pretentious and stupid. I think the parody serves as fair warning for any brand with such crappy advertising.

But what happens when a brand listens to their customer and gives them what they want? I’ve got a couple example to share that show what happens when consumers really love a brand/product and take the marketing materials and make it their own. Yes, it’s an Apple example, a brand that almost seems unfair to compare any other to, but it’s worth the comparison if only to show how high the bar is set.

Witness “Hit Me With Your iPhone,” a song composed by a fan and with video remixed from a marketing video on Apple’s site:

Next, take that same video, remix it with a feature suggestion for an improvement to the iPhone. That ”I love you” at the end speaks volumes as to how this brand reaches people.

iPhone Copy and Paste

P.S. iPhone, I love you too.

Flash Forward Boston: Day 1

This week I’m happy to be at Flash Forward in Boston. I’ve been to coming to this conference since 1999 or 2000. I forget which year it started. It’s always exciting to see the presentations and find out what the best Flash heads are doing now and what’s coming down the pike.

I attended 4 sessions today, the first day of the conference. The day started with the Adobe Keynote address presented by Kevin Lynch. Mr. Lynch has been the face of Adobe at many of the FFs I’ve attended. For this conference, he gave an summary of all the recent Flash developments Adobe has introduced over the past several months. One of the most interesting to me is Adobe Air which provides a way of making desktop applications from Flash content. As an added bonus, Adobe also gave every attendee a copy of Colin Moock’s Essential ActionScript 3.0. Thanks, Adobe!

The next 2 sessions I attended were ActionScript 3 for Designers by Rich Shupe of FMA and OOP for the Noob by Peter Elst of Mind Studios. I’ve been playing around with Action Script 3 some and I got quite a lot out of both of them. Peter was good enough to post his session notes on his blog. Check it out here.

My last session for the day was Video Game Opportunities with Flash by John Say of Say Design. His primary topic was casual games. If you check out his company’s site, saydesign.com, you’ll see many cool casual games in the portfolio section. At his company, they prefer to develop games in Flash. There are several advantages to Flash. The development process is easier than traditional programming. There is also a great advantage in distribution since the Flash Player isn’t limited to a single computer platform since Flash games easily play on the computers most people think about when Flash is mentioned--PC, Mac and Linux. In the past year, Flash has moved to our TV screens with the Nintendo Wii and the Playstation 3. Causal games also have a good marketplace on XBox Live, although they are not Flash based in that case.

The highlight of the entire conference was also on the first day, The Flashforward Film Festival. You can check out all of the nominees here. Bitey Castle won the People’s Choice Award for his wonderful 30 days: 30 shorts project. Be sure to check it out here. 

This Is Your iPod Talking

I love music. You’d have a really hard time finding me with my iPod close at hand but you won’t hear much music coming from my iPod. I listen to spoken content almost exclusively. Because I’m a bit of an information junkie, I was really taken with the invention of podcasts. podcasting is simply embedding a file, usually a piece of audio content, into an RSS feed. (What’s an RSS feed? Basically a special kind of link that’s always up to date. Want to know more about RSS? Check out the article at Wikipedia.)

The variety of podcasts being produced is incredible. There are a lot of tech podcasts, probably because that’s the world podcasting started in, but you can find something for nearly ever topic. (Yes, even that thing you’re thinking of right now.) If you’ve never added a podcast feed to your iPod, I encourage you to give it a try. The easiest way to get started listening to podcasts is iTunes. The podcast directory is in the iTunes Store, but don’t worry, you’re not actually buying anything when you subscribe to a podcast. Every podcast there is free. Just enter a search in the upper right hand corner and see what you find.

I’ve got nearly a thousand individual episodes of podcasts on my iPod, so I’m won’t post an exhaustive list of what I listen to, but I’ll give you a few that I like to get you started. My favorite podcasts tend to have a Mac focus, so if you’re a PC fan, you might want to steer away from some of them. (Or you could just get it over with an buy your Mac.)

Never miss an episode:

• Mac OS Ken
• Security Now
• Mac Geek Gab
• This Week in Tech
• MacBreak Weekly

Regular listens:

• The New York Times Audio Digest (This is the only paid podcast I listen to.  It’s included with Audible Gold subscription)
• The New York Times Tech Talk
• BBC Documentary Archive

Occasional Listens:

• Ken Radio
• Please Explain
• Ask Leo!

From an advertising perspective, I think they are an incredible way of reaching a dedicated audience with a very targeted message, whether it’s a tech enthusiast or a knitting enthusiast. The problem has been that there haven’t been great tools to measure the audience for an advertiser, which makes it a difficult investment for the people who have to account for their media spending. There finally a little hope on the horizon for the creators of podcasts with the founding of the Association for Downloadable Media. (Read about it in this article from the New York Times.) This means that the variety of podcasts produced will only increase. That’s good news for everyone. 

Vint Cerf Speaks, I Listen, I Post About it.

Last night I was lucky enough to see Vint Cerf speak at the Google New York headquarters. He’s one of the “founding fathers of the Internet” and is now employed at Google as their Chief Internet Evangelist.

While the crowd gnawed on fried food and sipped free drinks, he gave a lecture he calls “Tracking the Internet into the 21st.” He spoke about how the internet started as 3 separate small networks that were not connected together back in the late 1960’s to how the internet is now being taken to an interplanetary network. Seriously, interplanetary!

Along the way he touch on topics like advertising online, the limits asymmetrical broadband service is putting on advancement online, how the surprisingly high level of user generated content is changing the world and the evils of Power Point. His Power Point quote, which he said he was borrowing from someone else, was hilarious. ”Power corrupts and Power Point corrupts absolutely.” Priceless.

I don’t have video of last night’s presentation, but you can view the same lecture he gave at the Google London office. It’s a little different that last night’s but it covers probably 95% of it. Very well worth your time. It’s broken into 3 parts.

Part 1 - 28 min 18 sec

Part 2 - 31 min 13 sec

Part 3 - 31 min 7 sec

I hope you enjoy it! I did.

When You Stick an Ad in My Game, It Better Be Good.

Can you imagine Mario trying to save a big can of Pepsi for Princess Peach? Maybe if you complete the whole six-pack, you get a rare bonus Crystal Pepsi!

If you’re reading this at some distant point in the future, I sure hope you don’t find Mario World invaded by Pepsi, but the video game landscape has finally caught the notice of big advertisers. I recent read Is In-Game Advertising About to Take Off?, an article discussing how ripe video game players are for reaching with advertising. Gamers can’t really change the channel, TiVo a game to skip an ad, or take a bathroom break from a game so they can skip ads if they are incorporated into a game. They not only have to “watch” the ads, they have to participate in them. Reaching gamers “in game” is like shooting fish in a barrel. These gamers are also a highly sought after demographic.

I do work in advertising and I truly believe that advertising does not ruin everything it touches. When done well, advertising can be really enjoyable and that’s why Very Funny Ads is a great place to spend time. The thing I fear are the bad advertisers fumbling into gaming with arm loads of cash (thus getting their way) and ruining the gaming experience. The article does mention this as a challenge, but it’s one of the last things mentioned.

Another challenge is the need for advertisers to focus on the players’ experiences. “Advertisers have to be creative and provide gamers with tangible benefits from the ads; if they are just interested in displaying their ads, their efforts will eventually fail,” Parks Associates’ Cai told the E-Commerce Times. Techniques now being tested to tighten the bond between player and advertiser include special promotions, rebates, coupons, newsletters and text messaging follow-ups.

Getting advertising and video game integration right will take time and quite a few stumbles. If you take the typical number of commercials you see watching one hour of TV as an example, only a small percentage of them are actually good. Is this the same ratio we can expect from advertising integrated into video games?

Some thoughts come to mind in this area.

• Instead of integrating an advertising message into a game a person has already paid $50 for, a better solution is probably having extra levels or optional areas of games sponsored by advertisers, complete with parental controls to give parents the ability to block advertising from their kids if they choose.
• Perhaps the advertising can actually offset the price of the game. This was the promise of advertising invading movie theaters, but the hoped for discount never materialized for movie goers.
• I thought the Burger King XBOX 360 games were a really nice examples of gaming and advertising playing well together. The fact that they required you to purchase actual game disks made the delivery of the games a little clunky to me though. Now that digital distribution has come to consoles, this probably will cease to be a problem.
• Mobile phones, from a conceptual level, seem like an ideal place to let consumers spend some spare moments having fun while getting a brand message. The problem, at least in the US, is that the service providers and the phone manufacturers have so many different standards and restrictions, that reaching your consumer effectively becomes a huge burden.

Read the article here.