I have a tendency to keep hold of presentations from throughout my career, sort of like a geek photo album. I was browsing though some t'other day from a few years ago, and found a [not that] old brand positioning deck prepared by an ad agency. It was full of smart insight that logically defined an emotive and differentiated territory that could create a business advantage for the brand in question. Then it finished with a load of TV scripts. Much as I like Mad Men (and the collected works of Bill Bernbach for that matter) I was shocked at how out of date it seemed. There was plenty of insight, but no idea: just a leap from insight to advertising, without any consideration of whether advertising might be the most effective way of spreading an idea.
The reason this struck me is because I've been watching a lot of kids TV recently. Or rather, my son has, and I've been trying to ignore it while I've been in the room. And there's an ad running on there for a game called Code of Everand, which was dreamed up by some smart folk at work for the Dept of Transport. Code of Everand is grounded in the fact that 8-10 year olds know that crossing the road is dangerous. Advertising that explained or dramatised the danger would therefore be ignorable, as it is something so obvious. Not to mention that fact that people don't tend to like being preached to. 8-10 year olds also love multiplayer games, particularly free multiplayer flash ones.
So the game was designed to use roadcrossing skills in gameplay - setting challenges, completion of which demanded taking on fast moving monsters to move around and gain concentration points. The background is here
The fast moving monsters move from at 180 degrees to you, and their motion is based (through some genius data analysis by game developers Area/Code) on actual traffic movement data. So although the concept and gameplay is professional standard, the skills that are required to succeed are those of safe road crossing. So learning desired behaviour rather than being told to do it.
Actually there are a lot of people who are telling participants how to do it safely - there have been fansites and forums appearing since the game was launched late last year: roughly this manyTo the extent that there are already cheat guides for it. That makes sense, as it seems designed not to look like public information, but like anything else that someone might be playing, as these comments from a PlayBBG post make clear:In fact the attention that it is starting to generate, while not actually competing with big commercial releases, does at least figure on the same chart as them:which is in no small part down to those ads that I saw on kids TV. Because after months of research and a year's development to understand what could drive behavioral change and how people could become involved in it, the idea (the game) was realised, and after a further 3 months of allowing gamers to play it, find cheats, post tips, and build the ecosystem that any realistic game requires, then advertising had a role. To let people know about a free game.
Following on from Nick's post about CBS social viewing rooms, there's a few more bits of kit out there that are putting conversation at the heart of the viewing experience, to help drag the good ol' tellie back into the forefront of media innovation.
I'd argue that it is user experience rather than distribution speed that is the main thing preventing on demand TV reaching mass appeal. 99% of the population are happy with the big screen in the corner of the room, even if the little one on their lap gives them access to far more content. Once the content can easily move between the two, then we start to see a fully on demand viewing experience available back on the TV screen. I had expected that the hardware that will deliver this will become available (probably iTunes/Apple TV based) and have appeal outside of early adopters once Kangaroo made huge great piles of back catalogue and nostalgia available, and marketed it heavily (using iPlayer as a benchmark for my future guessing).
The obvious problem with mass take-up of on demand is that it takes away the role of TV as a conversation starter - the water cooler moment. This won't happen overnight, but it will slowly eat away at the central role that TV plays in the national psyche. Which is ironic, when brands that have historically relied on TV for advertising are starting to realise that communication might actually be a two-way process.
Gamers on the other hand have been able to converse via the TV set for years, since the launch of XBox Live in 2002. Over 60% of US owners pay the annual subscription for the service. So it is no surprise that the next release is rumoured to include a much wider range of social recommendation tools, for a range of gaming and entertainment content. And this type of social feature is starting to make its way into the next generation of entertainment hubs - Boxee is a downloadable app that organises all the content on a PC or streamed live from the likes of Hulu. It is designed on the basis that it will be viewed on a big screen and operated via remote, and it has social recommendation at its heart - it can't actually share content with friends, but can recommend. You would expect that the next move from here is along the lines of CBS's ideas about individual groups of friends all being able to start off viewing simultaneously and comment over the TV screen. This begs the question of whether the big social networks are missing a trick - surely Facebook TV would be a viable option? Again, it depends on having the infrastructure to deliver content to the TV screen (both the broadband distribution and the hardware in the home), but television is inherently social so the readymade friend network and app environment would give this type of application a distinct advantage.
The real trick being really missed though is gaming devices. The social element is already built in, and they already bridge the gap between laptop and TV, and there will be a huge gap in the market in the UK around Kangaroo launch time. 6 months on from Hulu launching in the US the hardware manufacturers are still chasing their tails.
Could XBox or Playstation running Kangaroo on a Facebook app be coming to a living room near you?
To the extent that there are already cheat guides for it. That makes sense, as it seems designed not to look like public information, but like anything else that someone might be playing, as these comments from a PlayBBG post make clear:
In fact the attention that it is starting to generate, while not actually competing with big commercial releases, does at least figure on the same chart as them:
which is in no small part down to those ads that I saw on kids TV. Because after months of research and a year's development to understand what could drive behavioral change and how people could become involved in it, the idea (the game) was realised, and after a further 3 months of allowing gamers to play it, find cheats, post tips, and build the ecosystem that any realistic game requires, then advertising had a role. To let people know about a free game.
