the-inbetween.com

Earth Hour

Earth Hour is a crock of shit. It’s an insignificant gesture that amounts to nothing. An 8.7% drop in power usage sounds significant, but what does it really mean? Assuming that there isn’t any statistical error in that number (there likely is!), an 8.7% deviation from the hourly average amounts to an annual deviation of 0.0009932%. Basically insignificant. A number so small that things like National Night Out, where people are encouraged to keep all their outside lights on, will likely cancel it out. Then again, they don’t have the marketing push that Earth Hour does.

Google’s temporary black on white design was emblematic of the problem. In their own about page they acknowledged that black screens on LCD monitors actually consume more electricity than white ones. It’s a shallow showing from Google when you consider just how much power their data centres consume and what kind of environmental impact they have.

To make a real difference — an 8%, if not more, annual drop in consumption — you have to do more than a symbolic gesture. Ban incandescent bulbs. Get all the massive corporate towers to shut off their lights when not in use (something they should be doing for Lights Out anyway). Get retailers to dim their glaring lightshow storefronts turned off. Get people to use public transit and get the government to invest in it, especially the dilapidated TTC (who are in a legal strike position as of Tuesday and, if they do go on strike they will be bring more cars onto the roads.)

And Earth Hour isn’t really about that. It’s about the marketing. The WWF, along with Leo Burnett Australia (the Australian office of my current employer), spent a lot of money on a very extensive campaign to promote this. It is a feel-good campaign that can be exploited and flaunted (which they’re very much doing).

Ironically, the best thing about Earth Hour was when they shut off all the obnoxiously bright and distracting advertisements and TV screens that surround Yonge and Dundas. Now that is a cause I can get behind.

Probably Promotion

If Duke Nukem Forever is released in 2008, everyone who comments on this post* will get a free, RETAIL game from me.

I’m not sure what the buzzword for this type of advertising is but it seems to be coming up more and more. It all basically follows the same formula: if event X (outside of the company’s control) then free (or discounted) Y. In the above example, if Guns N’ Roses releases Chinese Democracy this year, Dr. Pepper will give away free drinks. During last year’s World Series, Taco Bell offered a free taco to everyone if a base was stolen. This wasn’t the first time they used such a promotion. In a more localized setting, Pizza Pizza offers every ticket holder at a Raptors game a free pizza slice if they score 100 points. This has caused some odd reactions during some blowout games.

In some ways, these kinds of promotions can be regarded as gambling: there’s a prize and it’s dependent on chance. I wonder if there are any legal implications? The payoff for the marketer, of course, is that if the chance event doesn’t happen the company gets free advertising. On the flip side, if it does happen I’m sure numerous statisticians were employed to crunch the numbers to ensure that the possible risk is still worth the benefit. So even if they have to pay, the cost is minimized by the advertising and side-purchases it brought them (a single taco isn’t going to fill you up. Want a drink and fries with that?) I’m also sure that numerous lawyers were used to ensure there were appropriate outs and loopholes to ease the potential damage. There’s always a catch.

That said, I figure I’m not above self promotion. I can get in on the act. If Duke Nukem Forever is released in 2008, everyone who comments on this post* will get a free, RETAIL game from me. Make sure you leave your email address (will not be shown.)

• * Before the comments are closed, which is usually about 30 days or at my own discretion.

Modern Sins

That wooshing noise you hear coming from the Vatican is the sound of the Church grasping for straws, hoping to stay relevant in an increasingly irrelevant age. Trying to stay modern, and not with the mores of the eighteenth century, the Church has come up with a contemporary set of seven deadly sins. Amongst the set are “Environmental pollution”, “Genetic manipulation”, the vague “Morally debatable experiments” and the wordy “Violation of fundamental rights of human nature”. I don’t know about these. They don’t have the marketing appeal that the old ones had. They’re not snappy. They don’t flow. The branding message is confused.

Say what you want about the ridiculousness of Scientology, but at least they know how the brand themselves in the modern age. Whereas Christianity is full of boring stories about a guy going fishing and escaping a cave, Scientology has sexy blockbuster-material involving alien invasions, nuclear weapons and the super colossal motion picture. It’s like the difference between Into Great Silence (which I sat through, all three hours of it, in a painfully uncomfortable theatre) and Independence Day.

If the Vatican wants to stay modern it needs to do more to improve its image. The brand needs a total overhaul. That old logo isn’t cutting it anymore, it needs to be shinier and more extreme. Jesus needs a talking animal sidekick. It needs to diversify and find new angles and promotions.

But most of all, the Church needs to be more expedient with these brand changes. If they’re going to change the rules this late in the game (a thousand years too late) then they’re going to have a hard time winning over new souls. And they sure as hell aren’t getting mine. It’s already accounted for. I work in advertising.

Burnout’s Battle for your Eyes

One of the main tasks in Burnout Paradise is seeking out, and driving through, the 120 “Burnout Billboards” scattered around the city. It’s standard collect-a-thon game design, much like the orbs in Crackdown. However, where as the orbs in Crackdown were these floating nonsensical game-ish items, the billboards in Paradise make contextual sense and are nicely integrated into the city.

As I was driving around the city looking for my last three or four billboards, carefully going through every street and corner, I was hit with a revelation. This is an EA game and like most EA games, it has a lot of advertising. There are vehicles branded with sponsor logos, like a Wal-Mart clad F1-styled racer. There’s the “EA Trax” music, which is such a weird mish-mash of songs that the only possible reason for their inclusion is music industry dollars (Avril Lavigne in a high-speed arcade racings game?) And there are sponsored billboards around the city promoting fast food chains, shaving products, clothing and now defunct retailers. Billboards.

We ignore banner ads at an almost instinctive level. There’s even a term for it: banner blindness. It’s the reason why many advertisers are using distracting flashing graphics and floating overlays and interstitials. They get the attention that static banner ads do not. The billboards in Burnout Paradise are static, yet here I was looking for them.

Find the “Burnout Billboard”s amongst the many fictional and quite real advertisements in this Times Square-esque location.

I’m uncertain as to how conscious of a design decision this was and, more so, undecided as to whether this is devious or genius.

Codemasters’ marketing makes me feel DiRTy

The Colin McRae series of rally racing games are probably my favourite non-arcade racers. I have four separate McRae games, three for the XBox and one for the PSP which is the only import game that I own for that system (it was released only in Europe.) The next-gen incarnation of the series is something that I’ve been looking for, in spite of the series’ name change to the bland four-letter word title “DiRT.” The weird lower-case “i” doesn’t do the title any favours. It’s, well, stupId, but the name of the game isn’t going to keep me away

The demo for DiRT was recently released (curse you shoddy Microsoft hardware!) and the early word has been positive. Indeed, it is a very nice looking game and if it plays anything like its predecessors, it is certainly worthy of any extra attention (especially since the previous titles didn’t come across as massive sellers). My frothing demand was increasing.

Enter Dirty1CMD.

This morning I receive a message in my Flickr inbox: “You are Dirty1CMD’s newest contact!” Nice! I go and check out his photo stream and what do I see? Nothing but screen shots of DiRT. I check the profile:

This site has been set up to showcase images from the new Colin McRae Dirt game.

All the game images are from XBOX360 so far. PS3 shots will be added as soon as they are approved.

I’ve not added anybody as a contact who wasn’t into Rally, cars or Videogames.

Sorry if anybody feels like they’ve been spammed. I’ve tried to be subtle.

Subtle my ass.

I was likely targeted because of my recent photo of a Sonic the Hedgehog graffiti mural which clearly shows that I like video games and, obviously, getting unsolicited messages about video games. Hey, I’m all for using Flickr to show your screenshots and to build a small community around your site, just don’t be spamming me about it — and yes, a mere “contact add” is spam when it’s coming, unsolicited, straight from Codemasters’ ad wizards. Yes, compared to the dozens of spam emails I might get in a day it’s not a big deal, but this is a reputable company with many, many legitimate ways to plug its game. This isn’t one of them. All this does is leave a dirty taste in my mouth and I’m sure that’s not the kind of “dirt” they were aiming to get.

How to Properly Respond to Complaints about Your Ad

First, there was this commercial for Kia. har har. OK, we get it. No big deal. After seeing it dozens of time, we forget about it.

Then this happened. Police complained about the ad and it was pulled.

So, naturally, Publicis later releases this ad to much hilarity.