f you have a computer machine that's connected to the interweb this week you have probably been sent a few messages from excited web enthusiasts containing links to compilations of subtly animated gifs. Some of them are very nicely done. Some less so. They generally involve pseudo-cinematic scenes looping at, gasp, reasonable frame-rates. The art in this approach to gif-crafting is in carefully compositing the discrete object in motion, and returning it to its start position gracefully such that the loop can repeat near seamlessly.It's an old trick. And yet I have just received a dozen of these messages.
Anecdotally, it would appear that animated gifs are weirdly blipping the viral radar this week. At least for certain web developers eager to do something "cool". Most of the messages I received included suggestions that it would be so cool to "add this to our site(s)!"
Whoa whoa whoa. Guys, I can't be the only one in the room old enough to remember the last time people hyperventilated up the animated gif flagpole, am I? It was around 1997, and your messages were worded exactly the same way. "We should totally do this on our site - it's so cool." Only back then you were talking about jerky rotating logos and offers that blinked. Now you're talking about…
So I had to sit through yet another meeting today where some breathless 30-something expert urgently asserted that email is going away because, as we all know, "teens" signal what's coming in the future. And since teens use Facebook and Twitter and SMS, and don't use email, that naturally means email will soon go away for all of us.
Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg earlier defended this idea, employing a recent PEW report that only 11% of teens email daily (a significant generational drop). Then she said:
"If you want to know what people like us will do tomorrow, you look at what teenagers are doing today."
You've heard this elsewhere right? A bunch of times probably.
And it makes a terrific little sound bite, and feels all edgy and smart and progressive.
And it would be - except for the fact that it's completely dumb and wrong.
Sometimes I like to imagine what ads would be like if there were an omnipresent Marketing God. Some supreme, completely honest marketing voice that knew all. All about the products and companies that we have access to.
In order to draw fair and complete comparisons between complicated products and conditions you have to think that ads created by the Lord our Marketer, would be pretty wordy, but because the Marketing God really wants to make sure I know the truth, and knows I am lazy, all the words would go into my head in the form of a native thought. Pop! Full understanding.
Like an ad for a pen might go:
"My Son‚ " My marketing God always starts his advertising copy that way.
"My Son, on the one hand at 50% off, Writemate's New Gel Premium Grip pen is well worth its monetary price, costing you $0.02 less than the cost of materials, production, packaging and distribution. On the other, I beg that you weigheth the claim of "disposable". Alas, it is not disposable in a compositional sense, excepting that once it runs out of ink you will simply wish to discard it. In fact, if you buy now, the specific pen you are holding will persist intact for 357 years at which time it will be mistaken for a silverfish and swallowed by an as-yet un-evolved Sea Lion species near South American shores. That will be on a Sunday…
So we all saw the new Gap logo. It looked weird. It looked wrong. It looked like all sorts of other unbecoming words that were broadcast over Twitter and Facebook within hours of its unveiling.
Then, in what is going to be (or should be) remembered as the biggest corporate branding fail of the last decade, Gap caved in to all the little whiny Tweeters and defensively pulled its shiny, new logo.
Anyone who thinks that move was rational - that pulling the new logo was the best thing Gap could have done in the situation - is somewhere between equally ball-less and an idiot.
No, it was the worst thing Gap could have done in the situation.
I love Apple products. But something has been troubling me...
People have been calling me and my kind Apple Fanboys for many years. Before that term was trendy they called us Apple fanatics. I used to resist these labels since from my point of view I was just reporting the obviousness between Macs and PCs. It wasn't my fault Apple products were superior.
Anyway this isn't about who's better or who's right . That's old news. Apple is kicking butt these days and most of the anti-Apple people I've known have finally let go of their irrational embrace of a Windows PC-only paradigm, bought iPhones, iPods, iPads and iMacs and we can finally move on.
And my story starts there.
Because as any true Apple Fanboy will tell you, it feels oddly disorienting to see Apple kicking butt . Yeah, it's what we fought for over the last quarter century, and yet now that we have arrived, the universe is out of balance, only perhaps not in the way you might expect...
Three years ago some ad agency dweeb leaned into my office and smirked "Dude, our campaign just went social".
And I think, after a brief pause, my immediate reaction was to throw up in my mouth. I silently hoped I would never hear that stupid little term again. That something "went social".
So after a particularly frustrating day of having Flash-based content crash my browser, I finally buckled under and succumbed to the recommendation of my old business partner Tim Smith and downloaded a little, free Mac Safari plugin called "ClickToFlash".
I can't be the only one. The only lifelong Apple fan boy who wears shirts with collars on occasion. Am I?
I ask because if there were others, if maybe even one of us worked for Apple on the iPhone team, the iPhone headphones would be designed differently. It's a fact - no two ways about it. That somehow this critical design flaw should never have survived the Apple design process, unless of course, they really all do wear t-shirts - exclusively.
When Apple started using the color white as it's industrial design foundation back in the late 90s - it evoked all the coolest parts of Star Wars' Storm Troopers, 2001: A Space Odyssey - and bathroom fixtures all at once. It was a powerful design conceit that differentiated the company assertively for a decade - and big-banged out trends that are still rippling their way down the lower design food-chain today.
Then, with the advent of multicolored aluminum iPods, Black MacBooks and silver iMacs, Airs and Mac Pros, it looked as though His whiteness was finally, at long gasping last, bowing out. And none too soon.
The fact is, the whole white consumer technology thing has been done to death. There is all manner of non-Apple, white and plastic-chrome "iWhatevers" on the market. So ubiquitous is the white and "chromed" plastic look that anything done that way today usually has "made in taiwan" embossed on the side or comes from a gum ball machine.And then
Apple unveiled the iPhone 3G.
When I saw the white and chrome iPhone 3G - an exclusive color way for the premium 16GB model - I remember mildly deflating and uttering, "...really...?" And then I think I just squinted at it - waiting for the coolness to kick in. A reality distortion field. A different angle. Anything.
Sorry for the belligerent title. But you know it, I know it, and everyone you know knows it, except maybe those 11-year-old-girls at the mall who smell like strawberry lip-smacker and buy Live Strong-knock-off rubber bracelets that say "I'm Rad" at Wet Seal, that music-based ringtones are so very lame.
"Viral Marketing" is a myth. Always has been. It never existed. And as you'll see, even if it had, you would want nothing to do with it. "Word of Mouth"? Less toxic, but critically, equally incomplete. Social Network Marketing? Swarm Marketing? Mobile Marketing? Just more opaque containers. In a revealing display of the industry's ongoing struggle with interactive, none of the terms in use today comes close to illuminating how an advertiser can approach inspiring that Holy Grail of interactive marketing, a User-distributive spread... Until now.
EVERY INTERACTIVE CONSTRUCT MUST PROVIDE REIMBURSEMENT OF VALUE EQUAL TO, OR IN EXCESS OF, THE USER’S SELF-APPRAISED INVESTMENT OF TIME, ATTENTION AND EFFORT OF ACTION.
All the rules of economics apply to this system- though nothing physical is exchanged. In this economic exchange the User must perceive being the inordinate beneficiary, where time, attention and action are His currency. Whereas, promise and (not "or") payoff of value are the currency of the Interactive content creator.
Ultimately value - and not the communication of value - is the light that attracts the moths in this system.
In 1996, at Red Sky Interactive, in partnership with a rebellious band of talented individuals, I developed the HP PONG Banner Ad: the first interactive banner ad on the net, and the web's first example of "rich media". But behind the scenes, that banner was an atom-smasher, revealing the very principles of interactive advertising- and sweeping industry changes yet to come.
I have been developing Interactive work for over 15 years, and sadly, my son may never see any of it. That's because we are living in what future generations will undoubtedly call: The Digital Dark Ages.
The User is your King. You are the subject. Like it or not the User is in control. The User is the ultimate master. The User is King. Those of us who create interactive experiences must accept our lowly positions in the Grand Interactive Order, serving, amusing, and satisfying; ready and able to wield every ton of technical prowess and creative ingenuity we can muster to completely conform to each user’s unique interest, desire, whim and disposition. To delight the user when she grows bored. To shuttle the user to the very thing she needs or wants instantly- with nary a second spent indulging interests of our own. Don't bow to this Axiom, and you will fail...
Some time ago, I found myself thinking about all our amazing technical advances - especially those that beg moral questions- and I began a journey that changed the way I approach technology, and changed how I think of humanity... and headphones.
"Should we be doing that?" I thought.
Should we be cloning humans? Developing implantable chips, artificial intelligence or nano-technology that may some day advance beyond our control? Will our technology unquestionably remain at our service? Will it's advance really improve our odds of survival, or will it just change it?
Is technology good?
Virtually every really bad doomsday movie launched from this string of questions. But even so, there are few certainties in life. Death being one. And, I need to add one other absolute certainty to that short-list:
- Man-made technology fails.
I have never used a technology that was perfect. It always breaks - it always reveals vulnerabilities - it always, always fails at some point.
The last thing the web needs - no, the last thing the world needs is another Blog. I admit that. Or at least that's what I thought 10 years ago. But a decade later we're still struggling to advance this medium past the point of base comfort.
I had a brilliant roommate in art school who was an exchange student from Hong Kong. English was his second language, and he came into the country with very little ability to communicate. His accent was thick and his vocabulary limited. Years into his time in the US, his accent still just as thick and his vocabulary still limited, he admitted to me that at some point shortly after arriving he'd lost the drive to work on his language skills because he was getting by. He was functional. At least that's what I think he said.
And I guess that's where I think we, as members of the interactive industry, are resting at the moment. Glowing in our vague Web 2.0 awareness, we are functional. We're getting by. We lived through a time of extreme and chaotic experimentation, then the bubble burst, and a lot of people got scared, and now we're resting on the resulting knowledge base. We're content in our current understanding of Interactive Language. It's even reassuring after all that unknown expansiveness of the mid 90s.
Well, I'm not at all happy about that. From where I sit, innovation, real creative innovation, the kind of innovation that expands the language and changes everything, has cooled to a quiet drip. We've fallen into a process of dull incrementalism.
