didn’t see that coming

“Non-gamers often ask when videogames are finally going to get their ‘Citizen Kane.’ But when Spore ships sometime next year, this infant medium might receive its Torah, its ‘Origin of Species’ and its ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ all rolled into one.” - Newsweek, 2005

Will Wright has been making genre-defining games like SimCity for twenty years, and his last franchise, the Sims, has brought in $1 billion dollars for EA. Given he’s been working on Spore for the last six years, and it was originally titled Sim Everything, there is a lot of reason to be interested in his latest creation, set for release on September 7th.

Spore is interesting as a creative achievement, and as a contribution to culture, especially considering the video game industry is now bigger than the music or movie industries. But it’s also interesting for anyone involved in creating applications and services for the internet, as Will has both borrowed from the web and is giving a few innovations back.

Here’s a few interesting examples:

It’s all about user generated content and customer co-design

One of the key features of Spore is “pollinated content”. Everything you create in Spore gets uploaded automatically to a central database, given a rating based on how many people have downloaded it, and then distributed out to populate other players games. And your own Spore universe will be filled with the creations of your fellow players.

Or in marketing-speak, Spore is introducing into it’s online world an asynchronous approach to user generated content syndication.

It brings Web 2.0 language and behaviour into a new sphere

“What you want to do is find some metaphor for the players to wrap their minds around it right off the bat. That’s where looking at things like social networking sites became a really good model, a communication tool for us to make it really clear to a player what a Sporecast was, or what a buddy list was, or what tagging of content was. These are terms that a lot of our players will already understand in different kind of arenas. It’s just hasn’t really been applied to games before.” Will Wright

Maxis has based a large amount of Spore’s social and collaborative functionality on common web 2.0 features and semantics. Here’s a few examples:

• Tagging: Players can add tags to the creatures and objects they create, as well as those of others, to enable sortability through the massive volume of user content that will be created. Will Wright has credited Flickr as the major source of inspiration for this approach.
• RSS subscriptions: By subscribing to “sporecasts”, players can track the latest creations of their favourite Spore players.
• Buddy lists: You can make a buddy list, and the game will attempt to seed your friends’ content at a higher frequency in your game.
• Commenting and feedback: As Will Wright explains, “When I get a card for a piece of content—whether it be mine or somebody else’s—at any time I can open that card and leave a comment on the card, and the person who made that content will get the comment. It’s like a guest book for every card. So the idea is that there’s going to be a running community discussion group based around the content where every piece of content is its own thread discussion.”
• Shareability: Content from Spore can be outputted as embeddable HTML, allowing easy integration into blogs and social networks like Facebook. With a button click you can create an animated GIF of your creature, and demonstration videos of your creations can be uploaded and integrated directly in YouTube (more on this below).

What’s interesting about this is that both the language and behaviour of social networks are starting to filter into other areas of culture. With high-profile examples like Facebook, Nike+, and Spore seamlessly blending metaphors of gaming and connection across sport, community and entertainment, it’s interesting to think about where else the concepts apply, and where else users will soon expect and demand them.

Designing for and encouraging shareability

Machinima movie-making has been growing and evolving for years, with critical praise and commercial success for Halo-based Red vs Blue, and features on MTV.

Will Wright’s games have been no exception, and one of the popular forms of emergent gameplay of the The Sims was the scripting and re-enactment of complex storylines via the game. Recognizing and wanting to encourage this, Sims 2 included built-in recording capabilities. Red vs Blue creators Rooster Teeth Productions took up the challenge and used the Sims 2 engine and recording capabilities to produce the comedy series Strangerhood.

Spore takes things even further, attempting to bring game-based video to a much wider audience. Through a deal with Google, Spore players can upload a video from the game directly to the Spore YouTube channel.

The functionality is similar to the direct-to-YouTube functionality announced in May for Playstation 3. But not content with just making this sharing easier, Maxis and EA are actively encouraging content sharing by holding contests such as the current Creature Creator Dance Off, and also by awarding players who submit the best videos with special badges for their efforts.

The video export even allows the ability to generate a “green screen” background, specifically to allow people to be able to easily composite in other footage.

Pre-seeding and buzz via Spore Creature Creator

Many a campaign manager has learned about the importance of pre-seeding your campaign or community to ensure it appears vibrant and active before launch. Generally speaking, people want to do things that other people are doing, and that appear alive and popular. Launching a ghost-town of a community space can be an invitation for failure. Pre-seeding with a select beta group helps get around that hurdle.

Spore was never going to be a ghost-town, but the release of Spore Creature Creator months before the actual game release is a stroke of marketing genius.

For one, it’s a fun way to generate buzz and get people introduced to the game ahead of the launch. The Sporelebrity charity contest featuring creatures by luminaries like Stan Lee and Richard Branson is a nice touch.

Second, it ensures a whole universe full of user-generated content come launch time.

Third, they are actually making money off of it — the full version of Creature Creator costs $10. And what are the chances that everyone who spends the time and money creating creatures isn’t going to want to buy the full game to see their creatures in action?

The strategy appears to be working. In the first month of release of Creature Creator, 1.6 million creatures have already been created.

Attention data

Many of the hottest web companies, from Netflix to Amazon to Last.fm, have been built around the principle of using your attention data to automatically serve you with content you would find interesting.

Maxis has brought that same principle to Spore, and Will smartly looked to model Spore’s behaviour after pioneer Amazon.com:

We actually first started looking at things like collaborative filtering on sites like Amazon, in terms of “How can we organize this content, and sort it, and find content that would be relevant or interesting to you?” At the simplest level, when a piece of content comes in we actually do a feature analysis of the content. For instance, if I took a City Hall from my city, it can look at other content that thematically matches that City Hall, and suggest that to me. “Oh, maybe you’d like to buy these buildings because they kind of match the City Hall We’ve seen other players connect these buildings to that style of City Hall.” Will Wright

From that deep level of granularity, the game scales up it’s response to your behaviour, by matching game content automatically to your style of play.

Learning from your audience

“Every game is a learning experience you build upon. At some point you could have build something that seems to be in the right area then you give it to the players, they do something really remarkable with it, and it opens new vistas that you want to explore the next time around. It’s almost this back and forth ping pong where we jump in this new space, explore it as thoroughly as we can, then we can use players, and the players transform it, and decorate it into something remarkable, which clearly shows us the next door to go through.” Will Wright

In traditional broadcast advertising, marketers pay a huge amount to produce a TV commercial, and then a figure many times that to distribute it. You only get one chance to get it right, and you generally didn’t get much in the way of direct feedback.

One of the most important concepts in engagement marketing is the idea that what you produce will be received and responded to by people. They may not like things about it. They may do things you didn’t expect with it. But whatever they say and however they react, it’s hugely valuable, as it provides insights into how you can continue to develop, enhance and evolve both your strategy and tactics.

Agencies and marketers are used to having to believe at all costs that they got it right the first time, as there is a huge amount riding on it. With ongoing engagement programmes, both parties need to plan and budget for the truth that even the best in any industry rarely get it 100% right the first time, and take advantage of the luxury that the internet as a medium provides to keep tweaking and responding in real time. It’s the “always in beta” philosophy brought to marketing.

The details matter

So you’ve built a game experience that is effectively infinitely unique. Why stop with the characters and settings, when you can do the same for the music?

I never really heard any decent procedurally generated music. At some point in the project, though–probably right around then–we hooked up with Brian Eno who ended up working with us on the procedural score. So actually we ended up with over probably–about half of our music is now procedurally generated within the game based upon things you make.

We found it was so fun, we’ve actually built this little kind of harness where Brian and our sound engineer could play around with the underlying levers on the procedural engine. This is one of those things that became so fun to play with, we decided we had to surface it the player.

So in the game right now, when you’re designing a city, one of the things that we allow you to do is open this little device and compose your own theme song for your city and it’s actually using the procedural generator. So I can hit the “roll the dice button,” and it generates a new procedural melody with rhythm, or I can actually grab the notes, and if I want to even put in my own tune on the notes. We’ve basically turned the procedural music generation into its own little toy and embedded that within the game as well.

Again, you need to factor in both time and budget, but attention to details like this are what makes an experience truly compelling, memorable and remarkable.

Summary

Like SimCity and The Sims before it, Spore is set to produce an asteroid-sized impact in the gaming world. And these days the gaming world includes most of us, including women, who make up 55% of the players of The Sims.

With so much of the experience drawn from social networking and the web 2.0 world, and so much of the content designed to be streamed back in to the web, it goes without saying that Spore will be an important influence in our industry as well. There will be benchmarks set, lessons learned, and behaviours changed. And like the emergence of machinima storytelling from games before it, it will be interesting to watch the other ways Spore changes and contributes to our culture.

References

Wikipedia entry for Spore
Will Wright’s exemplar user-generated Spore creatures - Joystiq
The Evolution of Maxis’ Spore - Gamasutra
Game Master - The New Yorker
Why Spore Is Taking So Long, And Why It Will Be Worth the Wait - Newsweek

You don’t see nearly as many brands on Flickr as you do on YouTube or Facebook.

But they do exist, and after a few conversations recently about what the opportunities for brands were on Flickr I thought I’d have a look. Having trawled through pages of Google and Flickr searches, I’ve grouped the results into three categories:

• Brand communities and extensions
• Branded resources
• Branded contests

And at the end of the review of what’s out there already, I’ve distilled a few learnings, a few things to watch out for, and a conclusion around the opportunities for brands on Flickr.

Branded resources on Flickr

Nikon Digital Learning Center

An extension of the Nikon School and Nikon Digital Learning Center website, Nikon’s Digital Learning Center on Flickr was launched in August 2007 as an “online resource (that) provides Flickr members with tutorials, practical photography tips and advice from Nikon photo professionals to assist them in taking the photos they’ve always dreamed of capturing.

Nikon’s Digital Learning Center shows where the opportunity space for branded resources is. Although they provided professionally authored tutorials, they’ve also brought a number of their sponsored pros to the group, where they post photos, answer questions from the community, and share their experience.

As of now, the group has 8,527 members, 23,440 photos, and 669 discussions.

Brand communities and extensions on Flickr

MAKE Magazine

The O’Reilly magazine that is both bible and manifesto for the resurgent hardware hacking scene has smartly used Flickr to create a space for its inventive readership to share and discuss their creations.

It’s a match made in heaven, as even Caterina Fake, one of Flickr’s now-departed founders, called it “the best magazine ever“.

Results: 3,970 members, 23,476 photos, and 114 discussions over the last three and a half years.

CRAFT Magazine

CRAFT, O’Reilly’s sister magazine to MAKE, has done even better than its sibling with its rampant CRAFT Flickr group.

Results: 4,503 members, 57,654 photos, and 203 discussion groups over two years.

Innocent

As a brand universally admired by marketers in the UK for “getting it”, it’s not surprising to see Innocent doing cool things on Flickr.

The beauty of their approach is that it feels in line with the brand’s values. It’s not big bang marketing stuff. It’s also not a one-off UGC program destined to be abandoned after the campaign of the moment is over.

Rather, Innocent is using Flickr as a place to:

• Put up photos here and there of the events it runs, including their unique AGM and the Innocent Village Fete
• Provide exposure to the Big Knit charity promotion and a way for people to share their creations
• Run quirky contests (etc etc etc)

The result is a natural extension of Innocent’s brand, at least as I perceive it: playful, good, natural.

BBC

The BBC made integration with social media properties a key pillar of their BBC 2.0 strategy, establishing spaces on Flickr for fans to upload photos which would be integrated back into BBC websites and multimedia properties.

A few examples of BBC photosets on Flickr include:
The One Show (820 members, 2,709 photos)
Eurovision 2008 (78 members, 922 photos)
Elecric Proms 2007 (23 members, 125 photos)
At the Fringe 2007 (31 members, 559 photos)
Rugby World Cup (94 members, 529 photos)
Football World Cup (154 members, 844 photos)

Urban Outfitters

The above image comes from a blog post on the This Week in Etail blog, which rightly notes that at one time the Urban Outfitters’ Flickr group was promoted from their homepage and their blog.

The tout is long gone, but the the group is still a growing collection of pics from both wardrobe remixers wearing UO clothes and photoshoots from Urban Outfitters themselves, and is currently over 2,000 photos strong. The European contingent of UO have a stream of their own, and an interesting attempt at a branded pool dedicated to Summer Music rounds off the series.

Results

• Urban Outfitters: 648 members, 2,087 photos
• Urban Outfitters Summer Music: 47 members, 403 photos

GM

GM recently celebrated their second anniversary on Flickr, having established a profile as part of their GM Blogs initiative in 2006.

Their photostream has been updated regularly since, with 1,377 photos posted to date. It’s a wide range of imagery, ranging from vehicle launches to user generated content and everything in between.

It’d be interesting to hear from GM how much traffic their images receive, but they definitely deserve credit for sticking with the initiative and not letting it become another branded social media graveyard.

7-11 x Kwik-E-Mart

As part of the extensive promotional campaign around Simpsons: The Movie, 7-11 stores around North America were turned into Kwik-E-Marts. It was a brilliant and fun idea, but more than the value of the local traffic was the global exposure to the execution. Flickr provided a home for the Kwik-E-Mart photos, and blogs and media around the world funneled in traffic to the photoset.

Results: 833,972 views of 60 photos, 33 comments since July 2007.

Bank of America: America’s Cheer

For their America’s Cheer campaign, Bank of America have hit all the obvious social media spaces: Facebook, Youtube, and Flickr.

The campaign microsite pulls in group photos from Flickr, but it’s the contribution part which is interesting. Using their status as a sponsored Flickr partner, they’ve built a branded tool called America’s Cheer Photo Share which allows people to very easily add photos to the BoA group directly via their Flickr account.

Results: since launch three months ago, an underwhelming 159 members and 77 photos. And two user posts in the discussion area, including one that in true Flickr style simply says “This group is stupid. Yay America.”

Smithsonian

As they say on their profile page, photography predates the Smithsonian by only a few years. The world’s largest museum and research complex has over 13 million photos in their collection, of which only a small fraction have been digitized.

However the Smithsonian’s first batch of photos on Flickr represents a glimpse into the potential wealth in the archives, all of which are supplied with the “no known copyright restrictions” designation.

Bon Jovi

The hair metal band have shown remarkable staying power over the years, and have transitioned into the digital era with their own social media strategy.

In addition to a competition centered on YouTube, the band have asked their fans to upload photos to the Bonjovilovesmytown group on Flickr. From their, photos might make their way into the band’s concert videos, or onto a mosaic poster, which they envision will look like this:

Results: 448 members, 1,559 photos, 13 group posts

Purina’s Do More for Pets

Purina is another brand leveraging Flickr for user contributed photography as part of a wider campaign strategy. In this case, selected photos submitted to their Do More for Pets gallery are featured within their Do More For Pets microsite on Yahoo!, which looks suspiciously like one of those Yahoo! “branded universes” that were supposedly ditched when Terry Semel exited.

There’s no apparent incentive to submit, but as anyone that uses Flickr knows, the only as popular as photos of babies, flowers and kittens are pictures of puppies. There’s no shortage of source material.

Results: 580 members, 1,858 photos, 10 discussions over 13 months

Branded contests on Flickr

CRAFT & MAKE magazines Halloween competition

Siblings magazines MAKE and CRAFT got in the Flickr competition business early, starting with Halloween crafts contest from October 2006.

Simply take a photo of your scary crafts creation, upload it to either the CRAFT or MAKE Flickr groups and tag with “MAKECRAFTHALLOWEEN“. Selections would be highlighted on the publication blogs or featured in the magazine.

GM FYI

Who would’ve thought old-school auto giant GM would’ve been first to the punch, but they were in there even earlier, featuring one Flickr photo tagged GMFYI on their GM FYI Blog every day since May 2006.

Results: 4,530 photos of GM vehicles old and new

Nikon Stunning Gallery

Nikon grasped the power of the Flickr community early, and launched a simple but highly effective campaign that put the prosumer photographer at the heart of “Stunning Nikon”.

The proposition was simple: if you shoot Nikon, tag your images “nikonstunninggallery” and the best would be featured on the Nikon Stunning Gallery microsite. Nikon also cross-promoted Flickr to its own customer base.

The competition was dead easy to enter, backed by an integrated campaign including the first ever Flickr brand advertising and a UGC component involving some of the community’s stars, and the reward was the simple currency that all Flickrites craved: exposure of their photos.

Rohit Bhargava presciently predicted that the promotion could result in over 100,000 images. The campaign launched in 2006 so it’s taken a while, but the count is now over 120,000 images.

Results: 123,208 tagged images

New Yorker Eustace Tilley contest

The venerable New Yorker celebrated their 83rd anniversary by holding a competition for artists, illustrators and readers to create their own version of Eustace Tilley. The competition was run through a Flickr group, with winners featured on newyorker.com and the anniversary issue of the magazine itself.

Results: 305 members, 173 quality entries

LG Viewty

Driven through a sponsored group, LG’s Viewtyful World Photo Contest on Flickr came with a prize most photographers would salivate over: the chance to be published in National Geographic magazine.

LG also kept the barrier of entry low: simply submit the most interesting and striking image in your photo library.

Photos were judged by a National Geographic photographer against three categories “Night View”, “Retouch”, and “Moments”. Weekly winners based on the number of votes made at the LG Viewtyful website received free handsets, and the final winner also received $10,000 in cash.

Results: 6,728 group members, 19,518 photos.

SCIFI.COM, MAKE magazine + DVICE: Make a Cylon contest

To kick off the return of Battlestar Galactica to the airwaves in spring 2008, SCIFI.COM, MAKE magazine and DVICE partnered up on a contest targeted at the hardest of the hardcore geeks amongst the crowd.

The brief: make a Cylon, using physical materials.

The mechanism: add your photos or videos to Flickr or Youtube with the tag “dvicemakecylon”

The payoff: entries judged by two of the hot female cylon stars of the show, winners shown on the SCI FI Channel for the adulation of your peers in geekhood, and a variety of BSG swag.

Results: only 85 photos and probably a third of those original entries, but the barrier of entry was very high. And the results are pretty inventive:

Firefox 3 T-Shirt Design Contest

As part of the huge buzz campaign orchestrated for the launch of Firefox 3, the Firefox marketing team ran a t-shirt design contest on Flickr. Showing what’s possible when you have a huge and rabid fan base at your disposal, in a matter of weeks the competition racked up thousands of entries to choose from.

A good creative outlet for the designers amongst the Firefox loyal, and another effective and ultra-low-cost marketing exercise to add to the Firefox collection.

Results: 3,535 members, 1,832 images, 173 discussions

Others

I kept finding more and more competitions, so I’m going to simply list the rest here:

• Film 4 Summer Screen competition
• MOO sticker design competition
• U.S. government department EPA’s Earth Day photo contest
• PBS Nature’s photo competitions, including the Alps and Parrots
• Brooks Track Jacket photo competitions
• Opera browser photo competition
• PSFK Cool Hunt competition

The opportunities for brands

Looking at the activities brands have engaged in on Flickr over the last few years, it seems there are at least four areas of opportunities:

1. Spreading remarkable content
   If you’ve got unique visual content that would be truly interesting to people (and not just your brand), why not share it? 7-11’s Kwik-E-Mart photos hosted on Flickr received over 800,000 views after being distributed around the web, and GM uses their photostream as a way of showing off their product, past, present and future.
2. Crowdsourcing content and hosting competitions
   Want to run an image-based UGC competition without the hassle of creating your own infrastructure? Host it on Flickr as LG, Firefox, NYT, CRAFT and many others have done.
   
3. Creating a community area and creative outlet for fans of your product
   If you’ve got a passionate group of creative fans, Flickr can make an ideal place for them to gather and share their creativity. See MAKE, CRAFT, Urban Outfitters and GM for good examples of this.
4. Providing support or resources for your customers
   Nikon’s Digital Learning Center is the benchmark on Flickr so far.

The most under-explored of the opportunity spaces is Branded Resources, by a mile. I suspect this is because the Flickr community is strongly self-supporting, and the need for branded resources might be seen as less. But this seems like a missed opportunity. Why couldn’t Red Bull run an extreme photography resources group, or Expedia a travel photography one?

Things to be wary of

As with any social space, Flickr users are extremely protective over their community and suspicious of any brands trying to participate.

There is a lot of opportunity to engage with such a passionate, creative and social group of the web and create something new and meangingful as a result. But make a wrong step and you will hear about it, loud and clear.

Here are a few things to be aware of for brands looking at Flickr:

1. Flickr must approve commerical use
   Commercial use is theoretically banned on Flickr without explicit permission from Yahoo! and will be removed upon discovery, but it’s not that cut and dry in practice as many of the examples above illustrate. In this regard I think Flickr is similar to MySpace.

   Paid for deals with MySpace get you a promotional package, a custom template design with much more flexibility, and potentially unique and custom functionality which can enhance your campaign. But there are lots of branded MySpace pages out there which have not been paid for — usually you can tell as they still have the top banner serving ads on the page, which paid for pages do not. You run the risk of MySpace taking down non-paid pages, but I think generally they’d prefer to try and upsell you to a paid community page rather than damaging the relationship with a brand by simply deleting your page.

   On Flickr, this appears to hold true as well. Sponsored groups get special promotion, and can make use of the API as Bank of America, Purina, LG and Nikon have done, and get custom Flickr group templates as Nikon have. However brands like GM and Urban Outfitters are doing OK seemingly without any formal sponsorship in place.

2. Don’t forget the model releases
   Even if you stick to Creative Commons licensed photos on Flickr that allow commercial usage, you still need model releases, as Virgin recently found out the hard way in Australia. Nikon got around this by putting the onus on the submitting photographer.

3. People assume the worst from brands when it comes to personal copyright
   One of the big challenges with user generated campaigns that involve original content is dealing with the copyright.

   Many brands simply deal with the risk of getting it wrong by applying a blanket agreement that any photos submitted can be used for whatever purpose, in perpetuity.

   These terms are typically written by lawsuit-shy lawyers rather than marketers intending to surreptitiously build a giant library of advertising fodder. However, people tend to assume the worst about companies, especially since these terms are generally buried in the small print.

   The net result is generally not good, and even solid photography brands like Nikon aren’t immune from the misconceptions and skepticism around this. And what can start as an attempt to do something good, like providing exposure to up-and-coming photographers, can end in misgivings all around.

   How do you get around this? If possible, people will respond better to terms that are specific as possible rather than a blanket agreement to use the photos forever for any purpose.

   Beyond that, the key is simply to put your terms up front and in bold rather than in the fine print. People get upset because it seems like the brand is trying to rip them off. If you say clearly and up front what rights people will assign over to the brand, the brand’s intentions come across better and people are free to consciously choose whether they are comfortable with exchanging those rights in order to participate in the activity.

4. Attempting to start a community space without a passionate user base in place or cred to start one.
   Urban Outfitters and MAKE have loyal and creative customers that are happy to express themselves alongside the band.

   Bank of America on the other hand is being ignored and treated with cynicism by the Flickr community for their attempt to tap into the community to get involved in their Olympics campaign. And given there’s been no activity in the group by the brand in the last three months, and only the lamest of attempts to get people involved, you can see where that might come from.

5. Competitions with prizes based solely on user voting are asking for trouble.
   You don’t have to read Portuguese to know that the people involved in the LG Viewtyful competition are less than impressed with the results of the competition. No one knows you’re a dog on the web, and no one knows you’re a bot with a zombie network voting for the same photo again and again. Or even just one guy with a proxy server and too much time on his hands.
6. Just because you build it, doesn’t mean they’ll come.
   Brooks recently ran a series of competitions on Flickr that involved people tagging photographs of them wearing Brooks track jackets. The results? Well, let’s just say the most popular of the three had just 18 photos submitted from 8 different people, including a couple from Brooks themselves.

   The big problem? Not enough promotion. I’m guessing the only place you could find out about the competition was from the Brooks website, where you had to navigate through a few levels of sub-navigation. If you want people to participate, especially if there’s a barrier of entry involved, then you better make sure you are also doing the job of spreading the word.

Last thoughts

Given there are 44 million unique visitors to Flickr a month, Flickr has received a disproportionately low share of attention from brands compared to MySpace or Facebook.

There are a number of potential reasons for this. Firstly, Flickr is obviously focused on photography whereas Facebook and MySpace are essentially a free-for-all of personal expression and social interaction. The latter make much more sense for most brand activities.

Flickr is also probably more protective over its community than MySpace and Facebook. One of the big reasons for this is that Flickr generates revenue directly off its members through Pro subscriptions and affiliate deals, and so is not reliant on advertising and sponsorships the way that MySpace and Facebook are.

However, with Flickr being as big as it is, and with a passionate, creative and diverse user base like it has, it has great potential. The key is finding an opportunity that is both right for the brand, and provides something of value to the community.

Competitions are easy and obvious, but branded resource centers are virtually unexplored territory.

In any case, it’s best to understand and get to know the community a bit more before diving in. Have a look through the groups and streams, and read this article from George Oates and these community guidelines from Heather Champ and George Oates.

This turned into a much larger post than I originally intended, but hope it’s useful as a starting point. Did I miss anything or have any thoughts? Please let me know via email or in the comments, and I’ll try to keep this post up to date as an ongoing reference.

Technorati Tags:
brand, engagement, marketing, social, flickr

As the wikipedia entry points out, single serving sites have been around as long as dancing hamsters.

And actually the idea predates the web itself, with an Internet-enabled Coke machine devised by the uber-geeks at Carnegie Mellon University as early as 1982.

But Kottke pointed out in February that between Is Lost a Repeat? and Barack Obama is Your Bicycle and about 500 other sites, single-serving sites are on fire right now.

As the wikipedia entry points out, cheap domain names and cheap hosting have made it basically free to slap something together and chuck it on the web, almost always as a joke, and to see what happens. Whether you want to provide people with a constant status on Abe Vigoda’s vital signs or help the people of earth spell “definitely“, the world is your oyster.

And now brands are getting in on the game, with Converse kicking things off with a whole set of possibly entertaining, definitely time-wasting, video-based single serving sites, each serving up one piece of content. Topics range from when the Marquette b-ball team will be back in action to tips on how to get a hot girl from a girl that’s even hotter than that girl.

The strategy is basically built around the idea of snackable content, creating lots of individual bits of content that are easy to consume and spread, with the hope that a few of them will go viral within various segments of their audience. And given the sites are all connected together, if you get people in one site, the likelihood is pretty high they’ll click the next one. It’s spread betting brought to branded entertainment. They’ve made it really easy to just enjoy some random content, brought to you by Converse.

And that same strategy is being employed by a slick little YouTube mashup that’s been rolled out by Poke New York, upl8.tv. Which makes the second branded single serving site in less than a week.

UPL8.tv is a cool idea and with a great execution. Let the wealth of random YouTube videos wash over you, hit space bar if you want to skip one. And as Iain points out over on Crackunit, it’s even programmable by URLs. 80’s pop videos?. Hockey fights? Kenny Loggins? Check, check, and check. It’s all there for the taking.

It is the best kind of single-serving site: it does one thing, really well. There’s no clutter or distraction.

Technorati Tags:
brand, buzz, engagement, innovation, marketing, trend, viral

Right now on My Starbucks Idea the first 10 ideas under the Popular heading are:

1. Recycling cold cups - bins and education
2. Free coffee on the day of your birthday
3. Buy 10 get 1 free!
4. Stop trashing empty cards
5. Coffee ice cubes
6. Lower your prices
7. Stop wasting so many pastries!
8. I’ll buy you a drink remotely
9. Discount when reloading a Starbucks Card
10. Recycle!

In one respect or another, 40% of those ideas are about the environment and 40% are about personal finances. Another is about melting ice cubes, but let’s put that aside for the moment.

Given that a lot of the world is worrying about global warming and the credit crunch right now, these results aren’t necessarily surprising. But it is interesting that you might be able to get a feel for what people are really concerned about right now by looking at a corporate suggestion box, even on a giant scale.

Starbucks’ crowdsourcing portal has given them a window into the priorities of their customers. More than that, in many cases the customers have even suggested specific solutions and actions. The amount invested must be negligible compared to the value of that insight and those ideas.

And that’s not even counting the boost in loyalty, advocacy and consumer sentiment gained from actively listening to, responding to, and acting on their customer concerns. Dell reported that sentiment moved from 50% negative to 23% negative just one year into their social media strategy.

So with results like these, the question is why are more companies not following Starbucks and Dell’s lead on this?

Technorati Tags:
buzz, green, loyalty, marketing, trend, customer experience

Today our team at AKQA and AKQA Mobile launched Nike PhotoiD, a new way of using the NikeiD customization service. How does Nike PhotoiD work? It’s a simple 4-step process:

Note that the mobile shortcode varies by country, check for yours near the bottom of this post.

What it looks like
Here’s a few example shots that have been making their way around the office, including a photo of the Windows default screen as a Dunk, and the flowers in reception:

Why I think it’s interesting from a marketing perspective
Admittedly I’m biased, but there’s a few things I really like about this.

First, it’s not a campaign about NikeiD. I think it’s better categorized as a product enhancement. Instead of just telling you about NikeiD, PhotoiD gives you a whole other way of interacting with it.

And for me, the idea that instead of going through the process of building your shoe from scratch you can simply source and apply inspiration from the environment around you is an interesting one.

Along with my colleagues, I spend a lot of time thinking about how to build applications and services for brands that people might be interested in engaging with, whether because they are enjoyable or useful, ideally both.

Attempting to create something people would actively seek out and share is generally not the easy route, but it’s definitely an interesting alternative to simply delivering messaging through advertising, and I think it can be ultimately a lot more rewarding to everyone involved.

With that in mind, I hope we’ve been able to create something in partnership with Nike that people do enjoy interacting with, whether they use it one time or fifty.

Where it might go
For launch the service is just for Nike Dunk sneakers, and matches and applies the two primary colours of your photo. If you do want more colours than that you can simply use the returned shoe as the starting point and keep customizing away.

But yeah, we hear the call for more shoes and more colours, and we are definitely listening.

We’ve also got a few ideas for how we could take this much further, but I’ll have to keep them under my hat for the moment. I’ll welcome any suggestions though!

Country shortcodes
The initial launch includes 9 territories in Europe. If you want to give it a try, simply MMS a photo and the word ‘DUNK’ to the following shortcodes:

• 88247 in the UK

• 3464646402 in Italy
• 99666 in Germany
• 5222 in Spain
• 31000 in France
• 1231 in Denmark
• 17163 in Finland
• 2201 in Norway
• 72445 in Sweden

Tips to get the best results
A few suggestions to get the best Dunks back from your shots:

1. Get close up. Fill the frame with well-defined, vivid colors.
2. Go for a small number of distinct colors over a large number of potential colors.
3. Indoors (or outdoors in low-light) use your flash if you have one for optimal results.

Happy Dunking!

Technorati Tags:
engagement, marketing, utility, mobile, photoid, nike, innovation