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I get the feeling that big advertising still believes that people are sheep. Well, this old school notion is going to bite them in the ass.

There is an unwritten social contract in advertising where I give the advertiser a piece of my time in exchange for something. The more valuable that something, the more effective the advertising. For example, I watch a commercial in exchange for relatively cheap television. It used to be free, and still should be, but that’s another discussion.

Most consumers don’t really think about the value of their time, but sometimes it takes being part of a captive audience to hammer it home.

I went to see the new Bond flick, Casino Royale, last night with my buddy Mike. Mike and I went to college together and we both graduated with an advertising degree, so we often have heated conversations about branding and messaging where other guys would talk about sports. As soon as the lights went down and the curtains opened, Mike tore into is rant about movie theaters. I actually quite enjoy the rant because he has a very good point and we take every opportunity to vocalize it and spread the outrage.

Why are there commercials in the movie theatre?

I have paid my money. I paid it to see the movie. Why should I be forced to watch commercials?

Advertising in theatres is the big screen equivalent of a Jehovah’s Witnesses at my door except that at home, I’m not forced to answer the door.
Advertisers must be paying a pretty penny for my captive eyeballs. Where’s my payback? The ticket prices aren’t any cheaper. The movie experience isn’t any better.

To add insult to injury, most of the ads are the same exact ones that are on television. If you are going to force me to watch your ads, at least spend the money to show me that you made an effort to enhance my experience.

It is ill-conceived ideas like these that create an us-and-them attitude between consumers and brands. There is a growing disconnect and experiences like this add fuel to the fire. Technology is making it easier and easier to consume media without having to endure advertising so advertisers are scrambling to find other ways reach us. The problem is that instead of taking this as an opportunity to learn new ways to connect to consumers, advertisers are, for the most part, just applying old out-dated concepts in new ways. The result? They piss us off more and more.

How can they fix this? Either find new ways to talk to consumers (branded utility, for example) or go back to the basics and remember that advertising can be an art form if done right. Recently a colleague sent me a link to an ad on YouTube. It was an ad in the new Guiness campaign. Brilliant! Simple idea, well executed…and I went out of my way to specifically watch that ad. Now I’m blogging about it.

Maybe there is a lesson here for old-school advertising. Of course the only way they would listen is if we ram it down their throat…through their pocketbook.

We’ve been having a lively debate about trying to define Branded Applications over here at Teknision. From one end we look at it from a development viewpoint and debate the differences between Rich Internet Applications and what we consider Branded Applications. From the other end, we look at potential clients and try to show how building branded applications instead of the typical presentation based web sites creates a stronger bond between the audience and the brand. It got me to thinking about Branded Applications, or branded utility as a movement that is part of a bigger change in consumer attitudes.

I think that the rise in of Branded Applications is part of a trend towards personalizing experiences. Take the popularity of shows such as Lost. I find myself constantly complaining that it is nothing more than a big drawn out tease, but I keep watching. The reason why I keep watching is that it is not simple entertainment, it makes me think. Lost has no easy answers and leaves a lot up in the air without even a hint as to when mysteries will be revealed. Lost forces me to build my own theories about the storyline. In doing so, I have an intensely personal experience of Lost. In fact, my experience with Lost is completely different than anyone else’s. I have personalized a TV show.

When people who watch Lost get together, they share their theories. In essence, they share their experience with Lost. This conversation adds to our individual experiences. Image being able to do this with a brand? In order to get this level of internalization, a brand has to do more than entertain. A brand has to make itself meaningful to a person. I believe this is where where Branded Applications excel. By providing a valuable service and entertainment at the same time, the user builds a personal relationship with the application.

So what has this got to do with Bittorrent?

According to TorrentFreak, Lost is the most downloaded TV show on Bittorrent. An average episode is downloaded over 500,000 times. Thats’ 5% of all Lost viewers!

1 in every 20 viewer downloaded the show and joins the Lost experience without a single commercial interruption.

How many more do the same with a Tivo or DVR or…. gasp!… a VCR?

The number 2 and number 3 most downloaded shows are Prison Break (> 320,000 downloads) and Heroes (> 190,000 downloads). What do all these shows have in common? They are all shows that demand viewers build their own relationship with the story.

People want to have personal relationships with their entertainment. Branded Applications mirror this online. I think this is only the beginning of a bigger trend.

Way back in the early 90s I had a friend who worked at a car rental kiosk at the air port. One day someone left a mixtape in one of the rental cars. We were going camping for the weekend and he brought the tape with him. That tape became the sound track of the entire summer. It was full of songs we had never heard before. We didn’t know what the songs were called or who they were from, but by summer’s end we had them all memorized. I wish I still had that tape.

Fast-forward to 2006 and I find the same magic happening all over again. Check out Finetune.

One of the great things about our company is that we get to work for clients we genuinely like and we get to work on projects that we would actually use. This makes us very passionate about our work. Finetune is the latest such project.

Finetune is a music discovery service where you explore the music catalogue and create playlists that you listen to or share with your friends. We built the music player and the embedded player (you can see it right here on my blog - it’s the beautiful widget on the right) and are currently working on new versions of both as well as revamping the web site.

If this sounds like a shameless plug for our client, it is. I have no shame about it. We love our clients and we believe in thier products. I’ll keep you informed of new releases as they come. For now, learn more here:

Our CTO, Tony MacDonell’s blog.

The Finetune Development Blog

About a year and a half ago, I came up with the term “Branded Applications” for what we do at Teknision. The term arose from a need to clearly explain our niche in the web design and development world. I couldn’t find a good description so I made one up. It looks like I was on to something.

First, a little background…

I’m a firm believer that the path to success lies in differentiation.

The best thing a company like ours can do is pick a specific vertical in which we can demonstrate a unique viewpoint and a measurable level of expertise and then market the shit out of our services to that vertical.

The beauty of differentiation is that it simplifies your marketing and opens your company up to more clients, two things that sound completely counter intuitive.

We used to say: “we are a multimedia design and development shop that focuses in Flash based marketing solutions. Our award winning designers follow a proven process to ensure our client’s success.” How many times have you heard a version of that speech? The problem is that any shop can say the exact same thing. The only point of differentiation in the entire sentence is the focus in Flash, which is really a horizontal not a vertical and only reduces our competitors from a pool of hundreds of thousands to tens of thousands of companies. The whole awards and process bit is nonsense. Everyone has a process and everyone who is in the game long enough wins an award. Smart clients know that. Thank god we don’t do anything outside of Flash or, heaven forbid, traditional design such as print or broadcast. The worst words you can use are “full service”. The point is that if the message you put out to the market can be said by anyone, then there is very little reason for a client to choose you over a competitor. In fact, the deciding factor is often whittled down to one dreaded thing: price. Never ever ever compete on price. It’s a losing game.

The funny thing is, a clearly differentiated company can talk about design awards and process and get away with it. If we were a multimedia design and development company that focuses on solutions geared specifically for the skiing and snowboarding industry in North America, then all our talk about awards and processes suddenly get qualified. Plus, your list of clients becomes very clear and easy to build. And, best of all, when you call a client out of the blue, you have something important to tell them.

So this was the problem I was faced with; how to differentiate Teknision. I looked at the types of projects we did, what we liked to work on, what we were really good at working on and the types of clients we liked to work with and I noticed some similarities. We excel at making rich internet applications. We have a strong background in understanding user behavior, but also have a background in understanding consumer behavior. Plus, we hate designing anything thats boring.

So we came up with “Branded Applications” as a way to describe projects that are both valuable applications and entertaining experiences.

The more we thought about it, the more we realized that Branded Applications is more than a description of what we do, it is also a growing trend in marketing. The concept is getting a lot of traction lately under a slightly different name, Branded Utility. It started as an article in Ad Age about the future of advertising and then spread to the blogshere with posts in Jack Cheng’s blog,  Dino Demopoulos’ Chroma and, ultimately a series of articles in Piers Fawkes’ PSFK.

So the moral of the story is to try as hard as possible to clearly differentiate your business. When you are stuck for a description, make one up. Who knows, maybe there is no description because you are riding the wave of something new.

Branded Applications or Branded Utility, they both sound good to me.

There has been a lot of chatter about Agency.com’s Subway pitch. Some love it, some hate it, most find it trite and simply moved on. At first, I fell in the trite camp and was well on my way to moving on. Then I took a look at the heated debate raging in the comments on sites like Adrants, Adfreak and blogs such as Experience Curve and The Next Wave.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, check out the Adfreak link for a summary and to watch the video.

I don’t want to jump into the fray and argue whether the video is viral (it is) or whether the idea was great (it was) or whether it was well executed (it wasn’t).

My point is that it has become very obvious to me that old school advertising mentality is sadly alive and well in today’s supposedly forward thinking “Interactive Agency”. It seems the majority stand on the video is that, while Agency.com comes off looking like a bunch of cardboard souled wanks, you can’t deny the fact that the video has made big waves. Some people have even stated that they would be happy if their agency can generate the kind of traffic that this stunt has created.

This mentality makes sense in a world where “Reach and Repetition” is king.

The problem is that we live in a different world online. The Reach and Repitition mantra is useless. In the online world it’s all about focus. Who cares about reaching a million people when only 100,000 of them are the people I want to talk to? If I can guarantee that I can reach those 100,000 at a time and place where they welcome the message, don’t you think advertisers will pay me more to do it? Welcome to permission based marketing.

We have a word for a marketing message that strives to reach as many people as possible, as often as possible regardless of whether or not the recipient is part of the target market: SPAM.

What Agency.com has created is the viral equivalent of spam on Subway’s behalf.

In striving to show that they are at the vanguard of trendiness, they ended up showing that they are cool, edgy and fashionable, but lack any sense of strategy.

Take a look at the brand impact of the video. How has the video helped build the Client’s brand?

Subway’s Brand:
At the end of the day, the fact that the pitch was for Subway was incidental. There was nothing intrinsically “Subway” about it. You could easily substitute any company for Subway and you’d have the same video. In fact, I bet within 6 months time most people will remember that Agency.com posted a video of a pitch, but they won’t remember (or care) who the pitch was for.

Agency.com Brand:
Well, here’s where I could see some room for debate. They definitely made a splash. However, the entire effort lacked any sense of “big thinking”. What I got from it is that they would probably be fun to work with, may probably be able to execute very well, but I would not go to them for any real strategic thinking.

YouTube’s Brand:
Here is the real winner. The video re-affirmed YouTube’s positioning as the place to go for the bleeding edge of video goodness. They should send Agency.com a box of Subway cookies.

A Booby Prize goes to Coudal Partners for coming up with something that does a great job of differentiating Coudal’s positioning by piggybacking on the hype of agency video without coming off as the “Mee too!” also-ran.

By the way, want to know how to make a viral video that isn’t spam? Focus on making a great video. Quality will always be passed around and it will build the brand of all involved. Don’t believe me? Fallon did it with the Making of the Sony Bravia Ad. Come to think of it, I bet this was what Agency.com was hoping to mimic.