Eric Decker : : Dynamic Persuasion 2007

There are many forms of marketing. One very effective new type is interactive marketing, in which the campaign is mostly carried out online and leaves a better impression with the consumer by forcing them to interact with it. Usually these are in the form of a viral piece. Viral marketing refers to something that will advertise itself, by means of other users. Basically, the only money spent is to develop the ad, which might be a game, a funny video, or minisite, and then it is spread around the Internet by word of mouth, usually in the form of “Send to a Friend”. So rather than paying for airtime or banner ad space, people will send the ad around for free simply because they enjoyed it.

Things that can be interactive range from games – having the user do something fun, as well as environmental – putting the user in another space. Games are effective because people enjoy them, so they don’t really know or care that they are looking at an ad. Plus, this adds a great way to utilize STAF – you can challenge them. Other times there are prizes for having a high score – you can get a desktop wallpaper, your name on a high scores list, or even win prizes. A good example of this is www.gettheglass.com, where users who won got actual milk glasses. Other ones that involve environments, such as the Michelin site where you are taken thought the factory -www.michelinman.com/forward. Others let you create your own content, such as the popular Pet Mustache site for Burger King where you upload a photo of your face or member, give it a ‘stache, and make it sing so you can show your friends.  The site www.savethemonkeys.com uses humor to sell its product.

Where can this type of technology go in the future? Maybe in 10, 20 years what will it have advanced to? Currently technology is in the works to make all sorts of digitalized physical products. Imagine actual flat screens that are as thick of a slice of cheese or paper, and that actually are a piece of paper, or cheese. Cereal boxes try to get kids all excited by having all sorts of stuff to do and play with on the back. They commonly will have plugs to try and get kids on to their site. Well, imagine the back of the box is a touch screen and has automatic wif-i, so there is an actual game to play on the back and you can visit the Chocolate Obese-O Sugarmamas website while you have breakfast. Pretty much the way market will go, there will be two types of interactive marketing- passive and aggressive. Already we have this.

Passive interactive marketing are the sites I have already mentioned. There are a ton of others, they are any site that you choose to go to because you saw a commercials, had a link from  a friend, or saw it on a message board, etc. Aggressive marketing can be considered things like pop up ads – the really annoying ones that go from being 50 x 50 to full screen. These force you to interact whether you like it or not. You have to look at that product, even if it is to close a window. And if it is for a movie, and you do want to see it, that add is not going to make you so mad that you don’t see it/ Rather, it will reinforce the opening date so you don’t forget to go see it. Now imagine that sort of marketing strategy and apply it to a more physical space. Your house could become full of spyware.  Maybe someday those Flickr wireless digital photo frames are popular and in every house. Now imagine spyware getting into it and having pop ups for porno sites covering photos of your grandmother’s birthday. Not a pretty site.

But back to the positive side. The future might take hold of more type of inputs and feed backs – right now we are pretty limited. For inputs, all we can do are simulated movement (mouse), imagery (webcam), and audio (mic). Output devices are only sight (monitor) and audio (speaker). Imagine fully immersive peripherals – we can smell flowers (or farts) or we could touch innocent little bunnies (or imagine the other fun things we could touch). I doubt I would want a taste device, I don’t think I would want to put anything in my mouth that I found laying around on the internet. But it could help sell products, you can touch the fabric before you buy it or smell a candle. Then it will be a total virtual store. For games, we could have force feedback. I think Brendon Trombley, the curly haired kid, had come up with an idea to make mice have a feed back so they could slow down your movement or make it bumpy. Roll over a glue spot and the mouse actually moves slower, not just the pointer. I have heard that the smelling device is in the works, and the biggest challenge is making it so that it can have custom odors, not just preinstalled tablets. That way if it is dynamic, Godiva or Starbacks can have heavenly aromas on their sites, while Degree and Dr. Scholls can have a tottaly different onion smell. Screen resolution and color quality will increase how well we see images, as we make monitors that display trillions of colors, more accurate blacks, and crisp details. Perhaps even polarized 3D screens will take off, so you can see the product in 3D space right in front of you and you can spin it and do all sorts of fun interactive things.

So the future will bring many great things. Interactive is the way to go, and it is defiantly effective. Super Bowl ads are down because companies figure, why spend millions on an ad then when you can spend maybe 1/10 of that for a viral campaign that works just as well? Plus, people are spending more and more time online, and marketing goes where the people are. Companies are realizing that they can use games to market their product or services. MTV recently announced that they will be spending a huge sum of money to promote casual flash games, this includes their Nickelodeon franchise. And even though some of the companies providing these Flash games have lost extremely valuable employees, they will see an increase in demand for their services.

View Dreamscape

Here’s the beta of dreamscape, it still needs a little loving in some of the design (esp. the typography) and there might be a few bugs to tweak out.

Improved comps, fixed the following:

• typography – header fonts are more elegant, the previous font felt too Gothic or medieval.
• The paper cards have been replaced with simple, smooth gradients. Less literal, more dreamlike.
• The watch was altered to be days, not hours, as well as have directional arrows and colors that match the environment more.
• The selected star/dream is simpler, the circle and text felt too tech-like.
• The diagonal grass texture was replaced with a more organic and less visually distracting one.

A few things have been changed and revised since the proposal and wire frames. Instead of having keywords to search as a filter, time posted can be. This is represented by a clock that lets you click and drag back x amount of hours ago and see what was posted then. Additionally, there will be a search feature that just grabs the dream by it’s ID so people can easily find ones they’ve posted before or their friend’s.

The main screen will show all the dreams, represented as stars. Additionally, each star will have a ‘crystal’ at the bottom, basically a random thin triangle that points towards it to build a landscape. The clock on the left will allow users to ‘rewind’ and see dreams appear and disappear. The two buttons at the bottom bring up the “Post Dream” window and “Find” window. Dreams are read by clicking on the star.

An idea to make sure the changing the time thought the ‘rewind’ function is to have it just compare the current time to the time of only the last visible star in the array, rather than all of them. Then, if it does match and needs to change it, it will continue down the array until it needs to stop.

Project 1 is a user generated text site. My project’s production name is ‘dreamscape’ and the focus in on people sharing their odd dreams. Users write a small summery of what happened, as well their name and a title for it, if they choose. They can also add theme keywords for other user to search by.

The data will be displayed as stars over an abstract landscape. The landscape is mostly geometric, and is generated randomly by how many dreams are uploaded. The same goes for the stars, and users can click on stars to view different dreams. There will also be a filtering section to find dreams of similar nature.