Advertising Lab: future of advertising and advertising technology

Ponoko: Marketplace for Things

If this post's headline seems awkward, it's because I can't quite find the right words to describe the service.

"What happens to the music bits today will happen to the chair bits tomorrow when you are able to download the arm-rests from Ikea and the upholstery from Crate & Barrel, mix them up and print them out."

This sounded a bit too sci-fi even to me when I posted it a couple of years ago. Today, I found Ponoko.

Ponoko (about) is for physical things what Lulu is for books and what CafePress is for t-shirts. You create a design for, say, a chair, upload it to Ponoko's site, and list the chair for sale. When someone likes your chair and pays for it, Ponoko laser-cuts the pieces out of a range of materials, packs them up and ships them to the buyer. Or to you, if you want to assemble the pieces first. You can buy product plans created by other people and, depending on the license, customize them to make and sell something new.

You can see, of course, how something like Ponoko is a great fit for the 3D interface of Second Life, which is all about people designing 3D models of stuff, or Google Lively (read AdLab's first impressions).

To throw in somewhat similar services I discovered while looking at Ponoko: FigurePrints makes custom WoW models, ShapeWays does rapid prototyping on demand, and a few others mentioned in the previously posted stories here on AdLab.

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Billboard With Face Recognition

"NEC Corp has developed a digital signage system that determines the gender, generation and other attributes of a person standing in front of a display using a face recognition technology and outputs advertisements on the display according to them."
-- TechOn

Earlier:

• Device Measures Engagement Through Face Recognition
• Animated mannequins with face recognition
• Smart Fitting Room Gives Fashion Advice
• Mirror as Intelligent Computer Display
• Concept: Social Retailing
• Future: Billboards with Face Recognition
  

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Blogorama: Rethinking Peanut Butter Jars

Lots of open browser tabs today:

- Inspiration for the week: Easy PB&J Jar, a peanut butter jar with lids on both ends.

- An excellent compilation of brands with presence on Flickr

- Virtual Greats is a new company that plans to merchandise celebs' likenesses in virtual worlds. Done right its a gold mine. A story in Variety.

- Debris, or stop cramming your blogs and sites with useless widgets.

- An interesting take on the e-card idea: send online notes that self-destruct after being read.

- Bic, the company that brought us disposable shavers, is working on cell phones.

- You are what you tweet: psychologists asked students to type up their thoughts for 20 minutes, which was enough to predict major personality traits.

- Yearbooks are dying out.

- Animated visualization of Wal-Mart growth in the US since the first store.

- My Million Dollar Movie: a filmmaker is selling frames in his new film (here's the site).

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Job Hunting with LinkedIn Direct Ads

Advertising arsenal for job hunters has been expanding from direct mail (sending out CVs) and working with recruiters to creating profiles on specialty sites, career blogging, and posting YouTube videos (that sometimes backfire). Now you can add media buying to this list.

LinkedIn's newly announced self-service advertising program DirectAds seems like a great tool not only for a variety of B2B marketers, but also for job hunters (who, if you think about it, are also B2b advertisers). Select an industry and a job function, and a link to your CV will be in front of, say, 52,889 HR people and creative folks in ad agencies and marketing departments.

The program is not without its limitations. You cannot target an individual company or a search term, and you also can filter LinkedIn's audience only through two categories: you can't pick Boston+advertising+HR+creatives+company size, for example.

If you do try it out for yourself, please leave a comment sharing your impressions.

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The Other Second Life: Off-Label Uses of Brand Products

A page on Bounce from Joey Green's book Polish Your Furniture with Panty Hose

"A sufficiently thick stack of Bounce will actually stop a bullet!" (source)

Adweek has an excellent article today by Andrew Adam Newman about marketers slowly acknowledging and at times embracing secondary and often unintended uses of their products:

"For several years, a list that details quirky uses for Bounce dryer sheets [AdLab - probably this one] -- including tying them to belt loops as a bug repellent -- has been the subject of viral e-mails and blog posts. Procter & Gamble, which makes the dryer sheets, was well aware of the phenomenon, but did not acknowledge it.

But the more online chatter the company observed about alternative uses, the more the resistance dissipated [...]. Brand managers decided it was time to "lean forward and take a risk on our part" and to try "to capture the consumers' passion for the product and use it as leverage."

It was time, in other words, to promote the off-label uses of Bounce."

"Canada Dry Club Soda, for example -- which, along with other club sodas, is lauded by consumers as a spot remover for clothes and carpets -- says it's just good business."


P&G collects ideas for off-label uses of Bounce on BounceEverywhere.com.


Two books:
- Joey Green's Fix-It Magic: More than 1,971 Quick-and-Easy Household Solutions Using Brand-Name Products

- Polish Your Furniture with Panty Hose: And Hundreds of Offbeat Uses for Brand-Name Products

Previously on AdLab:
Ethnographic Research on Packaging Usage

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Former Time Publisher on Media Changes

Jack Haire, the former publisher of Time Magazine and president of Fortune/Money group who last week joined Balihoo's board of directors, talks about industry chaos, advertising networks and the movement of media dollars [emphasis mine].

"In spite of the challenging economic times we're in, I like to think of the media business as one of the sectors showing the greatest innovation and development. The media pie continues to grow, even though the ad spend mix is shifting. At the moment new technologies are the rage providing new levels of customization and accountability. Share, and in some instances, absolute dollars have shifted away from broadcast TV, magazines, newspapers and radio to the web, cable TV and outdoor, which has shown an exciting ability to reinvent itself using technology to better target and deliver value. When you think about all the new interactive brands, both new and associated with traditional media, it's pretty exciting."

In some ways, I think of this shift from traditional venues to online as a swing of the pendulum to a new more accountable medium, and the need for marketers to test and refine their approach. But as the pendulum finds middle ground, the one constant will be that great brands will draft off this competitive threat and get stronger or be marginalized. I am often reminded of how efficient and effective traditional media is at getting the word out to a large audience of readers and viewers. And they do this in very clean uncluttered, effective environments that are time tested at generating efficient results. The web is only one piece of the pie."

On online ad networks:
"I'm not a huge fan. And it is interesting to note that really strong web brands like espn.com and Martha Stewart are eschewing them because they realize that they are the crown jewel brands that advertisers want and will pay for. In essence they are the lead brands that "legitimize" the network. As an advertiser, I'd want to make sure I know where, and in what environments my ads will appear in. As a publisher, I'd worry about being commoditized by being a part of these networks. That said, with new behavioral and contextual targeting available, these networks do give you a way to reach your targets efficiently. So if I'm looking for an efficient way to reach hand raisers, I'd have them in the mix. One of the huge benefits of these networks, is that they are an efficient way to buy multiple sites. Balihoo can help marketers be far more efficient, and still allow them to buy brands they know and trust."

More about Balihoo on AdLab. Balihoo provides a platform for media planning and buying, and is AdLab's advertiser.

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Proto-Web in 1934

An article in NY Times about a Belgian inventor Paul Otlet who in 1930s created a proto-Web that "relied on a patchwork of analog technologies like index cards and telegraph machines":

"In 1934, Otlet sketched out plans for a global network of computers (or "electric telescopes," as he called them) that would allow people to search and browse through millions of interlinked documents, images, audio and video files. He described how people would use the devices to send messages to one another, share files and even congregate in online social networks. He called the whole thing a "réseau," which might be translated as "network" — or arguably, "web.""

***

"He hired more staff, and established a fee-based research service that allowed anyone in the world to submit a query via mail or telegraph — a kind of analog search engine. Inquiries poured in from all over the world, more than 1,500 a year, on topics as diverse as boomerangs and Bulgarian finance."

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The Future of Retail: Instant Price Match

The obvious future of in-store experience: you find something you like, reach into your pocket for a small device, scan the barcode, and the device tells you whether and were the same product is available for a lower price. Brick-and-mortar stores become little more than showrooms for merchandise bought elsewhere.

This future just got one step closer today with the release of an iPhone app Checkout SmartShop, "a shopping assistant meant to help you fine online and local prices when you’re out and about shopping." For now, you still need to type in the UPS code; they are working on converting the iPhone camera into a barcode scanner.

How much time do you give for this app to hit the market: you go into a Blockbuster, scan a box, and the movie is cued up for download on your BitTorrent client?

In a post last January on online experiences and offline expectations, I wrote, "Retailers gotta act quick if they want to have some control over the converging experiences. In a few years, people will be carrying web browsers in their pockets and won't be needing all this retail innovation. Then they would go to Barnes & Noble to browse books and order the ones they like on Amazon right from the store. In a few years, people will be carrying web browsers in their pockets and won't be needing all this retail innovation."

That part about "a few years" was probably too optimistic. If you are a store, you might consider investing into a cell phone jammer or printing out this free "No iPhones on Premises" sign.

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Banners and The Right Click

Do banners that allow standard right-click navigation options -- "open in new window" and "open in new tab" -- have higher click-throughs, other things being equal?

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Friday Special: Ethics of Gravestone Advertising

AdLab has explored the question of tombstone advertising to a great extent, but never from the ethics angle. Apparently, the question has been resolved. Love the "report abuse" button.

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