Randomrobot Blog

Last week, the smart fellows at Jumptap hosted The Mobile Upfront – an all-day event that brought together the top people working in mobile phone advertising. The army of panelists talked about the State of the Mobile Movement - the mistakes ad agencies make, and predictions on how mobile will further change the already chaotic media scene.

The Mobile Upfront was 10 days ago, so I realize in regards to the Speed of t eh Netz, this blog post is a total dinosaur. Please allow me, this humble plesiosaur, to talk about some of the things discussed that day.

And lo, A Bushy-haired Man Will Show Us The Way

Bob Greenberg, Visionary Leader (or as I think of it, The Great Seer) at R/GA, started the day off with a 1-on-1 interview on all things mobile. Crammed into that half hour were many tasty gems of mobile knowledge, which I shall impart to you (like the good disciple that I am).

-Greenberg Prediction One: Mobile Will Become The 1st Screen

Most advertisers work off a hierarchy of screen importance:

TV = 1st screen – the most important, most far reach touchpoint
Desktop/Laptop = The 2nd Screen
Mobile Screen = 3rd Screen

Greenberg points out that the coming of 4G Networks (broadband speed on phones!), streaming mobile video will take off. GPS and geo-location will become increasingly used on a daily basis. Better voice recognition means voice search, armed with the possibility of your phone becoming truly a Personal Assistant, and further become a Personalized Entertainment Device. Thus, we see how the smartphone can evolve to become the 1st Screen.

Not quite covered by Greenberg, but discussed throughout the day:
The other effect of people becoming increasingly attached to their mobile screen (much more than now, when a large amount of people already sleep with their iPhones next to their pillows), is that the smartphone becomes a very private, personal screen.

It’s not like a TV, which is meant for groups of people to partake in (even if one watches TV “alone”, its still an experience potentially shared by millions).

The mobile device is becoming a utilitarian, and entertainment, device. As the mobile user customizes and personalizes his smartphone to run all the things she is interested in. A device that can be intrinsically in-tune with its owner. Of course, this is another step in humanity turning into cyborgs, which I support wholeheartedly.

However, that phone also holds a cache of very valuable data on the owner – which marketers would love to have access to. But if marketers do get access to that data, how can we use it without creeping out the owner?

Already, I can foretell people being creeped out by overly-pushy geo-location advertising. When I had a cellphone in Tokyo, I would get spam emails on my phone about 3 times a week. For whatever reason, I always felt more creepy about spam hitting my phone, instead of my computer. Because it’s my phone. If marketers started pushing (read: interruptive advertising) more into my mobile phone space because of what they have learned about me, then I very well might feel violated.

Thus, when pursuing mobile marketing ideas, we need to make sure we think about and respect the privacy of the mobile user. Nothing revokes trust/loyalty faster than not respecting the privacy of the person.

I’ll update this blog in the coming days with more wisdom from Greenberg and the other panelists from the Mobile Upfront. If anyone has any questions, comment me.

I was satisfying my Gay Urges by queuing up the latest Lady Gaga video on Youtube Veveo, and this little piece of awesome popped up.

As far as I can tell, this was made at this specific Jersey dealership – all in-house. Some might see it as hokey, but I see it as charming and effective.

Effective – because it is a great compliment to know that you, as a Volkswagon driver, will be so respected by the robots who will eventually take over the world, that they will be spared. Indeed! The intelligence of VW drivers can match the robots.

For the geeks in their 20s and 30s, this is a high compliment. I WANT to prove the robots right.

(if only I was in any way in the market for a car…)

What I love about this, is that I could have done this with my paltry 40 hours of Flash classes. You can tell they just used some VW stock footage, coupled it with an old-school Screen-Title announcing their dealership, and bam. Done. On the super cheap. Marketed to people only in the Jersey area via Youtube.

I expect to see more cheap, ultra-local efforts like these. I hope they are more fun and quirky and less the dude singing about his furniture store.

(Don’t get me wrong, I still want to marry this dude. Our Gaybies will form a glee choir)

- My Boners RE: Visual Design.

I’m hardly Chip Kidd. I did, however, design all my personal branding pieces, including my Main Portfolio Website - what with it’s cute cartoonish Dillons and sunbursts patterned from old Chairman Mao posters.

- L33t wr1t3r = FTW

Guerilla Campaign for J&D’s Bacon Salt

User Experience and MOI

I create nothing unless I feel people will interact with it. Or at least chuckle.
Proof: TFGI Fridays Campaign

Elite Abilities in the Developments

No. Not even. Nope!

That said, I was the only person at my program at Chicago Portfolio School who took intensive courses in BOTH Flash and HTML/CSS. Even then, this only places me around 2001, developer-wise.

If I could have TARDISed my way back to the early aughts, I surely would have ruled over Geocities.

The Whole “I’m the Facebook Generation” Self-Appraisal

I don’t post on my Twitter/Facebook feeds about when I ate a particularly nice donut.

Also, I’m falling in love with LinkedIn. Here’s Me InLinked.
(and where I heard about this internship posting)

Regarding My Ability To Stop The Entropy of Daily Malaise From Swallowing Me Whole Like A Sandworm

What’s actually sorta sad is that I’m about to turn 29 - yet, for years I got paid little for still being a workaholic. I’ve done a lot of comedy/theater/creative stuff, leading multiple projects and groups in New York, Tokyo, and Chicago.

Maximum Fun: Producing/Hosting Dr. Sketchy’s Anti-Art School - Tokyo Branch it’s first year

Maximum Comedy Exposure: Interning at The Second City. I watched 15 years of their sketch shows.

Finally, Ad School: 14 hour days as the norm / didn’t break past $1000 a month in the take home.

That Undying Curiosity Thingie

“Dillon was a unique student. He has enough energy, and curiosity for two people if not three. He brings diligence and knowledge of all the latest social, cultural and technological trends to the table. He was great to have around. For example, he was the go to guy for filming our guest speakers and spearheaded the school’s youtube channel. He volunteers for anything and everything and isn’t afraid to get his hands dirty or put the time in to meet the objective.” December 7th, 2009

- Maria Scileppi , Associate Director , Chicago Portfolio School

I err… also get trapped in Wikipedia Loops. Commonly. I have Wiki apps on both my iPodTouch and Droid Phone.

Signed,
-Dillon Font (The Copywriter You’ve Been Looking For)

Wal-Mart is pushing their well-designed, good quality generic brands. Thus, the Name Brands of America panic, the hallways of their offices filled with the screeching stampeding of a workforce coddled into thinking the consumer masses will buy your name brand as long as there is a fun graphic or commercial on the air about it.

I guess you can’t rely on 50+ years of consumer/company history to keep consumer loyalty. My, aren’t us consumers just fucking ungrateful to Nabisco and company.

National Name Brands once stood for quality – the idea that, each box would be the same as the last. It was helped that most generic competitors just looked a good deal crappier than the Name Brands there were trying to clone. No, no Silver Shark crackers for my family, thank you!

Then came the Recession, and us consumers are telling the pollsters that we aren’t really planning to come back to the Name Brands once things get sunnier.

Essentially, people are recognizing that the extra 50 cents we’ve spent for the name brands, is just 50 cents of marketing. If the cheaper generics can offer an equally pleasing package, witha product that makes you want to NOM NOM through the whole bag anyway, then one has no reason to support the name brands.

In this atmosphere, here I come, trying to break into the advertising game. I have the challenge of working with a smarter, savvier consumer to convince them that they should drop those 50 cents. Afterall, If that 50 cents is marketing, then I better do a good job of it.

What the Name Brands can do, and a select few are doing, is giving consumers Utility.

Kraft is my Big White Knight, because:

-Their website, Kraftfoods.com, isn’t just a company page listing their products – it’s a deep den of recipes.

-The iFood Assistant App. A couple of bucks and you have hundreds of recipes at your thumb-tip. Stumped at the Supermarket of what to make for dinner that night? Give the iFood Assistant 2 minutes of your time, and you have a recipe and a shopping list all ready to go. For the working mum on a budget, this is highly useful.

Here is Mark Stewart, the VP of Global Media at Kraft, says it best in 3 minutes on this Advertising Age Video.

Companies who give value to their customers will keep buying their products. Make us appreciate you and love you.

This makes my job a lot less about writing witty headlines, and a lot more trying to best serve a consumer’s needs. And if I’m lucky (read: good enough) they’ll buy my brand.

I’ve… got a lot of work to do.

I spent the Aughts assuming that I was sort of a failure. I went to a fantastic, super expensive college and found it ridiculously hard to find good, decent work. I ran away to Japan for 3 years, doing odd jobs there, only to get back to America, earning 10 bucks an hour with no health insurance at 28.

It’s somewhat cathartic to see the editorials, and graphs like these, detailing The Millenial Lost Generation - the people getting out of school in the Aughts and finding a lack of entry level jobs. There are record amount of people in their 20s-30s living at home with their parents.

And after reading Christopher Buckley’s satire Boomsday , it kept creeping into my head — The Boomers, the bastards holding onto plum jobs, at inflated pay rates, while people in their 20s, eager to break in and grow up, find our adolescence extending seemingly into infinity.

As I finish up ad school, with most of the recent grads having stupid trouble getting jobs… will I ever get a chance at a big boy job?

PC World has this interesting tidbit:

“A tectonic shift has taken place for the digital age: ad rates for popular shows like The Simpsons and CSI are higher online than they are on prime-time TV. If a company wants to run ads alongside an episode of The Simpsons on Hulu or TV.com it will cost the advertiser about $60 per thousand viewers, according to Bloomberg. On prime-time TV that same ad will cost somewhere between $20 and $40 per thousand viewers.”

Which makes me wonder why the companies who hold highly syndicated properties (Simpsons obviously, but also shows like Seinfeld, Friends, et al) haven’t been rushing to host their episodes on the internet - and hopefully, with this PC World report - they will.

The magic of these favorite shows is that certain moments live in our head - and when we think “Man, I’d love to see the Radioactive Man movie episode again”, thanks to the internet, we now can

As it is, me and the boyfriend, whenever we have the craving for Simpsons, we don’t turn on the local TV - we go to Watch The Simpsons Online - a fan effort that hosts most every Simpsons episode ever made. Free and immediate, any episode we want to watch, we can. Oh, how digital media spoils us!

The massive syndication of The Simpsons on regular TV since the mid 90s onward have resulted in us being very used to seeing Simpsons almost whenever we want. So we’re not necessarily going to go out and buy the DVD sets - but, put HQ versions on the net with commercials? Yeah, I think most of us will totally do that.

Regarding the Simpsons specifically, its sad that Fox isn’t more aggressive in putting these shows online. Hulu.com is only hosting 5 full-length episodes currently.

As usual, the fans have beat them to the punch, and people can now watch the episodes free online, without any commercials. Media companies need to get their heads out of their asses and embrace on-demand internet video - for if you give us free content EASILY, we shall embrace your advertisements. Let me watch The Rear Window parody on the Simpsons, and I’ll probably buy your shampoo, too.

While most homos, driven out of the house due to a fight with the husband-in-future, would find solace in the arms of either liquor or kind male strangers, I - the most nerdotronic one - got myself to the nearest used bookstore.

“Summer is the season to re-read Harry Potter”, as I like to sardonically imagine, but I also stumbled upon this awesome gem

The Aum Shinrikyo Cult gained notoriety when they executed a sarin gas attack, in the Tokyo subway system back in 95. Haruki Murakami interviewed tons of victims from that attack a few years ago.

This book, however, goes into interviewing members of the Cult. In a broader sense, Lifton is trying to break down what drives people in general to such strong Fundamentalist urgings. What’s fascinating is that a lot of what motivates people to join up with these more extreme forms of religion, are really not that much different as the reasons most people subscribe to the specific subcultures that they do. Geek. Punk. Queercore. The power of small worlds/scenes, where your actions seem to have impact and merit.

Then I keep running all this around in my head this weekend, and think “Well, how can I apply this to advertising?” Thus sealing my fate as a sell-out for all eternity.

Anyway, this is all to say that this has been terribly interesting summer reading, even if that admits a fascination with such things as Contemporary Apocalypse Cults. Not that I have any sort of sanctified legs to stand on - considering I spent Saturday night seeing fag punk band Pansy Division rip apart a Bible on stage while singing about blowjobs. Considering I’m going into advertising, I suppose that I am exactly that which Good Christians fear.

Who knew it could come in a package quite so cute as this?

The internet meme is a fucking intriguing beast, especially when you mix brands and specific technology into it.

Like Guys With iPhones.Com!!

My my, I wonder how Apple feels about its must-have smartphone (even I have the poor man’s iPhone AKA Le iPodTttttttttouch) being used as the must-have fetish object in this gorgeous self-objectification of the male flesh.

(Aaaah, sweet nerdy faggotry)

One of the more intriguing aspects of the speeding-up process of Marriage Equality for all - is all the more palatable ways Gay Marriage has been marketed in the past few years. And a lot of that is learning what terminology/words we are fighting for:

One of the more interesting recent semantic “twists” in the dialogue concerning Legal Homo Love Contracts comes from Le NY Times

The good Mr. Tom Souzzi lays out an interesting semantics debate - to call a gay coupling specifically a Civil Union creates a seperate but (un?) equal institution - however, the word “Marriage” by itself comes massive religious annotations - and it IS important that we don’t force churches to perform gay marriage (AKA sinfests) if their religion is insecure enough to not want that to happen.

So he uses “Civil Marriage” vs “Religious Marriage” And here, we see how by simply  changing the language of something, the definitions themselves change. Souzzi is striking out the middle ground - of creating an institution which is equal in name to marriage, but gives the God-lovers a way out (which is fine and dandy - oh seperation of church and state, how I’ve positively missed you!)

Afterall, a major aspect of the Gay Marriage debate is the issue of language. “Marriage” comes across with all the religious aspects bundled into it, so the initial compromise on civil unions at first seems like a good way

Here’s a fun chart:

So, the more homos market themselves as the sorts of people who :

A)exist in everyone’s daily lives, and

B)aren’t vicious she-demons intent on raping the corpse of marriage as they dance in a fire circle with the spirit of that hooved man with the fiery abs of steel

the more people come to a conclusion that, at the very least, Gay Marriage isn’t any sort of sign of the end times, and that generally denying people rights just because they’d rather have a nice bratwurst is pretty illogical.

Thus, marketing myself as a fun, slightly weird-but-in-the-cool-sorta-hipster-way Faggot will not only help land me a job one day (hint hint) but will get more people to be thumbs up for Gay Civil Marriage

Or, in a perfect world, it’d be called Butt-Buddies.

Me and my Butt Buddy. How are you not jealous yet supportive of our disgusting ironic love?

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