Applied Semiotics

In the "Technology" section of this Saturday's NYT, there's an article on the rise of "true" web applications, or perhaps more appropriately, web-active desktop application replacements (wadars?). What's a wadar? It's not a web application like Orbitz or EBay. Plunk someone from 1991 down in front of Orbitz and the response would be "What the fuck is this?" But a wadar... plunk that same chrononaut down in front of Writely and they would say, "This? This is a really nice version of Word." Only after you had explained the networked collaboration, the fact that your files were being stored on some server out there in the white hot data cores of the matrix would an expression of gnostic horror would take control of their face.

Google has had the pieces for a totally networked "Office," for a while - Gmail, Google Spreadsheets, Google Calendar, Google Maps, and Writely. Writely hasn't been rolled out yet (the beta site has it rated at "62% beta," for what that's worth), but when it goes live there will be a suite of office software that is operating system independent and totally free - because the operating system is the web and revenue stream comes from context cued search. While this is tectonically, seismically, geologically important, it is not news. This was Larry Ellison of Oracle's pitch way back in the heady 90's. Thin clients. Massive networked data centers. Multiple modes of access and delivery. To which I say, "So what?" This kind of thing has been possible since the days of Nth tiered software architecture. Browser technology has finally caught up with the idea of ubiquitous data through ubiquitous computing. The important thing is that something much more significant has caught up - user expectations of experience.

"Web as Platform" has gone mainstream. When you ask a friend if you can check your email and they hand you their phone, WasP is mainstream. When turning in your essay to your composition professor means uploading it to Writely (apparently a killer app for the service), WasP is mainstream. All of this is significant because it means the needle has moved on user expectation of experience.

If the game experience is now the default frame of reference for an immersive, high-interactivity user experience, then the wadar experience is holding down the other end of the bench. Users are arriving at websites today expecting the sites to do something. Ask them questions to help configure a car. Search for product more powerfully. Aggregate and process content based on their preferences. They are expecting the site to work in certain ways: moving data and input asynchronously. Remembering what users want and do and reacting. Life is an active, metabolic state. Web sites do not "deliver" anything. Websites need to help users work, help them live. It is a concept which goes as far beyond providing static product information as a word processor supersedes a typewriter. Both work in words, but beyond the layout of the keyboard there is simply no comparison.

Sites that simply provide a "virtual brochure" experience are essentially Colonial Willamsburg for the late 1990's. Sites that provide rich media interfaces for galleries of photos and product information are more of the same, circa 2004. The future of user experience online looks like a chimeric hybrid between an Excel spreadsheet loaded with all the data you've ever touched and a robot knife fighting game, all delivered via Firefox... except that Firefox is now your operating system, except it isn't, because you're on your phone. Wait, you're on a Lenovo-clone made in Thailand with a Tupperware exterior, the whole thing ginned-out in a inkjet fabrication plant for $40, running on open source software that you are continually tuning to your personal tastes. It's all just a door to your data.

Where am I going with this? This is the state of the experience gap. Users expect a game with a cinematic-like high definition world, or they expect tools - newly powerful tools that are increasingly replacing the role of desktop applications. Both experiences carry with them an expectation of doing something. In World of Warcraft they are forming social networks and building personalities. They are creating a sense of community and accomplishment that may not exist in their analog lives. On Google Spreadsheets they are conducting business, crunching number in a free groupware environment. They are getting things done. That is their mindset when they open up their computer, users are not "online" so much as just living. They are not creative professionals and developers caught up in technologies and branding. They are doing.

With our brands and our microsites, what are we doing for them?

or how everything (and I do mean everything) is falling further and further

behind the accelerating hyperreality of video games.

I went to E3 last week and felt old. E3 is the Electronic Entertainment Expo, the biggest video game trade show in the industry. For the last several years its been held at the Los Angeles Convention Center. I'm going to get back to E3 in the specific and video games in general, but before we move on, I want to unpack "feeling old" a little, because it's important to the larger point I'd like this essay to make.

I've felt uncool before. Old is a similar feeling to uncool, because both involve feeling out-of-the-loop. There is a party going on that you weren't invited to, because.... why? Because you don't get it, your clothes are no longer of the mode, you don't understand what people mean when they say "I totally crushed it." You're just a little too slow.

This is ultimately an essay about speed - movement over time. Speed is always a function of time, and speed is of massive importance in a capitalist economy, especially a post-industrial information economy. We talk about computers in terms of processor speed. We talk about the collapsing speed of the news cycle. Much of the information we deal in our day-to-day lives is with is issued with an expiration date, its ability to confer value or competitive advantage is a function of its time criticality - its relationship to time is a goad to speed.

This was the first year at E3 where the product I saw exhibited was a radical departure from my mental model for "video game." What I saw was so cinematic, so photorealistic, so massively multiplayer that it bore as much relation to my old Atari 2600 as a cheetah bears to a trilobite. Sure, there's a line of relatedness, but the distance is so great that comparison is largely an academic exercise.

This has been a long time coming. Anyone that understands Moore's law could have guessed that these consumer-grade consoles were eventually going to get to this level of capability. But we need to put this capability into context. This was the year that I felt like we arrived at the watershed. Sure, video games are in the ascendant. That's not news. What is news is that video games still looked like video games last year. This year they looked like... nothing I'd ever seen before. If the past is another country, the future is a land filled with objects, means, systems and ways that nobody has ever seen before. It is the landscape of the unprecidented. Yes, video games are in the ascendent, but it is a question of scale. It is a question of speed. This is a media on an ascending trendline like an F-18 going into a balls-to-the-wall climb - two pounds of thrust for every pound of airplane, the sky turning outer-space black outside the canopy.

Context. It is not just that video games are amazing. It is that this was the first time that I saw them replacing... everything. Television is still our dominant media form, but in the developed world we already exist in a hybridized space where television is the one-way mass-market high-def delivery pipe that plugs people into the conversation-driven high-findability medium of the Internet. We are a post-literate society, that's not news. But I could feel the money at E3 this year. Bigger than publishing. Bigger than film. The thin edge of the wedge, to be sure, but it was there. The gap is getting bigger. And the rate of growth is accellerating at computer speeds. Think about that, cultural change at computer growth speeds. When Toffler spoke of "Future Shock", he predicted that our post-industrial society would eventually hit a change curve where we would inadvertently alter our own culture so quickly that we would wind up giving ourselves collective culture shock - just by walking out the door for a quart of milk. What he didn't guess was the mechanism, or that the biggest change would be at home, on our living room screens. What he didn't guess was the rate of change, the speed.

Context - video games are the new context of comparison. In my day job we build websites for the automotive industry. The experience gap that we have had to deal with to date is the space between television and a networked personal computer. That gap is effectively gone - we are pumping video to people, creating product-focused reality tv shows, offering things that could never be possible on conventional tv. Our star was on the rise.

But our best offering looks like shit compared to the games I saw. Yes, the game industry has billions of dollars more than we do. But guess what? Nobody cares. The consumers we are targeting will increasingly hold these massively immersive and interactive game environments as their gold standard, their default frame-of-reference. So what that our website has a $300k budget and your game has a $100m budget? Do you think that Joe and Judy America at home give a shit what my budget is? I still have to compete with your game if I want to sell a car. How am I going to do that? I'm not sure, but the result sure isn't going to look like the way we do it now, I can tell you that much. The answer may be not competing at all. Or that the game producers are the new television networks. Or that advertising and the whole of the culture industry as we know it is over.

In his book "The Curve of Binding Energy" John McPhee describes how the calculation of the CBE made nuclear weapons a theoretical possibility. By plotting the curve, physicists could know how much energy would be liberated in the detonation of a nuclear weapon. Once the trend of that curve was known, the arrival of a weapon orders-of-magnitude more powerful than anything in human history was only a matter of time.

The new curve is there for everyone to see. And as the aperture of the gap between video games and everything else widens, the light it will liberate will be blinding. Everything else will seem shabby and dull by comparison. The culture industry is in for a turbulent ride.

This isn't the end of the world. As Bruce Sterling likes to point out, the past is always with us, and the present is composted to make the future. When the bomb was born in July 1945, we had to learn to live with it.

Adjustments will need to be made. Fast, as in "with speed."

A tag search for "Precision Guided Munitions" on Flickr goes horribly wrong

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Things find us. Mosquitoes, gossip, bombs. There is the information and the vessel that moves the information.

My buddy Wade sent me this email:

subj: Benjamin Rush, "Plans for a Peace-Office"

SF author Will Shetterly linked to this on his blog, saying, "The plan itself is a charming mix of the practical and 17th century enlightened Christian gonzo."

http://www.lewrockwell.com/vance/vance76.html

Gonzo, indeed! For example, his plans for redecorating the War Office - what would now of course be the DoD - are striking:

In the lobby of this office let there be painted representations of all the common military instruments of death, also human skulls, broken bones, unburied and putrefying dead bodies, hospitals crowded with sick and wounded soldiers, villages on fire, mothers in besieged towns eating the flesh of their children, ships sinking in the ocean, rivers dyed with blood, and extensive plains without a tree or fence, or any object, but the ruins of deserted farm houses.
Above this group of woeful figures, – let the following words be inserted, in red characters to represent human blood,

"NATIONAL GLORY."

Folks, this is strange stuff. The kind of semantic air pocket that knocks the coffee out of your styrofoam cup and burns your leg. I mean, one moment you are thinking about your morning team meeting, then next... this.

Let's retrace our steps through this garden of forking paths: Crazy Age of Enlightenment Framer, the suspended animation of print, then blogged by Messrs Rockwell and Shetterly, the link cut-and-pasted into a email to me from Wade.

Awoken from the death-sleep of a forgotten book, the molecule-slowing cold of deep space, roused by the heat and warmth of the Internets into some kind of hyperactive quickening of forwards, the strangeness of this Peace Office idea is like The Blob crawling out of a freshly crashed meteor in a cornfield. One brain out of six billion pulls a gene of information loose from the big goopy genome of a book, enzyme splices it into a rhinovirus, and then wipes it on the handrail to the subway. And the next thing you know you are imagining Donald Rumsfeld as the Secretary of Peace, blissed out from the electrode implanted in his substantia nigra, transformed into the lever-whacking lab monkey of American foreign policy.

Shocked awake by our collective You Tubed Flickrated Dr. Frankenstein consciousness, these informational chimeras shamble to their feet and hammer at the glass double doors of our mental shopping centers. They find us. And after that finding, the world is different.

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This isn't Aeon Flux. It's just tagged that way. The meaning isn't destroyed, just stranged.

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I typed Aeon Flux into flickr’s tag field – and somehow wound up with what seems to be a Nike ad.

Nike has its headquarters in Portland, which is a very strange town. So what exactly is going on here? The quantum noise of people thinking and sticking words on things. Nothing new there - poets call it "motion of mind." They call it that in MFA programs, in any case.

What is new is that when I stick a word on something, and I make a misstep, or a misstick, the missticking still stays stuck. And that slippage, that seismo-semiotic skip remains visable from the air. It is findable. And that mashup of findability and strangeness is new.

Neomorphisms get neologisms. I would like to propose a new word. Proposals are usually the start of something strange anyway, somebody asking you to do something you didn’t think of on your own. The word is RESE, which is a strange kind of word, an acronym:

Reverse Entropic Strangeness Effect

Strangeness is created, but it is never destroyed. And once it is created, it gets found. Once it's found, it grows ever more findable, as the neural network of our brains is wired (and continually rewiring itself) for strangeness.

Chris Anderson has written extensively about The Long Tail, the way the Internet has changed the traditional behavior of markets. To quote him directly:

The theory of the Long Tail is that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of "hits" (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail.

In other words, niche markets thrive because demand can ALWAYS find supply. This is how the Long Tail disintermediates, disambiguates and other discombobulates traditional markets through the subversive power of findability. But I want to push that concept one step further. The Long Tail not only allows people to find strangeness, but in the finding it creates more strangeness.

Dadaism works by through combinatorial effect - by combining disparate elements in an unexpected way it subverts the significance of both. It is the power of Eisensteinian montage to create meaning turned on its ear. Or as Johnson characterized the metaphysical poets, "The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together."

The proliferation of life forms that evolutionary paleontologists call "The Cambrian Explosion" likely occurred because of the development of sexual reproduction - the deliberate combination of previously uncombined genes into totally new genomes. Information could suddenly shuffle its own deck, over and over again.

That's what we are in the middle of, right now, a long orgy of recombination, our information reproducing itself not in monastic cells of orthodox transcription, but in a writhing mess of brains, trained and untrained. A mess of information in transit and transition, with the only constants being change and strange.

The Long Tail isn't quite enough of a label for this phenomenon. Maybe we could call it the Long Flail, or the Strange Grail, which isn’t even an anagram, but does rhyme, and sounds very Golden Bough.

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This is Aeon Flux. And a physical tag of Aeon. And the tag has been tagged ...

"That which does not kill us makes us… stranger."

As much as I love that line, I didn’t write it. Trevor Goodchild says it in the animated series Aeon Flux.

Have the Internets ushered in a brave new tomorrow of transparency, a real-world correlate to what economists and game theorists have called perfect information, the informational equivalent to the frictionless void of high school physics homework? I don't know. It's probably something like that.

Have the Internets unleashed a horrific avalanche of human depravity and avarice upon a previously insulated world? I know that I managed to make to thirty years of age before I knew what a furry was - and then the internet brought not only the idea into my head, but an actual furry into my living room. Guess what? I never wanted to know about the furry lifestyle ("lifestyle" - a favorite strangeness mixer), but once that box is opened and the cat is out of the bag and the metaphor is mixed, there not a damn thing you can do about it. It's a kind of entropy, an arrow for time based on the inalienable ratchet that while strangeness is created, it is never destroyed. Because strangeness is bulletproof. And look, I don't have a problem with furries. Ok, actually I do. I don't think I would have so much trouble with the concept if these people were better looking. Maybe if I looked like that, I would want to pretend I was a priapic dolphin covered with synthetic fur. It may be one of the last acceptable prejudices in the developed world. Enjoy it while it lasts.

I don't know if the Internet, if this ever-improving exchange of information has made the world a better place. I don't know if it has made it a worse place, or only helped us be awful faster and harder than we ever have before. But there is one thing I know for certain...

The Internet has made the world stranger.

Out here on the perimeter, there are no stars. And the Internet is only perimeter. Everything is an edge. The long edge.

The edge is where things get strange.

Stranger.

When I started blogging, I told myself that I was not going to blog from anger. I told myself that I was going to mostly write analysis about marketing, the internet, the automotive industry. The subjects would be edifying and the tone would be a kind of readable, Harpers-esque midbrow academic. A think tank of one.

But this is the dumbest fucking thing I have read in a long, long time:

"Senators to push for $100 gas rebate checks"

One hundred dollars. To every taxpayer in the US.

On the IRS website I learned that there were 130,423,626 individual filings in the US in 2003.

130,423,626 x 100 usd = 13,042,362,600. Go ahead and slide that decimal point over a couple of orders of magnitude.

That's THIRTEEN BILLION DOLLARS.

Not to mention the overhead to distribute the thirteen billion.

This bill is being sponsored by legislative superstars like Senators Rick Santorum (R- PA) and Ted Stevens (R-AK). I am further saddened to say that the whole enchilada is being quarterbacked by Chuck Grassley (R) of Iowa. Iowa. A state that is leading the nation in the production of biofuels. A state with a real stake in researching alternative energy.

What would 13 billion dollars worth of biofuel investment look like? What would that kind of investment in research and development or biofuel infrastructure look like for our nation? What would it look like for the good people of Iowa, who are supposedly Grassley's constituency?

What would 13 billion dollars worth of state of the art refining capacity look like in America? Recent studies suggest that fuel prices in California would be $.25 to $.50 cheaper if there was new refining capacity. But NIMBYism and a total lack of ANY MARKET INCENTIVE for the petrofuel industry to increase refining capacity have paralyzed the development of new refining infrastructure in this nation for the last twenty years.

What would 13 billion dollars worth of tax incentives for high-fuel economy passenger cars look like? What if the bonus was higher for hybrids and clean-diesel super-sippers build here in AMERICA, using american technology, burning american biofuel produced in american midwest, by american farmers? WITH NOT ONE SLIM DIME GOING IN TO THE POCKETS OF CORRUPT, DESPOTIC MIDDLE EASTERN OIL INTERESTS?

And why in the wide, wide world of sports - why for the love of all that is holy are we, the american taxpayer, paying for this Republican election-season faux-populist snowjob? Why are these supposed titans of the free market so happy to give our money away? Can't we let a little good old Adam Smith Invisible Hand pressure work on those prices some?

In marketing we have a little thumbnail rule called the $100 test:

If you would make more impact giving out the project budget as $100 cash incentives, the idea is no good. But good is such a dangerous term, because "good" is usually a value judgement grounded in relativities. Who is this $100 good for? It sure isn't good for us, the american taxpayer.

We elected these people. So let's keep our Bomb & Spend domestic and foreign policy. Let's have the foxes rob the henhouse one more time to stay in power, mortgage our collective future and security for their short term gain.

Energy Security is National Security.

The Midwest should always come before the Mideast.

Technorati Tags: automotive, government, oil war, peak oil, Bomb & Spend

A report from the frontlines of lifestyle event marketing

It is a beautiful, warm day in California's Great Central Valley. Fresno to be exact. I just ate a delicious lunch, which Toyota paid for with a $15 dollar gift certificate. I am about to take a Scion tC coupe for a test drive, something that I am mildly excited about. Paid agents, young good-looking people who are enthused about the Scion product have been paying me all kinds of loving high-touch attention for several minutes.

I am filled with a sense of well being for the Toyota Motor Corporation, USA.

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It is a well known fact that the weak link in the automotive industry's purchase funnel is the dealership.
On the one hand this makes a huge amount of sense - advertising agencies and other creative enterprises hire great talent to create brand and look for the product.
The dealership hires a clown to hand out balloons and hot dogs. Their staff works on commission - every human that walks in the front door is nothing but a man-shaped silhouette, a target that needs to be knocked down to make the sale.

But this disconnect is the great paradox of the industry! Ultimately the automotive industry is about... cars.

And cars are design objects. The number one piece of terrain between an intender and their purchase is the *physicality* of the car, this artifact *designed* from sheet metal, foam, plastic, and software. If the intender has their deepest hopes and dreams affirmed during this critical first close encounter, then the hardest sales job, the emotional sales job is over. The car "feels" right. And takes the quotes off feels - because the feelings of the intender are real.

So why is the dealership the weakest link when it should be the strongest?

How do we get the wonderful physicality of cars into the decision space of automotive consumers, literally put the product back into the hands of our customers? Especially when the retail experience of a car dealership is something that seems totally out of synch with the rest of 21st century retail universe?

You bring the mountain to Mohammed. You make meeting the product a natural part of their life.

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The Scion Drive Tour: Event Scene Analysis

Short version - this thing is a home run for Scion. It was a fun, hip, low key even that participants and passerby seemed to love.

Space: The Tower Distict
I'll be honest, I never expected to find this in Fresno. Microbreweries, cafes, bookstores... boho city. Interruptive advertising sucks when it's jamming up your episode of Desperate Housewives, but somehow it's delighful serendipity when spatially dropped into your lunch break. The location, right off the main drag, pulled in a lot of foot traffic.

Time: Lunch and Dinner
Set up next to a popular (and good) cafe, the Scion team was set up to grab both the lunch and the dinner rush.

The People: Good looking & Smart
I mean, this seems pretty obvious, but someone put a lot of effort into staffing this event. Smartly dressed in Diesel jeans and fitted Scion tshirts, the crew looked the part and knew their product inside out. They came off as smart, not pushy. And they were quietly efficient - this thing ran like a swiss watch.

The Approach: Gentle, Let the product do the talking
Nobody was out doing pushy "sign my petition" marketing. If you asked a question about what was happening, they were waiting to answer. If you asked what was going on, they explained how the test drives worked and asked if you wanted to try out a Scion (very nicely and sincerely, I might add).

How it worked:
Top to bottom, the whole thing took about 25 minutes, and that was with me asking a number of pain-in-the-ass undercover corporate operative questions. I timed other people and saw folks do it in as little as 10, with most people coming in around 15 or so minutes. This is a crucial metric - if you took 45 minutes or so to eat lunch on your lunch break, you could easily do the drive on a whim and still get back to the office without your absence becoming a major production. This is opportunity-based product-focused marketing at its smartest. The whole thing was a Scion-branded experience.

All I handed over was my drivers license. I signed a single form - and that was just a release. 30 seconds tops. I asked for the tC and the booth operator radioed back to the lot. When I got there Mike was waiting for me.





The Drive:
Mike asked if I wanted to drive, or be driven. I said I wanted to drive. The traffic control staffer even took our picture. And that was it - we were off.

Mike was my product specialist, and he was no temp agency flunky. He knew the product backwards and forwards - displacements, horsepower, gearbox, options, you name it. There was no a single question I asked that Mike didn't know the answer to. Seriously, this was the man that Toyota wanted working this show. He came off as very confident and friendly. All told we drove about 10 minutes, on a mix of urban arteries and residential roads.

Scion is a great product. Fit and finish was surprisingly good, especially considering that the Yaris comes off as such a piece of commodity-grade junk. This little coupe was a pistol to drive, and the Pioneer sound system was great. And for a vehicle that folks were climbing in and out of all day, it was immaculately clean. Prep was super.

I asked Mike about how they transported the cars from city to city - car carrier or motorcade.

"Oh, we convoy - get them out on the road."
"Do you do opportunity marketing, I mean, talk to people at rest stations and restaurants?" I asked.
"Oh yeah, we always answers people's questions, and in a group the cars make a real impression."

This event squeezes out branding and product experience value at every possible turn.

Impressions:
EVERYONE was having a great time at this event. It was very low key, but people left smiling. The mix of staff, location, a free lunch, and direct product interaction is an alchemical brew. I walked away with a great impression of this product, to the extent that I would consider the tC as a purchase if it only had a little more headroom (I'm tall).

Does a lifestyle event like this generate the numbers that a national media campaign does? No. but does it have the pricetag of national media? Also no. And this has to be, dollar for dollar, a phenomenal promotional value. BIG brand and undoubtable translation to sales. The people that were hit were *hit*. They walked away *knowing* Scion. They would talk about it when the got back to campus or the office.

The whole thing had a lightweight, almost guerilla feeling to it. These guys traveled light, but my guess is they create smart-bomb results - this is putting the marketing right on the target, but then letting the target opt-in.

Folks, this is the future. Spatially interruptive marketing that comes off as a surprise picnic, not something to be TiVoed past. How do you create awareness about the event? How scalable is this kind of marketing? Big questions, but ones that need to be answered in our Post-television, time-shifted world.


Additional commentary and complete photoset at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/johnny_n/sets/72057594107162390/

Technorati Tags: automotive, branding, event, fresno, scion, advertising

Headed north on CA99 on my way to Fresno I passed this and had to pull over to take a picture. It seemed a fitting inaugural.



I couldn't get off the freeway until the next exit, then made my way back along the frontage road. Working my way back, I passed this:



While I was taking pictures of the gas station sign and the old datsun, the old man that owned the car noticed me outside.

"I saw you taking pictures of the car," he said.
"Yessir, I did take a picture of it. Is that OK?" I said.
"Who do you work for?"
"I work for Nissan. We built that car of yours, I guess."
"Well, it's a good car," he said.
"Yeah, a buddy of mine had one just like it in high school. It was a great little car. I liked the color of yours so much I thought I'd get a picture of it," I said.
"I didn't know if maybe you wanted to buy it."
"Does it run?"
"Not right now, I got to rebuild the carb, you know?" he said.
"When's the last it run?" The conversation had rapidly shifted to two rural men talking cars.
"Well, maybe about three years ago? "
"Has it been in your front yard all that time?" I asked.
"Where else am I going to keep her? Hell, I'll give you the goddamned thing, sonny." Yes, he actually called me "sonny."
I thought about it.
"Naw, I can't bring home another problem like that," I said.
"Think about it. It's a good car when it runs."

Technorati Tags: oil war, photoblog, datsun, automotive