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This Week in Lumps
#15 [28/08 - 03/09]

· Earlier this year, January 31st to be precise, there was a bomb scare in Boston, Massachusetts. On two separate occasions that morning, commuters spotted what they initially thought were ‘improvised explosive devices’ attached to bridges and interstate supports, and for both situations alerted the authorities. With the events that have taken place in the US this decade, officials have learnt to deal with any kind of ‘threat’ with gusto, as you would expect, and arriving on the scene (later described by The Boston Globe as “An army of emergency vehicles”) were police cruisers, fire trucks, ambulances, and the Boston Police Department bomb squad. Also present were live TV crews with helicopters circling overhead and a large crowd of onlookers. Peter Berdovsky, the American businessman partly responsible for putting these objects into the positions also showed up as part of the onlookers, but soon realising what the fuss was about carefully retreated back to his apartment, like a dog with his tail between his legs. He knew what the rest of Boston, and the rest of the world would soon find out: these were no bombs, he was just harmlessly advertising his new film. However he got more attention then he ever thought possible.
Later dubbed as Aqua-Gate by Kevin Pereira, co-host of Attack of the Show, The devices turned out to be battery-powered LED placards with an image of a cartoon character called a ‘mooninite‘. The placards were part of a guerrilla marketing campaign for Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters, a film based on the animated TV series Aqua Teen Hunger Force. Cue embarrassed faces all over. It got attention, just the wrong attention, but let’s slip on our ‘what-if’ jeans; what if Boston had seen this simple advertisement as it was meant, not as it came across? Would this movie had gained so much attention? My answer is yes.

Firstly, for those of you, like me, who are not studying marketing, both Viral (used more to describe marketing through technology) and Guerrilla (used more to describe marketing on a more physical basis) are unconventional ways of performing promotional activities on a tight budget. These promotions are sometimes designed so that the target audience is left unaware they have been marketed to. Sometimes (like the story above) it can raise ethical questions, but most times it works wonders. However, there are two main foundations you need for viral and guerrilla marketing to work: You need a strong brand, and an intelligent audience. Have these things in place, and you could have a successfully promoted product. Examples? Sure, here’s a handful:

The Dark Knight, the sequel to the 2005 release, Batman Begins, is set to be released in 2008, and has sparked life back into a tired and dated franchise, ruined by cartoonish casting aimed at the ‘Saturday morning with popcorn’ market. In May, the studio behind The Dark Knight launched 2 teaser pages for the film, one after the other. The first featured an image from the fictional political campaign of Harvey Dent, portrayed in the film by Aaron Eckhart, that was captioned, “I Believe in Harvey Dent”. The second website showed a vandalized version of the same page named “I believe in Harvey Dent too”. Clicking onto that website now simple displays an error message… or does it? Nate from the Be A Design Group was one of those who cleverly saw through this guise:

“Rule number one in viral marketing is: nothing is as it seems.”

One ‘right click, select all’ later, and the highlighted text displays many “Haha’s and a hidden message that reads “see you in December”. This is just the tip of the iceberg. The studio have also hired random people to walk into comic shops in the US, where they start dropping playing cards, but just the Joker ones. It’s so simple yet so amazingly clever, and affective.
For all the pictures on The Dark Knight viral campaign, revealing all the clues so far, visit the Be A Design Group article.

Another film which has caused a lot of talking and a lot of rumours even before the actual film title has been released is the next J. J. Abrams film, known either as Cloverfield, or the films release date ‘1-18-08‘. So what’s the film about? Wikipedia currently sums up all we know so far:

“A group of people struggle to survive a monster attack on New York City.”

Yep, seriously that’s about it. And if you had gone to see Transformers you would have seen the trailer, and will already know this information about the film. The trailer is very ‘Blair Witch’, its shot on a hand held camera, and the monster is still unknown, despite the hype about it being a Godzilla remake (which have been denied). I have to be honest, the trailer did grab my attention full on, and I was curious to find out more. Sadly, all that we know so far are puzzles from strange Japanese websites called Slusho, and rumours from Comic-Con.

Sometimes you don’t need to create a buzz. For ‘Bioshock’ the reviews spoke for themselves, but the buzz that followed the game from fan to fan isn’t something that happens very often in video games. Samuel L. Jackson’s thriller Snakes on a Plane was legendary even before its release, thanks to the Internet; one journalist even said that it was “perhaps the most internet-hyped film of all time”. Like I said, Sometimes you don’t need to create a buzz. Sometimes however, it can be the difference between a good brand product, and a great one.

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· A blog entry from the London-based internet radio and music community website Last.fm caught my eye this week; I’m a big fan, I use it on a constant basis (as a paying subscriber), and consider it one of the best websites currently available. Just in case you’re not sure what I’m about about, here is a little insight as to what this ’social music revolution’ provides:

More than ten million times a day, Last.fm users “scrobble” their tracks to our servers, helping to collectively build the world’s largest social music platform. On Last.fm you get a page which lists all the bands and songs you’ve scrobbled, so next time somebody asks you about your favourite music you can send them straight to your Last.fm profile. Every music profile is public, so you can have a look what your friends are listening to and find other fans who share your taste in music.

The blog entry was about ‘Phase One’ of the websites ‘audio fingerprinting’ process. This is a method of tidying up data; moderating, merging and making the data that little bit more accurate, based on the ID3 tags that your MP3’s have stored on them. Let me try and wash clear any confusion this may have introduced to your day:

For the ’scrobbling’ to work, you need to have correct ID3 tags, and as you can imagine, the worlds music list is full of spelling errors, mis-named bands and the audio-plague known as ‘Unknown Artist – 01 – Unknown Album’. For example: Rage Against The Machine’s most scrobbled track is Killing in the Name, from their first album which is currently standing at 52,981 listens, however you would also have to take into consideration the 43rd most listened to song on the list, the mis-titled: Killing in the Name Of. Likewise, the Radiohead song 2+2=5 appears three times at positions 60, 72 and 95 in their top 100 scrobbled tracks. Richard Jones explains what it is the website needs:

“We need people with MP3 collections (of any size/quality) to download and run the fingerprinter to make this work, so spread the word. Remember, you don’t need to clean up your ID3 tags before running the fingerprint app: This time round, people with imperfect tags are actually going to be of some use to us, and don’t deserve all the terrible things we normally wish on them ;)”

The benefits of this software therefore seem obvious, but also vitally important in regards to the accuracy of the stats, and anyone who uses Last.fm will be able to tell you that the stats are just one of the many plus points that this website provides, and provides better than the competitors.

If you use Last.fm, keep checking back to the website for stats and graphs of all the collected data. If you don’t use Last.fm, you really really should. Trust me; you’ll be hooked within weeks.

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· Popular social network website Facebook is back in the news this week, as the Trade Union Congress have said that employees should have access to social networking websites during office hours. They go on to say:

“Whilst employers are completely within their rights to forbid staff from using sites such as Facebook, MySpace or Bebo in work time, a total ban may be something of an over-reaction. Instead the TUC suggests that sensible employers, realising that their staff spend much of their waking hours in work and lead busy lives, should be trusted to spend a few minutes of their lunchbreak ‘poking’ their friends or making plans for outside work.“

A few workplaces have banned web surfing altogether, due to a fall in work productivity and time-wasting, such as Kent County Council, who have admitted banning Facebook for all of its 32,000 employees.

Personally, I’ve been at both ends of this argument. For the last few years, my various job roles have involved sitting at a computer for 95% of my paid hours. I can honestly say that in the roles where all Internet access was banned and strictly forbidden, I found that morale was affected, commitment was non-existent, and, yes, productivity wasn’t all that great. In a strange coincidence, the managers and bosses in these jobs also obsessed about length of breaks, toilet breaks and clocking in and out. I’ve looked back at jobs I’ve had (and especially one in particular) where this level of untrusting, Nazism-like behaviour of those in charge meant that it soon became impossible to do my job properly.

You may say that productivity in the workplace would be even worse if any old ‘.com’ was allowed, but that’s not the case at all. Let’s clear one thing up: Access to the Internet during working hours is ultimately the decision of the employers. If you are lucky enough to work for a company who allow websites to be accessed, it will be made clear to you when you start what the do’s and don’ts are; you will also be told that as long as you understand that Internet access is a privilege, not a right, you will be treated like an adult in the situation. After all, if you’re employing someone to do a professional job, they’ll also expect you to treat them professionally, ie like an adult and to give them a certain amount of freedom. Simply put, as long as you don’t abuse the right, there is no problem.

If you can trust your employees to take the correct amount of time for lunch, then they will. The simple solution if they abuse this, is to a) have a quiet word, then b) have a quiet word with extra warning, followed by c) verbal or written warning, and finally d) shown the door. This should be the same for website usage. A good example would be Microsoft or Google, who allow a large degree of employee flexibility in return for quality (not quantity of) work. The fact that these companies are more successful (and with a larger bank balance) than companies with ultra-restrictive regulations speaks volumes.

However, sometime during our lives we do have to put up with jobs where the aforementioned ‘rules’ do not apply. These are all fair and well, but are slightly dated and are usually imposed by people who may not understand that workplace environments have moved on since they were working entry-level positions. So the BBC’s Magazine Monitor have come up with 10 excuses to give to your boss when you get caught ‘poking’ the girl you like. My favourite would be:

“I’m vetting potential new recruits to the company.”

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That was the week in lumps, a week in which: Halifax FC approached myfootballclub to save them from folding, Sony finally killed off the dire ‘Connect’ brand, Kings-of-PC Hardware Logitech are now planning to rule the Wii world, and best wishes for a speedy recovery to Micky from Supergrass, who has broken his back by sleepwalking out of a window.

Time for me to say farewell until next time, before I leave I just wanted to let you know that the stunning trailer for the new Sigur Rós film has been released. Titled Heima (translated to ‘At Home’), the film is a documentary about the bands tour around Iceland in the summer of 2006. During this tour the band played two big open-air concerts, as well as small scale concerts. The documentary will also include footage of an acoustic concert played for family and friends at Gamla Borg, a coffee shop in the small town of Borg. This documentary will be released in Iceland at the Reykjavík International Film Festival opening day, 27th of September 2007. The DVD release is set on 5th November 2007.

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