This article over at Scatterbox (dutifully maintained by Steven Silvers) really caught my ire. Apparently two moronic employees at Domino’s utilized 21st century technology to illustrate to the world what total disregard they have for the customers of Domino’s, sticking ingredients in their noses and spitting in sandwiches, all on video tape and all on Youtube. Of course, this caused no end of trouble for Domino’s and got the suits asking themselves, “Oh crap! What do we do when our employees can use social media tools to cluster bomb our brand?” The normal reaction is likely to put a corporate policy into zzzzz… Sorry, ever since getting out of the rat race, I can’t finish sentences with “corporate policy” in them any more. And it doesn’t matter, because what they’re going to do is precisely the wrong thing to do.

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I’m not going to do an analysis of Opera Unite. The long and the short of it is that Opera (the browser maker) has made a play for the social networking space. Their claim to fame is that clarion call to freedom! Be free from your social platforms, your servers, your oppressors in the cloud! But as this razor sharp analysis from Chris Messina FactoryCity will illustrate to you Opera Unite is selling you anything but freedom. I have a few things to say about that as well. Read more…

The shock! The vehemence! The vigorous impetuosity! A person from a company I like a lot just revealed to his followers that he will be experimenting with putting advertising into his software. Read the comments on the page. Wow! I’m not quite sure I could get so passionate if Brent Simmons did the same with NewNewsWire but depending on how it was accomplished I wouldn’t be surprised to find myself grumbling and moving on to another piece of software. But the whole conversation among the blog hermits about how much they reviled advertising and would in fact, be happy to pay for upgrades rather have to look at advertising made me realize, advertising got spoiled somewhere in the 80s.

Seriously, advertising, you’re, like, everywhere. I myself even engaged in a bit of billboard liberation when a Comedy Central (my favorite channel, btw) ad started talking to me at the urinal. Something snapped and I dug the electronic voice box out of the ad and through it in the toilet. Enough! Advertising jumps around in banner ads more than a five-year-old after a 20oz coke. And I really think that’s largely due to the fact that ads are just a fading fad. When the whole world’s information is at folks fingertips and you’re trying to get a message to them, what’s the use in irritating them?

It strikes me that advertising got spoiled during the good ol’ days of linear media where every fifteen minutes on the (free) radio or the free (television) it got to yack at us. But when media goes nonlinear like the web, you just can’t afford to be that obnoxious. Advertising needs to get its class back, like The Deck or like BMW films. Class, advertising! Class! You can talk to people without shouting, you can persuade people without lying. But in the long run, business is still going to have to get back to basics and start trafficking in real information; not shinola.

Amazing. The Republican’ts lose, big-time, and the best they can do?—rip-off Barack Obama’s web site and call it “our newest grassroots Web site.” I’m sorry, what was the one before this one? From the gradients, to the reflective surfaces, to the placement of social networking tools, to the tone, this things is a serious rip-off of all things Obama.com. I shouldn’t even link to this sham of originality.

Two significant trends in the computing industry are meeting head-on these days. First off, Computing is going mobile. Second, most of those mobile platforms are trying to integrate tactile media into their designs—look no further than the iPhone and its imitators. So why is there such a disparity in their attempts to advertise their products? Surely the most important thing about a product that embraces tactile media and mobile computing is the screen and interaction itself? And yet, in what would seem to be a kind of “cool” response to the iPhone, advertisers for the Blackberry Storm have decided that the ideal thing to do is to hide the interface.

I’ll update as soon as I can find a video on the web to link to, but on the snailvision networks there are all these advertisements running for the new Blackberry with a lot of sidewalk bystanders examining the machine and saying “Wow!” and “I’m thinking I shouldn’t have bought my iPhone,” without once showing the “real” audience the interface to the machine. When advertising claims that, “We refuse to show the interface on the grounds that it is too cool,” they have just completely ignored the aforementioned trends. New media these days is tactile and distributed. Apple is “advertising” that more than any other company.¹ Exactly what is RIM afraid of? Also-ran shouldn’t be nearly so bad as duck-n-cover as an advertising strategy. But when advertising, these days, is the only thing differentiating realistically commoditized products, it’s pretty important to make sure that you are “cool” as opposed to better; better that you should influence your consumers than convince them. Inductive logic is a breeze when compared to deduction.