If you ventured into Sydney city yesterday you would have noticed almost every second adshell has an unbranded poster of a goat with a frog on its head. I debated with my friends if it was for Telstra (colors look right) or Optus (use of animals) or some other random brand or just part of Sydney Festival (maybe Sydney is sponsoring art in ad shells instead of just ads). We also debated the stupidity of buying so much media with no brand.
Imagine my surprise when I visited news.com.au today to see the the ad again with the brand. it was Trading Post (owned by Telstra)
Here's one ad where you can create a sentence in goat talk! Why? Who knows but you can get it sent to your mobile and show of to your friends how cool you are.
I'm guessing TV media starts today (it did see Mumbrella for more info) with the reason I would want to "talk like a goat". The website Goatizer might be ready soon too. As the T&Cs link goes there but nothing else is visible.
This is a total waste of outdoor media dollars. I initially thought it was all about building word of mouth. ie People start asking "WTF is with the goat and frog ads" and the brand is revealed a week later. They would have made it interesting to buy the search term "goat with a frog on its head" and lead them to a similar mysterious website to capture those people interested enough to search for it. But sadly the mystery is now spoilt the next day by online.
Or is this a new strategy devised by the geniuses at Trading Post's agency? Run branded TV and online and offline unbranded. So you subtly remember the brand.
Since working with gaming brands the last few years and intensely the last year with Activision, I have stepped back into my old habit of being a super big game nerd. The good thing is that the difference between the mid 90's and now is that gaming is the biggest entertainment sector in the world and broken out of boys in their bedroom and arcades to become mainstream for everyone. Factor in that every console now has Twitter and Facebook integration you'll see that gaming is really moving forward with the times.
Nintendo was the first to really see the future, outside of the hardcore gamers, and look what it did for them. They are the envy of Sony and Microsoft. The only other company that garners so much jealousy is Activision Blizzard with their money making machine World of Warcraft.
The big news last year was when EA came out and said they were "Going social". Initially I thought that meant ramping up social network integration into their console games or utilising them to promote their games. Or partnring with companies to promote their console games like this Dante's Inferno FBRPG.
But it looks like EA were not messing about after announcing they are buying Playfish games for $300-$400 million. Playfish are the #2 Facebook games developer after Zynga. Although I read Zynga wanted $1Billion so that's probably why EA bought the #2 company and not Zynga who are #1.
If you don't know about Playfish or Zyanga then you should really check them out. Zyanga run the #1 facebook app Farmville. You might of heard of that one. If they rock your boat also check out Nexon the Korean company doing great things also. All these companies are backed by tens of millions of VC so we're talking big business here. At 2008 article here shows $1.7Billion dollars invested into online games.
EA already owns Pogo and in 2005 bought Jamdat to make their mobile department so EA have their fingers in a lot of pies.
I then assumed this would be the extent of the "social move". EA integrates some of their properties into Playfish style games and they progress slowly from there.
But last week EA launched the public beta of their World of Warcraft for golfers. Tiger Woods online. Terrible timing and I'm guessing it would have been announced earlier (it's been in beta since August last year) had it not been for all the Tiger press. Here's the official EA blog post about the game launch and the Tiger scandal.
Why get consumers to pay $60 USD for the game (and hope they upgrade next year) when you can get people to pay $10 a month (or more)? You'll also hit the golfers who probably can't tell the difference between a PS3 and a Z3, ie the business professional.
Tiger Woods Online uses Unity3D which was part of our 2010 predictions. The effect blows anything Flash can offer in the way of 3D.
The people at World Tour Golf must be shitting their pants right now. Not online is Tiger Woods Online a better game (full 3D, customizable everything) but it has all the cred and support that EA can provide. WTG might be more realistic but for the majority of people they want a fun game not a realistic game. All EA have to do is offer a tweak to the settings to then appeal to both types of players.
This asks the question if other publishers will move into the subscription model for some of their popular franchises. MMO's are the big hit but are time consuming to create and manage and there already seems to be over saturation. If I had to throw a prediction out there it would be Call of Duty Online / MMO. The franchise is on the biggest in the world and there have been rumours already about a MMO or subscription model.
Not stopping there EA has pushed aggressively into iPhone game development. I saw them talk at the GDC in San Fran earlier in 2009 and they announced pretty much every franchise they had for the iPhone. No other publisher has pushed into iPhone more than EA.
EA have also created a "Micro Studio" called 8lb Gorilla which debuted a zombie game Zombies and Me last year. Here 2D Boy (a successful indie micro studio) talk about the news.
Another EA Micro Studio called EA2D which ficusses on promotional flash games for their console titles. Like their first title Dragon Age Journeys. This is a studio made up of freelancers from around the world rather than a traditional studio.
Activision and Ubisoft are the other two big publishers that we should keep an eye on to see how they embrace social games over the next few years. Ubisoft have their Uplay system but this is just unlocking rewards in their existing games.
The last two years have been an interesting time for the gaming community and 2010 won't be any different. For those that aren't interested in games I suggest you at least keep an eye on the business side developments as there is a lot to be learnt from the success and failure in that industry.
Disclaimer: In the past 2 years I have worked, while at Soap Creative, for Activision and Ubisoft and was also a major Sega fan boy in the 90s.
Google have unveiled their new iPhone killer the Nexus One. I like the demo site and they also have a special Nexus One Youtube Channel too.
The big draw card for the iPhone is the app store. With so many great apps Google will have to fight hard to compete for the casual user who just wants a $800 toy/mobile games station rather than a useful phone.
Sure their is the Android Market but that's tiny compared to Apple's 100,000 apps and growing.
Some stand out features for me are the SD expandable memory (up to 32GB), 1Ghz CPU, 5MP camera and OLED screen. However the bad news is the OLED screen and faster CPU drains the battery faster making battery life lower than the iPhones poor battery life. For a good comparison check Pocket Gamer.
So the choice isn't so clear. I'd be temped to get a Nexus One just to be different.
No firm plans from Google on when the Nexus One will make it to Australia (source) and no confirmation if the phone will even work with an Australian SIM so I'd hold off before shopping on eBay and dropping $900.
So 2010 will be the real smart phone year as now people have a real alternative to the iPhone. And with a lower price it's sure to gobble up market share. BBC have some good coverage of the press release here.
Another Google Phone
The Nexus One shadowed the release of Google's Other phone the "Fuck You iPhone" which has an interesting set of features.
Holler and Stupidkrap have teamed up to create an Interactive Graffiti installation which is part of Creative Sydney. Check out the other events going on for Creative Sydney too as there is lots of good stuff.
It’s a collaboration with an urban artist collective around Ben Frost, Numskull, DMOTE and KidZoom. Interactive in the sense that visitors use a camera to go back in time and see the beginning of the painting.
Rather than try and explain it just watch the videos below.
New Tool for Building and Managing DoubleClick Rich Media Creatives
On April 30, DoubleClick Rich Media announced the launch of DoubleClick Studio, a free rich media production and web-based workflow tool. If you've produced DoubleClick Rich Media ads in the past, you're probably familiar with either DoubleClick Motif Ad Kit or DoubleClick TABS,which is used in Europe. DoubleClick Studio is the next iteration of rich media tools complete with improved components for Adobe Flash, AS2 and AS3 APIs, and a quicker, slicker web-based workflow.
If you're on a creative team tasked with building DoubleClick Rich Media creatives for the DART ad server, DoubleClick invites you to sign up for an account at studio.doubleclick.com. Here's some things they think you'll like about building and managing rich media ads with DoubleClick Studio:
Smaller, more versatile, Flash components make it easier for novice ad builders to create rich media ads
Powerful AS2 and AS3 APIs let advanced programmers and developers build ads with code and access innovative external data sources
A web-based interface makes the entire workflow easier with tools for keeping creatives organized, seeing where each creative is in the process, previewing and debugging creatives on live URLs, and submitting creatives to QA
Advanced preview features allow you to generate multiple creative previews for a campaign in a single URL, change the preview background to a live webpage, and test event reporting triggers from the preview page
To see some of these features in action, take a quick tour of DoubleClick Studio in this short video from Shamim Samadi, product manager for DoubleClick Rich Media.
