I got this thing in the mail from a company called Veer. The cover slip said: “A giant hand. Angsty Cats. Rioting Models.”

How could I not open it?

It turned out to be a huge advertisement poster. It was so big that once I’d unfolded it, I had to lay it on a chair.

It looked like such a pain in the ass to fold it up again that I left it lying there and went and made coffee.

I was standing in the living room again a few minutes later deciding what to do with my Saturday morning, and I started absentmindedly reading some of the copy on the poster.

It was like I’d created a Veer billboard in my living room.

There was a picture of a sweatshirt I thought was kind of cool. Turns out it’s for sale at Veer’s website. (Veer’s primary business is selling stock photography, fonts, and other graphic design resources.) Then, a description of an animated short that sounded interesting, free to view on the site.

Next thing I know, I’m on my way to Veer’s website, looking for the sweatshirt and the film. Wow. They really got me, didn’t they!

In consideration of the web’s enormous power and ubiquitous presence as a commercial tool, I think this is a testimony to the continuing importance of things you can touch, that interpose themselves in our three-dimensional spaces.

But the story’s not over…

Veer’s website is down.

At this point, I’ve been so adroitly manipulated from being a complete bystander to actively seeking out this company that I’m sure this shutdown itself is also part of the strategy: a way to get me to come back on Monday and talk to someone at Veer, hooked in just a little deeper by thinking I’ve serendipitously ended up with this 10% discount opportunity.

Now I’m caught up in this interesting meta-story–curious about Veer’s tactical moves, wondering if they are being as deeply strategic as I’m imagining?

This whole interaction is an object lesson in the complexity of moving a potential customer back and forth between realspace and webspace, and how many interesting ways there are to go about pursuing this objective.

We’ll see if I use the 10% discount to buy a sweatshirt.

Like Adam Richardson, I’m fed up with “Indentured Advertude.” Shortly after his post appeared, I returned to my Orlando hotel room and found that housekeeping had left my TV remote like this:

In order to get to the controls, I have to remove it from the sleeve. Like other forcing functions I’ve written about it creates some mindfulness that drives a desired behavior; in this case it’s not in my interest at all. You must engage with this ad before you can perform another task. The service being advertised has no connection to watching TV or using the remote; it’s just there to get in your way.

Orlando airport, June 2008

A touch screen looks like any other monitor; designers have not created anything in the physical form that denotes interactivity. It falls to the content (what is on the screen) and the context (where is the screen placed) to invite people to touch. In this case, they’ve chosen to add an external static sign to indicate what you should do.

This is in an airport, so informational rather than advertising content might be a more natural draw for interacting (seriously, an interactive menu experience?) and having this thing sitting near an escalator doesn’t make a lot of sense; it’s not a place to linger.

Here we have another example of post-design, fixing a problem in the original design by adding on another piece. Seeing that added instructional text made me wonder how we typically know that a screen is one that we can touch and interact with. It’s an interesting opportunity for the hardware manufacturers to create some visual language that can help with that invitation.

Years ago on the Simpsons, the family home is destroyed by fire. An insurance agent appears on the scene and the following exchange ensues…

Agent: Any valuables in the house?
Homer: Well, the Picasso, my collection of classic cars…
Agent: Sorry, this policy only covers actual losses, not made-up stuff.
Homer: [miffed] Well that’s just great!

I had a similar reaction when I saw the recent newspaper advertisements for
SOYJOY Nutrition Bars

The details:

The Soyjoy site is thick with links to scientific articles that explain the role of soy in disease prevention and the like, but the site (as does the ad) leads with these much softer and (I believe) unreal benefits. But how appealing it is to imagine that eating some product would increase your optimism? Indeed, in preparing this post I had to think for a minute (and look on their site to check myself) about whether or not it is or could be true.

We don’t expect that Red Bull will really give us wings, other than metaphorically. Here Soyjoy is making literal promises, though, as they describe how we, the eater, will feel. Even if we decide intellectually that it’s just advertising, what is the power of association they’ve created, without having to deliver? Where does our culture (and our legal system) draw the line about what claims must be provably true and what claims are so speculative that there is no expectation of belief?

AirTran poster, Savannah airport, March 2008

Minipops (an ongoing project, but a big Internet meme in 2005/2006)

In Japan: URL’s Are Totally Out we see an emerging form of advertising a web presence in Japan: showing a search bar rather than the actual URL. I looked through my recent photos and pulled some examples that show this, but also several examples that use the more traditional (if that’s the right word?!) presentation of URLs.

Search bar:

Traditional URL:

And finally, an ad for a search company (Excite? Who knew they were still around) that uses a URL, and also the increasingly popular QR code (see Rob Walker’s recent Consumed column).

(As a side note, I couldn’t find any pictures in my collection but I also remember seeing many examples of a graphical presentation of a URL that (similar to the search version above) used the visual elements of a browser’s address bar with the URL itself being typed in, complete with cursor hovering over the “go” button)

My second interactions column, Everbody’s Talkin’ At Me, has just been published. I offer some thoughts on the crucial but undervalued activity of listening within the context of storytelling.

Get a PDF of the article here. As the interactions website only has a teaser, we’d like to offer a copy of the article. Send an email to steve AT portigal DOT com and (if you haven’t given us this info before) tell us your name, organization, and title. We’ll send you a PDF.
Other articles

• Persona Non Grata
• The Journey Is The Reward
• Hold Your Horses
• Living In The Overlap
• Some Different Approaches to Making Stuff
• Poets, Priests, and Politicians
• Interacting With Advertising
• Ships in the Night (Part I): Design Without Research?
• Ships in the Night (Part II): Research Without Design?
• We Are Living in a Sci-Fi World
• On Authenticity
• The Hard Work Lies Ahead (If You Want It)
• What to Expect When You’re Not Expecting It
• Elevator Pitch
• Kilroy Was Here
• Never Eat Anything Raw
• Content, the Once and Future King

I already described the ridiculous persona-encrusted collateral from Yahoo’s Search Marketing. This week I received a package from Microsoft (with an unnecessary piece of styrofoam in the box to protect their precious wire-bound book).

With tips from me – Search Master Steve

Search Master Steve? Good Lord!

I’m not sure whether Microsoft’s only-works-in-IE search marketing interface is worse than Yahoo’s. I guess it’s like asking if you’d rather have two fingers ripped off by an angry gorilla or have three fingers removed surgically. These products are not fun to use and the crap I’m getting in the mail from the Microhooligans is insulting.

I’ve uploaded nearly 1300 of my Japan pictures to Flickr. For reasons I’m sure you’ll understand, I haven’t added titles or tags or descriptions proactively, but please add comments or questions on flickr and I’ll gladly offer a story or explanation.

Meanwhile, I’m including some of my faves here, as well as part 1 and part 2.

Rhino art at the Centre Pompidou. Better pictures here and here

Cattle advertisement in the Bankside area of London.

Take the form of some large animal and paint it Ferrari red. Then cover it with layers of gloss. Is the result art or advertising? The context in which we experience it seems to make all the difference. A museum or outside a restaurant?

Note: a more detailed, and impassioned exploration is in I Know It When I See It. But they start with the big red rhino, too.

The 5th guy is a public health awareness campaign from the Florida Department of Health. It

illustrates a simple point – most people respect certain hygienic norms. They stay home when they are sick. They cover their cough with their arm or a tissue. And they wash their hands, especially after using the restroom. There is observational data on that: The American Society for Microbiology sent researchers into public rest rooms to watch what people do. They found that four out of five people wash their hands after using the restroom. Thus was born the campaign’s central character: the “Fifth Guy.” In the ads, this fifth guy – played by a wonderful comic actor named Ben Spring – keeps making the wrong choices and suffering the social consequences as a result. The take-away message is: Unless you are staying home when sick, covering your cough with an arm or a tissue, and washing your hands often, you’re a fifth guy, an outlier. That’s the motivation. No one wants to be a fifth guy – to be that one person everyone whispers about.

It’s interesting to think about the line between playing on social norms and shame-based advertising. Advertising is often about encouraging you to take some action, telling you that you should take action, telling you that everyone else is doing it are basic forms of persuasion.

Florida is trying to encourage what they claim is a dominant behavior, as opposed to trying to create a new behavior, so pointing to the majority makes sense.

Many years ago I worked on a project for Unilever. They were considering the challenge of “on-the-go cleansing” — people away from the place (the bathroom at home) where they normally use Unilever products. I think the timing was just before “germophobia” went mainstream. The people we observed and interviewed were experiencing a serious tension between the need to protect themselves from germs and the need to behave normally.

You were expected to shake hands with someone in a social setting, but you were also made aware of the fact that that person’s hands were covered in germs. You were expected to share food with colleagues and friends, but you may not know if someone else put their hands in the candy bowl without washing them. And you weren’t allowed to pay too much attention to your own cleanliness, lest you be seen as having a mental illness (i.e., OCD).

We identified several strategies for Unilever to use. One of them, like the 5th guy campaign, involved making things normal by making them common. The box of office tissue that everyone takes from, or the skin lotion pump that is used by colleagues at work are both examples. Everyone uses them, therefore it’s normal, therefore it’s okay.

Another strategy involved creating hidden usage opportunities, where new cleaning behaviors could take surreptitiously, in a pocket, or in the pages of a book.

And a strategy that lived between those two was to mask new behaviors as existing normal activities. For example, makers of insulin pens have begun to make their devices to look more like pens than syringes.

I hope there’s good data with this Florida initiative, but I suspect some of the biggest change has already taken place, within the organization itself. I remember that our clients at Unilever worked hard to grasp the depth of the struggles we shared with them; indeed, they kept referring to the “people with OCD” as we reiterated that most people had these very concerns over germs but did not want to be assumed to have OCD. Our clients were participants in the culture they were seeking to understand and getting to that new perspective took a lot of work on both sides. The (what I presume to be) new thinking exhibited by the Floridians is encouraging.

The KFC store in Taiwan also featured this mascot for a spicy chicken sandwich, with fiery hair and just a bit of drool. Are Western characters allowed to salivate in advertising? I wish they were.

I recently discovered the Prelinger Archives of American Ephemera-
an amazing collection of advertising, educational, industrial, and
amateur films.

For anyone into these types of artifacts, this is a veritable buffet.

Design fans, I heartily recommend checking out American Look:
a lovely piece of Chevrolet-sponsored cultural self-definition from 1958:

American Look Part One

American Look Part Two

American Look Part Three

My dad received the following offer in the mail: a chance to win a free cremation. If he enters, he’ll have a chance to win each month!

They don’t specify, but I guess that must be each month until you die?

What’s especially fascinating is their connection between cremation and mobility:

“With everyone moving around these days,
placing a loved one in a ‘local’ cemetery
may not be as functional as it used to be.”

Portigal Consulting has been doing some projects recently on mobile devices, but I never thought to include cremation urns in that category.

The best part of the letter is the disclaimer at the end of the second page:

“Please accept our apologies if this letter
has reached you at a time of serious illness
or death in your family.”

How compassionate.

Springwise tells us about ads that “clean” the streets.

[Using] high-pressure cleaning machines to wash brands, logos and adverts onto dirty pavements…the SAS team blasts the stencil with water and steam on dirty walls, roads, pavements or even road signs…Nothing but water and steam are used, and it’s all perfectly environmentally friendly and legal, SAS stresses. …”[W]e wanted to apply a technique that was not just eye-catching and effective but also friendly to the environment. What could be more natural than water?”

But wasting water is hardly environmentally friendly! And steam requires fuel to produce. This sort of claim is too easy for anyone to make and is too often unscrutinized, like the folks at Springwise who reiterated the company’s hollow verbiage without challenge.