Articles from: Entertainment

The gentle art of seduction

Every day I talk to clients about how digital solutions can be particularly good for nudging and exciting their customers. It’s all a bit like dating but without the Casanova ending.

As was later the case with 20th century marketers, Casanova often repeated the same pattern in his pursuits. He would discover an attractive woman (customer) having trouble with a brutish or jealous lover (competitor brand). And then three acts would follow.

Act 1: The seducer ameliorates his lady’s difficulty. Act 2: She shows her gratitude, he seduces her, a short and exciting affair ensues. So far so good, but then comes… Act 3: The seducer gets bored and orchestrates a rapid exit. The end.

For Casanova, life was an open field of sexual opportunities without consequences. For the marketers, it was an open field of transactional opportunities without post-purchase responsibility.

Persuasion without information is as unsatisfactory as information without persuasion, but together they beget seduction.

The best thinkers in User-Centered Design have long claimed that information and persuasion are two opposite modes. Some content is labelled as persuasion or even manipulation, and is associated with advertising and marketing, while other content is understood to be information and therefore virtuous. But maybe persuasion and information are not mutually exclusive. Maybe we just need to re-write Act 3 so that persuasion + information = seductive strategies.

Here’s an example: a week before Valentine’s Day I went online to find something nice for the lady in my life. I tried my best to appear susceptive by freely giving away my personal details in the hope of attracting some targeted offers relevant to my needs. I entered competitions to romantic holiday destinations; I saved several virtual shopping baskets full of flowers and chocolate, and so on. I even returned to several websites, just to show how keen I was. But maybe I was too keen, as instead of tailored suggestions for romantic gifts all I got were the usual Viagra spams, dating and gambling adverts, and an offer to join a new gym.

Persuasion design is dead. Long live seduction design!

Seduction design is all about nudging and exciting the customer, rather than using an all-or-nothing strategy. The most elaborately designed experiences inspire people to adapt their behaviour and engage with new features and functionalities. In other words, the customers allow themselves to be seduced and buy into the proposition that the product or service is worth their time and money.

Designers, marketers, and creatives need to design for seduction as much as for aesthetic impact and usability. Methods of seduction can sell a genuine offer through the combination of motivational psychology and careful preparation. To convert this into a website, a mobile application, an email, or a banner, each element – graphic or verbal – must be given a seductive value that deepens into a suggestive relationship over time.

Had Casanova known that, I’m sure his romantici evenings would have ended happier both for him and his ladies.

Marcus Mustafa - Head of User Experience - twitter.com/dacrumb

Following on from the excellent Knife Crime (which pipped us in this month’s Creative Showcase) is Where’s Dexter - Prooving cheap interactive video is a reality and it might even be fun.

Provided as a teaser to the TV show, the audience is invited to find Dexter in a crowd of people. Success links you through to a new movie. Thankfully those smart enough to spot the elusive Dexter can share hints through the comments - although to the devious amongst us - is a great way to further frustrate others by seeding false information.

In need of some instant fun we decided to have a Kemp Folds inspired session. Take two pictures of Hard Man, Ross Kemp fold and enjoy.

Once we’d warmed up we took random photos of our colleagues and held a fold off. Each person took a random print from the table, folded it as required then with baited breadth revealed it next to the same image folded by another colleague. The biggest gasp, laugh, shock won.

Great fold. Fold on.

This friday fun was suggested by the Dan ‘Hold the Fold’ Holder - who now has his own personal tribute site - Folder of the Holder

Last week I was lucky enough to give a talk at the IAB about blending creativity and technology. [Presentation deck is available here 7.7MB PDF].

Now that’s something we know a thing or two about here at LBi. We’ve a talented team of technologists who work closely with our creative and experience architect teams. It’s not always been easy or smooth but it’s something we’re committed to getting right - as the new digital world - really needs joined up creative and tech to deliver the fantastic ideas we have.

Here are a few simple tips for better blending:

- Make both sides aware of what’s important
- Don’t throw tasks over the wall
- Let your technologists suggest ideas
- Give everyone the chance to be a hero
- Challenge your technologists with the impossible

Keep up to date with our Technical Architects team right here on LBiQ. Jim and Mark-A are already posting, with Nick, Jon, Riaz and Mark-D preparing their own brain splittingly clever bits for your delectation.

Clever technology & creative blending means we can do things like this, that and the other.

As this seasons Apprentice draws to a close here’s a quality piece of subversion from Cassette Boy to show us just how entertaining the much maligned Sir Alan is; playing the nations favourite pantomime villain. I do hope the BBC don’t get all officious about this and start talking about Copyright infringements, as it’s a brilliant advert for the series as well as being one of Cassette Boy’s finest. I could go on about how this perfectly represents what true new/digital media is all about, but I won’t. Just sit back and enjoy. Notable funnies include a B in GSCE French and the size of his appendage.

SMUT Warning from Cassette Boy. It might not be safe for all work environments so think before you play out loud.

According to this article, Warner Bros. have financially backed a realtime streaming video console called OnLive.  Which is quite an interesting development.  I for one wasn’t expecting anything like this until we all moved on to super-broadband.  It seems they can avoid b-b-b-buffing by leveraging clouds.  Insert your own joke.

Thru You is some guy’s (KUTIMAN) fantastically executed album based on you tube clip edits.  The only thing that could make this more awesome is if this ran on the fly, generating the clips based on algorithm.  Great work though.

I love it when people take direct inspiration from other people’s creativity and give it new life. It’s great to see people use sub-plots, objects or characters as the starting points in their own expressions. Borrowing from established cultural artefacts seems to make the idea all the more real and resonant. For example the idea behind the musical Wicked touches everyone who had seen The Wizard of Oz as a child and triggers an immediate inquisitive response, to what the story might reveal.

A recent example of this spring-boarding is a book by Jack Torrence, the main character of the Stephen King film, The Shining. It uses the story of Jack writing his book and his inability to write anything other than ‘All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy’. The book uses this idea and using an increasingly varied approach to the layout reproduces that statement over 80 pages. It’s unlikely to be a best seller, but it’s a lovely example of taking a small idea and expanding it out. More details from the Guardian.

With digital work gaining in maturity (and much influenced by previous non-digital pieces) I’m wondering how long it will be before someone creates a popular new experience or narrative directly inspired by famous digital piece. Clearly there are some IP issues to resolve, but when one borrows from an established source you’ve got to come clean on your inspiration.

PS. For those with a passing interest in ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’, you might have been aware of HAL 9000s birthday a few weeks ago – 12^th January to be precise. I wonder if this date could become a notable day in our global culture for neural computing and artificial intelligence.

LBiQ4 - Death of the big idea?

In our jaunt through LBiQ 4 and it’s exploration of ideas; big and small, traditional and new, it’s clear completely new ideas are increasingly hard to find – if they ever existed in the first place. “There’s nothing new under the sun”, after all, as some crusty old fool once said. (I think we can be fairly sure he didn’t work in advertising.) As the web grows up, and is no longer the brave new world of unchartered possibilities it used to be 10 years back, we need to look back and recognise the patterns that were formed during that period of innovation, to identify the successes, and the failures, and to work with and from these in order to keep advancing.

In the thrust for The New it is important not to lose sight of a few simple facts. Check this year’s hot work: quizzes, games, viral films, soap operas, blogs and scrolling banners. Nothing new there, per se – these formats are now established, in some cases almost traditional - but all are succeeding today in 2008 by combining creative thinking with brand messages in novel and interesting ways that match and resonate with the passage of time and the changes that are happening in the world at large. 

Just as David Gunn says there are only 12 types of advertisement, a creative writing teacher might inform us of only 14 ways to start a novel, or seven types of plot; and a musician teaches us that there are only a set number of chords; we can surmise there are a limited number of interaction models in digital, a set number of viral types, and a comparable set of methods for online advertising.

So let’s stop sticking our noses up at ‘just another’ video site, or in-search-of viral film, or interactive scrolling banner, and look a bit deeper. There are ideas a plenty in the digital world - ideas that creatively stretch the main brand promise, trigger the all-important emotional hook, and ensure they are bloody well executed. Inventing new forms of communication is hard, and it’s not necessarily the job of a commercial creative. Don’t be afraid to use what you know already. It’s easier, simpler, and usually much more effective, to focus on mixing and matching known quantities in order to find creative digital ideas that work. 

Want some inspiration on finding big brand ideas? Take a read of Brand Marketing Manifesto, in which a feisty future-looking John Grant sets out a thesis for ideas and creates a framework based on eight cultural streams: innate emotional hooks that exist deep within our psyche and can be found in centuries of literature, film and music.

Me? I’m off to write a book on the 10 different types of viral. Stay tuned.

This Is Where We Live from 4th Estate on Vimeo.

There’s a real groundswell of love for loaders at the moment - what with the Creative Circle Honours 2009 having a special one-year-only award category, and a build-up of online chatter about this more and more rarely seen craft. Now Big Spaceship have taken us into the next dimension with their brilliant loader museum - Prettyloaded. At the moment it seems to be just hosting their extensive agency collection, but looks like plans are to expand. If you have a great loader, email the curators here.

If you’re ever wondering how to name your heavy metal band, here’s a wonderfully simple information design that should help you in the quest.

If there was one overarching theme from the Consumer Electronics Show last week, it was that absolutely every device in our lives is becoming a computer connected to the Internet. Well about bloody time.

I remember back in the 90’s being promised I could order my milk directly from the fridge, control the temperature of my house from work and set my favourite TV show to record whilst riding on the bus to work. All this by 2001.  Ok, so if I buy Rupert Murdoch’s satellite box i can probably do the latter, and I’m sure some smart Alec will tell me that so-and-so fridge, or with thingy house you can do the other stuff.

I’m not looking for elite products i’d have to pay through the nose for though, or some kind of footballer’s fancy mock-tudor gadget home. I’m talking about a bog standard. Give me a wi-fi enabled IP fruitbowl and give it to me now.  I’ve had broadband for years - it’s about time it could talk to more than my laptop and ipod touch.

So, to London’s trendy Hoxton for the party to celebrate the relaunch of Revolution Magazine, complete with free booze courtesy of the guys at Eyeconomy.

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