Let the product speak

I recently took a look at the websites for two 'super cars'. One is the Audi R8.The other the Koenigsegg CCX. I'm not sure that I saw what I expected, or experienced what I was supposed to.
But a quick word about the cars – they couldn't be more different.

The Koenigsegg is the baby of a Swedish man (Christian von Koenigsegg) who got bored with the import industry and decided that what he really wanted to do was build a sports car. So he did. The first version of which boastes some 650 + bhp and a staggering top speed of 230+ mph. Later version have taken the power output up to 980bhp and untested top speeds. Possibly urban legend, but this car holds the record for the fastest speeding ticket ever given, at 243mph. The car has some real lateral thinking about it, from the way the doors work to the way that the cylinder block of the engine is a rigid, reinforcing component of the chassis.

The Audi is different. Developed from the Le Mans super car then tuned down to something for the top end of the domestic market, it is a design that whilst holding true to the Audi brand style, looks at least as good as the Koenigsegg. The performance, whilst not being quite as extreme is to 200+ mph and given that if doesn't carry the £600K + price of the Koenigsegg this seems like a fair trade off. The Audi is the technological marvel you would expect, from the engine to the aluminium space frame chassis.

This is where something strikes me as funny about the marketing and the way the websites are done.

The Audi micro-site for this model is amazing. The level of interaction and just plain cool it provides is very high and it allows easy access to lots of information about the car.

The Koenigsegg website is not as advanced, showing you information in a common, tested and slightly old fashioned format.

The difference is that with the Koenigsegg website, I found I was looking at the car, and with the Audi site, I was too busy playing with the cool interactions. The upshot of this is that I was left feeling like the koenigsegg was a more honest website with less about the marketing message itself and more about the product in it's own right.

The message I took away from this? Something that echoes an odd request from a client a few years ago who asked us to design them a marketing powerpoint that looked like they had done it themselves. Don't make the website cooler than the product it's trying to sell... and too much glitz and gloss just makes the message look untrustworthy...it's all about balance.

Pale

Blogvertising

Last week I did an internal awareness session on the (mis)use of Social medial to deliver brand/product advocacy and advertising messages. The concept that companies may be crowd sourcing the writing of this kind of copy into blogs, forums and other social networks – including those that aren't your own - was met with some scepticism and a (healthy) amount of disdain. Then I happened to buy a copy of the February 2008 edition of Wired magazine and found an article by and about someone who does exactly this: is paid by advertisers to blog (positively) about products and services. You can find it on page 58 entitled ' Hawker Media: Advertisers paid me to blog about them. Is that so wrong?' See. Told ya!

Pale

The narrative of now

Whilst a colleague and I spent 3 hours on a tube journey to and from a client meeting that never was (that's a whole other story on why you should virtualise project meetings...), we got into a discussion about car based games, and specifically about licensed vehicles.

It's fairly standard practice that if you make a car based computer or console game, and want to use a real-world car you must pay a significant (tens of thousands of pounds) licensing cost to be able to reproduce the shape and detail of the car and the brand identity of it and it's maker. This practice is understandable from a brand control point of view – you don't want your car brand associated with a game that's going to give you negative publicity. It's common practice for the can manufacturers to insist that no damage is shown on their vehicles, regardless of how they are driven , so that they always appear in pristine showroom condition.

A side effect of this is that it effectively shuts the smaller developers out of a this sector of the market for one simple reason: games that don't have licensed real-world cars just don't sell anywhere near as well. There are a few notable examples of this, the Burnout series being one.
This led the conversation to the obvious next question: Why does it matter is the cars are copies of real world ones?

My opinion is that society and the media does a very successful job of fostering materialistic desire for unobtainable things in most people. For example, I would dearly love to own a Ford GT. I know this will never happen – they only made a hand-full of them and even if I did have the money, I know there is a long list of more rational and immediate things that the money would be spent on.

As I've mentioned, I play games. One of them being Test Drive Unlimited by Atari. It's a driving game with some really unique elements, but the relevant fact it that one of the cars that a player can save hard-won in-game cash for is the Ford GT. When I eventually had enough cash I bought the car and it was a great pleasure to own and drive.

The question again is: Why?

My theory is that this all comes back to something that is innate to all of us, since a large amount of our communication is based upon it: stories.

From the way I describe to you now, what happened on the tube train yesterday, to how I might explain the fall of the Roman Empire or how an alpha channel on the surface of a nerve cell contributes to that nerve firing, each is encapsulated in its own story, described from the 3rd person.

This brings me to immersion and player emotional investment in games and social environments like Second Life. I'm invested in my virtual Ford GT, on it's virtual island of Hawaii. I worked hard to earn the cash, it's a wonderful design and it out performs a lot of the other virtual cars in it's class. It satisfies the desire for the unobtainable, and is a significant milestone on the story of my experience in an environment that, lets face it, isn't real. But I do have to say when talking to someone who plays the same game, the discussion about what's in our virtual garages is exactly the same as if everything where real. We project ourselves into the virtual, willingly adopting the parts we play in the game, comparing our progress, our status in an imaginary world.
I find it very interesting how easily people settle into a text based social environment. Just looking round at the people I see working, tools like Skype have gone from being relatively rare a couple of years ago to be on the majority of desktops now. Then there's SMS.

When conversing in these types of environments, we begin to insert narrative elements where they are missing to complete the experience. LOL is a prefect example. I may have laughed out loud, or just thought it, but in the shared narrative of the conversation, from your point of view, I laughed. This evolved from early text chat users adding in descriptive elements to replace the missing visual and tonal cues about their emotional state whilst chatting. These then where reduced to acronyms for ease of typing.

This becomes more apparent in visually represented worlds like Second Life or MMORPG games like World of Warcraft. People having conversations in it find that the conversation becomes more and more embellished with narrative detail, echoed by the animated gestures of the avatars. This isn't just the stuff to provide the missing social cues, but additional narrative. This all leads towards better immersion, more emotional investment, a better conversation and the people in that conversation retaining more of it for longer.

These are the stories of now. Narratives communally written about what is being discussed right now. Adapting to changes of focus and projecting the emotional state of the co-authors.

I think that these stories exist and work because they are presented in textual form. The medium naturally encourages the reader to use their imagination as they read each line. But here comes VOIP – Voice over IP ... a relatively new technology being deployed to allow users to chat using microphone and speakers to hear the voices of the people they are conversing with.
This has two effects. Firstly, making it harder to break the bond with reality and become immersed in the world with which you art interacting (finding out that the eight foot tall Orc you have been adventuring with has the voice of a twelve year old American kid, doesn't help the suspension of disbelief). Secondly it adds back in all the social cues that have been missing in the typed conversations, making for a more genuine social experience.

There are other considerations in this that I won't explore here ... one is the ability of people using text based chat to hold a number of parallel conversations, often with a number of people in each conversation. The fact that the communication is typed text allows this to happen. I also read a something on a blog recently that was saying that people using a virtual environment like Second Life, and VOIP so that they could hear each other talking, found that they got a better sense of being somewhere together than using web cams with VOIP to have a video conference.

Text chat will I think continue for quite some time alongside technologies like VOIP – it offers too many features that are not available with spoken communication. Just as it suffers from the things that are missing, but I think we are very good at finding ways to fill the gaps and immerse ourselves in the virtual environments we use.

Pale