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July 05 2011
Augmented Reality: Koreans Grocery Shop While Waiting For the Subway
For those of us for whom multitasking is a high art, a South Korean retail experiment combining grocery shopping with commuting looks like a godsend.
In a bid to boost online sales, grocery retailer Tesco covered the walls of a Korean subway station with photos of its merchandise arranged on store shelves. Each item was endowed with a QR code, those black-and-white squares recognized by smartphones, and commuters on their way in to work could snap pictures of the codes with phones to fill a virtual shopping cart. They paid for their items via an app, and the food was delivered to their homes after they got home from work.
No after-work grocery shopping crush, no squeaky-wheeled carts, no post-apocalyptic check-out lines. Just a little less time devoted to playing Angry Birds on the platform.
In terms of technology, nothing here is new: QR codes have been around since the 90s and began to appear on ads soon after the advent of smartphones, and grocery shopping online with services like Peapod is old (fifteen-year-old) news. But this appears to be the first time the two have been combined.
It’s certainly a more constructive use for QR codes ...
June 30 2011
Sexy Ad Campaign Targeting Monkeys Makes A Splash
“Advertising for monkeys” is just too good a phrase to pass up.
Even since ads created for a study investigating whether monkeys respond to billboards debuted at the Cannes Lions ad conference, the headlines have been flowing freely. We learn Yale primatologist Laurie Santos and two ad executives came up with the idea at last year’s TED, after Santos gave a talk on her experiments showing that monkeys that learn to use money are as irrational about it as we are.
Ad firm Proton has now developed two billboards to hang outside capuchin monkeys’ enclosures, and the researchers plan to see whether they will prefer one kind of food, or “brand,” over another when it is shown in close proximity to some titillating photos, including a “graphic shot” of a female monkey exposing her genitals and a shot of the troop’s alpha male with the food.
Once the monkeys have been exposed to the ads for brand A, scientists will see whether they show a preference for it over brand B, which won’t be supported with a campaign. In essence, they’ll investigate whether sex sells for monkeys. Brand A will be ...
October 26 2010
What Neuroscience Has to Say About Gap’s Logo Disaster
The abysmal flop of the Gap logo redesign has prompted a flurry of critique from marketing experts, branding consultants, as well as the inner critic in each of us that wants to explain what, exactly, went so wrong.
Now another group is chiming in: neuroscientists. NeuroFocus, one of the leading neuromarketing firms in the country, just released an analysis of why our deep subconscious rejected the Gap logo with such finality. Here are some of their findings:
1. When words overlap with images, as in the unsuccessful Gap logo, our brain tends to bypass the word and focus on the image. So we ignore the “p” when it’s placed over the blue box (for the Gap name, that’s a big fail).
2. We’re hardwired to avoid sharp edges because in nature they represent a threat. The sharp edge of the box cutting into the curved “p” is unappealing for that reason.
3. Being a little funky appeals to the brain. The original Gap typeface was unusual enough to stand out from the crowd. The new one, on the other hand, is boring old Helvetica (which really is taking over the world).
4. The brain loves high contrast. In the original logo, white letters “pop” against a dark blue background. In the new logo, the blue box weakens the black/white contrast.
Cool, huh? I guess… although neuromarketing is a fledgling science–some would even hesitate to call it a science–and graphic designers could have told you the same thing all along (without all that fancy brain equipment).
Point number 1 says image and color are supreme. Number 2 says shape and proximity are key. Number 3 says be unique and number 4 says contrast, contrast, contrast. The Nike, Lacoste, and FedEx logos are all great examples of these rules in action. The importance of color, shape, proportion, simplicity, contrast, and uniqueness are some of the foundational principles of graphic design, and clearly the new Gap logo violated many of them.
For the designers who want it, they now have some neuroscience to back them up. But I’m not sure they ever really needed it.
By Lena Groeger. This article is provided by Scienceline, a project of New York University’s Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program.
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Image: Wikimedia Commons
October 05 2010
Climate Change Activists’ Head-Exploding Ad May Have Gone a Bit Far
Warning: Some viewers might find the video below disturbing and graphic.
In a move that some are calling a misguided publicity stunt, the environmental activist group 10:10 Climate Change Campaign produced and released a gory and disturbing short film, similar to Plane Stupid’s “Polar Bear” video (warning: also gory), to promote the climate change action day scheduled for October 10, 2010 (or 10/10/10).
In the video above, people who don’t pledge themselves to 10:10’s cause (including school children and Gillian Anderson) are exploded into red, chunky goo with the press of a button. It was released last week and has resulted in a media backlash, including Sony’s retraction of support of the cause. It even inspired a cartoon.
Not only does the video offend and disgust, but the New York Times’s Dot Earth Blog summarized another main problem with the video–the dark shadow the negative publicity has spread over the entirety of the climate change debate:
If the goal had been to convince people that environmental campaigners have lost their minds and to provide red meat (literally) to shock radio hosts and pundits fighting curbs on greenhouse gases, it worked like a charm. Of course the goal might have been buzz more than efficacy. Too often these days, that’s the online norm. They succeeded on that front. I, among many others, am forced to write about it. Congratulations.
The Guardian (a supporter of 10:10’s) says the ad campaign was a joke that the public just didn’t get. In the original blog post about the video, they talked to 10:10 founder Franny Armstrong:
But why take such a risk of upsetting or alienating people, I ask her: “Because we have got about four years to stabilize global emissions and we are not anywhere near doing that. All our lives are at threat and if that’s not worth jumping up and down about, I don’t know what is.”
“We ‘killed’ five people to make No Pressure – a mere blip compared to the 300,000 real people who now die each year from climate change,” she adds.
10:10 Climate Change Campaign is a project to inspire people to cut their carbon emissions by 10 percent in a year, by taking on home improvement projects or changing their lifestyle. The group issued an official apology on Monday (10/4), along with this statement to the Guardian on Saturday (10/2) :
“With climate change becoming increasingly threatening, and decreasingly talked about in the media, we wanted to find a way to bring this critical issue back into the headlines while making people laugh,” said Lizzie Gillet, 10:10 global campaign director. “We were therefore delighted when Richard Curtis agreed to write a short film for the 10:10 campaign. Many people found the resulting film extremely funny, but unfortunately some didn’t and 10:10 would like to apologize to everybody who was offended by the film.”
For more reactions to the film, visit the New York Times’s Dot Earth blog.
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80beats: NOAA’s Conclusive Report: 2000s Were Hottest Decade on Record
80beats: Senators Cut Climate Change Rules and Renewables From Energy Bill
June 24 2010
Can a Brain Scan Predict Your Behavior Better Than You Can?
It would be an advertiser’s dream: knowing the exact location in your brain that indicates whether an ad has worked, and whether you intend to buy that cat food or wear that suntan lotion. Now, some researchers claim they’ve found a region which might predict whether viewers will act on what a commercial tells them.
For a study published yesterday in The Journal of Neuroscience, researchers asked 20 participants to listen to a series of “persuasive messages.” While the test subjects listened, researchers used an fMRI to record the activity in various regions in their brains. The study was small–but researchers say that, with these 20 participants, they could determine many of these listeners’ intentions by looking at a region associated with self-consciousness, called the medial prefrontal cortex.
The subjects listened to messages covering a range of subjects, but the team, lead by Matthew Lieberman at UCLA, was really interested in a public service message about the importance of using sunscreen. Before the brain scans, researchers surveyed the participants about a variety of their behaviors, including their expected sunscreen use for the next week.
After the brain scans were complete, researchers asked about their intentions again and gave participants “goodie bags” that included sunscreen towelettes. But a surprise follow-up phone call a week later revealed that only about half of the participants had lotioned up as often as they said they would.
The researchers then went back to the scans to hunt for hints that might have predicted this “complex real world behavior,” and that’s when they teased out possible predictions in the medial prefrontal cortex. By examining the activity in that area when the listeners heard the sunscreen messages, the researchers say they could predict the real sunblock use of three-quarters of the subjects. Thus, they claim, the brain scans were better predictors of behavior than the subjects’ own projections.
Emily Falk, a coauthor of the paper, told Reuters:
“We are trying to figure out whether there is hidden wisdom that the brain contains.”
Even if their lackluster sunblock use might leave these sunny Californians at risk for skin cancer, they don’t have to worry about brainwashing quite yet. Given the variability of people, the researchers will need probably need to test their tech on more than 20 people before they can use this information to craft the perfect public service announcement, or advertisement.
Related content:
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80beats: Mind-Reading Infrared Device Knows If You Want a Milkshake
Image: flickr / candescent
June 22 2010
AD4HERE: Digital License Plate Ads May Come to California
What’s a quick way to make some cash? Sell advertising space on anything you’ve got. That’s what a proposed bill suggests to put a dent in California’s $19 billion deficit. If the bill gets passed, the state will roll out digital car license plate ads for traveling promotion.
While the car is in motion, the plates will display the driver’s standard license plate number, but four seconds after stopping the magic happens. The plates will then flash ads alongside the number until the car starts to move again.
This bill was the bright idea of Curren Price, a democratic state senator from Los Angeles, who told the AP:
“We’re just trying to find creative ways of generating additional revenues,” he said. “It’s an exciting marriage of technology with need, and an opportunity to keep California in the forefront.”
By forefront, Price implies that other states are also considering digital license plate technology–which he says wouldn’t only drum up advertising revenue, but would also cut costs associated with the traditional ways states distribute and activate license plates.
A San Francisco-based company called Smart Plate is working on this technology, but chief executive M. Conrad Jordan says the product isn’t ready for the assembly line yet. According to the AP, Jordan also sees the plates as a way to show off college or company affiliations–the next step in custom plates.
Given that researchers have recently found ways to hack a car itself, hacking a digital license plate seems relatively easy. One wonders if the DMV, expected to weigh in on the bill in 2013, will consider not just the possible distractions to drivers, but also what it might be like to drive off into the California sunset with IAMDUM on your bumper.
Related content:
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80beats: Forget Car-Jacking: Car-Hacking Is the Crime of the Future
Image: flickr / gruntzooki
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