Customizing Commercials, the Old Spice way

I had a bit too much caffeine yesterday and was laying in bed awake at 1am. Given the ungainly hour and my reluctance to get up, my mind began to wander. And it eventually landed on the Old Spice ads that are being posted to YouTube in response to Twitter comments from random people.

Examples:

I got to thinking about why it is that these commercials actually work. You see, they don’t follow the typical trends of commercials. They don’t convince you that this product is better than its competitors. They don’t really push that if you use the product, you’ll be like the cool person on the screen that uses it too. (note: the original old spice commercials did that one, blatantly – but the twitter based ones really don’t.) In fact, they don’t even mention the product at all, verbally or visually.

What they do do, though, is to form a relationship between the customer and the company. And that brings in socioeconomic principles. When the star of the commercial is taking time out of his life to talk to the audience of the commercial, we feel a certain indebtedness to him. In terms of relationship currency, we owe him a debt to be repaid.

Flash forward 10 days. We’re standing in the pharmacy section of the store looking at deodorant. We think, hey remember that social debt I owe the Old Spice guy? If I buy his product, I can pay back that debt. Kind of like when you buy girl scout cookies from  your niece to make up for missing her birthday.

The kicker is that odds are we aren’t the one for whom the Old Spice guy made the commercial. But we do identify with the random twitter user that the commercial is made for. We could very well be that tweeter. And so, we share that tweeter’s social debt.

I wonder if Old Spice has a psychologist or two on its marketing staff?

Teaching the Rhetoric of Commercials

I’ve been putting together the readings for a course I’m teaching this fall: Text & Discourse. It’s an intro to rhetoric styled course where you’re exposing sophomores to the idea that language has a persuasive aspect. There’s a special emphasis on the presentation of a communication, not just the content of a communication.

And I decided to go with a theme of commercials for the course. I’ve been digging around, and there is just a ton of material out there on commercial rhetoric. I did a google scholar search, and there’s dozens of promising articles.

Tengrrl was kind enough to tweet a link to AdRant, a website that seems to focus on this very issue. (I love this mash-up making slogans into beatnik poetry)

I’m thinking I’ll be doing a combination of commercial styles. The silly ones for kids’ toys, political ads, food, medicine/health care, movies, YouTube-specific, apologetic (like GM’s recent ad), and such.

So, as the semester progresses, I’ll try to post some of the more interesting finds here. From me and from my students.

And if any of you know of good ads, please, please, please, please send them my way. I’d love to have them for the class.

Millennials and Attention Spans

An interesting perspective hit me the other day when I was thinking about the millennial generation and their perceived short attention span.

At least in my experience, baby boomers tend to think of the millennial generation as being very impatient individuals who aren’t willing to wait for gratification.

But I don’t really think that’s true. I agree – they’re less comfortable sitting quietly in the afternoon listening to the birds chirp. Or fishing at a lake with nearly no fish in it (the scene I saw that inspired this). I don’t take that as a sign of them being impatient though, unwilling to wait for gratification – be it the rare bird, the 8 pound bass, or the college degree.

What I do take it as a sign as is that this generation is less accepting of boredom, mental inactivity. In my experiences as a teacher, students have no problem with long assignments where they must put in weeks or months worth of work. In fact, they actually seem to enjoy the more complex assignments more. And they do just as well (if not better) than my generation did in maintaining attention during long class sessions and lectures.

But their constant connectedness to the world through social media and mobile computing has developed in them a disdain for simply sitting there. In the five minutes before class will start, only a handful of students will actually sit quietly. The rest immediately log onto Facebook, start the iPod, or catch up on their texting.

I don’t necessarily take this as a bad thing. An unwillingness to accept boredom (i.e., not having your brain actively processing information) may turn out to be a huge advantage when they become contributing members of society. Constant mental activity can lead to increased productivity and a near-constant examination of one’s life. And both of those seem critical to me as components of the successful citizen.

This creates a challenge for me as a teacher, though. Students who need constant stimulation require more effort on my part – in terms of both content and activity.

I could, however, be completely washed up on this one. For those of you with a psychology background – does this play out in that field’s theories? For those of you who have taught more of the baby boomers than I have, have you seen the same phenomenon?

Virtual Reality Revisited: Social Media (part 3)

This is part 3 in a series of posts that look to revisit the concept of virtual reality in a web 2.0 / social media / cloud computing Internet. Part 1 is here. And part 2 is here. In this particular post, I want to talk about the ways that social media play into the concept of virtual reality.

When I first started playing around with the idea for these posts, I had recently demoed Facebook and Twitter for my parents (my mom had just created an account). When I talked about how Facebook allowed you to make friends that you never actually met in real life, I described them as “virtual world” friends. My father took to the idea, but argued that they were an extension of the physical friends and didn’t entirely exist in the virtual world (since they were generally made through connections with physical friends). And that got me thinking about how the physical world had melded so well with the virtual.

Facebook

And Facebook may be the best example of that. I’m thinking of my undergrad students – and the fact that they immediately log onto Facebook when they walk into the computer classroom before class. But it’s what they do on Facebook that gets me thinking about virtual reality.

They develop an identity inside Facebook that may or may not correspond with their identity in the physical world. Very often their Facebook identities are much more outgoing, brazen, and frank than their in-class ones (though I can’t speak to their out-of-class identities).

And they maintain friendships with people they would never see again outside of Facebook. The majority of them keep in touch with their friends from high school that they won’t see for another 22-24 years (at the high school reunion).

And they develop new friendships with people they’ve never physically met. These tend to be friends of friends, or people in their networks (such as people in the Texas Tech network). Now, they may one day meet these Facebook friends, but that’s definitely questionable.

All three of these features strike me as remarkably “virtual” when it comes to discussing reality. Having an identity that is distinct from the physical one is a hallmark trait of virtual realities. And developing relationships and communities that don’t exist in the physical world is another. But I’m really hard pressed to make any kind of argument that the virtual world of Facebook is disconnected from the physical world. Rather, my students exist in something of a blend between the two. One feeds the other. The virtual world of Facebook is made stronger because of the physical relationships. And the physical world is made stronger because of the virtual relationships. The line between virtual and physical is really blurred.

I’m thinking to a panel I sat in at CCCC2010 a couple weeks back. The presenter was talking about charity groups that let you “adopt” African children. World Vision is one she referenced. Child Fund International is another. An interesting twist that was highly effective as a fund raiser for these groups is to make a Facebook community for the African villages. Apparently these groups will set these villagers up with their own Facebook groups that others from around the world can join (here’s Child Fund International). This gives the villagers more of an identity and leads to more action to help them.

Now, if you’re bonding with African villagers through a Facebook group, will you ever physically meet them? Most likely not. So, they exist for you only in a virtual sense. Yet, they aren’t simply constructs in a computer program. Rather, they have a physical presence just like you. It is only the relationship that is virtual.

YouTube

And much the same phenomenon happens with YouTube viral videos. There’s the new trend of YouTube stars popping up in which real individuals gain a virtual stardom. These individuals (after having posted some silly video, usually) develop their own fan base and followers and garner millions of views.

David after Dentist is a great example of this. David even has his own merchandising line now!

Numa Numa is another one – a guy who (as I understand) initially tried to hide from his new found Internet fame before embracing it

Now, these are both videos of real people that gain virtual fame, but there are virtual “people” who do much the same. The Dancing Baby, a 3D animation, was popular back in the 1990s. And those who play World of Warcraft will be intimately familiar with Leeroy Jenkins, a virtual character who has spawned a gaming legend amongst the flesh and blood players.

So, if we’re trying to figure out the relationship between the virtual reality of YouTube and the physical reality of the people looking at computer screens, it’s very hard to make much of a division. Indeed, even the “blurred line” analogy is a bad one because of the interconnectedness of the two worlds. David after Dentist’s physical and virtual existences are so intimately tied that they’re nearly impossible to separate. Numa Numa made a resurgence online because of physical world pressure. The separation between virtual and physical realities is more than just blurred – it’s nearly gone.

Augmented Reality

And that brings me to a trend that as of this post is recently emerging – augmented reality. As explained by the good people at Common Craft, it’s a way to use smartphone technology to provide extra information about the physical world. There’s an Android OS app called Layar that will take a real-time capture from your phone’s camera and present you with content from the Internet about what you’re looking at. The screen provides you with the camera’s view (namely, the buildings and geography you’re pointing at) and overlays it with content bubbles that tell you more about what you’re seeing.

Right now this technology is in its infancy, as everything I’ve seen is just Wikipedia-like factoids. But it has interesting potential as a way to garner restaurant reviews, find your way if you’re lost, and provide a kind of assisted tour in museums.

I just love this term, though. All of the blendings I’ve discussed happen asynchronously. Facebook relationships, YouTube stars, and literary escapes (see last week’s post) all develop over time. At any one moment, you’re clearly dealing with either the virtual or the physical world. But this takes that concept and makes them synchronous. You are interacting with both the virtual world and the physical at the exact same time. And that takes the line between the two and throws it right out the window (to blend many metaphors into one).

I wonder if there will be an augmented reality version of YouTube. I could point my phone’s camera at someone and see all of the social media postings she’s made and that have been made about her. It would be a great way to figure out if that guy in the office down the hall really is the Numa Numa guy.

Virtual Reality Revisited (part 1)

Kind readers, kindly be patient with me as I stretch this next idea out over several posts. I’ve decided to start a multi-week series on virtual reality, or rather revisiting the concept in the context of a Web 2.0/social media/cloud computing world.

A few months back I moved offices. As part of that process, I ended up going through a number of old graduate class readings – including a class where we spent a great deal of time talking about virtual reality and its pros & cons. Seeing those pieces got me thinking about some of the predictions the authors made and how the vast majority of those predictions really haven’t come to fruition. This series of posts, then, is designed to see what went wrong (or, if you’re not post-apocalyptic-ally inclined, what went right).

What the predictions were

So, maybe the best place to start is what the predictions were. I think this may be next week’s post, as  it’s one in and of itself. But to summarize, a number of tech-rhet scholars in the late 20th century had a very divided view when it came to “normal” reality and virtual reality. They were seen as two entirely separate universes and people’s lives were seen as separated when they existed in one or the other.

Maybe the best example of that separation is what is arguably the first popular virtual reality – Second Life. Second Life, as it was originally conceived was a world entirely separate from the “normal” one, where you could go to create a separate identity. It’s notable that Second Life basically forbids you from letting your avatar’s name be the same as your own. In fact, you are locked into a certain set of predefined last names for your avatar for that very reason. The virtual reality (as originally envisioned) is completely severed from the “normal” one. (now, how that separation has changed is a later topic)

Add to this separation the attraction of virtual realities and you get the post-apocalyptic prediction of a number of scholars. They saw people become obsessed with early MMORPGs (massively multi-player online role playing games – basically Dungeons & Dragons online). And they saw those early gamers start spending more time in the virtual reality than the “normal” one. The prediction then became that we were heading toward a world in which people would spend their lives in a virtual reality to the neglect of the “normal” one. This prediction was really quite common in the sci fi of the day. Futurama, the sci fi version of The Simpsons, played up this theme in many episodes. The Lawnmower Man, a film that grossly corrupted Stephen King’s rather gruesome short story, did this as well. And Star Trek played this idea up with its holodeck, with several trivial characters becoming obsessed with the possibilities.

The lack of separation

But, when I look at these predictions and I look at contemporary uses of the Internet and virtual realities, I don’t see this sharp divide. I don’t see people becoming obsessed with virtual reality and completely neglect “normal” reality. Rather, the two have blended into a kind of hybrid where virtual lives and “real” ones are extensions of each other.

A second ago I mentioned Second Life. As it was originally envisioned, Second Life was a world completely separate from First Life – a world where you can create a second you. But what has happened is a marked intrusion of our first lives into our second. People are using Second Life as a realm to enhance their first ones, as businesses host job fairs there, college instructors hold class sessions there, and Texas Tech’s Distance Education program invests $10,000 on their Second Life island.

But I think our definition of what virtual reality is has changed. We no longer operate with the concept of creating entirely separate worlds whose inhabitants are entirely virtual. Instead, we create realities in which the inhabitants are quite obviously from “normal” reality. YouTube and Facebook are perhaps the two most obvious examples to me.

YouTube

When I say YouTube, I mean YouTube stars, those people starring in viral videos that garner 1 million plus hits in a matter of weeks if not days. David after Dentist is an easy example. I’d try to list others, but they’d be out of date by the time I hit “publish” on this post. I argue that David after Dentist exists in a virtual world. I will never meet him. He will never go over to my niece’s house to play. David after Dentist will never have any role in my “normal” reality. However, I can watch him and chat with friends about his silliness in a virtual context – a context mediated entirely by digital technologies that exists only in bits of ones and zeros on a Google server somewhere.

But David after Dentist is a real person. The kid is not a CGI creation, or an avatar created by his father. He has a “normal” life in addition to his virtual one. I remember reading somewhere about the paparazzi going after these YouTube stars with about the same fervor as they go after Brangelina and the like. David after Dentist’s virtual world is impacting his “normal” one. The two are being blended.

Facebook

And then, there’s Facebook. This is perhaps the place where our virtual lives collide the most violently with our “normal” ones. When the typical person first creates that Facebook profile, she goes out and friend requests all of those people who play prominent roles in her “normal” life. That would be parents, children, close friends, and extended family. That Facebook friend circle then starts expanding to former classmates, coworkers, acquaintances, and close friends of close friends. Pretty soon, if the person really becomes a “Facebook whore,” the friend circle includes people she has never physically met and most likely never will. That is, she has developed a solely virtual relationship with people through Facebook. But that virtual one is intimately tied to the “normal” one.

Gaming

Now, gaming in its contemporary context is a much more complicated endeavor. Modern video games really are virtual worlds. World of Warcraft is a fundamentally virtual reality complete with its one laws of physics, societies, and political intrigue. Halo 3 and its various cousins have the ability to develop relationships with people from around the globe whom you will never meet outside of the game context.

But both of these and all of the games similar to them have developed online support communities. Players have put together full blown websites with all the amenities that are specifically designed to let them collaborate on game plots and strategies. And the people who participate in these communities are often a blend of their “normal” identities and their in-game ones.

Where do we go from here?

So, this is the direction the next few posts will be taking. I’m going to explore each of these areas a bit more, as I see each of them having their own unique impact on how we think of virtual reality.

But suffice it to say that I see the concept of virtual reality as markedly different than predicted. Rather than a separate reality completely severed from the “normal” one, it’s intimately tied to it. Our virtual lives are extensions of our “normal” ones. And, more and more commonly, our “normal” lives are extensions of our virtual ones.

Suffice it to say, this series of posts most definitely deserves the tagline:

May you live in interesting times.

Edit: Subsequent posts
Part 2: What it used to be