Crowdsourcing has become a new and sexy target in the interactive marketing world when a project brief lists ‘engage the community on a limited budget’. Unfortunately, it seems that lately, both brands and agencies have been exploiting crowdsourcing thinking they can have their cake and eat it too. In essence, crowdsourcing is an attempt at trying to get professional and premium results for amateur pricing. (Note: for this blog entry I’m not referring to legitimate attempts at crowdsourcing such as the Netflix initiative but rather attempts at crowdsourcing that are blatantly trying to commoditize specialized services relevant to marketing and advertising.)
Cripsin, Porter + Bogusky (CP+B) is at the heart of a current controversy involving the design community and CP+B’s intent to crowdsource a logo design for their client – Brammo. Not only has this put CP+B in a poor light (both in the design community as well as interactive marketing community) but it’s not making their client look so hot either. CP+B sent out an RFP for logo design and is offering $1,000 for the winning logo. How much money CP+B was paid is anybody’s guess, but this again shows how crowdsourcing is being exploited for monetary gain. Not to mention, why would a brand need an agency if all they’re going to do is create a RFP and post it on a site for community submissions? Does crowdsourcing even need a middleman in this instance? The irony here is that as crowdsourcing becomes more popular it makes an agency less relevant.
Then you also have another form of crowdsourcing exploitation that are thinly veiled ‘community contests’ which offer little to no prizes in exchange for the glory and prominence of associating a designer or developers name with a popular brand. Gap is the latest culprit here using an iPhone App crowdsourced contest whereby the winning developer ‘wins’:
Their app to be noted as the ‘official’ iPhone app for Gap
2 months of free office space (which was recently added to most likely entice more entries)
The winning developers name in a Gap press release
Yes, you read that right, the big prize for spending all that time and effort is a name along with Gap in a press release. And what could the 2 months of free office space be for? You draw your own conclusions there… Furthermore, the second tier prizes range from $100 to $500 gift certificates which is really helping to ‘commoditize’ iPhone App development in general. Has any development platform in recent memory (iPhone App in this instance) gone from premium pricing to commoditized pricing in such a short time span?
Most professional designers and developers are already aware that by basically performing these crowdsourcing initiatives, for free, they’re in effect helping to commoditize their craft. Even if a designer and / or developer is in it for the glory of having their name associated with a brand, how would other agencies or companies view the winner when it comes to real world pricing? My gut tells me that any agency or brand would figure if the winning designer / developer would do something for free, they’ll be more than happy to do a paid initiative even if it’s ridiculously low budgeted and barely above the cost of ‘free’.
Crowdsourcing is just another example of User Generated Content but in a more controlled manner and specialized environment. With any brand sponsored contest, prizing / monetary value is always key to attracting the best talent and most qualified entries or results. In addition, it is also important to offer monetary value that correlates to the effort of work involved. It seems in these recessionary times, there’s an attempt to skip over that small detail. Unfortunately though, as the last 3-4 years have shown for UGC, some things still hold true – you get what you pay for.
CYOA (Choose Your Own Adventure) Interactive Videos are continuing to become the go-to execution when brands and agencies are trying to create more consumer engagement for their online video executions and/or campaigns. There was a great recent effort out of the U.K. called Knife Crime where it was used as an educational vehicle to show the result of making a wrong (and life altering) decision. You can also check out many other great examples of CYOA video on a blog post we did a few months ago called The Best Examples Of Choose Your Own Adventure Interactive Video.
We’ve been discussing doing a very in-depth blog post on our experience to date with multiple CYOA executions and I think that post will be very soon. However, I did want to jump start things by including a pretty cool article and graphic from Flowingdata. As you can see from the flowchart below, it’s critical in any CYOA video that you’re flowcharting out all the possible directions and results at the start of your video. Granted most CYOA executions so far are much more simplified and often only branch out into 3-4 overall directions, but as this area of Interactive Video matures, I do think you’ll start to see much more in-depth Interactive Adventures that stay true to their current “Choose Your Own Adventure” name…
I write this post realizing that if I were to title it, “The Top 20 Augmented Reality Apps That Will Totally Change Every Aspect Of Your Life,” that it would get way more hits, and would probably be tweeted about nonstop for the next three days. Thing is, in reality, not one truly life changing app exists yet, outside of a special effects lab. It seems, though, that no one in the blogosphere really cares. Augmented Reality is the sensationalist tech headline of 2009.
AR developers can’t change the hype cycle, but they can position themselves to withstand the upcoming trough of disillusionment. I think it will come with the iPhone 3.1 launch, when users find that the mobile AR tech isn’t quite at the level it’s advertised to be. So, how does a developer set themselves apart from the sea of wannabe AR upstarts? Here are a few suggestions:
Develop either your own AR tech or unique implementation of existing tech
If I wanted to, I could find someone to create a 3D model and put on a marker for less than $500. No AR developer is going to survive, in the long run, if they provide a product that can be reproduced by an offshore company, for a fraction of the price. This will soon include GPS/Compass based AR, as an open source toolkit is already available.
At Zugara, we’re busy creating web based, core frameworks, as well as new implementations of current frameworks, with a focus on practical applications. Companies with this mindset will win out in the long run, because those focusing most of their efforts on getting short term, viral publicity won’t have a viable product when the novelty of Augmented Reality wears off in a few months.
Don’t post videos promising more than you can currently give a live demo of
I put Layar 2.0 on the company G1 development phone yesterday. It’s a good app for what it does, but like all GPS/Compass based mobile apps, in my opinion, it isn’t worth the “OMFG this is AMAZING” blog posts that it’s getting. I’m confident that when the mass populace gets a hold of these types of apps, there might be a novelty to them in the beginning, but no one in their right mind will use them over a Google Maps implementation.
I, like many people, have been watching the hype following Layar for many months, where it was presented as overlaying information over the real world. In reality it overlays things in such an inaccurate manner that the camera feed is a completely unnecessary component of the program. This is nothing against the program itself, since the hardware technology doesn’t really permit any more functionality than is offered. I will, however, point a finger at how Layar was lacking in pre-release, live use video demos, since in the long run, the fostering of over expectation of a product’s abilities hurts the brand behind it. I believe that this is what will happen to most of the companies focusing on iPhone 3.1 AR.
In order to get around this problem, the smart AR developer clearly marks a video that they can’t reproduce in a live demo as being a concept or a work in progress. An even smarter developer never releases any promotional videos without a matching live run video. Following this rule will present the company as being more legitimate than those just looking to get some press.
Note: Ahead of possible comments, I’ll acknowledge that Zugara’s Webcam Social Shopper only has a promo video available to the public. This is because it was written as an API for clothing retailers to utilize with their product database. A fully working demo, with a sample database, is regularly demoed to clients.
Think outside of the box
Rather than repeat myself, for my reasoning behind moving away from visual examples, check out my earlier post on eye candy AR.
Augmented Reality is a visually amazing thing the first time you see it, and I think that this forces many people’s creativity towards visual implementations (including map overlays, since they don’t really provide any more functionality than an overhead implementation). This doesn’t mean, on order to be ahead of the curve, that it’s necessary to create totally new forms of AR from the ground up. In fact, I’m confident that the really exciting implementations, over the next few months, will be a mixing of object/marker recognition based AR with social networking tech.
I’m sure someone will read that and say, “TAT already did that with Augmented ID,” except that I haven’t seen a live demo video of it, so in my book, it’s a concept project only and holds as much weight as Minority Report. Zugara’s game, CannonBallz, on the other hand, even though it’s simpler version of AR is motion tracking and 2D overlays, uses Facebook Connect to share game photos. It gives users an interactive glimpse into what will be available in the near future for AR.
Overall, what I’m trying to get across is simply to be responsible when conceptualizing, developing and promoting your AR products, because pretty soon the public is going to be demanding substance over swagger, and right now there’s a whole lot of swagger going around.
The promotion video for Layar was (UPDATE: changed "a post production job" to "a completely controlled environment demo that can not be reproduced by the end user") that heightened many peoples' expectations. To what extent is debatable.
TAT’s Augmented ID is another example of a product that many people think is already at the proof of concept stage, even though there is no evidence that it is anything more than a post production video.
This week, Layar, a mobile augmented reality browser for Android phones launched globally to an incredible amount of excitement in the tech community. So, what exactly is Layar? Well, I’ll let Mashable describe it because they can do a much more efficient job than I can:
“Layar is a Reality Browser, which means it displays real time digital meta data on top of the physical world around you, as seen through the camera of your mobile phone. Point the camera anywhere, and you’ll see layers of information on top of real world objects; these layers can be real estate info, bars and shops, tourist information, tweets from users etc. Imagine sitting in an internet cafe and seeing what the folks around you are tweeting through you camera? Well, that’s exactly how it works”.
Only, here’s the problem. That may be how it’s being pitched/positioned, but that’s not “exactly” how it will work when consumers get their hands on it.
Let me be honest: like most interactive marketers, when I first read about this tech I felt like Steve Martin (in “The Jerk”) when the new phone books showed up. My mind was swimming with possibilities – I mean, think about all the ways we could use AR to provide real value to consumers. Think of the amazing experiences we could create! Then, I talked to our Senior Software Engineer who unceremoniously brought me back down to earth with a “thud”. The problem, as it turns out, is not with the software that’s being developed (as I firmly believe that companys like Layar deserve a serious “hat-tip” for pushing the industry forward) but with the hardware (i.e. the phones) that consumers will be running these technologies on. The fact is the hardware just isn’t accurate enough to deliver on the types of precise experiences that are being showcased/promised in videos around the net. Here are the two primary reasons:
THE GPS – No matter what handset you’re using, we aren’t dealing with military grade GPS. The fact is, even in the best conditions (please note the word “best”), civilian GPS is accurate up to 50 feet. With that in mind we spent the other day playing with Layar on a Google G1 (note: the phone’s hardware is not Google’s but HTC’s) to see what we were dealing with, and we noticed something. Typically we experienced a GPS accuracy level of somewhere between 100 to 250 feet. Now, remember, that could go 250 feet to the left, right, forward, or backwards… So really, the device was telling us that the piece of data that was overlaid on the phone’s screen was somewhere within a 31,400 square foot (if accuracy was 100 feet) to 196,250 square foot (if accuracy was 250 feet) area. That means you won’t be able to swing your phone around an Internet café and match a tweet with a face. In fact, you can’t even safely assume that the person whose tweets you’re reading is even in the café with you (not to mention you may feel a touch silly in an internet café holding up your phone and spinning around anyways, but that’s a conversation for another day).
THE IPHONE 3GS’ COMPASS – As of right now you can’t get AR apps on the iPhone but that’s going to change next month. So we should probably discuss this now as the the new phone’s compass will be a major component of most GPS related executions. Let’s check out the screenshot below. Do you see that “V” coming out from the user’s location? That “V” indicates that they are facing somewhere within those parameters. So, if the device doesn’t know exactly where you’re facing, how can you tell if the real estate data you’re looking at is actually for the house you’re viewing through your phone’s camera? Not to mention that as you get farther away, the margin of error increases. So that subway station you think you’re walking towards… it could actually end up being three blocks over and two blocks up. And that’s just what you want when wandering around New York right? A nice game of “hot or cold”.
At the end of the day, if the hardware can’t accurately tell: where you are, where the data that’s being overlaid is anchored, or where you’re facing… how reliable and useful an experience can you possibly have?
Now, you may be thinking that those two inaccuracies noted above aren’t that bad. Certainly, when you’re driving a car you never really noticed any issues with your GPS, right? Here’s the thing, an exit ramp being a couple hundred feet off is not a big deal. Between the street signs, the fact that there’s only one ramp in the area, and your speed, you just don’t notice the inaccuracies. But, if you’re going to overlay data on a precise location (e.g. real estate information about a house, or information about a city’s historical landmarks) via a phone’s video screen, those inaccuracies make a huge difference in the consumer experience. And here’s the corker, if at the end of the day the data isn’t accurate/reliable why will consumers use it (outside of that initial “this is cool/different” moment that one has the first time they try it)? So, I guess the real question is why would a consumer continue to use it?
Now, don’t get me wrong; my hope is that there are developers out there that are seeing this technology and having an “A-ha!” moment. I’d love it if some fantastic and useful apps get built even with the hardware’s limitations. I’m starting to doubt that it will happen given what I’ve been discussing, but a guy can always hope right? All I’m trying to do today is manage your expectations, because the experiences that are being promised are not what you’re going to experience when you get the application in your hands.
So, enough blabbering out of me, what do you think?
We Are Organized Chaos (WAOC) is Zugara’s (www.zugara.com) interactive marketing and advertising blog where we’ll be featuring some great projects and discussing upcoming trends in the digital world. Work — good and bad — will be critiqued. Hope you’ll enjoy reading our insights and thoughts on interactive.
