Serendipity Book

Big Brother at Alton Towers

So, it seems that I'm only 2 years late to the news that the British theme park Alton Towers has introduced RFID technology in wrist bands to physically track and video their customers using CCTV as they move around the park.

The technology is primarily intended to offer a service which creates a custom video of "Your Day at Alton Towers". Guests wear bracelets fitted with RFID tags that trigger surveillance cameras throughout the park. The video footage is then spliced together automatically with stock "B roll" footage from the park to produce a custom DVD for each customer with a run time of up to 30 minutes.

The surveillance cameras are also used for "safety and crime prevention".

Guests opt-in to wear the tags but the privacy implications for other guests who will feature as "extras" in other people's DVDs are worth reflecting upon. The Alton Towers privacy policy states the following:

Please note that personal data in the form of images of visitors to the Park is collected via the operation of closed circuit television ('CCTV'), ride photography and video cameras all of which are located throughout the Park. Your image will be recorded and processed for the purpose of producing photographic images and video recordings.

Data from video cameras is collected by the wearing by visitors to the Park of a radio frequency identification (RFID) wristband. Please note your image may be captured passively through other visitors to the Park who may be wearing an RFID wristband.

I'm torn. Is this an relevant, exciting and clever use of a new technology which offers a genuine benefit to guests or a gross invasion of privacy?

P.S. Did you realise that it now costs nearly £100 a head to get in to Alton Towers?

Via RD's Delicious links.

BBC Sound Index - buzz-based music chart

The BBC have created an innovative music chart called the Sound Index based on aggregating usage and purchasing data from popular internet music sites:

"The BBC Sound Index analyses what people are writing about, listening to, watching, downloading and logging on to. It then counts and analyses this data to make an instant list of the most popular 1000 artists and tracks on the web.iTunes, MySpace, Bebo, Google Groups, Last.FM and YouTube

The more blog mentions, comments, plays, downloads and profile views an artist or track has, the higher up the Sound Index they are. So, the Sound Index is a music buzz index controlled entirely by the public."

The chart is updated every six hours and broadcast on the BBC every Sunday. Yet more good stuff from Ashley Highfield and team:

"Under Ashley's leadership, the number of UK adults visiting bbc.co.uk has more than trebled from 4.6 million to 14 million every month and page impressions have increased tenfold to just over 3 billion a month."

Our changing relationship with media - some recent commentary

A quick roundup of some interesting recent articles from around the web on the subject of the changing nature of our relationship with media.

1) First out, a nice infographic from The Guardian (pictured below but do go here for the interactive version ) showing the surge in Google's ad revenue relative to traditional media:

2) Chris "Long Tail" Anderson explaining why he believes that news aggregators have a limited future:

Every day I get most of my news from blogs. I don't visit "news sites" or use a "news aggregator". I use a generic feedreader (Bloglines) and a totally idiosyncratic RSS subscription list that includes everything from personal posts from friends to parts (but not all) of the WSJ. When it comes to the web, I have no interest in someone else trying to guess what I want to read or "help" me by defining what's news and what isn't. My news is not your news; indeed, you probably wouldn't call most of it news at all.

3)Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everyone, explains how people find the time to engage with participatory media:

[I told a TV producer about Wikipedia and] she shook her head and said, "Where do people find the time?" That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, "No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you've been masking for 50 years."

4) Rachel Donadio explores the rise of the author and decline of the reader in the New York Times:

53 percent of Americans surveyed hadn’t read a book in the previous year [but] in 2007, a whopping 400,000 books were published or distributed in the United States, up from 300,000 in 2006, Technorati estimates that 175,000 new blogs are created worldwide each day  7 percent of U.S adults did some form of creative writing, mostly “for personal fulfillment.”

5) Last week The Sunday Times reported on a study which estimated that some of us now cram 31 hours of life into 24 thanks to multitasking and our increased connectivity and access to useful gadgets:

Patrick Moriarty, one of the authors of the report said: "On the one hand it’s good – you get more done. On the other hand, when I left university seven years ago, life was much simpler. There was more talking face-to-face and more time spent over dinner. I suspect smarter phones may add another couple of hours but we are probably at the limit of multitasking for this generation."

6) According to AP, Bertelsmann is to start printing an almanac of Wikipedia.  Hmmm. And Bertelsmann likes to think that they really get the web.

7) A great round up by Aqute of the (lack of) innovation being shown on the web by UK publishing houses.

8) Brand Republic reports that a survey of 1000 people by online survey provider Ciao Surveys has revealed that 65% of people in Britain think that social networking sites should be banned at work, even though 56% admitted to being a member of at least one. Furthermore, a quarter of respondents believed that social networking sites are a 'passing fad

All change

A truly great piece of communication. I can see how this could work really well in a pitch situation.

Via Toad

Cadbury's Trucks - advertising eats itself

Juan 'the man' Cabral serves up 'Mad Max' via Pixar's 'Cars' in an attempt to give us a glass and a half of joy for Cadbury's.

Whilst 'Trucks' would no doubt score pretty high on engagement when compared to most ads, it seems to lack the drama and downright audacity of 'Gorilla' or the glorious multi-sensory indulgence that was 'Balls'.

I'm not sure that 'Trucks' quite cuts it as a piece of pure spellbinding entertainment in the way that 'Gorilla' and 'Balls' do.

And I'm a gearhead with a life-long interest in aviation (sad, I know).

'Gorilla' and 'Balls' both went spectacularly viral because they were truly incredible pieces of entertainment.

'Trucks' is merely quite interesting.

The question is, will that be enough for Cadbury's given that the strategy that Fallon are using appears to lean heavilly on driving salience at the cost of creating an enduring link back to the brand.

In Hey Whipple, Luke Sullivan cautions that to be effective "your interesting device cannot just point to the sales message, it must be the sales message."

Sullivan goes on to quote a similar piece of advice from Bill Bernbach ("Stay with the product") before continuing to recommend that creatives should avoid getting "tangled up in unrelated ideas, however fanciful. There is no such thing as borrowed interest. Interest lasts as long as something is interesting. Interesting words make for a delightful sentence but not a persuasive one."

I'm sure others would no doubt disagree.

YouTube analytics arrives at last

YouTube: "Today [March 26th] we're releasing YouTube Insight, a free tool that enables anyone with a YouTube account to view detailed statistics about the videos that they upload to the site. For example, uploaders can see how often their videos are viewed in different geographic regions, as well as how popular they are relative to all videos in that market over a given period of time. You can also delve deeper into the lifecycle of your videos, like how long it takes for a video to become popular, and what happens to video views as popularity peaks."

If only you could do the same (or get limited access) for videos that others upload too.

Fallon's Social Media Trends Presentation

Another slideshare treat. This is a trends presentation given by Aki Spicer to his colleagues at Fallon in Minneapolis over lunch the other day (which they incidentally broadcast live by video across the internet using Yahoo! Live).

His focus is on 10 trends in social media and how to take advantage of them. Here's the takeaway for those in a hurry:

| View | Upload your own

Every South Park episode is now free online

All 12 series of South Park are now free to view online. Well, they are if you live in the USA anyway. Apparently the site will be available in the UK soon.

The site, part of MTV networks, was executed by Schematic (part of WPP) and carries some very prominent advertising as you might expect with launch sponsors including Virgin and Toyota.

Press release here.

Some Free Thinking

First up, a great presentation on the future of marketing from Paul Isakson. He concludes with the statement "modern marketing = making people's lives better":

| View | Upload your own

Which reminds me, I never posted this t'riffic presentation on Insights from Matthew Milan of Critical Mass in Toronto:

| View | Upload your own

And, while I'm at it, I also forgot to post Gareth Kay's splendid presentation from late last year on what makes for a good idea:

| View | Upload your own

As Paul Arden said: "Give away everything you know, and more will come back to you". Start by putting your schtick on Slideshare.

More stuff about advertising on BBC Four

There will be yet more telly about the ad business on BBC Four tonight at 10.30pm.

In The Hard Sell Phill Jupitus narrates a series looking at 50 years of British TV advertising. Tonight's edition examines how sex has been used to sell, sell, sell to the public, with contributions from Tim Bell and John Hegarty among others.

The series in full:

26/02/08 - Sex
04/03/08 - Cigarettes & Alcohol
11/03/08 - Food & Drink
18/03/08 - Toys
25/03/08 - House & Home
01/04/08 - Technology