Ready, Xfire, AIM: Axed again!l
There is a lot being written about the increasing use of Instant Messaging especially about teenagers. CNET reports the following from an AOL commissioned poll: "Nearly 66 percent of 13- to 21-year-olds say they send more IMs than e-mails, compared with 49 percent last year…
Overall, 38 percent of users say they send as many or more IMs than e-mails…One-fourth of users would like to see entertainment content within instant messages."
In a separate article about business use of Instant Messaging CNET reports, "It’s official: Instant messaging is the new e-mail for the world’s businesses." They estimate that there are "1 billion IMs sent every day between 28 million enterprise users." Businessweek deemed email "So Five Minutes Ago" and attributed the trend to "the anthropological shift
occurring among tomorrow’s captains of industry, the text-messaging
Netgens (16-to-24-year-olds), for whom e-mail is so "ovr," "dn," "w/e
(over, done, whatever)." Trendwatching elaborates on virtual anthropology in their December issue.
Of course, where there is a consumer behavior as attractive as this one, advertisers are right there. iMEDIA reports "Major advertisers and their agencies are now leveraging the medium of instant messaging as a mainstream interactive vehicle." IMedia says that "major advertisers including Volvo, Daimler Chrysler, Warner Brothers,
United Paramount Network, NBC Universal, Procter & Gamble, Nike, Tysons Chicken,and ING Direct participate eagerly in IM-related ad campaigns."
MIT Advertising Lab reported in November that AOL was using 2 bots, Moviefone and Shopping Buddy in its instant messaging service. The reception among users has been mixed. In December, they report that MAKE magazine is delivering content via instant message.
"The MAKEbot is a AIM/iChat buddy you add to your buddy list. When you
type latest, he will give you the latest news from Makezine.com. You
can type "subscribe 1" and he’ll deliver the latest news each hour. If
you type "photos" you’ll get the latest photos from the MAKE photo
pool, type "bookmarks" you’ll get our latest bookmarks, type
"Instructables" you’ll get the latest how-to projects. Lastly - if you
type keywords like psp, welding, ipod or whatever he’ll search the MAKE
site, the pages from MAKE and give you a link from our search engine to
help you find what you’re looking for.
MAKE is self described "as a hybrid magazine/book (known as a mook in Japan). MAKE comes
from O’Reilly, the Publisher of Record for geeks and tech enthusiasts
everywhere." You can read more about it on the Make Blog.
We can only assume that this is just the beginning. iMEDIA reports a related trend: The relationship between gamers, Instant Messaging, and advertising content delivery. On-line games users have become their own demographic target. There are over 70 million gamers in the US and they are male and between the ages of 14-35. They are affluent, well educated and love to communicate via IM, blogs, text messages, websites and voice chat.
Remember the anthropological shift I just mentioned? Well, the hardcore gamer is the influencer according to iMedia: "Trends,whether gaming related, fashion, soft drink, cars, music or
film, are determined by the hardest of the hardcore gamers who then
influence less avid gamers"….spreading the word through Instant Messaging while playing games.
Apparently, IMs cause problems with other PC software causing computers to crash. This doesn’t make for a very nice gaming experience. Consequently online game developers solved this problem by allowing for IMs within the game.
One such company, Xfire, "has provided other community tools to improve the ease of
gaming and the spread of community information. Xfire lets gamers see
what games their friends are playing, do IM from within a game to
friends outside the game, do voice chat while in-game, download files
over a fast peer-to-peer system, and more. This has led to Xfire
becoming the fastest growing online gaming community in the world with
over 2.5 million registered users, each user running Xfire an average
of 85 hours per month."
OK, so I had never heard of Xfire and neither had my kids who fit right into the demos. That was the good news. The bad news for parents is that Xfire tracks users. The good news for marketers is that Xfire can implement very targeted behavioral marketing campaigns. Now, while at their site, I noticed a little round burst that said, "Its Free No Spyware". So, if they are tracking all this data, isn’t this spyware??
OK, so I have written before about Axe Deodorant before in terms of their targeting of adolescent boys with the premise that if they use Axe they will get girls. I have also admitted that along with disapproving of the message, I have purchased the product for my son on the premise that the end, a clean boy, justifies the means, buying Axe. In late 2005, Axe introduced a new scent, Unlimited, as in, unlimited ways to pick up girls, and used two characters, Evan and Gareth and sent them off on a blog adventure. They also started appearing on Xfire.
In viral marketing mode they started out with downloads of Evan and Garth movies without mentioning the "A" word. This apparently started the Xfire IM buzz going. Later in the campaign paid placements on Xfire along with Videos with Axe products. According to the iMedia article written by Mike Cassidy, CEO of Xfire,
The results of the campaign were spectacular:
- Fifteen of the 34 top downloaded files ever on Xfire were Evan & Garreth movies with a total of 530,747 movies downloaded.
- There was a 99.4 percent increase in awareness of who Evan &
Garreth were with an astounding 222.5 percent increase in awareness of
which products were really being featured. - Over half (51.7 percent) of the Xfire user base stated their intention to buy Axe products at the end of the campaign
- And 38.7 percent stated they thought "Axe would help get the girl"
Stowe Boyd writes about a Forrester Research Study
that affirms the importance of game advertising. The study says that
there are two kinds of game advertising vehicles: in-game advertising
which is like product placement in TV programs and movies and
advergaming which is an on-line game that is promtotion itself. The AXE effort used both methods.
So, from a marketing perspective, the importance of IMs and in-game marketing cannot be overlooked. Also from a marketing perspective, Axe has been a successful word-of-mouth marketing story. I can even attest to that as a parent having heard my own son give a guest lecture to his friends in the back seat of my car about why he preferred Axe to Gillette’s Tag.
However, from a parent’s perspective I remain concerned about this kind of "word of mouth" campaign targeted at adolescent boys with a message that is blatantly disrespectful and exploitive to women. I am also not comfortable with my kids visiting a gaming site that is mining data under the camouflage of a "no spyware" burst. See Google 2084.
Technorati Tags:
IM, Instant Messaging, AXE, Xfire, Viral Marketing, Word of Mouth Marketing Del.icio.us Tags:
IMs, Instant Messaging, on-line gaming, word-of-mouth marketing
Blog Stalking Parents…Fair Game?
The Weekend Journal has an article about yet another innovative way to join the blogosphere, spying on your children. Big Mother is Watching (available by subscription) tells of a mother (unfortunately working "outside the home" as a marketing consultant….giving marketing consultants and mothers a bad name) who caught her daughter behaving badly by monitoring her blog….the mother said she would not read her daughter’s diary if it were in her room but inasmuch as her daughter was telling the world via the Internet, blog stalking her daughter’s activities seemed totally OK.
Well, I have two adolescent kids and would have to say that if they had blogs, just like the rest of us, they should understand that anything that they write would be available for the world to read. The world of a teenage blogger could include parents, grandparents, teachers and of course, their peers. If this is not obvious, this might be a good thing to add to our parental repertoire of warnings!
Now, the next paragraph of the WSJ article goes on to say that the mother, after her initial blog discovery went on to put various spying software programs on her computers and now spends 30 minutes a day monitoring her daughter’s activities. 30 minutes a day spying on her daughter! Maybe she should take 30 minutes a day to hang out with her daughter to find out what she is up to. The Journal had a little sub-section on the necessary tools for spying on ones children on-line. What a tangled web!
The Pew statistics say that 19% of 12-17 year olds, 4mm kids, who use the Internet, have a blog. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has recently published FAQs for Student Blogging that discusses legal issues associated with blogging but also points out that it would be a good idea to remember that a blog is not a private diary that is kept in ones room….discretion is the better part of valor.
OK, there have been various "on-line" incidents, with my kids….all of the IM variety. I don’t particularly appreciate that they try to minimize the screen when I enter the room. I try to keep an eye on it and I lecture them far more than they want to hear. My standard monologue is mostly don’t IM anything that you wouldn’t say out loud, if everyone you knew including your parents were listening.
I also have told them of discussions among their friend’s parents who DO keep monitoring devices on their computers… and even though I don’t, someone else’s Big Mother could be listening. I have also told them about one of my friend’s whose son was in my son’s class who would get on her son’s IM account and blithely pretend to be him. I hope that they are listening to me. If not, the IMs will end. I do not want to be a spy.
As far as blogging is concerned, they don’t blog. They think it is stupid that I do…and there you have it as far as that goes. My older son tells me there is a kid in his class who blogs…he says he is kind of "depressed" and writes depressing things; he says he has very high readership. Niches are important.
Technorati Tags: teenage_bloggers, parents, IMs, spy_, software
Passion versus Obsession
A client was recently expressing her concern that her adolescent son may have Aspergers. He is and always has been a computer genius or computer nerd, depending on who is describing him, with a few friends that have similar interests. She and her husband are very social people which makes their son’s personality all the more striking in its contrast to theirs. He has one official diagnosis, ADD, and is medicated for that. Other than ADD, he is an adolescent which probably should be a pathology all of its own to define the narcissistic, angry years that begin around 13 and end around 20. Or so I am told. Over the years, they have consulted with many mental health professionals. Currently, the combination of adolescence, stimulant medication, his temperament and personality are expressing some very unpleasant behaviors. Aspergers keeps rearing its head as they consult with psychiatrists, neurologists, therapists and counselors.
The issues pointing at Aspergers are the lack of basic social skills, the inability to decode social signals, lack of eye contact, and conversations that about narrowly defined, highly technical interests. However, the last doctor that they saw said that he thought "everyone" at the medical school had Aspergers.
And we have all heard others say that "everyone" in Silicone Valley including "you know who" has Aspergers.
In thinking about this, I wondered about the difference between being considered passsionate about say, computers or being considerered obsessed with them. Or medicine, or whatever the narrowly defined highly technical interest might be. If the interest is "highly technical" maybe we say obsession. If the interest is not technical, such as a sport, maybe we say, passionate?
Of course one of my favorite blogs is Creating Passionate Users which is written by some very technical people….who write engaging, passionate posts most recently about the developmental stages of companies. What do you think about passsion versus obsession?
Andy Milonakis
My kids and I have several TV shows that we watch together with some regularity but with no particular rhyme or reason. I will confess them now: Roseanne and Murphy Brown on Nick@Night and Saturday Night Live. I never watched Roseanne when it was on prime time and Murphy Brown I never missed. Saturday Night Live and I go waaay back together although there were many seasons that were just plain b-a-d. My kids and I have found the last several seasons really funny. Go figure!
Now this post is about Andy Milonakis who I know nothing about other than one day my youngest son, Sam was watching him and I stopped because Andy was singing a song with a cutout pancake on his head…for whatever reason I found him hysterically funny. Andy is a very funny guy if you like his humor. We have been watching ever since….actually Sam was watching before as was my older son Forrest. Now, we all love Andy! I am not sure why.
Andy is in Wikipedia. Andy has a blog. Andy gets mentioned on other blogs. Andy is in USA Today. Andy is everywhere. What do you think?
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