The internet will spend less time trying to sell you things and more time helping you do things.

As evidence that the interactive space continues to trend more towards utility and away from Flash-heavy animation, I give you runpee.com, a site whose sole purpose is to identify the best times during movies to leave your theater seat and, as John Foster Dulles used to say, shake the dew off your lily. Above is the site’s scouting report on Star Trek.

What’s more, runpee.com will give you the low-down on what you missed while you were away. Despite excellent reviews, you will see that Star Trek nevertheless has multiple pee times available. Ridiculous though this all is, would you bet against the idea than an advertiser to step up to sponsor it? 7-11’s Big Gulp, perhaps?

If our civilization should last a thousand years, let men look back and say “this was their finest hour.”

Does the internet need a border fence to be profitable?

Brad Stone and Miguel Helft write in today’s New York Times that the exponential growth of internet usage in developing countries is bleeding the profit from many web-based companies. What’s happening is very simple: People in places like Turkey, Indonesia and India are spending extraordinary amounts of time on sites like YouTube and Facebook–far more than the average consumer in North America, Europe and Japan. They’re sucking up a tremendous amount of bandwidth. The problem with this is that thus far advertisers has placed little to no value on the eyeballs popular sites are attracting in the developing world. If these foreign consumers can’t or won’t buy their products, they don’t want to pay for reaching them.

As a result, the big online players have to ask themselves if growth that cannot be monetized is something they really want. It’s not out of the question that some of the most popular sites on the web will become restricted to residents of certain countries. Though this seems a betrayal of the egalitarian ethos of the internet, failing to make money is a betrayal of the reason the companies exist in the first place.

The mind-control helmet from Japan – Coming to you soon in a stylish trucker hat that’s guaranteed to wow the ladies

Scientists at the Honda Research Institute recently demonstrated an electronic helmet that allows the wearer to control a robot simply by thinking. Its inventors predict that “one day the mind-control technology will allow people to do things like turn air conditioning on or off and open their car boot without putting their shopping down.”

It seems to me they’re not thinking big enough. The e-commerce opportunities implied by this technology are staggering. Merely think about wanting something and your credit card will be charged for it. Catch a glimpse of a shiny gewgaw from the corner of your eye, and PayPal instantly bills you and ships it. Should this technology be perfected, it will be harder to get a license to run a direct-response TV spot than it is to purchase a shotgun. And rightfully so.

See the full story by Ian Sample here.

Twitter, real-time search and the integrity of information.

Some believe Twitter could find its business niche in the area of real-time search, something Google and its army of algorithms still don’t do particularly well. The only barrier between something happening on one side of the world and your knowing about it on the other is the time it takes to type 140 characters. See the full story from Technology Review here.

While I see the appeal of real-time search, the real need in the marketplace is for authoritative search. In other words, right now no one is really in the business of providing search results based on the integrity of the information returned. The interactive space is the greatest propagator of hoaxes, urban legends, rumor, innuendo, slipshod reporting and outright lies in the history of civilization. This has harmed countless people, causes and brands. Mark Twain said, ”a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.” Now technology has made lies faster still.

Is a move towards real-time search a good thing, or have we simply made it easier for the truth to be trampled by a stampede of tweets?

One billion Halo 3 matches = 63 CENTURIES of consumer engagement. Are any ad agencies listening?

Bungie.com is reporting that the one billionth match of Halo 3 was played on Saturday night. So just how much Halo 3 is that? If you added up all the time people have spent playing the game, it would come to more than 63 centuries. Yes, you read that correctly–more than 6,300 years. Yet for reasons that mystify me, most agencies continue to treat gaming as if it is some sort of fringe entertainment, and even more maddeningly, as if it is something that is only engaged in by 19-year-old dudes. 

1 billion matches. It doesn’t get much more mainstream than that. Even more importantly, the enormous popularity of gaming is a great argument for a new definition of media altogether. Media are no longer what consumers watch or read or listen to; nor are they what agency media departments buy. Media are what consumers do. They’re what consumers interact with. As advertising professionals, we have to realize that interactivity is fast becoming for than an option; it’s becoming an expectation. 

The most interesting interactive work has never been in the advertising world. It’s been in gaming, and that is not going to change in the foreseeable future. The fact is that advertising can’t possibly catch up. Its only chance is to integrate itself within the fabric of gaming. We’ve seen some of that already, of course, but nothing like what we’re going to see in coming years. The movie industry should gracefully step aside. It is a foregone conclusion that gaming will dwarf it.

See the full story on Halo 3’s one billionth match at bungie.com.

A hell of an idea from the Young Guns Awards

 

In the 21st century consumers are like great boxers, bobbing and weaving, blocking everything advertisers throw at them, stepping deftly out of the way at the last second. That’s why it’s so impressive to see an idea that nails a consumer where he is absolutely defenseless. This brilliant work from the Young Guns Awards seizes on a human weakness–in this case an almost universal impulse to “steal” free wireless access whenever we can find a network that isn’t password-protected–and turns it into a powerful idea that draws people inexorably to a program on the Discovery Channel. I won’t spoil it for you by putting more details here. Watch it for yourself. Really nice thinking. Thanks to Brad Meyers for the heads up on the link.

A weird trip down memory lane in honor of the stimulus package (if you’ll excuse the expression)

Check out this deeply strange interactive piece for a site called happytaxday that was done on my watch at Tribal DDB (Braden Bickle and Travis Staut did most of the heavy lifting, so blame them). It made the One Show in 2006. Thematically, it seems to fit in rather nicely with our current economic situation–i.e., our government’s having to beg for billions or even trillions of dollars. I’ll just leave it at that and allow you to experience it for yourself.

Roll over, Gutenberg. Step aside, Farnsworth. There’s a new sheriff in town.

The most serious flaw in advertising agencies today is their collective failure to understand the seismic shift in the media landscape. Interactive media don’t represent an incremental change to the media we already have. They are totally different, irreversible, unstoppable. 

Neil Postman founded a department of Media Ecology at NYU because he understood that the media we consume form a kind of ecosystem, which, when altered, will have winners and losers. Cory Doctorow has written a very smart piece on exactly this subject that should be required reading for every agency person in America. It’s called “Media-Morphosis: How the Internet Will Devour, Transform or Destroy Your Favorite Medium.” Check it out with all possible speed.

“An Angry Voice” is silenced in Egypt. Here’s why you should care.

For those of us who use interactive media to sell mayonnaise, beer and toilet bowl cleaners, it is easy to forget the political role of the technology–and specifically of blogging–in the developing world. By democratizing the tools of mass communication, the internet has given voices to those who were formerly silenced by repressive regimes that control the press.

When historians look back in 500 years, there is a good chance that bloggers will be recognized at the Jeffersons and Paines of our time–which is why it is disturbing to read a Reuters report on the arrest of yet another Egyptian blogger, Dia Eddin Gad. His blog, “An Angry Voice” is noted for its criticism of Egypt’s Gaza policy and President Hosni Mubarak.

“Dia Eddin Gad, 22, was detained on February 6 outside his home in the Nile Delta province of Gharbiya by security men who beat him as he screamed to his mother for help,” according to a statement released by Amnesty International. See the full story here.

Consider for a moment how terrifying it must be to live in a place where you can be arrested and very probably tortured (I will not provide a link to the oft-seen videos of the torture that goes on in Egyptian jails, though you can find them easily enough if you desire) for what you think.

Bill Bernbach said:

“All of us who professionally use the mass media are the shapers of society. We can vulgarize that society. We can brutalize it. Or we can help lift it onto a higher level.”

Sometimes lifting it to a higher level takes an extraordinary amount of courage–the kind of courage Dia Eddin Gad has shown by the simple act of saying what he believes. Let us remember that and also remember the extraordinary power of the tools in our hands when next we sit down to ply our craft.

Mark Cuban wants to fund your business idea. Really.

A lot of people don’t like billionaire Mark Cuban–founder of broadcast.com, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, unabashed competitor on Dancing with the Stars–but you have to admit he’s not boring. Take a look at his latest idea, the Mark Cuban Stimulus Plan–Open Source Funding. Basically, it boils down to this: He will invest money in business ideas (if he likes them) that people present for all to see (and use with no strings attached) in the comments section on his blog, blog maverick. There are a few conditions, of course, among them that the business must have break-even cash flow in 60 days and it cannot be a business model based on advertising revenue. 

So why is Cuban doing this? Basically, he wants to use technology to spread great ideas  that actually create value to stimulate the economy. Will this plan by itself make much of a dent in our economic morass? Probably not (though one must grant that it is theoretically possible Cuban could wind up funding the next great idea in the history of capitalism). Even so, what I love about this the way it leverages the interactive space to release a tremendous amount of creative energy into the marketplace. More companies should be following his lead to lift themselves out of the doldrums. 

In the future we’re going to see far more than consumer-generated advertising, we’re going to see consumer product, operations and strategy development. It might be a good idea for Detroit to start yesterday.