Bribe, Steal, and Cheat your way to Global Soccer Domination!

If not for ASM, you might have never heard of Zynga or Mafia Wars.

Totally not true, of course. The reigning don of social gaming companies, Zynga boasts 7 of the top 10 social games and 240 million players every day. That’s better than twice the viewership the Super Bowl gets. Every. Single. Day.

So when Zynga called ASM on our untraceable disposable encrypted cell phone, we answered.  Their challenge to us: plug ASM’s brand of digital storytelling into the most viral entertainment platform ever (social gaming) to engage Mafia Wars’ 18 million monthly users while helping Zynga conserve its engineering resources. The result: a series of MW challenge missions that take players on adventures through the underside of the world’s hotspots.

The first ASM-designed mission Zynga rolled out: London. The caper: Gather a crew of master thieves, ingratiate your crew with the UK’s most feared gang, kidnap a member of the royal family, and use the resulting chaos to snatch one of the crown jewels and whisk it off to a billionaire buyer in India.

The next mission, live this week: a mission pegged a certain global sporting event taking place in South Africa. The job this time: Blackmail the head of the mineworkers union, then… well, you’ll have to find out for yourselves. Go to http://mafiawars.com and in the “travel” tab, select South Africa, and dive in.

Look for more challenge missions in the months to come.

If I Can Dream’s Alex Lambert absolutely nails the National Anthem before the Dodgers game on Flag Day.

Attention Span Media has been working with Jabra to create and launch their first ever video campaign.  The goal was to bring awareness that mobile phone users don’t have to suffer from the inconvenience of or pain caused by continually holding their phone to the ear. In fact, cellbow is not just a catchy way to convince people to use Jabra hands-free bluetooth devices. It is also an actual clinical ailment with a medical term – cubital tunnel syndrome.

To help Jabra get the word out about cellbow, ASM created and produced these two videos which are available on YouTube and other video sites. To reach customers most likely in need of hands-free help, we helped create a “GotCellbow” microsite, where audiences can send a version of the video directly to friends’ mobile devices – via MMS – for a chance to win a Macbook Air, iPhones or Jabra devices.  We brought in MMS platform Mogreet to handle this task.

As a global brand, Jabra needed to reach global audiences, so we created the videos in 8 different languages: English, Russian, Japanese, Italian, French, German and Chinese (traditional and simplified text).

The Waiting Room



Several patients realize they’re suffering from the same ailment. Tingly forearm…numb fingers…stiff elbow? They’re obviously doing *something* too much…

Where does Cellbow hurt? The Prescription

Are you suffering from Cellbow? Jabra can help. Talk to your doctor about what Jabra can do for you. Actually, don’t talk to your doctor…

On the Set

More Prescription set photos: http://jkhstudio.com/vuex/jabra_production2/

More Waiting Room set photos at http://jkhstudio.com/vuex/jabra_production/

As most users of FourSquare would probably agree, there is something catchy about earning that mayorship or unlocking that “all-nighter” badge.  At the very least, that type of functionality has caught the attention of technorati, VC-firms and most other major social networks.  I believe they, in turn, are hoping it catches on with local businesses and brands. Some are dabbling.

Yet, this brand dabbling in the FourSquare ecosystem, for example, is also highlighting what I view as the platform’s shortcomings.  In one tactic, being the mayor of a location seems to entitle you to preferential treatment and discounts from that location. The Starbucks nearest our office is offering a $1-off frappuccino to the mayor this week.  But there are two problems with that:

First, who has time to bother with trying to be the mayor of that Starbucks?  I mean, I’ve checked in there 13 times, and the mayorship is nowhere in sight as far as I can tell. If I’m up against the same half-dozen screenwriters/knitters/sitters [or baristas!] that occupy the place day after day – would I ever be able to catch up?  If the masses don’t know where the goal line is, or see it as too far away, they won’t play the game.

Further, and perhaps even more problematic from a brand perspective, why does Starbucks want to entreat the customers that are already there all day, every day – who are hunkered down in that coveted corner table, using free wi-fi and preventing other, (paying) customers from enjoying a spot to work for an hour?  Even more, just because they are using FourSquare all day doesn’t mean they are social media mavens influencing more people to come buy a frappuccino. More likely, they are quite the opposite.

Is there a future for niche mobile services?  I haven’t used it much, but a new service called SCVNGR could be the way forward.  Unlike simply having checkins and mayorships, the SCVNGR framework allows unique ‘challenges’ and ‘treks’ that institutions, stores and brands can set up on their own. For instance, an adventure set up by MIT around their campus awards points for visiting a set of campus hotspots. Plus extra points for scavenging activities – taking pictures of specific statues, commenting on a certain professor, etc. that are shared with the app and potentially beyond.

The SCVNGR model allows for a greater diversity of activity, a more diverse user pool – and a more invigorating brand incentive.  Would a 7 year old be intrigued by FourSquare?  No. Would they do a SCVNGR hunt around the Museum of Fine Arts? Yes.

In the near term, FourSquare would do itself a favor by taking a page out of the Twitter handbook – make mayorships tied to trending and untrench early-adopters. Or add city council seats. Without doing something differently, with only 3% of the public knowing who they are, they risk losing their preciously-small userbase.

Boston, MA

San Fran, CA

The story’s main question: whether AOL’s Seed initiative can produce high-quality content at the massive scale needed to move the AOL needle, or whether the economics of search-engine-tailored content dictate that we will be increasingly inundated with mediocre content written for search bots rather than for people.

I think there’s some good news here. Facebook’s hotly-debated “open graph” and their kudzu-esque “Like” system may not be great for privacy, but they are definitely great for making it easy to see where the awesomeness is on the Web, according to the people you care most about.

The “Like” button, thanks to its ease of use — a single click to connect web-wide content to your Facebook friends’ news feeds — is a major new element in the “Activity Streams” field.

Google’s link-based index was nicely characterized in 2003 by John Battelle as “The Database of Intentions.” Battelle, as you’ll see from that link (!), has added social data like status updates, social graph info and location check-ins under the DBoI umbrella.

But I think that the grand summation of activity data warrants a notional database of its own: The Database of Attention. It’s a database that grows exponentially faster than the link-based DBoI of old, and the exact time that each action occurs becomes a far more critical factor in the DBoA.

Think about it: you are discovering more and more through seeing (via social activities) what your friends and idols are watching, reading, listening to and buying — and less through search query results. Another commenter on the Economist story reported that social sites are generating 10% to 25% of one publisher’s inbound traffic. That will continue to increase.

More good news, however – Google knows this better than anyone, and, rest assured, is on the case and is sucking in huge volumes of public social activity already. This means that activity streams will become an ever-greater factor in delivering good search results, and as a result, the level of content that ends up in search results should ALSO continue to rise.

Here’s the comment from the Economist story – since you’ve come this far, I’ll save you a click:

Facebook’s new web-wide “Like” function is going to help here. Demand Media and Associated Content crank out stories written, literally, for machines. It’s a smart play by those publishers in a world where discovery is governed by [link-based] search algorithms. But increasingly, discovery of content is being guided by human activity (Facebook “likes” and wall posts, tweets pointing to videos, etc). Social news sites like Digg and Reddit were the first step. Bing and Google have already begun inhaling and incorporating these social actions into their search systems. Until the next Demand Media figures out how to game the social stream (“Like-farming” replacing “click-farming” perhaps?) excellent content has a chance to rise above the mediocre search-oriented content generated by content farms.

With this belief from the outset, we honed our practices with our show “Dorm Life” and are now deploying the same practices – and a lot of new stuff – on the post-reality “If I Can Dream” project for 19 Entertainment.

Our new BFF Lisa Stanforth, one of the Superfans of both DL and IICD just published a great piece on Superfandom from the perspective of a fan. Check it out here:

The Blonde Blogette: the power of superfans.

Lisa kicks off her coverage of the project with the above post and video, an amazing guided tour and user’s guide to the IICD house titled “There Are People Living In My Computer,” which is one awesome way to describe the experience.

Then she follows with weekly episode recaps. How good are they? Well, we’re working on the show and we sometimes use Lisa’s posts as a reference guide when we need to remember where each IICD artist’s story was in a given week.

We’re doing some final testing of the interactive Twitter system, and are seeing and hearing members of the press in the house interviewing the artists.

The questions the artists are getting about what it’ll be like to live in front of live cameras 24 hours a day have the ring of questions you’d ask astronauts or deep-sea explorers on the eve of a voyage. The answers are appropriate for a small crew about to blast off into a region of unprecedented levels of contact with the audience:

not sure exactly what we’ll find there, but excited and hoping for the best. Here we go…

“People preferred e-mailing articles with positive rather than negative themes, and they liked to send long articles on intellectually challenging topics.

Perhaps most of all, readers wanted to share articles that inspired awe.”

omgzam.com, Online Media Gazette, Feb 2010

We find that when the social object (say, Dorm Life) and the folks interacting with that social object (say, the Dorm Life fans) are both awesome, the effect is an exponential increase in content-sharing.

Now that is good science.

[photo credit: cogdog]