TV advertisements are using music and mobile app Shazam to create links from the ads to the products they are selling. What else can audio tagging do for us?

For a while now, Old Navy has teamed up with Shazam to provide what is essentially the audio version of QR codes to consumers watching the ad. Here’s a quick example.

Click here to view the embedded video.

It’s essentially another opportunity to make a sale. I’m assuming here that the point is to minimize the amount of time between see, want and buy. It’s also interesting because it’s specifically designed to hit the growing segment of consumers who watch the TV with smartphone or tablet in hand. Otherwise it would be pretty difficult to pull out the device, activate the app and buy Old Navy jeans.

What caught my attention more recently was the use of the same type of audio tagging with a Progressive insurance ad. It made me think, if you can use audio as a hyperlink with plain dialog, you can pretty much do it with anything.

As you may remember, I’ve been thinking about the potential of audio to enhance content. Specific audio can trigger memories, feelings or emotions because of what we associate with them. However, creators will be more targeted with our use of audio when we can use it to direct part of a transmedia experience. We’re now looking at the ability to link musical cues.

Image by yto via Flickr

So far the audio hyperlink experience has not been very creative. Shazam is using it to make faster sales. Then there is IntoNow, who have recently been in the news for using audio to connect TV viewers watching the same show. There are better ways we can use this technology.

As we build our panoply of devices we’re also building unique experiences for our tablets, phones and computers; hopefully ones that take advantage of the strengths of those devices. QR bar codes have been the most common link from one screen to another, but they are ugly and require a too long to lock. As a result they are completely useless on a moving medium like TV.

If we use audio tagging we can:

• Hide audio clues in a TV show or advertisement.
• Promote unique content through music.
• Use music as a gateway to a regularly updating site.
• Build audio into ARGs.
• Ask people to mix and match audio clips to discover a link.

That’s just what I can think of off the top of my head. In 1889, the Washington Post commissioned John Philip Sousa to compose The Washington Post March. Then, it was just some really unique branding. If they did it now, it could be an audio link into their web content and a way to stick their brand in people’s brains as efficiently as the latest Lady Gaga single.

The one downside? Both Shazam and IntoNow seem closed off. How do you add to their directory of recognized audio? It isn’t very apparent on their sites either. I suspect that means it costs serious money for advertisers like Old Navy.

How easy will it be for those seeking to use the service more creatively? It’s something that we need to think about. After all, I bet way more people have Shazam than a QR code reader.

Any other creative uses of audio hyperlinks you can think of?

Related articles

• Shazam is the Future of TV Advertising (track tv ads like PPC) (gettingmoreawesome.com)
• Shazam turns to lucrative TV ads (WSJ)
• Traction for Music-and-Shazam Ads That Replaced Old Navy’s Supermodelquins (Ad Age)
• Progressive Insurance, Shazam, and the Audio QR Code. What was the point? (in10sity)

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Hello all,

No big blog post today. I’ve spent most of the day traveling to NYC for the College Media Advisors spring 2011 conference. I’ll be presenting for a few workshops and it will be cool. I’ll have more up here about what I’m doing later. If you will be at CMANYC11, I look forward to seeing you. If not you can track it on Twitter via the hashtag #cmanyc11. You can also find them on Facebook.

If you’re in NYC and want to say hello, I’m in the area until the 20th of this month.

-Aram

Related posts:

1. Work and play in DC, NYC [Update]

I’ve been thinking of how to engage more of a participant’s senses as they read printed content. I’d really like to figure out a way to go beyond the standard tricks or video clips and animated text.

If you are not familiar with the term, a music cue is the use of sound, usually musical, to signal a performer to “carry out an action or deliver a line.” However, the practice has evolved quite a bit. We frequently hear certain types of music to introduce a moment or event in a movie. Such a modern musical cue might be a deep thumbing tone for the villain or a quick jaunty tune for the jester.

In the golden age of sitcoms the use of stings became common. Strings are a certain bit of music used on a regular basis to signal the entry of  a character or the end of a scene. Sometimes particular stings are used to identify people or types of events.

There was one big reason why musical stings became popular. They made viewers more aware of what was going on in a show without necessarily looking at the TV. You could be eating dinner or washing dishes and when a certain tone played, you’d know to look up and pay full attention to the screen.

Image via Wikipedia

Of course, it was no coincidence that a sting would occur right before a dramatic climax or end of the scene. In other words, right before the advertisements.

In the early days of internet media, advertisements exploited our tendency to pay attention when a particular sound played. Mostly these were pop-up ads. This was a horrible idea for many reason, it couldn’t be turned off. It was annoying. The sounds were tied to advertisements and there was really no other sound on the internet, or even your computer, and participants quickly stopped being fooled.

Since that greedy misstep, no has really tried to integrate sound into our browsing experience again. I wonder, if The New York Times had started playing sounds first, would we be using an internet with an ecosystem of sound?

So what options are open to us now?

Well, quite a few. We’d want to make it clear what was going on so that people could mute a site before it started playing, but we could still bring music into the browser.

Video games have played with adaptive music for years now. With adaptive code, music can change beat and tone automatically when certain events occur.

Perhaps pages could include some soft, low-key, background music that flourishes or goes into double-time when the user hits a trigger? Another alternative might simply be a few stings played when users mouse-over a link. The sound would alert them to important elements on a page.

Sound could be triggered by:

• mouse-overs
• scrolling to a certain place on a page
• clicking through a pagination link
• timers
• focusing on a window
• other types of interaction, like highlighting.
• key shortcuts

I imagine any site that implemented this would have some sort of standard controls in a small floating div alongside articles. It’s very important that it be optional and that participants have full control over volume and whether or not music is playing. It would be really cool if participants could decide the genre of music as well.

I’d love to give it a try on this site, but I don’t know how to implement it. I’ll give it a try if anyone else can figure it out though.

Trying to reach out to the sound part of our brain would be a great way to increase attention and engagement. I think it is worth a try at least. Let’s bring a bit of music to our online reading.

Can you think of any other ways to incorporate more sound into our browsing experience?

Preview image via.

Related posts:

1. Story arcs beyond TV [Thinking]
2. Old vs New Media – Creative Commons, Wikipeidia and Post Scraping – What is Grand Theft Content?
3. Remix Project [Assignment]

Borders’ bankruptcy is seen as a victory for e-books and the beginning of the end for brick-and-mortar booksellers, but it doesn’t have to be. Here’s how to build a better bookstore.

QR Codes

Every book on every shelf should have a QR code. I want to scan that QR code and give the bookstore an affiliation fee or buy it from your company’s online bookstore.

Stop dividing Brick-and-mortar and online sales into separate silos. You need to make online sales and not just for your own device. If someone wants to go into Barnes and Nobles and buy something for their Kindle, give them the sale, because otherwise you are just not going to get anything.

Image via Wikipedia

eBook Readers with cameras

See above. QR codes allow you to build an online dimension into your bookstore. Readers should be able to take advantage using the device they use to read. Cameras are cheap and you don’t need much processing power to read a QR code. Stick it on the back and let them fly.

Let me use a computer!

This drives me crazy. Why is it that in half of these stores only employees are allowed to search the store via keyboard? Why can’t I get on that computer and find the book I want?

I understand that brick-and-mortar bookstores make a lot of money from people browsing and seeing another book they wanted, but some just want to get in and out, give that to them if you want to provide a decent alternative to Amazon.

Even better, offer a free mobile application that lets me walk into a store and automatically access that store’s database on shelving and stock. You want to make more sales, put the “If you like this book, get these others” bit on that application. Make sure it tells you exactly where in the store to get them too.

Alter reality

While you are at it with the QR codes, give me the ability to find out more about the book. One camera snap should allow me to access videos, author interviews, reviews and more.

Build a Rotten Tomatoes for books

I want to see a conglomeration of reviews for each book. Really. Has no one done this yet?

Make register transactions social transactions

Provide a service for your customers that can automatically publish their purchase to Twitter, Facebook and GoodReads.

Be a book-trading hub

Barnes and Nobles supports lending books to friends, but only digital ones. Why? Provide a local book club or two with a meeting time and space. Support book trading by providing geo-aware postings for your customers.

Allow customers to give you books to give away for free. Don’t bother trying to become a used book trader, just have a bin of sticker-ed books that people give to you to give away. At the end of every month, donate what’s left in the bin. Besides good will, it gives people a reason to step through the door.

Specialize

Who buys music in a book store? I mean it may make for the rare top-of-mind purchase, but for the most part you can just move to digital distribution by the methods above. Stop the wasteful and profit-killing attempts to stock music and just concentrate on the book-selling thing.

Related articles

• Borders files for bankruptcy, plans to keep operating but close 30 percent of its stores (engadget.com)
• Kassia Krozser on “Bookstores now, more than ever” (teleread.com)

Related posts:

1. Friday synthesis post: Soundscapes and Bookstores
2. eBooks’ greatest obstacle is that they function like books
3. The Browser Future of Interactive Fiction

Current’s newest TV show, Bar Karma, is an evolution in storytelling. The show is a platform for community contributions, ideas and amplified cooperation. The creators leverage contributions, recommendations, pitches and votes through a platform created by video-game great Will Wright.

The project is powered by a tool called Storymaker, which would be very useful to journalists, video game developers and narrative designers.

You may not be familiar with Current TV, Al Gore’s television channel is not carried in the default package by all cable subscribers and is often ignored by other media outlets. It is best known for its focus on community created content. Current produces some pretty high quality shows, the most notable of which are Vanguard, an excellent documentary series, and infoMania, a clever cross between The Daily Show and The Soup.

As of this week, Current adds a new show to their lineup, Bar Karma. The show comes from the mind of SimCity creator Will Wright and ex-Nickelodeon president Albie Hecht. Oh and Current Creation Studio’s medium-sized community of story-writing hopefuls and invested contributer-viewers. The concept for the show itself came from Current’s contributors, as does every single episode, in various levels of detail.

The site provides web-based software called Storymaker to allow people to create story ideas, pitch episodes and create concepts for various in-show artifacts. Professional producers then take the community contributions and use them as the kernel around which to base a show. They also have used community ideas to build a mythology for the titular Bar Karma creating an ever-expanding playground for contributors.

The first episode premieres this Friday and only then will we really begin to get a sense of if Bar Karma will be a success. I’d recommend watching it. All that being said, the most interesting part of Bar Karma is not the cast, producers or the community on the site. It’s the tool.

Storymaker: a serious tool for communities, multi-thread storylines and group content creation

I’ve spent a few weeks exploring the Bar Karma site, even trying out its iPad application. It is no exaggeration when I say that Storymaker is one of the most fascinating story-building tools I’ve ever seen. It provides excellent functionality in three areas: story-building, contribution display and community management.

Building narratives with Storymaker

Building narratives with Storymaker’s cards tool is one of the most organic experiences you can have. Each card represents around one minute of screen time and allows you to add an image from an easy search tool to help visualize any given scene. You can create descriptions of scenes, or out-and-out screen-play style text.

Storymaker Card View

Each card can be commented on, reported or individually recommended. Writing in each card is easy and mostly error-free. In writing 30 cards, I experienced data loss three times, but it was because I was frequently clicking in and out of Storymaker with multiple screens, copying and pasting for spellcheck. It’s not a normal use case and it is no longer required, as they seem to have now integrated spellcheck into the system.

When looking at an individual scene, you can even shuffle other people’s cards, to see what they’ve suggested. The system is aware of other cards in the same position and allows for threads to emanate from cards at any level of the system.

Storymaker tree view

The story tree view gives you a view of the various storylines in the system, allowing you to see various branches of stories from each points and all the available scene cards, via the visualization image. Besides being used for community-empowered storytelling, Storymaker could be an excellent way to plan out complex multi-branching storylines that are common to modern video games. It would also be useful for showing a timeline of events, how one event spurred a series of other occurrences, literally visualizing the chain reactions in history. It could be a great tool for journalists who want to break down complex stories into simple sets of events.

Storymaker’s pitch system

The tool seems to handle two types of content: short and long pitches. With short pitches, users throw out a brief idea which can then be recommended by other viewers. There is a maximum length and multiple short pitches are often created by the same person. The other type of pitch uses Storymaker’s primary function. You create your collection of cards and submit them for viewing by other users.

A Storymaker submission

Once submitted it shows up in the pitch request’s thread and can be shared, printed or ‘played.’ In the latter, users can choose one of three speeds and watch the story play itself automatically. They can also flip through the individual cards themselves, scrolling through any long text.

Recommendations and Community building with Storymaker

Storymaker presents a positive-only system for dealing with members of the community. There are no opportunities to vote or be voted down, instead you can only recommend content or choose not to recommend it. In addition, threaded commenting is present throughout the system, to allow you to comment on pitches, cards and full on storyboards.

Recommendations, along with selections and credits from the producers, display on a leaderboard.

You can vote on your own content only once and numbers are not displayed next to the content itself, though you can order most threads by ‘Most Recommended.’

Overall, I suspect that the positive reenforcement is highly beneficial to the community. If there was any backbiting or anger displayed, I didn’t see it in my browsing.

The future?

Very soon we’ll see just how much of the community input is taken into account in the first few episodes of Bar Karma. I suspect that will decide whether the show is a success of failure. I intend to post about this again once I’ve seen the first episode.

Either way, the Storymaker tool is really something remarkable. I’d love to see Current and Will Wright open source it, or at least give away a package that others can play with on their own.

Preview image via

Related articles

• Help Chart the Course of Current TV’s Bar Karma (dreadcentral.com)
• Current TV Begins Production on Original Drama Series, ‘Bar Karma’ (tvbythenumbers.zap2it.com)
• Will Wright Wants YOU to Choose What Happens In ‘Bar Karma’ (screenrant.com)
• Sims Creator Working On TV Show [The Sims] (kotaku.com)
• Will Wright Takes the Sims to Current TV With Bar Karma (wired.com)

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Image via Wikipedia

AOL has announced that it will acquire the Huffington Post and place Arianna Huffington as AOL’s editor in chief. What does this mean for the media, the future of content creation and the internet at large?

1. The portal is dead.

Ten or more years ago, AOL and Yahoo, among others, staked their profits on the idea that a single curated site would be the way we would interact with content on the internet. It’s clear now that they couldn’t have been more wrong.

Your interactions online now come automated at the courtesy of your social graph. We find content through our friends and sites or apps that build on their actions.

All you have to do is take a look at the front page of HuffPo to know that Arianna Huffington is all about the verticals. The single-page single-site model is officially dead. But that doesn’t mean that one company can’t become your only stop for news.

2. AOL wants to own your consumption at all levels.

It’s ironic that only after leaving Times-Warner has AOL started looking to control your entire media input. With the rapidly expanding Patch covering hyper-local news and Huffington Post covering general national news, AOL is building a serious content ecosystem.

Endgadget, TechCruch and PopEater all show AOL’s attempts to target the niche market of content as well.

It’s clear that AOL is angling to have content for everything you could have an interest in, from the very local to the broadest national news. From here on out, you may not use a portal to find AOL content, but you will still be reading it.

3. The content farm is on its way out, long live citizen journalists.

It’s doubtful that Arianna Huffington will preside over a Demand Media-style content farm. What’s far more likely is that she will turn her signature citizen reporting strategy loose on AOL’s various web properties.

Despite AOL’s recent moves in the content farm direction, their acquisition of HuffPo means that they will be home to serious amounts of freely contributed content. Since Huffington has continually been one of the biggest proponents of citizen journalism, it’s almost certain that she will bring it to AOL in a big way.

This is great news for citizen reports and bloggers whose only wish is to have their content writ large across the web. It’s also really bad news for the growing number of unemployed professional journalists, who have, in desperation, tried to eek out a meager salary from content farming. On the plus side, Patch is hiring.

4. Journalists can have public opinions. In fact, they should.

Arianna Huffington’s success comes from a number of things, but the overriding signature of her work is her passion. Huffington is frequently on record supporting the things she cares about and the way she believes the media should work. Her passion is what made Huffington Post a success and I doubt she will stop doing the things that made her and her site newsworthy.

In fact, it was both her loud voice in politics and in media policy that attracted others to her site and motivated them to build content. Huffington’s zeal continues to do more to power Huffington Post than the site’s CMS, software or server.

It’s more clear now then it has ever been that the future of journalism lies far more in emotion than in clinical reporting.

5. AOL isn’t a joke anymore.

For a while AOL had become a bit of a dot-com punch line. They didn’t have good content, they didn’t have an understanding of web 2.0. They didn’t have a strategy. They didn’t know how to make money.

Well, that’s over now. AOL is on its way to becoming an online media giant to rival any of the traditional companies out there. When it comes to figuring out strategy and monetization they are now the ones to watch.

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3. Boolean Logic: How to Search the Web [Re-post]

If you haven’t been watching Kirby Ferguson’s excellent Everything is a Remix videos, here’s a quick collection and some links to the excellent documentary. We often talk about remixed media as if it were something new to our culture. However, in these extremely informative videos Ferguson traces the modern remix back to 1961 and walks you through a history of cultural reuse that is both fascinating and required consuming for anyone creating content today.

Everything is a Remix from Kirby Ferguson on Vimeo.

Everything is a Remix Part 2 from Kirby Ferguson on Vimeo.

Robert Grigsby elaborates on Kill Bill as a remix.

Everything Is A Remix: KILL BILL from robgwilson.com on Vimeo.

Find out more about the series of videos and remix culture at Ferguson’s website. You can also find the video’s creator on Twitter.

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3. Remix Project [Assignment]

I attended another great DC Media Makers event tonight. There were two presentations, one on Crisis Camp, and one on the video blog project Why Tuesday. Both were excellent. Worth noting were some fascinating GPS and QR projects. Also, the Why Tuesday video, which I hadn’t heard of before, was just fantastic.

Sorry you missed it? Well there are some Qik videos, by Dave Saunders, of DC Media Makers right here:

Related posts:

1. Work and play in DC, NYC [Update]
2. Gore Verbinski Talks About Video Games
3. Link Roundup: The importance of blogs and blog-like interactions for journalism sites

Check out my video presentation on how to use free web tools for better journalism.

A little while back, UPIU scheduled me to present a workshop at the Southeast Journalism Conference this year. Unfortunately, due to all the snow here in the DC area, I wasn’t able to escape to Louisiana. However, I did make the presentation using a set of remote tools to livestream to SEJC2010. Here’s the poster advertising the event:

Research to Release Poster

As you can see the topic was how to use freely available web tools and software to create a better process for journalism, from research, to writing, to publishing. From what I’ve heard, people seemed to like it. So for your viewing pleasure, I’m embedding it here. Following is my screencast (length about 1 hour 45 min) Research to Release for SEJC2010 on behalf of UPIU.

Link package: http://bit.ly/sejclinks2010

Related posts:

1. Remix Linkin Park [Press Release]
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3. Putting the I in Journalism