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Today, Wired launched its highly anticipated iPad edition. While the Wired content itself was designed for the iPad experience, over 80% of the ads were either brochureware or simply had a URL to an external website. Did advertisers miss an opportunity to make a big splash?
This morning I downloaded the app and took a browse through the experience. I wrote about my findings on Hill Holliday’s blog.
When I heard the other day that Namco’s popular arcade game, Pac-Man, was turning 30, I had to do a double take. How was that possible?
I remember, like it was yesterday, the anticipation of the occasional Sunday night family jaunt to Louisa’s Pizza (which, at the time, had an adjacent arcade room). My brother and I burned through quarters playing Centipede, Galaga, and, of course, Pac-Man while waiting for our Pizza. But that was the early 1980s and it’s now 2010.
Video games (and their respective marketing opportunities) have come a long way in the past 30 years as my colleague Ilya Vedrashko illustrates so well. And with Microsoft’s Project Natal finally coming to fruition by this year’s holiday season, the user-experience bar and marketing potential will be raised even higher.
But I must admit, as I played around with Google’s in-banner Pac-Man tribute (and stunningly accurate recreation of the game), I found myself drawn in.
Was it nostalgia? Maybe. Or was it a simple elegance that, for a very brief moment, gave me pause from just how complicated (yet amazing) life, as enabled by technology, has become. (So he says as he downloads Pac-Man to his iPad ;-)
So happy 30th birthday, Pac-Man – your yellow skin is still as wrinkle free as ever.
I cross-posted this on Hill Holliday's blog.
Earlier tonight, Betty White made her hugely anticipated debut as host of Saturday Night Live as a result of a campaign on Facebook resulting in over 500,000 people joining the Betty White to Host SNL (please?)! group.
And in her opening Monologue, what started out as a seemingly genuine thank you to her fans on Facebook quickly turned into a rant about how Facebook is a waste of time.
“I have so many people to thank for being here. But I really have to thank Facebook. When I first heard about the campaign to get me to host Saturday Night Live, I didn’t know what Facebook was. And now that I do know what it is, I have to say, it sounds like a huge waste of time. I would never say that people on it are losers, but that’s just because I’m polite.”
Did her remarks offend people? It doesn’t seem so. The comments on Twitter all seem very positive and fans raved about her performance tonight. This, so far, is an opposite response to when William Shatner hosted SNL in 1986 and in a sketch about a Star Trek convention told a group of “trekkies” to “get a life.” And back then, there was no Twitter to create an instant groundswell.
The best line in her monologue? “Needless to say, we didn’t have Facebook when I was growing up. We had Phonebook but you wouldn’t waste an afternoon on it.”
And using Google Insights for Search to help predict interest over time, it's clear that at 88.5 years old, Betty White has blasted off once again.
