Visiting Google HQ

On Monday morning, fully half the Zeitgeist team awoke from its slumber, left its abode and walked the 15-minute walk to Mecca. While not a dedicated fanboy, the integral part this company has played in the evolution of the Internet over the past decade, (Zeitgeist first remembers using their search engine in 1999), is undeniable. The morning would be spent in the hallowed halls of Google HQ. Mobile advertising for the Android platform would be the focus.

After munching on a croissant, downing an Earl Grey and meandering past the ice cream delivery bicycle, Zeitgeist was talked at by Ian Carrington, Amanda Rosenberg, Reto Meier, Scott Seaborn from that indefatigable ad agency Ogilvy and from IconMobile; Steve Griffiths.

Given the high volume of iPhones-to-people ratio in the room, it was not best to start off the morning with a non-so-subtle jibe at the aforementioned device. However this was indeed how the morning started; these jibes became the sine qua non of the whole event. Given the current regulatory scrutiny Google’s search empire faces regarding Net Neutrality, any hubris around ‘open source’ might have also have been best kept checked, yet there it was. Those who persevered in their listening heard that 2010 was indeed the year of the mobile. For some it may have seemed like they had been stuck in an echo chamber; every year since at least 2005 has been deemed ‘the year of the mobile’, occasionally with the suffix “but this time it really is!”. Zeitgeist would not care to argue with the statement though, as finally consumer desire and the corporate technology to suit that desire seem to be approaching an optimum. Last Christmas, there was a sale on eBay through a mobile device every two seconds. We were told that “Everything Google do, we have a mobile version of”. Despite this poor syntax, this was an impressive statement; something simple and logical, but surely something that only a very small number of companies could lay claim to.

Google’s director of mobile advertising said that the company’s mantra when developing new products was now “mobile first”, again, an impressive affirmation when you really think about it. Currently there are fifty times as many searches performed on smartphones vs merely WAP-enabled handsets. So the iPhone, Android platform and its myrmidons are clearly providing a better user experience for consumers, that they in turn are utilising – though it will be interesting to see whether the soon-to-be-introduced data tariffs will have any impact on this. This may not be the year of the mobile, but it certainly is the year when futureproofing becomes a sound investment: In 2013, smartphone sales are predicted to overtake PC sales, which will coincide with mobile internet use overtaking desktop computer use. It’s quite plausible by then that such distinctions between types of computers will be even fuzzier than now, (iPhone, iPad, netbook, laptop, desktop) if not moot.

Google is currently in the throes of redesigning its Android application store, currently with 60,000 apps and growing (compared to Apple’s 250,000+). Apps are an interesting phenomenon. With Apple’s initial inception, they are now quite the hot item, the thing your client’s clamour after without knowing exactly why. Yet what service do they provide? According to the meeting yesterday, 95% of Apple’s apps are not used after twenty days. For Windows’ part, half of the ‘Marketplace for Mobile’ apps are made by Microsoft, suggesting they have some way to go before accruing a wide, collaborative audience. The utility of an app, it was suggested to the audience yesterday, could be one of two things; engagement or purchase. Your app is there to either enhance the brand (like Chanel or Dior) or to encourage purchase (Argos). Time, lack thereof and frequency are also a large contributing factor to an app’s use. Simply put, it would not be worth someone’s while to download the Expedia app to their phone in order to book a single flight. It would, however, be of use to a regular traveller.

The audience was later shown a graph showing mobile and desktop search queries throughout an average day, with troughs and peaks mirrored between the two systems. Google stated they were not sure whether mobile search had a cannabilisation effect on desktop search, and that they “don’t care”.

We were then treated to a presentation by Amanda who delved into the world of Android-capable handsets. This included voice search – asking the phone directly “What are the best restaurants for breakfast near Union Square in San Francisco?” led to a satisfying list of responses – and voice text; unfortunately punctuation is something that remains almost impossible to do by voice, currently. There was also an example of Google Goggles, which, as well as being able to identify a building from a picture taken by a user, can also scan hard copy text, translate it and then pronounce it for you. All of which, except for the semantics of context, was most impressive.

Scott Seaborn then stepped up to the plate, going through some interesting case studies of mobile advertising. Two in particular caught Zeitgeist’s eye. The first was the Seer app that IBM updated for this year’s Championships at Wimbledon. This interesting video from the somnambulistic “Click” show on the BBC details the amazing thing that OgilvyOne’s app can achieve. Also quite fun was the new Coke Zero iPhone app called The Cleaner, soon to be released.

Steve from WPP’s Iconmobile brought up some similarly interesting case studies. The first of which was for T-Mobile as it attempted to encourage paperless billing with a great mobile initiative that involved “green” perks. The other highlight was that of a North Face campaign in China, which won a Silver Lion at Cannes. An interesting co-incidence of brand and region, as most Chinese people are currently gravitating to an urban life, and do not traditionally treat hiking or mountain-climbing as a past-time.

We then heard more about the Android platform. 160k devices that support Android are activated daily now. One of the nicer features that Zeitgeist saw was the enablement of cross-app usage. A user could be browsing through nearby restaurants on one app. Upon finding the one they want and clicking on a button in the app to book a table, the user would then be taken straight to the OpenTable app, which would immediately display the available times and tables for the restaurant you were just looking at on a separate application. While convenient and a nice move, this does present a potential hindrance for advertisers if users begin to navigate through the web merely by going from proprietary app to app rather than using a browser where they would be exposed to more advertising.

Conversely, the expandable ads that will begin to appear on Android platforms while surfing looked great, especially for things like films (the example we saw was for Adam Sandler’s Funny People). Lastly, we saw the new ‘Navigation’ app, which is currently only available in the US. Its map system allowed for alerts to the user for nearby amenities on their chosen route, e.g. cinemas, restaurants, etc. Interestingly, it also allowed for sponsored layers, meaning advertisers could put specific flags down on the map for particular promotions, to encourage people to take advantage of en route to their final destination.

As for Google’s final destination? Well, we’ll save that for a future article.

Nintendo’s Nemesis & Evolution

“All is unceasing and rigorous competition in nature”, said the Marquis de Sade. Rivalries come and go, it is the victor who must with each success continue to innovate and ultimately change, enduring the onslaught of new competitors. Yahoo vs Google, Microsoft vs Google, WPP vs Google and more recently Apple vs Google and Apple vs Amazon vs Google; in similar circumstances, we have gone from Sega vs Nintendo, to Sony vs Nintendo, to Apple vs Nintendo.

Apple themselves have pushed beyond their preliminary battle with Microsoft to a place where they now court multiple rivals in all the different markets that they affect with products like iTunes, the App Store and Apple TV. Steve Jobs, in September last year, said that the iPod touch was being released with gamers in mind after having had much feedback from the public as to what they used the device for. This was part of the reason why the iPod touch was cameraless, unlike its smaller, cheaper cousin. Nintendo must have known it was only a matter of time until their paths would cross…

Zeitgeist has very fond memories of inadvertently reshaping the bones in his thumbs while playing the Mario Brothers trilogy for hours and hours back in the day. The Nintendo Entertainment System, their first console, was fantastically successful. Somewhere along the way, however, the company got a bit lost. The turnabout it managed thanks to the Wii (and to a lesser extent the DS) is extraordinary; Sony and Microsoft saw share of their respective PlayStation and X-box platforms gradually erode to give Nintendo a position of dominance, becoming the market leader less than a year after its launch; PSFK named it one of their top ten brands of 2010. In the last week though, Nintendo have reported an earnings drop – its first in four years – hurt by slow sales of the Wii and possibly effected by piracy as well, according to Le Monde. Just as Apple are encroaching on Nintendo’s sovereign territory, the reverse is also true, as Nintendo have been offering Netflix movie rentals for a while now. Will the DS soon be facing off against the iPhone, iPod and iPad? According to Le Monde, in 2008 Apple’s iPhone represented 5% of the gaming market, Nintendo 75%. Today the iPhone’s share is 19%, Nintendo’s 70%. It is the casual nature of its games that made the DS and Wii appeal to a market that other consoles never even considered. Now though, those casual gamers are equally at home playing on an app on their iPhone, as well as on Farmville on Facebook. Variety says, (emphasis added),

“More than 32 million people tend their virtual crops each day, and the game has a total user base of 80 million. That’s roughly seven times the number of people who play the online smash ‘World of Warcraft’.”

Of course, rivalries like this will become increasingly common in this sector, as technology platforms – what the great Lawrence Lessig calls “layers” – continue to converge, allowing for excellent, mutiple functionality on one product (look at the iPad as an example). Somewhat counterintuitively, customers may not readily embrace this convergence, as behavioural economics tells us that people put more trust in a product that performs one dedicated task well; they assume anything else will be somehow diluted. Neither Nintendo or Apple should fret, exciting times are ahead. There is speculation in the Le Monde article, among others, that Nintendo should take the fight to Apple by releasing its own phone. Zeitgeist would find that a real treat. Almost much as much of a treat as the original Japanese advert for Super Mario Bros. 3. Enjoy.

Turning the Screw

Increasingly, there seems to be an Orwellian slant to the machinations of the Internet. Last summer, early adopters of the Kindle and fans of George Orwell would probably have been rather frustratingly struck by the irony of waking up to find their library somewhat diminished. As one blog writes,

“In George Orwell’s “1984,” government censors erase all traces of news articles embarrassing to Big Brother by sending them down an incineration chute called the “memory hole.” On Friday, it was “1984” and another Orwell book, “Animal Farm”, that were dropped down the memory hole – by Amazon.com.”

Another blog notes that the Kindle is “basically a device that Amazon controls that you just happen to have in your hands.” The novels were removed after being added by a company that did not have the sufficient rights to them. This may be sufficient reason to remove the product from the store; it does not, however, excuse the way in which Amazon went about systematically removing copies that were on owner’s devices, who had already paid them. The incident was noted in a more recent editorial in the FT, evincing a mounting ownership creep on behalf of major corporations. Now, more than ever, when products are not only files on your desktop but stored remotely in a cloud, a consumer’s rights to ownership have never felt less tangible.

Apple, specifically its App Store, has recently come under fire again, this time for the removal of adult apps. Some adult-themed apps, such as the Playboy app, will remain available. It is the thought of Apple acting not only as moral arbiter, but also in an ad hoc manner with that responsibility, which should give consumers cause for concern. If someone creates an app or wants to distribute a book online in the future, will they hesitate to share their innovation and creativity for fear it could be summarily deleted at will by a fickle corporation? TechCrunch has a fascinating and well-written article here on the removal by Google of many music blogs that were deemed under the DCMA to be infringing on intellectual property. Again, as in the Kindle case, it is less the justification of the action (although this can also be disputed), and more the way it was done that is inexcusable.

In the Communist nirvana that is China, things are worse. Le Monde reports that though the country is on the brink of launching IPv6, allowing people to create and type in URLs using Chinese characters, the government is also imposing draconian measures for those wishing to set up websites. The government already restricts access to sites such as BBC News, Facebook and Twitter. In the past two weeks, they have also asked that anyone wishing to open a web site must present themselves before the authorities with their identity card and photographs of themselves, ostensibly to combat pornography. Not only is this measure entirely unnecessary and completely antithetical to the libertarian principles of the Internet, but from a practical standpoint it is wildly inefficient and will certainly stifle innovation. The UK government’s initial plans for censuring those who share files illegally have been, for the moment, stayed.

Conversely, these same bodies are not operating with impunity, even in situations where arguably they are not to blame. Three Google executives were convicted in Italy at the end of last month. The charge, Reuters reported, was “violating the privacy of an Italian boy with autism by letting video of him be posted on the site in 2006.” Quite how it was decided that those hosting the video – on a site that apparently serves a billion videos every day – could possibly have responsibility for it is beyond Zeitgeist. The New York Times writes “It suggests that Google is not simply a tool for its users, as it contends, but is effectively no different from any other media company, like newspapers or television, that provides content and could be regulated”. One of the accused, global privacy counsel Peter Fleischer, commented that if employees were “criminally liable for any video on a hosting platform, when they had absolutely nothing to do with the video in question, then our liability is unlimited.” Despite corporate overreach in some areas, sometimes the judicial system can be just as harsh on those same corporations. The insight is that what goes around, comes around.

App Store celebrates first birthday

From the August Zeitgeist…

Apple’s App Store recently celebrated its first anniversary, and not long afterwards crossed a similarly momentous watershed of recording 1.5 billion downloads. With a little calculator work, this turns out to be over 4 million applications every single day, and just under 50 downloaded every second worldwide, for iPhone and iPod touch models, “creating an ecosystem that any technology company would envy” says eConsultancy.

The immense popularity of the App Store is evidence of the current industry shift from focusing on hardware to software. The iPhone, somewhat unexpectedly, became about much more than Apple’s sleek design and functionality, instead incorporating a user generated aspect, allowing the phone to do anything you want it to. In other words, this was customisation as personalisation, making your product bespoke. It has led to the development of some extraordinary applications, from picking a restaurant – perhaps you could look up your nearest Pizza Hut? – to organising your whole night out.

Just as the Internet in its youth has been compared to a Wild West, so it is now with the app store; Apple has to individually approve or deny every app that passes its way, often on a very ad hoc basis (witness recent deliberation over the first pornographic application). This should serve as a warning for any clients that wish to make apps that are controversial or risk making Apple functionality redundant.

Two recent iPhone applications do a great job of illustrating the potential use brands can make of the handset. The first makes use of augmented reality to embed the app’s own graphics onto real-world imagery displayed through the camera. Click here for a video. As VentureBeat explains, “When a user holds the iPhone flat, it shows all 13 lines of the London Underground. Then as you tilt the phone up, the application shows what direction the stops are in and their distance.” The possibilities for combining the iPhone camera with augmented reality could lead to some very engaging campaigns for clients. To see how augmented reality can literally alter the way we see advertising, click here.

Another recently released app is the first to be  integrated with a Blu-ray disc, for the latest incarnation of that bastion of mediocrity, The Fast and the Furious franchise. There is a “Virtual Car Garage” you can control, and integration with Facebook and Twitter that will appear on future films as well (i.e. “Jordi is watching Balto III: Wings of Change”).

Embracing such synthesis of product over multiple platforms offers brands who can provide engaging content the opportunity to increase interaction with consumers.