I never would have thought I would say this, but GE has an innovative solution. They're calling it the One-Second Theater. It's a hidden short slideshow inside their regular, 30-second ads.
With a DVR, you can pause a recording of the ad and click forward through each frame to read the slides. You could see how too much of this could get annoying, but for now, it's a clever idea. I just spent much longer than 30 seconds reading GE's latest one-second theater during an episode of the Apprentice, and then of course I'm making it a viral meme by blogging about it (hence the name of this post).
Understanding how people use and will use TiVo is not impossibly hard. Occasionally there's hidden jokes in the Daily Show for freeze-framers, usually at the expense of people who use TiVos (The Simpsons' writing staff called these "VCR jokes".)
Still, advertisers forget that DVRs also mean that users can watch ads multiple times. Earlier I watched the Mariah Carey / Pepsi ringtone ad for ten minutes during an episode of House, and I was not ashamed until this moment. There were some VW Bug ads that I became obsessed with on replay a few years ago (you can find one of the ads here; thanks to fight.boredom for hosting). [edit: the other ad, "Squares," is online at the director's site.]
All I'm saying is change happens. My advice to corporate America is to do us all a favor and not fight it, but find innovative ways to use it to your advantage.
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3 comments:
is that lego lady supposed to be me? it has a striking resemblance. short, dark hair, sharply dressed, yellow.
Definitely maybe, but if so it's subconcious. I admit a resemblance - maybe we've found your avatar.
I haven't gotten to talk about the pictures of lego men yet since you're the first one to mention them in a comment, so I'd like to use this opportunity to explain how this one came about.
The torso, legs and the briefcase (in white) appear in the first lego picture I took. I always thought of that hair as the Aeon Flux hair, which is why I originally used it on a more futuristic body.
This girl appears inside my mom's copy of The Symbolism of the Tarot by P.D. Ouspensky (she has the large softcover edition) while I was at my mom's house.
I usually name these pictures after the books the lego man is photographed inside - this photo has a short name because I have two versions; one where she's holding up the briefcase, and one where she isn't. I used the one with her arm like that because it seemed more interesting and more fitting for the strangeness of the background, and also because the figure was bigger in the frame. I'll put the other picture up in my next post.
It was really hard to get that briefcase to stay in her hand like that.
I hope this doesn't make it seem like I am taking these pictures too seriously. I use the pictures of lego men to break up the text - I wanted something simple, iconic and original - but photographing lego men inside books is a fundamentally ridiculous enterprise. You should see me struggle with the lighting.
P.S. I may have said this about your last one, too, but this is the cutest comment ever.
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