Category Archives: Media

The Nike+ World Turns

The FuelBand activity is over, and the devices are returned. I asked a Nike executive at the conference about what happens to the other Nike fitness properties, now that it looks like Nike is recomposing the “Fuel” concept from calories to this weighted score. He said, oh, it will take months to reorganize that stuff. I said I was worried, because the FuelBand and site do so much less than I already getting from the Nike tracking I was using, and he said he wasn’t really involved with that. Fair enough.

Today the tracking product that drew me into the Nike+ ecology announced that their site will be down for months while they get rolled into the new thing.

The tracking product I’ve shifted to is still alive and well, prominently linked directly from the new hotness as a menu item, and so, one hopes, unlikely to disappear anytime soon. It is a very different product from FuelBand, and fits well into a mix that serves all activity levels. Nike+ has turned into a confusing crowd of sites and products, and simplification is good, but the timing woke me up abruptly this morning.

I am glad I’m not on the support queue that will take calls today from people who spent the last couple of weeks or months getting hooked on the website companion to a different piece of hardware they already bought. The email tells them that their data will still be there at that indeterminate point in the future, but these products are about habits and regular reinforcement. Months from now might as well be the heat death of the universe. I remember how entertained I was by rewards displays when I first found those sites, and I know I’d be pretty frustrated if I were waking up this morning to learn that I’d never get a chance to see all the levels.

Irresistible

Isaiah Mustafa remains ridiculously charming in this new making-of video:

Some people ask to ride me, which … depending on which saddle they have, the English or the Western…. I don’t like the Western. If they have the English, I usually agree.

RIDICULOUS.

Blah blah Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, whatever. I still don’t care about Old Spice, but I love this campaign and this actor. What a trouper!

Gawker Redesign

I don’t have much to say about the visual design of the Gawker sites. I am a regular visitor of only one of them, and I usually visit from a desktop computer. I don’t have any trouble getting around the new layout. But Gawker made one big error, and that’s in the functionality for directing visitors who link to specific articles on a mobile device (at least, on iPad and iPhone): visitors ends up at a listing of headlines, which may or may not contain the headline that interests them. If they even know what that headline is, since they may have arrived from a shortened link in a Twitter message, introducing the article with a cryptic remark.

It’s fine to say, “Keep your hair on. They’re working on a fix.” or even “Sounds like you follow faux-clever jerks on Twitter.” You’re entitled to that opinion. But a basic principle of sound Web design is to make sure the user always has a “scent of information” to follow. If users find themselves someplace unexpected, a good design will help them on their way. And that’s just for people navigating the site. If they’re following links to specific pages, getting them there should be a no-brainer.

If a person follows a link to a specific page in your site, it’s just silly to think it’s perfectly fine to send them anywhere else. If your developer knows enough about the device making the request to shunt it to a different layout of the site, the site should be capturing enough about the link the user selected to get all the way there. If it dumps the user on a TOC page, your developer simply didn’t complete the job. And if hash-bangs, or whatever the new hotness is, don’t work well enough or consistently enough with the major pathways into your site, then maybe you should resist the temptation. Who knows? If an iPhone can’t find your page with your newfangled whatsit, maybe Google can’t, either.

Those of us who have been using mobile for a long time are familiar with this half-assed approach. We’ve been seeing it on television and newspaper websites for years, going back long enough that some of us could kind of understand why a Web team’s use cases didn’t capture us. But that’s not the situation today, even for those legacy outlets. So why would a new-media darling, which surely has a massive base of users on the current It Device, whatever that may be, repeat such a classic old-media mistake? Engaged audiences already greet redesigns with suspicion—why not take the time to make sure the functionality is solid?

Dafoe Dafoe Dafoe Dafoe Dafoe Dafoe Dafoe Dafoe Dafoe Dafoe Dafoe Dafoe

I couldn’t care less about Jim Beam, but this is a beautiful ad.

It stars Willem Dafoe in about a dozen roles. It is directed by Dante Ariola, whose “First Taste” (for Coke) also touches on branching out, while his “Idle Thumbs” (for Virgin Mobile) tackles a series of characters. He also made one of my favorite ads: “Snowball” for Travelers. He does a nice job with these stream-of-situations stories. Maybe because of all his videogame work!

Super Bowl Ads 2011

Hate football so much you can’t even sit through one game a year so you can see the most fussed-over, expensive ads unveiled on television? Never fear: Fanhouse has em all.

Marvel at the just plain weirdness of the Coke Dragon ad (and Coke’s complete redemption with Border Guards). Recoil at the crass commercialization of Tibetan suffering by Groupon. Contemplate whether Darth Vader kid in the VW ad is a girl or boy.

Gotta watch ’em all.

Maybe.

If you’d rather read something thoughtful and insightful, here is a bonus link about advertising, sort of: an excellent article discussing how meta Mad Men really is.

Scrub, Sarah, Scrub – We Still Have Copies

Gabrielle Giffords was shot today at an event in her constituency in Arizona. She is a young woman, recently married, just re-elected to her third term in office. She is a member of the House Committees for Armed Services, Foreign Affairs, and Science and Technology. She is pro-choice, pro-renewable energy, and, yes, pro-gun (though not enough for the NRA). Her husband is an astronaut. I send my best wishes to her friends and family, who are not only at risk of losing a loved one of accomplishment and promise but now have to deal with the political environment in which this happened.

The revisionism, of course, is already beginning, so as much as I respect the sentiment that the politics can wait, I think it’s at least as important to reinforce clearly that no matter who did this, we are still well aware of the overall context of this horrible attack.

This was the centerpiece messaging for Sarah Palin’s “Take Back the 20” campaign, before 2010’s midterm elections. She can revise her web pages any way she likes today—it won’t change the fact that she published this image right alongside her own smiling face.

Note: www.takebackthe20.com’s accessibility has been spotty for several hours, and it’ll probably be hit hard for a while yet.

Update: Giffords herself on this overheated rhetoric, in an interview shortly after the healthcare vote, when Giffords’s office had been vandalized:

Update January 9: The spin is dizzying. As Dave Weigel notes, Current Palin spin for target map would make more sense if she didn’t spend 2010 doubling down on it.

Among the people who gave the impression that these were targets: Sarah Palin. When she announced the list in a tweet, she wrote “don’t retreat, instead – RELOAD!” I’m not an expert surveyor, but I’m not sure what sort of tools need reloading. Jonathan Martin points out that after the election, Palin tweeted about her success (18 of the seats went to the GOP) by saying “remember months ago ‘bullseye’ icon used 2 target the 20 Obamacare-lovin’ incumbent seats?” Throughout 2010, when Palin was criticized for the target map, she either didn’t respond or mocked the “lamestream media” for interpreting her gun metaphors as calls for violence. At the Southern Republican Leadership Conference, for example, she got big applause when she said “Don’t retreat, reload — and that is not a call for violence!”