About Brian Kress
In his early career aspirations, Brian thought he would channel his passion for art and witty, satirical ideas into a role as an art director. So, armed with an advertising degree from Southern Methodist University (with a minor in communications and almost-minors in philosophy, anthropology and art), he started down the advertising road. But he soon found that choosing typefaces wasn’t as interesting as playing in the world of brand. And that started him on the path to planning, strategy and consumer insights. At Click Here, Brian translates brands into the interactive world. He looks at consumer trends and emerging technologies, and then uses the forces of his inner geek to find solutions for his clients. As he puts it, it’s about understanding the brand, the consumer and the category to find a place where they intersect and can live in harmony. Fitting for his role as an interactive strategist, Brian is a self-described media maven who is always accessing some type of information, video, music or art. In the rare moments he’s not consuming media, he pursues right-brain interests – though not always well – like playing the drums, drawing, or tickling the keys.
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Mock as you will Apple’s new “magical” device, but the iPad – and soon-to-be derivative products – presents several new opportunities for brands as the mobile tablet space takes shape.
Even though it may not be the perfect device some critics expected, the iPad takes a new perspective on the tablet. Yes, it looks and feels like a hormone-injected iPod Touch, after all it has those exact same application icons, but this is a major change for the tablet space for several reasons:
- It’s not a laptop, it’s a tablet – Rather than cutting the keyboard from a regular OS, as most tablets are wont to do, the iPad instead uses the iPod Touch functionality proven to work for touch-screen users’ big, ugly fingers.
- A real display, and real speed to match – Most tablets have big, ugly, slow processors to match low resolution screens. With a full HD display, an efficient processor and a touch screen that feels organic, the iPad has the hardware advantage.
- A pre-loaded App Store – As with most Apple products, the magic of the iPad is in the software. It will leverage the 130,000-app App Store built for iPhone and iPod Touch users, and made it simple for app developers to upgrade their apps to the tablet space.
The iPad’s main benefit, particularly for marketers, is that it has laid ground for a new world of mobile applications, ads and websites that can display large, intricate brand experiences.
As we’ve seen happen with iPhone and other slate smartphones, on-the-go will become the primary surfing space for iPad users. These users will need much deeper, more functional websites than those we tend to think about for on-the-go users; they’ll be built for extended web usage, while still needing to live in the touch-screen world.
All this isn’t to say that iPad users should be treated exactly like normal desktop users. With the lack of file storage, Flash, and propensity to be on the go, we still need to consider use cases specific to users of the iPad and other tablets that are surely to emerge upon Apple’s success.
A few rules on how brands might ease into this space:
Be location aware
With devices connected to cell towers, we have the ability to target any mobile users’ location within a reasonably tight range. Marketers should build location-specific messaging into their content to improve the iPad users’ experience.
Include long-form content
Without the limitations of the small screen, iPad users will be more likely to engage and stay engaged with an experience on the web.
Remember, it’s touch screen
Lists of small links, long text fields on websites that work with a mouse and normal keyboard won’t work here. Consider new and innovative ways to cater your features and functionality to touch-screen users.
While it’s still in its early stages, most of the influence of the iPad is still yet to be seen. What else do you think the iPad means for mobile?
Virtual goods – items with no intrinsic value in the real world – are a booming economy. 12% of Americans have bought virtual goods in the past year from an industry that analysts estimate to reach $1 billion in the U.S. for 2009 alone.
Payments for virtual goods are typically made through microtransactions, which allows users to spend just a few dollars to give a gift or get them ahead online. For instance, Facebook Gifts typically go for $1 each.
Until now, most social games have used fake brands for their virtual goods, but the opportunity for brands in the real world to make a virtual world impact has demonstrated its power. Similar to how we have seen brands impact more traditional video games, the presence of real world brands in the social gaming space will lend an extra bit of realism to the overall experience. As a result, branded virtual goods on Facebook are clicked on 10 times more often than their non-branded counterparts. At the same time, the brands themselves benefit from extra recognition, exposure, and consumer interest from simply participating inside the emerging media format.
We see brands as currently having three opportunities in the space:
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1. Sponsorships
– The brand presence in the space could be as simple as sponsoring a piece of the overall virtual good experience. Like other sponsorships, virtual good sponsorship does best at establishing leadership.
Purina brand pet food announced late last year that they act as the exclusive virtual kibble supplier in FooPets, a place where users can care for their virtual pet. As a result, every time you feed your little virtual Fluffy, a big bag of Purina is what pours kibble into the bowl, nourishing your companion.
2. Unlocking exclusive content
- A brand could act as a hero, giving social gamers deals on special or limited-run goods. The brand could be the provider of access, thereby building some affinity.
For example, Facebook recently expanded their virtual gift offering to include music, sports gifts, charity gifts and e-cards. While we haven’t seen it happen yet, a brand could be the provider of, say, free helmets for the teams in the bowl game that they sponsor, or a selection of holiday songs leading up to Christmas.
3. Selling branded virtual goods
- Branded virtual goods have the potential to provide an extra benefit for ownership. Not only would the user get a recognizable brand name on their stuff, but it could also unlock special advantages, creating a bit of realism and building brand equity. For instance, if Nike sneakers make your avatar run faster and jump higher in your social game, they might also in the real world.
Virtual goods are an emerging marketplace, creating many micro-economies from 1’s and 0’s that tap on our natural human need to give to one another and nurture what we have. As this marketplace grows, we expect that brands will be more and more prevalent in the space.
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From text to apps to mobile sites, mobile marketing presents a wide range of opportunities. Today, I’m going to explore one of the most promising platforms, mobile search advertising.
As of March 2009, there are a little short of 20 million mobile subscribers using search engines, a number that is expected to climb to 60 million by 2013. In this search environment, Google is the far and away leader, capturing even more market share than it does in desktop search with more than 90% of the U.S. mobile search market.
How is mobile search different?
Today, the mobile search market, particularly in Google’s case, is conveniently integrated with the general search campaign. This meaning that search engines will typically serve the same ads within a mobile search as a desktop search. Over time, though, websites will feature more mobile-specific content. In the future, we expect that search engines will grant this content a higher ranking than its standard, desktop counterpart when competing for the same keywords from a mobile device.
That isn’t to say that marketers shouldn’t build a separate mobile campaign. People searching on their mobile phones aren’t as keen on typing in specific searches as they might be on the desktop, so our mobile search campaigns likely need to be a little different. Mobile search campaigns often require a different set of keywords – usually shorter and more general, and need to be monitored and optimized on their own. In addition, mobile search ads often have the option to include a phone number and a click-to-call link inside the ad itself.
Cost and performance
As with desktop search, the price of mobile search campaigns varies depending on the keywords you choose and how much you bid. For these campaigns, marketers set a daily budget and are charged only when a user clicks on their ads. Placement depends on whether or not they out-bid other companies competing for the same search keyword.
There have been conflicting reports on performance of mobile search ads. Some have enjoyed significantly better results than their desktop counterparts – often reaching 15% click through rates – while others have had difficulty even reaching their desktop search numbers with 0.5%. Brand metrics tell a different story. We’ve seen consistent increases of brand metrics, particularly unaided brand awareness, when a marketer has top position on mobile search results.
Considerations
Along with an up and running mobile campaign, it’s important to live with a couple things in mind:
Think post-click
Because many mobile campaigns currently experience high click through rates, it is important to build interesting and appropriate mobile websites. More often than advertising, these sites have the opportunity to include rich brand experiences like video and, for some phones, interactive elements.
Think integration
Mobile advertising works best as part of an integrated campaign. It’s a channel that has the flexibility to compliment both traditional and digital media over a wide range of objectives. Often, mobile can act as the brand bridge between the traditional and digital worlds, blending the sometimes-disparate experiences together. The best practice here is to keep pointing your audience to the next brand experience. From print, point to mobile, from mobile, point to online, from online, point to an event.
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There has been plenty of discussion across the web about measuring online advertising campaigns. Many posts cite our industry’s current fix, the click through rate, as a good solution, but we’ve found that integrating brand metrics into our view of success makes for a more complete picture.
Historically, online campaigns have had the luxury of ubiquitous behavioral accompaniment. Along with CTR, we track other behavioral metrics (aka Key Performance Indicators) such as impressions, interaction rate, total clicks, cost per impression, cost per interaction, cost per click, leads or acquisitions, visits to key website pages, purchases, and cost per significant action; each built and widely used throughout the online marketing world to help us better understand how our media changes people’s behavior.
While these behavioral metrics are certainly important, we feel that these metrics alone don’t tell the whole story. They tend to be a narrow window into how successful our campaigns are. Instead, what we have started to recognize is that value comes from more than clicks, time, and transactions. The most valuable customer isn’t necessarily the one that clicks, interacts, or even buys the most.
We’ve found that our behavioral metrics tell us the most when accompanied by attitudinal ones, metrics that help us understand how our advertising changes our brand in the minds of the target over time. These metrics allow us to better plan and place messaging considering how it effects our brand in the long term.
We use three types of studies on a number of clients to give us a more complete look at how our advertising is truly affecting our target:
1. Online advertising effectiveness studies: These studies issue brand tracking study-like questions to gauge the brand and sales impact of our online advertising. Most providers (our preferences listed below) use a control/exposed methodology, having each group respond to a questionnaire that includes common brand metrics like awareness, preference, motivation, persuasion, etc.
Insight Express, Dynamic Logic, Factor TG
2. Buzz monitoring: Buzz monitoring studies aggregate all the conversation happening online about your brand or category – in traditional or social media – and use that data to gather insight and make messaging recommendations. See our post on capturing conversations for more info.
Nielsen BuzzMetrics, TNS Cymfony, ScoutLabs
3. Net Promoter score: The sworn tool of loyalty marketing geeks, the Net Promoter score, asks a single question on a 0 to 10 rating scale, “How likely is it that you would recommend our company to a friend of colleague?” From there, it categorizes responses into three groups: Promoters (9 to 10 rating), Passives (7 to 8 rating), and Detractors (0 to 6 rating), then subtracts the Detractors from the Promoters. “Good scores” vary industry to industry, but, typically, anywhere over 40% is strong.
Each of these fills a gap of knowledge that the behavioral metrics certainly do not. When used in conjunction with those behavioral metrics, particularly when balanced per the objective in an index, we’ve been able to spend smarter and persuade more effectively.
What other methods have you used to find the attitude behind the behavior?
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Bowers and Wilkins is a British hi-fi speaker company, and one of the most recognized names in high-performance speakers. They claim a constant pursuit of perfection, and B&W goes to great lengths (sometimes lengths that will set you back $60,000 for a pair) to ensure that their speakers make a “transparent reproduction of recorded sound.” In order to engage the audiophiles of the world, even those who may not be in the market for a $10,000 set of speakers, they needed to choose an alternate path to advertising for engaging their audience.
We had an interesting discussion around B&W at last week’s Likemind that explored their use of Twitter. Rather than using their Twitter account to announce product launches, distribute press releases, or push deals, B&W uses Twitter to present interesting articles about sound and ask its followers for their input on the debates of the industry.
As evidenced by their Twitter presence, they noticed an important commonality about their audience, that those who will want the best in speaker design are also looking to participate in the discussion and future of sound. And they don’t stop meeting this insight about their audience at Twitter, but have created their own society, dubbed “The Society of Sound,” that survives to instigate big sound conversations and share in the love for music. With fellows including Peter Gabriel and others successful in the industry and passionate in the pursuit of pure sound, the Society of Sound is a powerful testament to B&W.
From both their Twitter profile and their Society of Sound, B&W’s messaging strategy, rather than discussing the merits of their product, focuses around curating content that reinforces their brand values while delivering practical benefit to their prospects. This approach from B&W is an example of a brand that wants to mean something very specific to a select group of people rather than everything to everyone. The brand-as-curator mindset may help find platforms to communicate that are both powerful in message as well as useful to their end customer.
Around a year ago (and a spike around two years before that), the marketing blogosphere was enamored by the idea of brand utility. Brand utility had been summed up by a single epiphany from Bob Greenberg at R/GA, where he became certain that brand culture would move away from the metaphorical (as embodied in the TV spot and its interactive extensions) and toward the useful. In an approach of brand utility, said brand would forgo the common approach to advertising focused directly around benefits and instead drift towards using media to improve the usefulness of its product. Product and messaging become one in the same.
Does the B&W example qualify as brand utility? Does the utility of the brand need to relate directly with the product that you’re trying to sell, or can it simply be a different, useful set of content that reinforces your values?
Either way, B&W shows us a path for deep engagement and clear communication with our customers:
1. Learn about your target. Answer the question: what is a shared passion between your brand and your target? What is a discussion that they’re already having that you can contribute to?
2. Curate content around that discussion. Twitter seems to be a useful option given its ability for quick distribution of content. Articles, comments, questions, and branded content each have a place in the feed. Scale up your engagement by incorporating content from thought leaders, exclusive content, and even branded forums.
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Books – well, the bulk of books – throughout their long history have managed to abstain from the persuasions of advertising within their pages. Often, those ads that do live somewhere within a book’s pages are relevant only when the book first launches, so as a result, most publishers have had a hard time justifying selling ad space to advertisers. Now, a patent filing from Amazon employees may suggest a new way of providing ads in books that could stand the test of time.
Amazon’s proposed ad model is dynamic advertising both within their Kindle ebook business as well as their on demand printed materials.
The new model isn’t contextual ads (i.e. “To eat more chikin or not to eat more chikin, that is the question.”), rather Amazon hopes to place ads throughout ebooks between chapters, following a certain number of pages as well as in the margins. The patent demonstrates how ebooks could update to more “modern marketing” by taking cues from websites – supporting “free” content by advertisements. See below for a chart of how it might work:
From the printed materials side of the business, Amazon wants to leverage the on demand printing capability of their BookSurge company to place ads into those books. They currently have a large on-demand market for those out-of-print and/or rare books that only a few people will want every year. So rather than print a run of books that will likely not be sold, Amazon chooses to print these books once someone has purchased them from Amazon.com. As a result, they want to create an arena for advertisements that are relevant within the pages of an on-demand printed book.
The dynamic ad serving capability would also allow Amazon to use some of the rich information it has on its users for advertisers to match up to the right target. Because they have a rich purchase history as well as geographical information about its users, Amazon has the potential to use this information to help its advertisers to get the right message to the right person.
There has been much speculation around how this will effect the pricing for books from Amazon.com. A few options seem to be:
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1) a lower price for the book for those readers willing to view advertisements
2) free ebook versions – supported by advertisements when you purchase a hard copy of a book
3) just another way for Amazon to monetize the content that they sell
An extra shower may be in order for saying this, but will books soon become a new avenue for advertisers to explore? It may be too early to judge, but we know a couple of things inherent in the situation:
Audiences are certainly engaged with the content on a page – possibly the most of any medium – which will be attractive to advertisers.
eBooks are already slated to reinvigorate a dwindling business for book publishers – Forrester estimates that 13 million people in the U.S. will have some kind of reading device by 2013.
Source Material:
Amazon Patent 1: On-Demand Generating E-Book Content with Advertising
Amazon Patent 2: Incorporating Advertising in On-Demand Generated Content
Amazon Charts Course Toward E-Book Advertising – AdAge
Amazon Patents Detail Kindle Advertising Model – MediaPost
Amazon Wants Patent For Inserting Ads Into Books – Slashdot
Coming to Amazon Kindle eBooks: Dynamic Advertising? – Search Marketing Communications
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Google has been the crowned king of search for some time now. In some ways, having a 70% to 80% market share has got to go to Google’s head. Having dedicated much time and energy to additions and alterations to it suite of products, some have started asking “what has Google missed?” It’s a question that has led to two new high-profile search products with very different objectives: Microsoft’s Bing and Wolfram Alpha.
In answering this question, we won’t only need to know what Google has done, but also what it plans to do. Luckily there are blogs these days, and in a 2008 post called the “Future of Search” Marissa Mayer, Google’s VP of Search Products, discusses, as you may imagine, Google’s perspective on where search is headed. She details out strategies for improving search like making it more mobile, multimedia, personalized, social, all ways to build upon Google’s foundation: the algorithm. It’s a post I’d encourage you to read, if you have a moment.
There is, though, a key problem we see with these search solutions of the future, and it’s a foundational problem. Each of her solutions are based on a mashup mentality, uniting the current results and content with new and interesting types of and ways to search. At the heart, it represents the basic assumption that Google’s algorithm does a good enough job in delivering relevant results.
But it doesn’t. We often find irrelevant results from Google’s. Posts not relevant to what we’re asking, unclear and untrustworthy information, and few options to treat different searches with a different type of output.
What Google Has Missed
This gives us an idea of what Google is missing:
1. An approach to treat different searches in distinct ways. For instance, a search for movie-related information shouldn’t pull or display results in the same way as a search for jet engine-related information.
2. An algorithm that gathers and displays the information that you’re looking for without pointing you to a web page. A key way to speed up the searches that we make is to keep us in familiar format and display only that information that is immediately relevant to our searches.
In come the latest pair of “Google killers.” Wolfram and Microsoft hope to dethrone Google by providing results in a different way, even changing the content that we receive altogether. They’ve begun to notice opportunities in the search marketplace that Google simply isn’t focused on: foundational ones, and they each have their own unique approach to how they’ll exploit them.
Microsoft Bing
Bing’s strength, at it’s core, is Microsoft’s understanding that different kinds of searches require different kinds of answers and interfaces. It treats a search for travel differently than a search for shopping by providing a different set of information and a different type of visualization for each. Google has started down this path with its suite of products meant for specific types of searches, but Microsoft has beaten them to an integrated platform that does the leg work for you.
Wolfram Alpha
Wolfram Alpha takes a different approach. Referring to itself as a “computational engine,” it has a single focus: rather than sending back web pages that may have results of the questions you’re looking for, Wolfram Alpha attempts to give solutions to you directly. Want to compare histories of two stocks? Just ask it. It goes about providing information by collecting and hand-curating info from databases across the web, eventually (read: a few hundred years) uniting all knowledge under a single source.
The Future of Search
Both Bing and Wolfram Alpha have their own set of issues, though. Microsoft uses an algorithm similar to Google’s that is spiced up with better functionality – you still get a lot of results that don’t pretain to what you’re looking for. It won’t take much for Google to catch up to the integration piece and leave out any competitive advantage for Bing – with the exception of their clever distinction between a “decision engine” and a “search engine.” (Future question reminder: how heavily does marketing effect the search business?)
Wolfram has an interesting approach, but its reliance on human input and customization of results might get it moving slower than the world expects. It needs something to streamline the possibilities of customized searches to truly be a reliable “computational engine.” It does, though, seem to have Google temporarily beat in the database game, Google’s comparable product Google Squared has some work to be done.
Hopefully, what all this means is that we’ll start to see some true competition in the search marketplace. Bing and Wolfram Alpha are pushing Google into minor panic mode, which is making them rethink some of those foundational elements in their service. What they seem to remember is that it doesn’t cost much to switch search engines. I’ll often start with Google and if I don’t find what I want fast enough, I’ll search on another engine.
We hope that what we’ll see result is both an exploration in new interfaces from search engines as well as an improved algorithm that helps us find the right results faster. Google’s missing something; it should search for it in Bing and Wolfram Alpha.
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The mobile phone, or third screen as they call it, continues to break boundaries in the content people are ingesting. Of course, the advent of the iPhone layed the ground for a turning point in the industry to treat your mobile device as more than a pure utility machine and into a sort of lifestyle device.
This turning point has opened the doors to a much more “mobile involved” customer, increasing incidence of nearly every phone behavior – with the notable exception of talking – but a particularly large increase in the use of mobile video. At 28%, iPhone users are 3.5 times more likely to use mobile video and TV than non-iPhone users according to GfK study.
There are three factors coming from the market that drive this adoption:
Better phones
The iPhone created an entire new category of phone – one that jargon is beginning to call smartphone plus. The screens are bigger and better, allowing for a vast improvement in video quality, and they are designed with an ease of use in mind that transforms the way we think about our phones.
Better networks
Most major carriers have implemented 3G across their network, which has sent download and upload speeds skyrocketing at near broadband speeds. The normal-speed internet surfing from your mobile has unlocked a lot of the potential for the phones to truly become the “third screen,” making video content simply a click away.
Better content
Here the iPhone had a triple role: 1. Allowing users to view and download the content they could download to their computers, be it podcasts, episodes or full movies, on their phones. Often in the Kress household, this means scrambling to download movies before you’re stuck on a plane for a number of hours. 2. Pulling in YouTube content from the start in an app that allows the iPhone user to watch any video on the site. All of those halarious clips that we talk about with friends became immediately available from our mobile phones. 3. The iPhone helped make another cultural shift when they opened the iPhone app store to third-party developers. This created a marketplace for people to customize their phone experience, with video being one of the obvious first choices. Joost was one of the first in the game, bringing its streaming content directly the iPhone in an app.
The mobile video craze isn’t limited to viewing content either. As phone cameras continue to improve and the software behind them meets customer demand, we are seeing more and more videos taken with mobile phones and uploaded on the spot to the video sharing site of your choice. We expect that consumer generated content, not typical video content, will begin much of the growth of mobile video.
The service Qik allows users to stream video content from directly from their phones to its site, sharing every step and experience immediately with family and friends. In the screenshot below, a Googler is streaming video from the Google I/O developer conference.
We expect to see much more from mobile video in the coming years, especially as the marketplace continues to adopt the large, touchscreen “smartphone plus” phones. Keep on a lookout for opportunities for you brands to get involved on the ground level of this growing space.
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From its outset, the Internet has been a social medium. Bulletin board systems beget personal homepages. Personal homepages beget blogs. Blogs beget social networking sites.
Along the way, people have had a huge amount of conversation. Talking about everything they might face to face and leaving that conversation for the world to see. When these conversations are repeated over time, people leave these long, winding wakes of data, which is publicly available and gives us major insight into who they are.
We have smart clients. In recognition of the wealth of data people leave behind, they have recently been asking for us to mine it with questions like: What are people saying about my brand online? How much conversation is about my brand compared to my competitors? How can I best influence this space? Why should I care?
The way we’ve begun to answer some of these questions is through a process of “buzz monitoring” where we either call upon our best Googling skills or a more formal buzz monitoring service. We’ve found advantages to each:
Do It Yourself
DIY monitoring consists of an individual or team sitting at his/her browser and searching through those free services that point to content in the social web. This process could include going to any of the following:
Google, Google News, Google Blog Search, Google Reader, Google Insights, Google video, Blog pulse, Technorati, YouTube, Twitter search, Facebook Lexicon, MySpace, Flickr, Yahoo! Pipes, Yahoo! Answers, Delicious, Feedburner, Digg, Slideshare, Brand Tags, Forums, Niche social networks, other blogs, etc.
We use these and services like these to gain understanding on a qualitative level, which tends to answer questions like:
Is my brand being talked about? What are some of the topics related to my brand?
Is my category being talked about? What competitors have a buzz presence? What are some of the topics relating to the category?
The major advantage to DIY monitoring is that typically the only cost involved is agency time, but the problem is that the simple search tools listed above DO NOT SCALE.
Buzz Monitoring Services
Formal buzz monitoring services are a different beast. These engagements with third party research groups that capture online conversations in a comprehensive scale. As opposed to informal testing, they use software and leveraged relationships with social media sites to mine through the whole of the data.
In addition to those qualitative tidbits that you might gain from informal monitoring, these services help add numbers to the data. In addition to those questions above, buzz monitoring services answer questions like:
How much is my brand being talked about? What is the share of buzz between topics? What is the overall sentiment there? Where is most of the buzz about my brand? Who has the most influence over it? Is my marketing doing anything to change that?
Who in the category has the largest buzz presence? What is the overall sentiment within the category? What market issues have an impact on our target’s decisions? Which ideas best engage our target?
These engagements typically run anywhere from a snapshot report of $3,500 to more detailed, long-term engagements upwards of $60,000.
Here’s a list of providers worth looking at in this space: Nielsen Buzzmetrics, TNS Cymfony, Radian 6, Converseon, Visible Technologies, Collective Intellect, and Motive Quest.
The space is new and growing, and we’re always on the lookout for new way to discover and use the data people leave in their wake. What sorts of tools have you found that provide some insight?
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If you haven’t noticed, social networking has infiltrated our lives. We post our resumes, our pictures, our relationships, our minute-by-minute thoughts, nearly everything we are to create better connections with our friends and loved ones. For the most part, though, we have left out our culture’s most recent entertainment resource: video games. Facebook, for instance, asks its users to list interests, favorite movies, favorite books, favorite TV shows, favorite quotes, and favorite charitable causes, but it neglects our favorite video games. We share most of our lives, but to date, no one has provided us the same ability to share our games.
OnLive, a new streaming video game service, is sweeping the gaming industry off its feet – or at least trying to. Through the use of cloud computing, they’ve created a platform that could allow all video games to be immediately accessible to gamers, even those not interested in buying a super-powerful PC or next-gen console. The technology is pretty cool.
The most amazing thing about OnLive’s user experience though, isn’t the immediate access to games, rather the immediate access to other gamers. OnLive has effectively created a brand new gaming social network.
What OnLive has recognized is that creating and maintaining social connections is a type of play, and is an important piece of the gaming experience that has been underserved by the current generation of consoles.
For example, simply search for Guitar Hero on YouTube.
The majority of what you probably found was a lot of videos of people playing those songs that people consider “impossible.” Almost like a rock star social club. The videos are meant to brag to their friends and the larger Guitar Hero community online. The only problem is that these rock stars have to reach outside of the game to share, rather than making bragging rights an integral part of the game.
Nintendo also had this insight when they launched the Wii. The entire campaign was based around the shared experience of the Wii with your friends and loved ones.
Although they recognized the importance of those physical connections, Nintendo completely ignored our virtual ones and failed to facilitate a useful way of sharing games or even playing with your friends online.
This is what OnLive aims to remedy. They have allowed gamers to create friendships, share videos, and watch their friends play across their entire library of games. If and when they combine this technology with a partner like Facebook Connect, OnLive will have finally allowed gamers to dive headfirst into the world of social gaming.
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