Presented @ FlashForward 2006

I turned off my Flash player a year ago. The result? fewer ads, less unwanted noise, and less jarring video. I use my computer at least 8 hours a day, and turning off Flash reduced my exposure to low quality animated media, the bulk of Flash content today. For the few sites with Flash content I want to see, I simply turn Flash on temporarily.

 

More users are discovering this phenomenon, and installing programs like FlashBlock, AdBlock, or manually disabling Flash.

 

This is a session to discuss this issue, from both sides – from the perspective of the developers creating Flash content/ads and the consumers of that content. As part of the session we’ll talk about the bigger picture – where the community is going and how to shape that direction.

The primary goal of this session is to tickle the philosophical side of your brain – the side that likes to ask “why” rather than “how”. You may not learn lots of new programming tricks or animation techniques, but you will come away from the session having spent an hour thinking about and discussing where rich media is going, what the implications are, and how your work fits it.

The session is organized in two parts: First, I’ll give a 45 minute presentation, discussing the state of rich media ads, and briefly examining some of the theoretical concerns related to advertising and HCI in general. Then I’ll open up the session for others to comment and express their views. I’ll post feedback from the session to my blog, cybergrain.com.

 

This document contains notes for the talk, as well as three readings taken from the web.

I’m a techno-artist mutt. I have a bachelor’s in Artificial Intelligence, a master’s in Computer Science and I am studying towards an MFA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths College in London. I was a Program Manager on the Sparkle team at Microsoft for a year. I also spent much of 2004 and 2005 reading New Media theory as part of a Manhattan-based theory group called Remediality.

 

 

 

Sites with more commoditized content/services have more in-your-face advertising. For example, some of the sites linked to by Google News are primarily advertising vehicles, and use attention-grabbing tactics. Similarly, Fandango and777films are reliably in-your-face with their advertising. Movie times are low-value so they must focus on ad revenue.

 

Because web ads run for a limited time period and often use JavaScript, they are hard to archive. I’ll show examples during the session. I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to find examples of good and bad ads today.

 

According to advertising execs, it is ok to be intrusive. Viewers forget their momentary annoyance at the intrusion, and intrusion increases the likelihood they’ll remember your brand. Remember Crazy Eddie screaming on TV? The attitude towards intrusion is built into the advertising culture.

 

At the same time, large-scale active displays for ads are becoming ubiquitous. The London Underground, for example, recently installed hundreds of flat panel displays along the escalators, replacing paper ads. New York’s MTA plans to install “information displays” throughout the subway system.  OLED technology makes it possible to turn whole walls into large cheap active displays.

 

Rich media ads will also find new venues, for example mobile phones: Flash is now installed on millions of mobile phones and in a year or two I predict carriers will show ads to people while they are dialing and using their phones.  

 

On the Desktop, Microsoft has started the Windows Live and Office Live efforts to move more of Office to the web. They have free versions supported by advertising. I expect to see adds embedded in many computer applications in a few years.

 

Even Google has finally succumbed, and has announced they will be adopting image-based ads in search results, as part of their new deal with AOL. (Ironically, Google today uses a Flash ad campaign to promote their AdSense text-only ad system).

You may not want your life to turn into a continuous stream of video ads, but disabling rich media is hard.

 

Public video displays almost never have an “off” or “mute” option. You cannot uninstall Flash from your phone because it is part of the firmware. On the desktop, de-installing Flash also doesn’t work – your web browser will continually prompt you to install Flash every time you visit a site with Flash content. (In my opinion, Macromedia achieved its high adoption figures mostly through attrition, as users eventually tired of clicking on “no” all the time).

 

Each browser requires several steps to disable Flash:

    

 

 

 

 

 

 

Try disabling Flash, then browsing on Google News or Fandango and see if you prefer the less animated experience…

I’ll briefly try to link together three concepts from New Media theory: the spectacle, attention and experience.

 

My argument is this: Advertising forms part of the “spectacle”, a dominant force for production in modern society. As the spectacle grows, there is an increasing demand for “attention”, creating an attention economy. As attention becomes scare, media producers increasingly focus on “experience” as a way to capture attention, broadening the spectacle to include experiential as well as perceptual phenomena. Both the attention economy and the shift of focus to experience have deep implications.

 

The term “spectacle” was made famous by the French theorist Guy Debord, who wrote this in his essay “The Society of the Spectacle”:

 

  The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.

   …

   The spectacle presents itself as something enormously positive, indisputable and inaccessible. It says nothing more than “that which appears is good, that which is good appears”. The attitude which it demands is passive acceptance, which in fact it already obtained by its manner of appearing without reply, by its monopoly of appearance.

    The basically tautological character of the spectacle flows from the simple fact that its means are simultaneously its ends. It is the sun which never sets over the empire of modern passivity. It covers the entire surface of the world and bathes endlessly in its own glory.

    The society which rests on modern industry is not accidentally or superficially spectacular, it is fundamentally spectaclist.

    As the indispensable decoration of the objects produced today, as the general exposé of the rationality of the system, as the advanced economic sector which directly shapes a growing multitude of image-objects, the spectacle is the main production of present-day society.

 

As social activity shifts to the production of the spectacle, there is an overproduction of media, creating a scarcity of attention (also known as “information overload”). Umair Haque points this out in “The Attention Economy” on the bubblegeneration blog (more in the Readings below):

 

Why does attention become relatively scarce in a Media 2.0 world? Fundamentally, because 2.0 technologies create a Cambrian Explosion in number and kind of media – a micromedia explosion. Since its birth, media has been limited in number and in kind. But cheaply networked digital technologies, on the other hand, are producing vast amounts of entirely new kinds of media – more than have ever concurrently been seen before.

…

These economics create competence traps for media incumbents in a 2.0 world: since attention is now relatively scarce, economic advantage flows to whichever players can allocate attention – not production – most efficiently. That is, to try and make sure, wherever possible, each viewer, listener, or reader is consuming media where, when, and how they derive the most value from doing so.

 

A tactic media producers are using to gain more attention is to focus more on “experience”, yielding a new kind of spectacle which works at a more primal level than just visual perception. It is no longer about creating compelling images and stories, advertisers are thinking now in terms of entire experiences built around a brand. At the same time, CHI researchers and artists are also turning to “experience” as the next frontier. (the attached reading by Erik Davis discusses this further).

Flash and the web are still fundamentally vendor-centric.

 

Why? If Flash was user-centric, the player would include an option to start all movies muted or paused, so that they only play when the user clicks on a “play” button. Flash would also include built in blockers similar to “popup blockers” – a way to stop or eliminate annoying ads, or block content from certain sites.

 

These options would significantly enhance Flash’s value to users, and weaken Flash’s appeal to advertisers. Since Flash’s primary customer is the advertiser, these capabilities are not bundled with the player.

 

To redress this, we as a community can take it upon ourselves to build content that is user-centric, valuing the user’s attention. For example:

 

The thoughts of the papoola, directed at the woman, reached Al [the Salesman]. It was greeting her, telling her how nice it was to meet her, soothing and coaxing her until she came back up the sidewalk towards it, joining her boy and husband so that now all three of them stood together, receiving the mental impulses emanating from the Martian creature which had come her to Earth with no hostile plans, no capacity to cause trouble. The papoola loved them, too, just as they loved it; it told them so right now – it conveyed to them the gentleness, the warm hospitality which it was accustomed to on its own planet.

…

The man said, 'Of course. They bought it here to sell jalopies. It's working on us right now, softening us up. The enchantment visibly faded from his face. "There's the fellow sitting in there operating it".

 

But, the papoola thought, what I tell you is still true. Even if it is a sales pitch. You could go there, to Mars, yourself. You and your family can see with you own eyes – if you have the courage to break free. Can you do it? Are you a real man? Buy a Loony Luke jalopy, buy it while you still have the chance, because you know that some day, maybe not long from now, the NP is going to crack down. And there will be no more jalopy jungles. No more crack in the wall of authoritarian society through which a few – a few lucky people can escape.

 

Fiddling with the controls at his mid-section, Al turned up the gain. The force of the papoola's psyche increased, drawing the man in, taking control of him. You must buy a jalopy, the papoola urged. Easy payment plan, service warranty, many models to choose from. This is the time to sign, don't delay. The man to a step towards the lot. Hurry the papoola told him. Any second now the authorities may close down the lot and your opportunity will be gone forever.

 

by Erik Davis

 

…

And so we enter the era of what I’m calling Experience Design. A quick scan of our sociocultural landscape suggests that, in terms of artistic practices, mass entertainment, sports, and emerging technologies of pleasure, productive forces are increasingly targeting experience itself — that evanescent flux of sensation and perception that is, in some sense, all we have and all we are.

 

Let’s begin with the rise of the so-called "experience economy." On one level, this describes an apparent shift within the consumption patters of the younger, more technologically savvy elite, a shift away from the hoarding of material goods and status symbols to the hoarding of novel, exciting, and challenging experiences. (Dennis Tito’s 20 million-dollar space holiday on MIR is the paragon here). The experience economy of the super-rich also dovetails with broader cultural trends, including the dramatic intensification of tourism over the last few decades — a process which offers us increasingly specialized, adventurous, and exotic packages (guzzling ayahuasca with Peruvian shamans, caving in Belize, visiting real live monks in Bhutan). We have also seen a heightened interest in technologically-mediated outdoor activities like rock climbing or wind surfing, along with the rise of "extreme sports," which have little to do with sports as contest and much to do with the production of subjective intensity. The extreme example here is the Bungie jump, which requires neither skill nor exertion beyond the passive willingness to undergo the death-defying neurotransmitter and adrenaline rush that hits the nervous system.

 

The turn towards increasingly raw experience also marks a number of developments within media and entertainment, including the often-remarked descent to the lowest common denominator of sex, violence and the gross-out stunts of MTV’s Jackass ("Don’t try this at home!"). Over the last ten or fifteen years we have also seen the rise of a new kind of film, one which features amazing special effects, but which otherwise sucks. Whether or not we judge such films to be good, or even worthwhile, depends on how much we accept the new regime of special effects as a semi-autonomous component of cinema whose art is largely devoted to stimulating immediate sensations and visceral — rather than symbolic or narrative — emotion. A similar logic comes to the fore in many computer games and mass applications of virtual reality technologies in amusement parks and arcades, all of which strive for the quality of "immersion" — which is often just another word for simulated experience. Meanwhile, the language of "experience" has become thoroughly integrated into multimedia design, even in the relatively low-bandwidth tricks and offerings that commercial websites use to capture sticky eyeballs.

 

… many other sectors of society are perfectly happy to employ these same tools to far more chilling ends. Advertising and marketing are only the most obvious examples on what I would call the right wing of Experience Design. ("Black magic" would perhaps be a more appropriate term, but I will leave the occult dimension of Experience Design aside for now). Here the target is often demonstrably irrational: an instinctive, un-self-aware subject whose inchoate fears and desires are organized around commodities or institutions. Though one must always beware of excessive fears over "subliminal" advertising, mallrats with sensitive noses will also recognize the pine and spice scents pumped into malls around Christmas time. Some slot machines are now equipped with high-tech smell emitters because certain scents have proven to keep individuals at the machines longer. Whether or not these cues are culturally determined is beside the point. What’s important is that at the moment, these stimulants aim for a technical zone of influence below "propaganda," which is still linked explicitly to a field of meanings. Instead they directly attack the limbic system, drawing the subject into a deeper, more immersive activity. As the West embarks on a Shadow War against terrorism, the tools of propaganda and psychic management alike can only proliferate.

 

Across consumer markets, attention is becoming the scarcest - and so most strategically vital - resource in the value chain. Attention scarcity is fundamentally reshaping the economics of most industries it touches; beginning with the media industry.

 

Let's take a step back to examine why and how. In a mass media world, distribution was the scarcest resource in the value chain. In some segments, this was due to regulation – spectrum scarcity, for example, enforced an artificial broadcast distribution scarcity. In others, this was due to natural monopoly dynamics – newspapers, for example, are natural monopolies. In either case, media industries were dominated by monopoly dynamics – either naturally, or by fiat.

 

This distribution scarcity gave rise to a single dominant strategy, over and over again: marketing economies of scale and scope. These are best exemplified in the blockbuster. Blockbusters realize superior returns to expensive content by redistributing it through numerous channels according to simple price discrimination strategies.

 

Essentially, the blockbuster strategy is a choice to invest in attention rather than production – through leveraging scale and scope effects to realize economies in marketing and distribution. Because attention was scarce relative to distribution – largely due to the natural monopoly effects discussed above – investing in it yielded superior returns.

 

These scale and scope effects, despite the best efforts of regulators and industry execs alike, created huge economic incentives for the media players to consolidate; hence, the consolidation waves first seen in the 30s, periodically again after that, and last seen throughout the 90s.

 

New technologies are disrupting and inverting these economics, by making attention the scarcest resource in the value chain. Because these technologies make production and distribution relatively more abundant than attention, returns to attention for incumbents begin to erode. Diminishing returns to attention are at the root of falling newspaper circulation, magazine subscriptions, TV ad revenue, radio listenership, and book sales – at the heart of the industry’s current malaise.

 

Why does attention become relatively scarce in a Media 2.0 world? Fundamentally, because 2.0 technologies create a Cambrian Explosion in number and kind of media – a micromedia explosion. Since its birth, media has been limited in number and in kind. But cheaply networked digital technologies, on the other hand, are producing vast amounts of entirely new kinds of media – more than have ever concurrently been seen before.

 

By networking digital media, the incentives for prosumers to produce a huge plethora of forms of micromedia pop into existence; blogs, podcasts, vlogs, machinima, fan films, and cosplay are just a few examples. The relationship between technology and media relationship has undergone a phase shift: from one to one, to many to one. This is the Cambrian Explosion in micromedia.

 

The primary economic consequence of the micromedia explosion is that the equilibrium price of media everywhere falls. This is due to the simple economics of supply and demand, where prices fall when the supply curve shifts outward. In turn, the micromedia explosion means that competition for attention becomes truly intense, with economics most media markets haven't seen since the era of the printing press: attention becomes relatively more expensive than production.

 

These economics create competence traps for media incumbents in a 2.0 world: since attention is now relatively scarce, economic advantage flows to whichever players can allocate attention – not production – most efficiently. That is, to try and make sure, wherever possible, each viewer, listener, or reader is consuming media where, when, and how they derive the most value from doing so.

 

But media incumbents, have spent the last century largely developing exactly the opposite competences – by using blockbusters to allocate production resources, they’ve developed competences in buying attention – in marketing, branding, and star power.

 

These competences become traps in the Attention Economy: incumbents throw more and more dollars into marketing, star power, and branding, and less and less dollars into production, each marketing dollar chasing a smaller and smaller return on attention, just to keep margins constant. This is, in a nutshell, the reason Hollywood marketing budgets (or radio/network TV ad time, or magazine ad space) have exploded in the last 20 years.

 

The original blog post I wrote, that led to this session at FlashForward 2006.

 

I strongly believe in user-centered design for computer software, but I dislike the phrase "User Experience", and its implications.

 

UX is a recent buzzword. I first heard of it at Microsoft in 2003, though the label dates back at least to 2000, and the ideas go back much further than that. (Microsoft's publicity machine jumped on the term).

 

 

"User experience" encompasses all aspects of the end-user's interaction with the company, its services, and its products. The first requirement for an exemplary user experience is to meet the exact needs of the customer, without fuss or bother. Next comes simplicity and elegance that produce products that are a joy to own, a joy to use. True user experience goes far beyond giving customers what they say they want, or providing checklist features. In order to achieve high-quality user experience in a company's offerings there must be a seamless merging of the services of multiple disciplines, including engineering, marketing, graphical and industrial design, and interface design.

 

 

With so many media messages to compete with, it is not surprising that artists and companies are looking for ways to create stronger experiences in their audiences. However, there are dangers.

 

Take the case of "Rich UI". For fifteen years, I (and many others) have been advocating Rich UI technologies, which enable animation and multimedia to be used in computer user interfaces. In that time, I never guessed that the Rich UI technologies would ultimately become controlled by advertisers. Now I find myself in the frustrating position of having to turn off, disable, uninstall or block the very Rich UI technologies I have been advocating and helping to build for so long - just so I can read the New York Times website without being distracted by a high-speed musical motion graphic. Animated advertisements have terrible usability. They invariably launch automatically, rather than under my control, and they almost always lack a "stop" button. Also, it is going to get much worse: companies like the New York Times have made it a clear goal to increase the amount of audio and video advertisements on their websites, as well as the number of "pre-roll" animated advertisements, which you are required to watch before you can see the real content. Simply reading a newspaper article has never been more challenging.

As we shift from Rich UI to compelling UX, the agenda moves beyond simply communicating messages. The goal of UX is to consider (and therefore manipulate) all aspects of contact between the user and the product -- to create a much deeper and more psychological relationship between products and people. And where product designers go, advertisers are sure to follow.

 

Perhaps an early example is the Deadwood installation in MTA's Times Square Shuttle. HBO was not satisfied with a standard advertising message, so the producers of the HBO TV series decided to create an "experience". They purchased the rights to redecorate the entire interior of three New York subway cars -- including the walls, floors, ceiling, and seats. Talk about pimp-a-ride! The S is a public shuttle line, so travelers have no choice but to use one of the decorated cars. The MTA has been converted into a mandatory corporate theme experience.

 

Computer interfaces today are being embedded in refrigerators, desks, walls, and furniture. As advertisers, too, shift their focus to "User Experience", how long will it be before they realize that our living spaces would make ideal mandatory corporate theme experiences? Will I have to install a music-blocker on my toilet seat, in order to prevent the "Ajax disinfection experience?"

 

* * *

 

The new focus on experience in art and technology follows, in my opinion, a much longer project focusing on "communication".

 

Deborah Cameron has done some valuable research in this area. She observed that, in the last one hundred years or so, we have moved from a culture of conversation to a culture of communication. In Oscar Wilde's era, people were idolized if they were good at conversation. The emphasis then was on what was left unsaid. Today, we are driven by communication. Even job postings for Janitors list "good communication skills" as a basic requirement. The goal of "communication skills" is the opposite of leaving things unsaid -- it is to express our internal states early and clearly. Oscar Wilde was a fabulous conversationalist. He had lousy communication skills.

 

Cameron points out that corporations have embraced the notion of communication, especially in commerce and advertising. The aim isn't necessarily to communicate well, but rather to convince the customer that the company cares about communication. For example, American shops frequently employ greeters who stand by the door of the store greeting customers as they enter. The individuals who do this job couldn't be more disinterested in whether you have a nice shopping experience, yet they always smile pleasantly and say a few encouraging words. The goal is to give the impression that the greeters care, and by extension the company itself cares.

 

For a while it worked: sales went up and customers gave positive feedback. However, people today are much more canny about what is genuine and what is fake, and the effectiveness of greeters has fallen off. So corporations are focusing not just on the words, but on the whole experience. Simply saying "have a nice day" is not enough. Now, the goal is to make you have a nice day, whether you want one or not.