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Starship Blogbook

Gods and Monsters

June 13, 2019

Gods and Monsters is a Ubisoft game that was featured at E3, with a cartoonish look to the artwork that resembles Breath of the Wild. Via Endgadget:

Ubisoft’s latest game goes back to classical mythology with ‘Gods & Monsters,’ which the publisher showcased with a cartoony first trailer at E3. According to Ubisoft, it’s an “adventure about a forgotten hero on a quest to save the Greek gods.” The player will have god-like powers and battle Gorgons, Hydras, and Cyclops. More details should emerge before the launch date of February 25th 2020.

Keanu Reeves on Cyberpunk 2077

June 12, 2019

Keanu Reeves has made a surprise cameo on Cyberpunk 2077, going so far as to make an unexpected appearance at E3. Yeah, E3 is on, one of the biggest gaming events in the world. With games being an even bigger money printing machine nowadays than films, we’re going to spend the week looking at some of the highlights that came out of E3.

I confess I’ve been waning on the cyberpunk genre to date. Cyberpunk 2077 looked exciting when CD Project Red introduced it years back, but over time the gameplay trailers have continued to look as like more of the usual. Western cyberpunk franchises, not to put a fine point on it, pretty much look like modern Asian megacities without (m)any Asian people. Just take a close look at the latest Blade Runner. This new franchise didn’t look like it would be much different, but then Keanu’s random appearance at the end is promising. We’re looking forward to the game.

Captain Marvel Deleted Scene

June 11, 2019

Captain Marvel has released a deleted scene that has the neckbeard section of the internet up in arms for her behaviour. Don’t ask her to smile. Also, if this makes her a villain, then so’s Colin Firth’s character in Kingsman for this scene:

Podcast ads

June 10, 2019
podcast ads

I’m listening to Pod Save America, an entertaining American Democratic podcast run by ex-Obama staffers. They’re discussing the 2020 Democratic candidates, which, I confess, I’m not really following the discussion closely. I don’t particularly care which candidate ends up the final nominee. The field’s immensely crowded right now and as such, less interesting. It’s sort of like Masterchef Australia before the inexorable march of time and TV ratings whittle the army of contestants down to a desperate and suspiciously photogenic few. The hosts’ discussion peter to a halt. A jingle plays. I brace myself. Ah, hell. It’s another Blue Apron ad.

(start rant)
By all that’s good and holy, unless you need a very tailored diet for a health reason or unless you live incredibly far away from a grocery store or have accessibility problems, why do you need a meal kit? The menu’s limited, Blue Apron is expensive, the ingredient quality is poor, and in an increasingly waste-choked world, it lands you with scads of plastic packaging for each meal. Why. Just why. The company hasn’t made any profit since its 2017 offering either. If you’re the 4% of Americans who love shit like this, you probably need to read the Uninhabitable Earth.
(/end rant)

To be fair to the hosts of Pod Save America and my personal biases, the ads they read out aren’t actually too bad, if only because they hardly ever follow the script given to them from advertisers. There’s usually a joke or two riffed off the political issue of the day. It makes the ad bearable, and I’ve actually checked out websites that they’ve discussed before. Pod Save America tends to be the exception to the rule, though. For many other podcasts, the fact that the hosts aren’t professional voice talent shows. There’s a reason why agencies carefully select voice actors for ads, radio or film.

To Skip or Not to Skip… Podcast ads

When an ad pops up on a podcast, I usually skip ahead. A recent study by WARC found that I’m in the minority, though:

  • 78 percent of listeners don’t mind branded sponsorships because they understand it supports the content.
  • Podcasts reach 62 million Americans (22 percent) weekly.
  • 41.7 percent of podcast ads are inserted dynamically, at the point of downloaded (instead of being pre-recorded).
  • 53 percent of listeners turn to YouTube to tune in.

A study from Hub Entertainment Research, in contrast, found that:

  • More than 8 in 10 (83%) DVR users skip ads “most of the time.” That includes 60% who say they skip every ad.
  • Two-thirds (68%) of DVR users say they will at least “sometimes” pause their DVR at the beginning of a live broadcast, so they can fast-forward through ads. One-quarter (26%) say they do this “every time.”
  • The majority (52% to 56%) skip ads “most” or “every time” on VOD and online platforms, when fast forward is available.

If people are more tolerant of podcast ads, podcasts might be a more effective way of getting your brand message out to a target audience. You could even reach audiences that are likely to be interested in your product: for example, if you sell sports equipment, you could make an ad for a local sports podcast. If the hosts are funny, let them riff off the script. The audience will be more likely to remember it.

Quick Tips on Writing a Good Podcast ad

  1. Use an agency… Hahaha. It’s true though. Get a professional to handle it.
  2. Get to the point. Try to deliver a punchy elevator pitch before the podcast listener can get bored and attempt to skip ahead.
  3. Don’t oversell. It’s really easy to lose trust.
  4. Have a landing page ready with an easy URL to remember. The podcast host is going to have to read your URL out on air. If it’s too long, it’s too hard to bother.
  5. Have a discount code available for listeners of the podcast. That will drive them quickly to your product if they’re interested.
  6. Spread out your ads if possible. Someone binging political podcasts doesn’t want to listen to your same ad repeated a million times. We’re looking at you, Zip Recruiter.

Want to learn more? Get in touch. And for the love of God, stop buying so much plastic packaging.

Adobe and Infringement

June 8, 2019

Adobe programs are to creatives what a tennis racquet is for Roger Federer, if there was only one brand of racquet available to all tennis players and the brand could make everyone pay every year to use the racquet, and raise their prices whenever they liked. If the racquet became more and more bloated and heavy over the years but everyone still had to use it because it was the industry standard. This has been a known and ongoing problem with Adobe software in the industry — since they have a monopoly and know it, they’ve been steadily just bloating their software, tacking on the less-popular software into the suite that most of us don’t need. Adobe now allows you to buy per app, with an individual price, student, business, or university, but compared to similar professional programs like Microsoft, the subscription remains an eye-watering price for freelancers:

Adobe knows that most freelancers really only need the Creative Suite — Illustrator, Photoshop, and inDesign. Yet for the price of those 3 programs, you pretty much might as well get the whole swollen raft of stuff you’d hardly ever use. Many people are lucky enough only to need Photoshop for their work (photographers, digital artists etc). Yet recently Adobe also doubled the price of its Photoshop package, sending people into panic:

The $US9.99/month option still appears for many users visiting the site, and if it doesn’t, PetaPixel has confirmed that it can still be purchased by contacting Adobe’s sales team by phone, using the website’s online chat to talk to a salesperson, or by contacting an official Adobe reseller. The $US9.99/month option can also be purchased as a 12-month plan for $US119.88, which can be further locked down for an additional three years.

But by hiding that option on the website, it means that new Creative Cloud subscribers who aren’t familiar with the current pricing structure will simply assume the $US20.99/month option is the cheapest way to get Photoshop, and that’s a scummy way to take advantage of them.

It turns out that Adobe was just “testing the waters”. Yay?

Adobe Piracy on the High Seas

I remember the first time I saw an Adobe product. I was in school in Asia in the 90s, and I’d walked into a computer store with my parents. There was a display rack with beautiful artwork, including “Adobe Illustrator”, which at the time I’d erroneously thought was an art program like Corel Draw. I was about to ask my mum for it when I saw the price tag. At first, I’d thought it had a few zeroes out of place. Perhaps unsurprisingly, when I finally taught myself how to use Photoshop for digital painting as a kid, I pirated the copy. It’s easy to pirate things in Asia. The internet’s extremely quick, and even if it isn’t, you can easily acquire dodgy copies of anything you want from shops.

Piracy is why Adobe embarked on creative cloud. Adobe products have been pirated for decades. Accessibility is certainly one way to address piracy: Steam/Valve, for example, famously remarked that piracy is simply a failure of marketing. However, Adobe’s eye-watering subscription price continues to make its software a draw for people who can’t afford the programs:

It’s often said that price and accessibility aside, one of the best ways to cope with piracy is to offer a superior service. Narayen says Adobe is doing just that with Cloud by offering unique features unavailable in ‘cracked’ software.

“As we’re delivering more Cloud-based services, as you know the only way to use the mobile apps and share content between the mobile apps as well as our Creative Cloud, is by having a subscription. So I think that’s also why we see more creative sync and creative profile being used, that’s certainly driving that,” Narayen added.

While it is indeed quite difficult to measure the scale of piracy of Adobe products post retail, the company’s popularity with pirates is still very visible.

Is this even still a viable strategy? Probably, yes. With the monopoly that they have on creative industries, it’s possible that Adobe might be able to trundle on, ever-increasing their prices on an industry that’s already in a state of reinvention or slow collapse. Traditional agencies are facing competition from consultancies. Adobe might not care about all the negative attention and bad press. It knows that the people who can afford to turn to cheaper alternatives are not its core audience: everyone who works professionally in the creative industry uses Adobe programs. It has an eye on its own stock price, which was recently upgraded to a Zacks Rank 2, reflecting an upward trend in earning estimates.

And Now This

Like many people stuck with Adobe programs, I use the old versions where possible. The newer versions tend to require faster and faster computers, tend to be more unstable, and have strange functionality changes that cost me readjustment time. Save for inDesign, of which I use the newest version because insisting that everyone else save idml files got annoying after a while, I use the older, stable versions of CC apps. They work with my MacBook, which I’ve been refusing to upgrade because the latest MacBooks have a terrible, easily-breakable keyboard.

Recently, reporting has indicated that people like me could be in danger of infringement. Can you really get sued for using old versions of Photoshop and Lightroom? Via Endgaget:

A spokesperson said in a statement sent to AppleInsider: “Adobe recently discontinued certain older versions of Creative Cloud applications. Customers using those versions have been notified that they are no longer licensed to use them and were provided guidance on how to upgrade to the latest authorized versions.” However, the spokesperson said Adobe can’t comment on claims of third-party infringement, as it concerns ongoing litigation.”

The company didn’t elaborate on what lawsuit compelled it to send out warning emails, but as AppleInsider mentioned, Dolby sued Adobe in March 2018 for allegedly not complying with their licensing deal. Adobe is contractually obligated to report sales of products that use Dolby technologies to the company and to pay the agreed-upon royalty fees.

According to court documents, Dolby is accusing Adobe of selling products that use its technology without paying at all and of refusing to provide the information it needed to conduct a meaningful audit of its books. At the time, Adobe told The Register that “Adobe does not agree with Dolby’s characterization of the issues concerning its audit of Adobe’s past use of its software.”

It’s not a great look for a company that’s already suffering from panicked exodus after the Photoshop stoush. It’s also unclear whether Adobe or Dolby can actually pin any legal responsibility on consumers: it’s not our fault that we were sold licenses for programs that Adobe didn’t have the rights to. Still, if you want to be safe, you probably should update. Bloatware and all. In the meantime, we still have memes:

Want to chat? Get in touch.

Nike Women’s World Cup Football

June 7, 2019

Nike Women’s World Cup Football ad is out, beautiful, inspiring… did you guys hear that New Zealand beat England in the warm up? Here’s hoping that the Women’s World Cup will inspire as much interest (and sponsorship) as the men’s… sometime in the future…

Mona Lisa Perrier

June 6, 2019

The Mona Lisa escapes the Louvre in this ad for Perrier, to live her best life away from the mobs of tourists. A full mood.

Pulling Ads in Protest

June 5, 2019
Pulling Ads off YouTube

Every morning, after I feed the cats, make breakfast, I open my MacBook and curse myself. “Twitter,” I say, “what’s the worst thing that happened while I was asleep?”

This problem with YouTube has been brewing for some time. It’s easily correctable on YouTube’s part — they just need to turn off the Recommended feature for videos involving kids, which their algorithm can already pick out. However, since that feature is the main driver of ad dollars to videos and to YouTube, they won’t. Yet another reminder that Google, YouTube’s parent company, left its ‘Do No Evil’ corporate philosophy behind a long time ago.

Sounds familiar? You’re probably a news junkie. The realization that predators have been using the YouTube comment section of home videos to guide other predators to the videos was previously written about a few months ago. Advertisers like started pulling (or considering pulling) their ads:

Nestlé, Epic Games and other major brands said on Wednesday that they had stopped buying advertisements on YouTube after their ads appeared on children’s videos where pedophiles had infiltrated the comment sections.

The companies acted after a YouTube user posted a video this week to point out this behavior. For the most part, the videos targeted by pedophiles did not violate YouTube’s rules and were innocent enough — young girls doing gymnastics, playing Twister or stretching — but the videos became overrun with suggestive remarks directed at the children.

The YouTube user, Matt Watson, came under criticism for having started an “adpocalypse” — a plunge in ad revenue — by publicising the issue instead of reporting the matter to YouTube’s own tools, even though combing through the thousands of home videos to manually report every comment was going to be a gargantuan task for a human. Months later, with the problem still unchecked and YouTube still intent on keeping its moneymaking algorithm despite the risks, it’s hard to see whether Matt’s approach had really worked — or if there was anything else he could have done.

Pulling Ads — The Beginning

Companies have often dropped ads or sponsorship for something they considered toxic. This hasn’t always worked. Floyd Mayweather, the boxer, remained one of the highest paid by revenue sports people in the world even without sponsorships. Nike was also recently revealed to have dropped sportswomen from its sponsorship after they got pregnant, and only committed to ending the penalties after an op-ed on the NYT brought backlash on the brand.

The most recent and well-known example of weaponising the process as a form of political protest came, perhaps unsurprisingly, from a freelance advertising copywriter from San Francisco. Matt Rivitz was incensed after the 2016 elections. In particular, he was angry with Steve Bannon of Breitbart news, an American conservative propaganda “news” site. He created an anonymous Twitter account, which he called Sleeping Giants. It encouraged people to take screenshots of ads appearing on Breitbart and forward them to brands, which were taken aback by images of their ads appearing next to headlines like “Birth Control Makes Women Unattractive and Crazy”. Hundreds of brands responded by blacklisting the site, and Sleeping Giants added Fox News to its purview, managing to remain anonymous until Matt was unmasked against his wishes by the Daily Caller, another conservative site. Via the New York Times:

“The way it happened sucks, but I’m super proud of this thing and of all the people who worked on it and all the people who followed it,” Mr. Rivitz said in his first interview since his involvement in the account was revealed. “We’re happy that we made advertisers think a little bit and realize what they’re supporting.” […]

“I was pretty amazed at the stuff they were printing, and my next thought, being in advertising, was, ‘Who is knowingly supporting this stuff?’” he said. “I thought maybe it would be two to three companies, and I quickly realized within a couple hours it was all placed programmatically.”

Mr. Rivitz was referring to the automated systems that place most online ads and tend to target consumers based on who they are, rather than which site they are visiting.

Sleeping Giants intends to make “bigotry and sexism less profitable”.

“People can use their free speech to say whatever they want and print whatever they want, and that’s what makes this country great,” Mr. Rivitz said, “but it doesn’t mean they need to get paid for it, especially by an advertiser who didn’t know they were paying for it.”

Careful Where You Advertise

It’s easy to pull ads from one particular site, but working on a blacklist system can mean that your ad will eventually just reappear on another site that doesn’t align with your brand values. Instead of trying to blacklist sites, it’s probably better for you to work from a trusted set of whitelisted sites, manually verified. You can build a nice whitelist just by checking out the most visited sites on the Internet and working from there.

Pulling ads from entire platforms is another kettle of fish. Not running ads on major platforms like YouTube as a form of protest isn’t something that a lot of brands can afford to do as part of their digital strategy. After all, YouTube’s owned by Google — do you then stop buying AdWords as well? Do you stop buying ads on Facebook and Instagram for all the dodgy things that Facebook has done? With the amount of noise out there, small brands with less clout in the marketplace will have to consider their digital strategies more closely than major brands who can generate news just from the act of boycotting YouTube.

Need more information? Need help with your digital placement strategy? Get in touch.

Image from Bizztor.

Death Stranding Full Trailer

June 4, 2019

The Death Stranding full trailer is out and it has to be seen to be believed. Good lord. Skip the first part if you don’t want to see the weird baby. We want to know if anyone’s explained to Mads Mikkelsen what the game is yet.

Japanese Gum Ad

June 4, 2019

This Japanese gum ad has to be seen to be believed. Seriously. Watch it to the very end for the ??? twist. We laughed out loud in the office.

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