Certainly, I’ve contributed my fair share of aesthetic pollution/terrorism during a lucrative and decorated career in interactive marketing, and if I end up starting my own shop, I’ll likely have to suffer through projects like these to make ends meet. (I hope not, but start-up life can be hard.)

Still, we should stay honest. Even if we ignore the irony of such an unhealthy product claiming to care about nutrition, this app won’t make America smarter, healthier, or more likely to buy Wonder Bread. These types of initiatives are pointless. Wonder Bread isn’t going to test better. It’s not going to borrow any halo from the iPhone brand. It’s not going to gain any new reach, any recall, and sure as hell won’t see any cases moved. It’s going to embarrass the person who flipped the switch on the green light.

Why do companies keep jumping on the “gotta be on every screen” mindless non-strategy? It doesn’t matter what we release, as long as it’s there!

The App Store, in particular, is a difficult ecosystem. Contrary to what marketing geniuses think, there isn’t an effective addressable audience equal to the number of iTunes accounts. Sure, the eyes are there, but they’re discerning (mostly), fickle (extremely), and purposefully ignorant of 98% of the apps in the store.

Wait a Minute…This is Genius!

Ya know, maybe Wonder Bread will actually help make America healthier with this app. By wasting their marketing cash on pointless efforts like this, they may lose some market share. Getting Wonder Bread out of shopping carts would be great for America.

Hopefully this strategy can spread to soft drink companies, tobacco companies, and booze conglomerates!

Who wouldn’t jump on a goofy bandwagon to get those kinds of numbers? Engagement rates of 0.00015% are a sure sign this Flash-based AR thing is going to take off. Or am I reading that wrong?

Read more on Flash-based AR in advertising.

Generally, the presence of brands and their representatives on social sites is well-tolerated. Everyone is used to the fact that brands are jumping in. We consumers have large, high-res displays and we’re great at building selective blindness. When brands participate in social media, though, we don’t necessarily need that blindness. They’re automatically invisible unless we want to see them.

The Honeypot

A honeypot is an attractive trap used to embargo a threat. In information security, a dummy server might be placed on the periphery of a network and left somewhat hackable. The dumber crooks break into the honeypot, thinking they’ve silently compromised a network, only to be kept at arm’s length and watched. A thriving, sensitive network might exist right behind the honeypot, but the attacker never knows. He’s satisfied with himself for breaking in and stealing (what he thinks are) the keys to the castle.

On social sites, we only engage with brands if and when we want to. We don’t bother following @zappos if we don’t want to interact with Zappos. The model keeps the power dynamic shifted the way it should be: in the favor of the consumer.

In a way, a brand presence on Twitter is the antithesis of display advertising. Rather than covering every visible surface in a shotgun effort to sneak into the minds of consumers, social media advertising is more passive.

Twitter and Facebook are honeypots for brands, keeping consumers protected from the annoying noise we see everywhere else. We reach in and pull them out when we want, but otherwise keep them at bay.

Twitter is better at this role than Facebook because Twitter lacks display ads. I think that fact alone makes us love Twitter, where we simply tolerate Facebook.

An Olive Branch

So, to brands, I say, welcome. Don’t screw it up, and don’t speak unless you’re spoken to. You’re not “going where the conversation is happening” – you’re going where people are, and letting them talk to you if, when, and how they prefer. Play by the rules and you will, over time, build a community. You’ll earn a voice. Just don’t be insulted if we tune in and out at will. It’s better for all involved.

An Example

Ok, so R/GA is about to bring Taco Bell all up in our grills on Facebook and Twitter. God save us from the chalupa and volcano nachos.

Luckily, I can opt out by not opting in. We all can.

It feels good, doesn’t it?

If you are trying to raise awareness, forcing a user to work is generally a bad idea. You have to give users something of high value while minimizing their effort if you want to build a better reputation.

If your goal is conversion, you should be especially careful of the barriers to entry and usage. This seems obvious, but brands consistently require too much of users in their digital marketing efforts.

Augmented Reality in Ads

Industry rags and blogs have spent months reporting on a steady stream of augmented reality (AR) ideas in marketing ever since GE launched their Smart Grid AR site.

A recent entry into the pool is for Always Infinity. The site claims to show you a magic trick.

All you have to do is follow the instructional video and simple two-step process of printing a graphic out on a sheet of paper and holding it up to the camera while it superimposes the magic. What’s the magic in this case? A 3d animation of a rabbit in a hat. It’s cute, but fluff. The real magic trick is making 5-10 minutes disappear with nothing to show for it – including a greater appreciation of their new pads.

This is how most of these campaigns work. I think they’re mostly flops. They’re ideas pulled out of the bookmarks bar of a desperate art director, sold to a client as the next big thing, and supported by an industry press with a shortage of interesting topics.

There were two instances of this particular form of webcam-based AR in recent marketing efforts that were successful. The first was the aforementioned GE project. This was the first big brand use of AR and it seemed like advanced – if novel – tech coming from GE. It was cool and not overtly pushing a product.

The second was a project developed by AKQA for the United States Postal Service (USPS) that let users hold items up to their camera to find the best Priority Mail shipping box. The damned thing had a purpose, and used the tech in an interesting way.

Everyone else doing this stuff has been trying to fit in, adding to the noise. They’ve expected users to find inspiration in the declining novelty of webcam AR, put in the work of printing an image, engage in the theatrics, and eagerly send to a friend.

Instead of patronizing your audience, pushing this gimmick as new to them, why not find a real reward for engagement? Make the payoff ten times as valuable as the work users put in. Only the first project to use a gimmick gets to call the work itself the payoff.

Let me repeat my new rule to the consumer brands out there looking for gimmicks that make demands of people: If it’s easier to buy your product than to engage with your marketing, you’re doing it wrong.

The newest example: Mastercard Priceless Picks.

Their location aware social review sharing tidbit finder app is a cute, ephemeral trinket (at best). It would have made a rather interesting location-aware banner ad. Unfortunately, someone told them they should ship an iPhone app instead of a ton of banners. Hey, why not, right?

Here’s one reason: installing an iPhone app is work. If you make users work, you owe them something valuable.

Despite the attempt at “one-click” installation, the App Store is a nightmare. iTunes is still slow and unwieldy. Installing, updating, deleting, and managing applications is still quite a bit of work.

Contrast this to banners. A banner loads when a page loads. Users don’t have to do anything. Actually, users don’t get to do anything – including disabling ads or opting-in – but that’s a post for another day. Unlike iPhone apps, the barrier to entry for a banner is very low. Your debt to users is lower.

They’re fast to develop, cheap to run, and simple to measure. They probably get more traction than iPhone apps, especially as the “first in my category!” novelty slots are snapped up. But alas, the creatives are bored with them.

These days, many digital agencies won’t touch banners. They relegate banner work to a production ghetto, churning them out when they have to, and apologizing to the creatives forced to touch such dismal fare. They blame the format for the lack of satisfying creativity instead of looking at themselves.

Hey, don’t get me wrong: I agree that banners, as a format, are terrible. I want online display ads to die as much as the next normal, sane human – and with them, their concepts.

There is a class of creative concept that belongs in a banner/widget, if anywhere at all. Most of the iPhone apps spit out by brands belong in that class. Transposing formats is a distraction. Sleight of hand. Another paycheck.

The Mastercard app shows the warm reception from the public.

Would so many agencies pitch iPhone apps if their compensation was usage-based? I don’t mean downloads, either. I mean repeat launches, with the first dozen per device being free.

A Mantra

Ad world creatives and strategists, repeat after me: My iPhone app idea sucks. It belongs in a banner. Leveraging the accelerometer, magnetometer or location API doesn’t change that.

If you’re the exception, I’ll buy you a pint. Of gold.

Brand App User Scenario

To those who will pitch their dumb ideas despite my sage advice, I offer a token of friendship: your primary user scenario.

The user will follow these ten steps.

1. Hear about the application.
2. Search App Store or come in via link.
3. Click install, wait for download.
4. Plug in phone.
5. Sync. Take nap while backup and sync complete.
6. Find the app on the many screens of icons.
7. Launch it.
8. Close it.
9. Delete it.
10. One star.

Ouch. I’m sure you’ll win an industry award, though.

According to AdMob, a large portion of iPhone and iPod Touch users claim to use their mobile devices to browse the web more often than they use their desktop or laptop computers. This number is undoubtedly going to grow.

Combine that with an article in AdAge this week examining the problems with Google’s AdSense for Mobile product, and you see the current, expanding dark period for users (victims?) of mobile ads.

Mix in Noah Brier’s thoughts on Google as a market leader and we see a larger risk: if Google ignores UX right now and users acclimate, nobody will have the weight to course-correct where the experience is concerned.

Admittedly, my opinion is that mobile advertising should shrivel up and die. That said, if it’s going to exist, the UX should be at least tolerable and, preferably, stellar.

This is the kind of problem that arises when engineers don’t obsess over UX.

The article is Jeff Goodby: We are Becoming Irrelevant Award-Chasers.

There are some real gems in this article and I agree with his core position. It echos something a friend of mine told me. He’s the Worldwide Creative Director at one of the world’s largest agencies. His group focuses on the shopper space and measures success in terms of direct sales. The motto he and his team operate under is, “We don’t take gold. We make gold.”

They focus on activation more than awareness, and obsess about ROI. Cases moved, not trophies from their peers. Definitely more MBA than MFA, though they’re no slouches on creativity.

This is a different position and purpose than awareness-building groups and campaigns, but I think the two are artificially separated.

My favorite paragraph from Mr. Goodby’s article sums up a problem a lot of folks joke about: using client dollars to build an agency brand first, client brand second.

It’s a warning that we are, in effect, making things that serve our own agency brands instead of serving our clients and making a difference in the minds of the world.

I see this all over the place. It’s an industry-rag myopia that often leaves consumers/shoppers/users out of the equation. It’s more prominent in the awareness-building side of advertising, because it’s easier to get away with there.

What I don’t agree with is the call for famousness as a driving force – at least not for the agencies themselves.

I want us all to be famous again, outside the walls of our agencies. How can we accomplish this?

I’d rather see the brands made more famous, the agencies fade into the shadows, and awards focus exclusively on metrics. The problem, of course, is finding new ways of measuring success.

In Which Toby’s Optimism Takes Over

If each major agency donated the time and brainpower of one pointless microsite or social network spam tool and focused on using technology to prove efficacy as it relates to activating sales all the way from display media to the credit card machine, they could transform the industry.

We’re all digital-obsessed anyway. Why are all the lines of code squandered on ephemeral campaign collateral? Why not come together and create standards that unify as many digital outlets as possible? Unify digital cable to mobile to web to shopper loyalty programs to e-commerce to out-of-the-home to in-store displays?

It could be awesome… A lot of work, for sure. A lot of ego set aside. Great care to liberate consumers/shoppers/users from privacy concerns, bad UX, and fatigue. A massive battle against inertia. But the payoff could be the ability to tune messages so effectively that we reduce the noise, stop fighting for eyeballs, and help people make decisions.

In Which Toby’s Cynicism Takes Over

But then, who wants to create tools that can measure success accurately? Who wants awards to go to campaigns that help move units if those campaigns end up straightforward and unobtrusive and inexpensive? What if your pet client is pushing a shitty product and user-centered advertising exposes it as worthless? Ouch.

And who can be famous for helping their clients get richer?

What if cabbies are unimpressed?!?!

In Which He Makes a Call to Action

So who wants to discuss the overall role, and future, of technology and user experience in advertising? Who can think outside of their current assignment? Who among us would like to be the Tim O’Reilly of ad-tech? Where are the visionaries?