Can you brand something with a blue bird in 2010 and not be referencing Twitter?
It’s a lovely brand, I just think someone’s using it right now.
I’m struggling with whether the designers:
believe Twitter, with about 6800 local participants, according to a quick Tweepz search, just isn’t prevalent enough in Winnipeg for the brand similarities to matter
are planning a brilliant Twitter campaign to support & extend the print blitz, or
have never heard of Twitter
Does Twitter own birds? Do they want to?
Modern birds have had their own look for roughly 65 million years. Can Twitter own the notion of a bird, or subset of birds (the blue ones)? If a brand spawns thousands of mashup logos, does it really make a sound?
That Twitter didn’t feel the need to purchase the icon outright like they did with Yiying Lu’s Fail Whale suggests they don’t want to ‘own’ the bird as logo. It’s a “decorative element”, branding wall art.
Logo liberty and the essence of crowdsourcing
The thing with Twitter is that the community really took the wall art and ran with it. You can find literally infinite permutations, literally, of Twitter’s blue bird and they all mean ‘tweet’.
Logo liberty is one of the sticky factors of the Twitter brand. In true crowdsourced, Web-2.0-at-it’s-best fashion we are all permitted to customize the brand to suit us while still projecting the brand essence. That’s because the brand essence is crowdsourcing and participation. It’s a unique medium-is-the-message branding model born of a cultural shift to group brand ownership.
Let’s examine the extent of this Bird of the Crowd metamorphosis, shall we?
Blue birds = Twitter
A marriage of Twitter’s corporate blue and Oxley’s iconic (not blue) bird, blue birds from a variety of artistic traditions were the first mascots to say “Twitter”. Beyond style preference, designers inserted their attitude visually as a means to convey their communication style (“I’m cute! I’m fun!”) or expertise (“I’m a freakin’ NINJA with WOLVERINE CLAWS!).
ANY bird = Twitter
We don’t all have blue websites, so soon all manner and species of bird came to symbolize a link to the Twitterverse. Twitter’s bird mindshare grew to encompass every bird.
Dissolving birds that are hardly even birds = Twitter
The whole ‘bird’ idea began to abstract, to simplify, to fly like a small blue bird to the wide open sky of possibilities, of barely-birds.
Anything blue = Twitter
With the bird concept now optional, the final ties to the corporate brand lay in colour. Twitter icons expanded to include anything in a fresh Web 2.0-y shade of blue.
Things that are neither blue nor birds = Twitter
Blue is so limiting. So are birds. There’s no reason a piece of toast can’t symbolize Twitter.
I’m sure you can appreciate the scope of the designer’s problem. If Twitter’s brand encompasses blue birds, all other birds, everything blue, and anything that isn’t blue or a bird, we’re going to need to open up more of the visual spectrum or something if we want to keep creating distinctive work.
This does make it tough to brand new products and services. Perhaps we’ve reached the end of branding, and it’s safe to start over again with small blue birds.
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If you’re reading this from Japan, you’re going to roll your eyes at me being Betty Rubble and living in Bedrock over here, but I’m getting intrigued by QR codes and am praying for their widespread adoption in Canada sometime soon.
Print advertising—magazines, direct mail, transit—has always engendered a sinking feeling of futility in my conversion-sensitive stomach. Creative teams bust their balls to conceive and execute an idea meant to motivate an audience to do something, but the disconnect between seeing an ad and acting on it is just hopelessly huge in these attention-starved times. I am just not going to go home and type in a URL I saw on a billboard. I don’t remember it and I don’t care about it anymore by the time I’ve got the leisure to look it up.
Groovy little portals to the future
Enter the QR code, a simple bar code readable by any phone with a camera & a scanner App. Spy a code on a flyer, tv show, magazine or poster & with a quick wave of your cell, you’re whisked to a mobile site providing the instant opportunity to:
Make a donation to a cause
Buy tickets to an event
Watch a movie trailer, documentary clip, or interview
Like a Facebook page
Enter a contest
Get a map
Download an app
Read current information about a person, place or thing
Wow, hey? No more barriers to conversion. Act now while you’re in the mood! The best example I read, and I’m pretty sure this is fantasy island stuff except in Jetsonsesque Japan, was the ability to stand around a movie store scanning boxes and watching movie trailers. I’m not sure there’ll be movie stores by the time this technology is widespread in North America, but you get the picture. Literally, ha.
QR Code 101: the Basics
Here are some neato things I’ve learned about QR codes.
QR codes link real world objects (anything that can be printed on or scotch-taped to or broadcast) to online destinations
A link from the real world to the internet is called a hardlink, which sounds cool
The practice of using these things is called mobile tagging
In Japan, phones come with scanner Apps. That’s kind of the holdup in North America
Your phone can read a code off a computer, tv screen, or LCD/LED billboard, along with printed codes
Designers: the white space around a code is part of the code. Don’t be croppin’ it
While the code reading experience is nifty, and marketers’ll be able to capitalize on sheer novelty for a while, the mobile experience the person is taken to is 80% of the interaction. You must not suck here. You must not make someone drag out there phone to get “more”, and give them less (ie, your not-even-a-mobile-site-totally-normal-website. That would be bad).
At the very least have your website streamlined for mobile by a cool interactive agency. With 23,000,000 mobile phones in Canada, this is gonna become an issue shortly anyway.
Not having encountered QR codes in Winnipeg, I couldn’t imagine why such a groovy, futuristic technology that finally, finally married the internet to real life wasn’t super enormous, so I asked cool Toronto QR agency QRe8 what’s going on. I hope to have an interview with them up shortly.
The nextMEDIA conference is a place where filmmakers and tv producers can hook up with new media partners looking to collaborate on transmedia projects. Stories can now be told as multiplatform productions that provide multiple entry points into a narrative, thanks to the explosion of digital media. Think the original analogue story extensions, like comic books and action figures, except digital, portable, and shareable. Think fan fic, games, and apps.
New media producers are great at figuring out the best kind of story to tell with different media. What part of the tale should be delivered and expanded upon by mobile phone? What secret goodies can we share with fans via QR codes? What did that sentence even mean?
Tactica’s done some amazing transmedia work with filmmakers, tv producers and educators like the National Screen Institute, and award-winning work for CBC. A recent CBC The Nature of Things convergent interactive piece, One Ocean, is up for a Wildscreen Festival ARKive New Media Award.
If you run into Kevin at the conference, be sure to say hi, and if you’re involved in storytelling and want to extend the experience to something a little more digitally immersive, get in touch.
Something unique is happening to stories in the age of participation.
Have you heard the term “convergent media”? How about “transmedia“? Transmedia is “storytelling across multiple forms of media in order to have different “entry points” in the story”. It’s a richer experience, an interactive narrative backchannel, that lets you learn and participate in what were once one-way broadcast media: film and tv.
Expect these kinds of experiences to become more common, as tv and film producers explore transmedia in extending and enhancing the worlds they create. The conversation, participation, and deeper understanding fostered by new media in co-production with classic media brings everybody a bigger, better experience of the story.
The Nature of Things One Ocean airs Thursday nights in March on CBC.
Tactica Interactive, Winnipeg-based interactive agency & my husband’s company, recently launched the Reason to Live campaign with the Manitoba Suicide Line. The launch, held at Klinic, featured Minister of Healthy Living Jim Rondeau & some moving Aboriginal singing from one of the campaign participants and his father.
“A key component to this approach is the use of social marketing strategies to reach youth in particular, and spread the message about the resource,” says Tim Wall, Director of Counselling Services at Klinic. According to Janet Smith, Program Manager for the Manitoba Suicide Line, “using social media such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube can play a critical role in suicide prevention and engage youth in conversations that promote awareness, understanding and help-seeking behaviours”.
The viral components of the campaign, designed for easy social sharing on Facebook and Twitter, include several powerful videos telling the stories of Manitobans whose lives have been affected by suicide. Watch for yourself; the first-person accounts are very compelling. Tactica’s social media strategy is already having an impact, according to program managers; with callers indicating they’d seen the message of hope online.
The challenge with this project was that it needed to have a social component, but there was no content to share. Tactica had to figure out what was the most compelling aspect of the Suicide Line’s work, which was of course the personal accounts of people who’ve dealt with suicide. Tactica decided to produce a series of videos, the most direct and easily shareable method of storytelling. If you want people to talk, you’ve got to give them something to talk about.
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