Cognitive Labs

Google is moving into offering ads inside Flash games, which extends the ability to put messages into the popular game format in what is a predictable move.

Those publishers with mobile-optimized games will probably be able to use a similar service in the future. Brain games since they are at the twin foci of health and user attentiveness should be very well represented.

Labels: ads, advergame, brain, foci, ingame

That's a fine question.

We did a little digging and went back to the year 1999 - the year of the IPO with many deals grounded in three words: internet, potential, optimism and the year made famous by the artist once again known as prince.

That was also the year in which a small interactive agency created the first action-game advertisement, punch the monkey which was Flash, not Java - which had jillions of impressions in the remnant inventory category by 2001 and was used as a system default by companies like L90, DoubleClick, Avenue A, etc as they slid down to temporary obscurity (most were resurrected in the past 2-3 years, like a Phoenix, if they stuck to their knitting).

Here's one I grabbed from mikeonads.com which he grabbed from mySpace...

We’ve all seen this ad… it loudly proclaims “Punch the monkey to win a free _____”, fill in the blank with whatever is new and out today. A ps3, an xbox, maybe even an iphone (which hasn’t even been released yet). It’s perhaps one of the strangest phenomenons of online advertising, and I have yet to meet a person not in the industry who understands how these make money.

lets look at an example I just saw on myspace.com:

So, if I hit this monkey ten times, I’m going to get a FREE PS3!!!

We would contend that Advertising is in its infancy. Disliked though it may be, advertising drives spurts of online innovation and will morph into forms that are heretofore unimagined, including not only avatars and virtual worlds (which already exist in version 1.0 format) but more bold and even 'dangerous' visions involving neuroscience and cognition which will impact multiple senses - vision, touch, and smell and thought.

The sense of smell (olfactory sense) is one of the most powerful emotional influencers, and the nose is the most direct pathway to the brain, bypassing the blood brain barrier. For this reasons loss of smell is one of the signs of cognitive dysfunction leading to Alzheimer's, and is a typical symptom of individuals suffering from Alzheimer's. (see William Frey's work on olfactory delivery methods).

Smell-based advertising opens up a new vista for marketers, activating memories and fomenting action: hitting a key, thinking a thought, etc.

Imagine if thoughts themselves could be tagged? Marketers could then finally measure mindshare. Since thoughts are electrochemical impulses, the known universe of human thoughts constitute the available market. By distributing a peer-to-peer ad system that people could subscribe to, (e.g., influenced by Sharman Networks, but opt-in, once called altnet, also linked to Skype) the basic marketplace could be formed. In technical theory, a peer system (or hybrid ad servers + peers) would be more ideally suited than a centralized operation..

imagine this:

Advertisement:

"A penny for your thoughts?" Nonsense!
Join neuroadvantage and get paid $100 a month for your thoughts. In fact, the more you think, the more you can earn! (Thoughts replace page views/Think-throughs replace click-throughs)

The peer would faithfully record your individual thoughts for a time. Once the activities were downloaded from all of the subscribing peers, patterns in the data would be located. Now the tricky part...creating electrochemical impulses with affiliated topical tags, that can be shared across the network in real-time, and inserted via your local peer (either a device or something like a personal cognitive address, not unlike an IP address, for each brain). These tags would then be inserted into breaks between individuals thoughts, not unlike the DART system or the old EDI systems broadcasters use to tell affiliates what ads to run when. The disconcerting aspect is that subscribers wouldn't know if that sudden hankering for pizza hut were real or a 'tag.'

This is quite similar to what happens today except the data gathering device is done at the root directory, the brain, rather than a remote subdirectory - the eyeball. Keep taking the concept further and you end up inside the Matrix.

Let's put together a biz plan...

Labels: ads, frey, neuroadvantage, neuromarketing, nose, sri

The deal is this:

We've decided to spend no effort selling advertising until we reach 1,000,000 visitors per month. Though since we topped 700,000 collectively in December that might not be too long.

So far we've been approached by Blue Lithium (Yahoo!), several ad agencies, car companies, pharmaceuticals, etc., people who want to join us to sell ads and partnerships but all we've done so far is Adsense...which covers our operating expenditures, and we keep selling subscriptions.

Do you like music? That's an area of the web that has devolved, or evolved - depending on your perspective, whether you are a label exec or a technologist.

Should we launch a music service along with our games? Well, we've got some pretty cool technology in this area, that may let you see your tunes in a new light, keep checking in...also what do you think of helio - a mobile service with a retail presence in Palo Alto, Santa Monica, New York, and more; founded by Sky Dayton, Earthlink's founder. The co. is backed by both SK Telecom and Earthlink. And now, the video "Santa Monica" by Everclear...

Labels: ads, adsense, everclear, helio