Warning: Two marketing posts back-to-back, you guys. I’m sorry.

I don’t watch a lot of TV on an actual TV these days and most of the TV that I do watch is time-shifted. We live in the future, you know. Instead, I watch a lot of programming on my iPad. Between Hulu and Netflix and iTunes, there’s not a whole lot that I need to miss if I’m content to wait a day (or 8 days, in the case of some Fox programming). I even sat and caught up on The Office the last time I got my oil changed by watching on my phone. Again, we live in the future. I hate to invoke the Apple mantra, but we live in a world where stuff just works.

Which is why it’s easy to forget that there are some platforms that make it truly difficult to complete their users’ intended goal. But I got a reminder about that very thing when I tried to watch last week’s episode of Leverage on my laptop. TNT’s video player is maybe the worst one that I’ve used in the past year.

Here’s what it looks like:

I also have to say, before I get going on UX, that the quality of the video player itself was downright impractical. It took me over an hour to watch 42 minutes of television because of how frequently the stream had to buffer, buffer, buffer.

When I landed on this page, the most immediate thing I noticed was that I couldn’t watch the video without logging in. Not to TNT.tv – to my DirecTV account. I’d understand the former, even though that’s another hoop erected for the user to jump through to do the thing he or she wants to do. Every time you put up one of those hoops, more visitors leave in frustration. I’m currently three steps into a funnel and I’m being hit with one more hoop that I didn’t anticipate.

Fortunately, I know my DirecTV password. But the only reason I have it at-hand in my brain is that I just set up the Cartoon Network app on my tablet (so I can watch Batman: the Brave and the Bold episodes, mostly), and getting that to happen necessitated me resetting the password and setting a new one, because that’s how frequently we use these logins, how infrequently we have come to use logins in general.

Ideally, adding your content to another channel should be about increasing the reach of that content, democratizing it and making it accessible to new eyes.  Or, in this case, it’s maybe about ensuring that the only people who can view your content are the same people who can already access it elsewhere. That seems backwards, doesn’t it?

The irony is that users without connected accounts can only watch the clips, the behind-the-scenes stuff, the stuff that the committed fan wants to watch. Would it be smarter to give the episodes to everyone, and restrict access to the bonus content? Most people don’t want it, but enough of the ones who do are likely willing to give TNT a premium, in this case in the form of entering an external login.

I can’t castigate TNT for this solely, since it’s something that I’m seeing more and more of. Hell, even as a Hulu Plus subscriber, I also need to subscribe to Dish Network in order to get some shows with next-day availability. This is the sort of corporate behavior that encourages piracy – the creation of a subset of users whose want for the content is not equal to their willingness to give the faceless entity that acts as its gatekeeper the toll it asks for. This is a decision that has nothing to do with human users; it’s another reminder that, though we may like to think so, we are not actually the customers of these companies and that we are, in fact, part of the product.

But that’s a tangent. The screen that you’re on while you watch this video buffer is a mess. The bottom of the screen has an ad space that is half below the fold on my screen and that isn’t somewhere where anybody is going to even pay attention to it. I’d love to see clickthrough rates on that ad spot, or even an eye tracking study. Next to that ad is a recommendation that I watch Rizzoli & Isles. I’m skeptical of how well this kind of cross-sell works. After all, if I wanted to watch Rizzoli & Isles, I’d be on that landing page watching them tell me to watch Leverage or Falling Skies or whatever. While people that watch a lot of physical TV are prone to couch potato behavior, with lots of flipping between shows and back and forth, the Internet TV viewer is often more single-purpose. Less “I want to see what’s on” and more “I want to watch Once Upon A Time right now.” That’s loyalty to an intellectual property. I doubt there are a lot of people who just say to themselves “I’m a big fan of TNT – I’m just going to surf over there and see what they’ve got.” Maybe that’s just me, though I doubt it.

What TNT could be doing on this page is upselling me on things related to the episode I’m watching. Maybe some DVDs (that is the dream, right? That someone watching online converts into a purchaser)? Maybe a second-screen app that’s exclusive to the show I’m watching? Maybe an attempt to attract viewers to the site’s community?

Maybe something more like this?

This layout takes up the same rough space as the existing one and targets it toward fans of the show with a bit more precision.  The login call-to-action is placed directly beneath the video here, presenting a much smaller profile while still being a constant reminder to anyone watching the video player without being logged in (and also, in my wishful thinking scenario where the login gates off bonus content instead of full episodes, it creates some continuity between the content they’re viewing and the content that’s incentivized).

I think that’s a little better, a little more focused. I could be wrong, of course. What do you think? How would you redesign a screen like this?

Warning: This post is at least tangentially related to my job as an online marketer. You may wish to avoid it.

About three years ago, I radically redesigned my business cards. This was the first card I designed for myself in the wake of pink kind of accidentally becoming my ‘personal brand’* color. I can barely stand to look at the thing now for two reasons: first, because it’s a typographic nightmare, but second because of the gigantic QR code on it.

QR codes were very exciting at one point. Like a lot of things that we can accomplish with the Internet, though, the reality is never as good as the promise and we live in a world where most people are perplexed by QR codes while a small core of people who are mostly interested in demonstrating how savvy and clever they are keep trying to foist them on a public that is probably never going to scan them.

There are two great barriers to the democratization of QR codes, and neither is likely to change any time soon, even if 2012 manages to somehow finally be ‘The Year of Mobile’ that has been presaged since time immemorial. Yes, smartphone adoption is up and web traffic from mobile platforms  has been trending up slowly but steadily, but there hasn’t been this massive shift in mobile use/adoption that keeps getting predicted by the technorati.

One of the barriers to QR codes becoming popular instead of just omnipresent is their own usefulness. In a post at Marketing Pilgrim today, Cynthia Boris very rightly points out:

I find that most codes just lead me to a website that I could have arrived at more easily by typing in the URL. Other than that, I’ve been led to a few recipes and some behind the scenes videos for movies. Nothing thrilling and certainly nothing worth sharing.

Factor this in, too, with all those QR codes you see posted in subway tunnels and other places where they can’t actually be scanned.

The second barrier? It’s that there’s no smartphone I can think of that has a QR scanner built into its native camera app. Change that – give me a toggle that lets me switch between the normal camera and an ‘augmented reality mode’** and you’ll see the engagement with these marketing strategies skyrocket.

As it stands right now, I take a picture of the QR code at the top of this post with my iPhone and it…takes a picture of the code. As with most instances of QR codes in the wild, there’s no instructions, no recommendation to download QR Reader or RedLaser or whatever, not even an intimation of what will happen when you scan the code (which, well, don’t worry about that, because it’s not going to be interesting or useful). The ideal interaction with QR or AR is supposed to be quick and simple and we’ve made it a pain in the ass. If we were talking about an augmented reality interaction as if it were a sale, we’d be looking at a conversion funnel that has way too many unnecessary steps.

When it comes to rich media and augmented reality, marketers need to stop trying to make ‘fetch’ happen. Instead of just vomiting out new things either because we can or because our personal echo chamber full of other marketers and tech-savvy hypersharers thinks it’s amazing. Make something valuable instead of something cool.

Those AR-animated holiday Starbucks cups? They’re completely lacking in value. At least they had the good sense to integrate the viewer into the Starbucks app that everybody is already using when they enter a store, the one they use to pay for their coffee.

It’s not about cartoony faux-interactivity or racking up pageviews; it’s about providing convenience and value (the things that create engagement).

Am I wrong? Anybody out there love QR codes and find them useful?

*I hate this term so much, and the quotes here are ‘sarcastiquotes’.

** Of course, with virtually every mobile provider choking off unfettered access to data, this becomes double impractical.

Go Saints, and all, but the really awesome things about last night’s game have nothing to do with football.  As anybody off the street knows, the real story of the Super Bowl is the ads, some of the most expensive spots on TV each year and the result of millions and millions of dollars in research, creative and production expenses. Millions of millions. The Super Bowl Ad is its own mini-industry.  Think about that and weep as you recount some of the biggest and most awesome hits from the 2010 Super Bowl.

1. Frequent pauses to explain random Internet culture references to co-viewers.  “No, mom, that’s Tay Zonday. He wrote a song called “Chocolate Rain” and put it on YouTube and he became kind of Internet popular, which is the kind of popular where you get booked on Jimmy Kimmel but not the kind of popular where most of Kimmel’s audience knows who you are.  No, that isn’t the bird from Cinderella.  That’s Twitter. Well, Twitter is….” [Incidentally - Vizio wins this year's distinction of Best Ad of the 2008 Super Bowl].

2. The ignition of a pantsless trend in advertising that will likely continue unabated for a few months until CP+B do a Burger King ad where the King has no pants on and there are five suicides directly linked to that TV spot.

3. Discovering that the secret to the Who’s longevity and relatively good preservation is an almost total lack of energy in their performances.   Watching Pete Townshend lazily windmill his arm around his guitar was like having my heart turned to stone.  I think next year, the Super Bowl should abandon the concert format entirely, and have the halftime show be a midfield reading by Dean Koontz or selections from Les Miserables performed by cats in 18th century French garb.  A giant TV screen displaying Facebook updates about the Super Bowl for 25 minutes. Wolves turned loose in the stadium. Anything.

4.  Another trend for 2010? Hating women, all of whom are joyless tyrants preventing men from taking control of their own adult lives.

5. Danica Patrick. Is it just me, or is she in every goddamn ad that didn’t feature Megan Fox or Betty White? Also, see #4 re: those godawful GoDaddy commercials that make me feel like I need to take a shower after each time I see one, just so that I stop feeling icky. We can show those all day long, but can’t show implied making out between two guys just once?  I mean, granted, it’s not something I’m chomping at the bit to watch, but really CBS?

AKA, I’m just going to ramble a bit to get a post up.

Because the kids are big into personal branding right now.  Personally, I loathe the idea of sublimating a person’s net worth down into a marketing message (in case you’re wondering about my verb choice there, it’s there to indicate how personal branding manages to make ephemera state-change to drivel without bothering to stop even momentarily at substance; I may have an English degree, but I didn’t always sleep through science, people), but I can’t deny that everybody has their own personal iconographies that get associated with them.

With me, I think that’s got to be hats and ties.  Hats, I have no defense for; I just like hats.  I blame my Twitter picture for this – an avatar that was, for the longest time, me wearing an ivy cap.  Now, guys with beards wear caps like that all the time; I don’t think I’m special in that regard (or really, any regard), but somehow, the hat became My Thing, to the point where there are acquaintances of mine whose first thought when seeing me is to comment on whether or not I have a hat on.

My thing with ties, on the other hand?  Well, there are a few reasons.  I’m thinking about this now, incidentally, because I’m wearing my second consecutive pink tie of the week (and will pull a third out of the tie drawer tomorrow). The prime reason?  As I’m sure I’ve stated before somewhere, the price I charge myself for being unattractive and out of shape is that I have to try harder to look good.  I could probably get away with wearing sweatpants to work some days, but I would honestly rather be hit by a bus than go any further into public than my yard in sweatpants.  On top of that, I spent a year working in a hospital environment where I had to wear a tie every day  as part of the dress code. To maintain a professional workplace environment, which was also being maintained by, for instance, the doctor I was working with wearing ripped jeans, an Allman Brothers t-shirt and a lab coat (true story).  It became a powerful habit and I, if nothing else, am a habitual creature.  Third is just plain superstition.  I always wear a tie when I have to give a talk, a presentation or present on a panel.  If I don’t have one, I panic. With work, the tradition has become specific, down to the color.  I started wearing pink ties to work functions as a bit of a joke.  The first time I did, I got a lot of compliments for it and nearly arm wrestled a drunk girl who tried to steal my tie; I consider that a bit of a success. It’s become a good luck charm for some of my co-workers.  When preparing for the panel I’m sitting on this afternoon, I was told that I “had to” wear a pink tie to assuage my co-presenters (today, it’s the unicorn tie, which has pink ink on it; it still counts).  The one time that I did not wear a pink tie to a work-related event (it was a purple tie that I wore to tape a webinar with my boss), there was a power outage.  I consider that proof.

I guess maybe my beard counts, too?  I don’t know; the only reason I don’t shave it is because I look horrible without it.

So, I’ve had a few questions from various corners about the results of the survey from earlier in the week – what the results were like, what my ideal answers are, whether or not anybody came close.

For the first question, as indicated in the same post, I’m hoping for cute, sane and nice. Out of all of the respondents, the only one that chose all three of these also chose every possible option, thereby skewing the data unreliably. So let’s just go with 0%. I don’t attract sane or nice people, it seems, and that explains so much.

The Beatles is an overwhelming favorite, with only two respondents declaring Elvis and one casting a vote for Elvis Perkins.

Almost everybody was a nerd, with only one supercool person protesting too much and saying no.

Which brings us to the wolf question, which is a reference to, for those not in the know, this piece of apparel (read the reviews!). Most answers were – thankfully, because I know most of the respondents – 0, but one unfortunate has 1-3 wolves in her closet and another who, based on her aggregate answers, may actually be my soulmate, says “Never Enough.”

I find it ironic that, when asked to define irony, only one person comes through and gives me the Reality Bites quote that I was looking for (go you!). Many others shared either Alanis Morrissette lyrics or embarrassing personal moments of irony – many of which were song-ironic but not for-real-ironic. Best answer? “Like silvery or bronzey, only with iron.” There were also three “I don’t knows,” one of which turned out to be ironic in and of itself after some followup in the comments.

And the Madea question? You are all what Corky St. Clair would call “bastard people,” the way you’re so mean to poor Madea. Many of you want to send her to either Jail or Hell (where she will presumably sass the devil). The same erudite lady who selected Elvis Perkins in the musical question here admits that she doesn’t know what Madea is but is familiar with the Greek tragedy Medea, which gets bonus points in my book.

And unsurprisingly, many of you were in the “No, Sir” camp on the Reagan question, except for the one person that I know that would name him “The Greatest.”

So, what have I learned? Well, other than that I surround myself with toxic, Beatles-loving people, I don’t know. And that first part I knew already, too. So yeah.

One of the things I notice when I go to cons is that small press (the small small presses, not the Top Shelves or the Fantagraphii) and self-publishers don’t get how to market their work a lot of times.  The future of the medium for them lies in leveraging the web, but I still see a lot of cases where creators have a pretty yet uninformative website, an obfuscated message and an over-reliance on clever merch to get the word out.

Small press comics creators are like local bands.  Not just in the sense that they rely on word of mouth and stickers to get the word out, but also in that they have a lot of creative energy, are looking for platform for it, and don’t have much of a clue how sometimes.

There is, and I think this is something that I’ve mentioned before, this myth that having presence on the web is magical, that it will increase awareness instantly.  Even in the best case scenario, that’s unlikely.

Likewise, just having a table at a con isn’t a slam dunk.  Speaking personally, I like to wander around cons and look for new stuff,  but there are lots of factors that conspire against me:

1. It’s loud

2. I’m being jostled constantly by virtue of my hugeness.

3. There’s some carnival barker in the next booth over shouting at me about “The Adventures of Zap^Man, the only hero with a ^ in his name!”

Really, the problem with the web and the problem with getting someone’s attention in person is the same – there is a limited window of time in which to capture a reader’s interest, and that window is full of competition from countless other stimuli.

I think too often, we (because I do this too) focus on the outposts where our presences exist online and not on the function those presences serve.  The reason we have a website, a Twitter, a Facebook page, etc. is to engage with fans.  All too often, inexperienced creators use these instead of engaging with fans, expect the tools to do the work for them.*

How do you do that?  Communicate what you’re doing. Do it simply and clearly.

If I don’t know what your comic is about within a few seconds of noticing it, I will probably not go through an overwhelming amount of effort to find out. Have an elevator pitch for the book ready to go when you talk to someone. Boil that pitch down to its essence. Make sure that your booth or website’s signage has that one thing on it. If you’re selling a few different things, make sure they’re all cleanly laid out and priced, ideally with a description of what the object is on the table/site next to the comic.

I had a few people just hand me stuff for free. This doesn’t work. Why? I don’t look at it. Or, when I do, I don’t remember why I wanted to read it. And then don’t.

The other thing? Ask for readers. You’ll get them. If you see I’ve glanced at your booth a few times, ask if I want to know more about your books. If you want more pageviews, tell the news sites and blogs that you read that you’d love it if they could review your comic. The romantic notion of found art is great, but in reality, even that happens due to networking and good pitching. Give me something to write about and I’ll promote you for it. That’s the implicit commerce of blogging.

I’m inspired to write this by my experience at SPX this weekend; I saw a lot of great stuff there, but I have the feeling that I missed a lot of equally great stuff because it simply got lost in the shuffle or wasn’t promoted correctly.

$0.02.

*And I can’t blame them.  I’ve sat with my niece through an episode of Handy Manny, and he doesn’t do shit – this is the legacy we leave our youth.

Although Jim Henson’s Wilkins Coffee ads are probably most notable for the unmistakable traces of The Muppet Show that appear in their DNA, the thing that I always appreciated about them was the wanton puppet violence.

In an era where Crispin Porter + Bogusky can make The King work as a viable campaign for Burger King, why hasn’t this kind of pitchery come back?

Puppet A: “Hey, do you bank with Citibank?”

Puppet B: “No, I hate them!”

*Puppet B is attacked by hyenas and torn into tiny pieces*

Or a puppet, standing in a room with a sleeping child, holding a pillow in its puppety hands, saying, “Shhhh.  Her parents don’t drink Pepsi Cola.”  Fade to black.