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.

When Doogie Hower had a blog, it wasn’t connected to the Internet. I don’t know that a lot of the people watching Doogie Howser, M.D. knew what the Internet was or imagine the thing that it would become. It was just a journal, but we knew that it was hipper and more modern that Kevin Arnold’s voiceovers in the preceding half-hour because it happened in a word processor. Beep. Bop. Boop. Beep.

I had a laptop as a kid. It was a big, hulking beast of a thing intended for road warrior salesmen like my dad was; it was his cast-off laptop that I inherited. It ran text adventures and Battle Chess and Thexder (which grew in me a specific kind of small affection for MIDI versions of other songs) and, most importantly, WordPerfect. I think one of the reasons why I still code myself as a writer when I think about myself is that I wrote constantly on that stupid twenty or so pound laptop with its orange and black LCD screen and its battery that was the size of a small dolphin. All manner of really dumb stuff, mind you, but I clacked and pecked at those keys in most of my spare time that wasn’t full of comics or painting my Warhammer miniatures or poring over Advanced Dungeons and Dragons books.

Don’t worry, I know all about how tragically uncool I was. But the point is, it helps to write.

That Doogie Howser journal, it was a blog. It was just that nobody read it. Except probably Doogie’s mother.

I think the worst thing that can happen to a blog is that it gets readers.

I’m thinking about this because I found myself browsing through the series of posts on Dan Harmon’s blog in which he talks about his breakup with his girlfriend. Harmon’s outpouring is remarkable for its emotional honesty and teen-movie earnestness. It’s a lot of brooding shoegaze stuff about love is a lie and all that – not true, but true to what’s in his head as he’s writing it, you know? And there’s a sad shoegaze-y poetry in that that resonates. I’m not going to post excerpts and I’m not going to link to it – I think that undercuts what I am trying to talk about, maybe. Google is your friend. Hell, this is three months ago – you’ve already read it already.

Like you’d expect, Harmon’s ex finds these posts and replies angrily. But that’s not the thing. The thing is the hundreds of people who ‘like’ this naked emotional outpouring from a guy who’s probably at a bad place in his heart. I read through the notes, because I’m the sort of person who says “I’m done reading comments” but then get sucked in when I should be doing other work and find myself doing exactly the things I know are not productive for me (that’s what I’m doing right now, in fact). Some Tumblr user reblogged it (lots of Tumblr users reblogged it, but this one in particular) and said “I love this.”

You love this?

I’m a big Ben Folds fan. You know this about me, probably. “Brick,” the one song of his to really become commercially successful, is an autobiographical song about being a high school kid who was so poor that he had to pawn his Christmas presents to pay for his girlfriend’s abortion. That’s some heavy shit, so much so that Folds didn’t talk about the song for a long time, choosing to let it stand for itself. If you’ve been there, he reasoned, you’d know what it was about.

I can’t imagine talking to Ben Folds and gushing about how much I love that song, is what I’m saying.

I listen to what my ex would always call “Sad Music;” I listen to it a lot, no matter what my mood is. Ask Natasha, because she still lovingly ribs me about my effusive praise for The Antlers’ Hospice album. The why of that is that, as a music listener, I crave that same emotional honesty that Harmon is laying down, the real Old Testament Western stuff about pain and loss and the limits of strength. I’m an eclectic guy who owns weeks worth of music, but that’s the stuff that’s my Sanctum Sanctorum music. You can be moved by it, you can excise the emotions and respect it as a text, but to say ‘I love this’ is perverse. To be ebullient over such a naked expression of sorrow, you have to be a fucking monster.

Putting those words down – whether it’s on a blog or in a song – is therapy. Because writing the words down is a solitary act, you get fooled into thinking it really is solitary and not for a billion people to read. As a result, it can be jarring when strangers find it and proclaim it “the best thing.”

That’s a mistake I made when I was at my worst. I started blogging six years ago to try and make myself write with more ease and regularity. Most of that early stuff was nonsense – paragraph-long movie reviews and silly anecdotes. As I got more comfortable with doing it, it started to become a zone of catharsis for me. There were no comments and only a handful of my friends knew the address of the damn thing. Maybe not much has changed, right? I even tried to stay anonymous for awhile, but for various reasons, that didn’t stick for very long.

At some point, the comments started popping up on things that I’d written for me but foolishly assumed that other people wouldn’t read and wouldn’t care about. That’s an awkward feeling to have. Scratch that; having your belief that you’re beneath scrutiny exploded as a myth,  it’s a terrifying feeling. It’s like being naked in a bad dream scenario. You may notice, that it hasn’t stopped me from oversharing about my life. But you get over your terror by looking it in the eye, and besides,  it would be hypocritical of me as someone who once wrote a social media column in a magazine to not live in public by my own best advice of openness and reasonable transparency.

And that comes with occasional moments of discomfort.  But then, everything does, and in the end it might not be worth stopping all the sociopaths from telling you how hilarious it was that time when you got your fingers broken with a claw hammer (which is a fake thing that has never happened to me, nor is it ever a thing I have done to others). Ultimately, that’s on the sociopaths. Who are also us, a lot of the time, really. In a culture of constant data and instant gratification, it really all comes back around to fan-entitlement, I think, and how we need to stop perceiving every piece of information we devour as a thing placed there solely for us to consume.

Note: A copy of Ready Player One was provided to the author for review.

The past decade has been the Age of the Geek – studios pander to the Comic-Con crowd, Internet buzz can destroy a movie’s opening weekend and nostalgia drives marketing. For every dyed-in-the-wool geek creator or personality, there’s at least two or three willing to take glamour shots of themselves licking a PlayStation while wearing a Red Lantern ring at a Jonathan Coulton concert. It’s easy to be skeptical of anything that tries to label itself ‘for nerds’ or ‘for geeks’ – those of us with long memories still remember when those words were pejoratives.  Too often the stuff they produce ‘for’ us is awash in high concepts, strained pop culture references and hyperactivity, none of which is anchored to a real story or real characters.

It’s easy to be burned by ‘entertainment for nerds’ and the real thing deserves to be lauded when it comes along.

Part Willy Wonka, part Say Anything… and part The Keep On the Borderlands, Ernest Cline‘s debut novel Ready Player One is an addictive mashup of nostalgia-powered science fiction, pulpy quest narrative and high-school coming of age narrative that transcends the mishmash of its parts. The subject matter is something that Cline, the screenwriter of 2009′s much-loved film Fanboys, knows something about, but can his first novel live up to his screenwriting? The answer is yes: Ready Player One is a fun, endearing debut novel.

Wade Watts lives in a near-future world gone to hell, where the class divide is a wide, bottomless chasm and megacorporations literally own their employees. To escape his dystopian trailer-park reality, he spends his time in The Oasis, an immersive, persistent massively multiplayer online environment used by most of the world’s population. In his free time, he’s a Gunter – part of an online subculture of hackers and gamers looking Halliday’s Easter Egg, the final bequest of The Oasis’s creator James Halliday. The first one to find the Egg stands to win billions of dollars and control over the future of The Oasis itself. Also in the hunt are Wade’s virtual best friend Aech, Art3mis, the girl of his dreams, and the corporate-sponsored Sixers, who want to sell the soul of his online world for windfall profits from restrictive microtransactions and subscription fees. The only problem? In the years since Halliday’s death, nobody has even found the first clue to the prize. Nobody until Wade Watts, that is.

A story that spans two worlds, virtual and real, can lead to a sprawling, complicated narrative (Tad Williams’ bloated if occasionally brilliant Otherland series takes a similar concept to Inception-esque heights), but Cline’s narrative is streamlined, straightforward and, with the exception of a few large expository infodumps in the early chapters, as kinetic as an amusement park ride. Most of Wade’s epic quest happens inside The Oasis, so the story never feels bogged down with ‘worlds-within-worlds’ acrobatics. Even the Oasis, despite its seemingly infinite number of in-game worlds, features only a handful of locations as important parts of the Egg Hunt, among them a Dungeons and Dragons module, a Blade Runner planet and a planet-sized vintage arcade among them. For the most part, Cline also eschews focusing overly hard on the technical side of things and spends more time showing us the relationships between the characters and Wade’s transition into adulthood. Grounding the story in online relationships is a move that makes Wade and Aech and Art3mis instantly more relatable. We aren’t living in their world, but we probably understand the nuances of having Internet friendships and romances.

Ready Player One reads like nothing quite as much as it does a John Hughes or early Cameron Crowe movie, the ones about charming outsider kids finding their dare-to-be-great moments. That’s no mistake, as Halliday’s quest – and Wade’s – is rooted in 80s nostalgia.

Beyond the 80s homages built into the plot and structure of the novel, Cline peppers Ready Player One with copious fandom references – from Star Wars to tokusatsu to Firefly and the full gamut in between. A weaker storyteller might try to use these to pander to its target demographic, to establish his bona fides to the audience by way of copious name dropping. Cline, on the other hand, uses each giant robot, each 80s movie quote and each classic video game to establish his characters more than he does himself, especially Halliday – a character who the audience really only knows through his own media consumption.

There are some clunky passages – Wade’s explanation of virtual public schools is a good example – but they tend to be a necessary evil of starting in media res in a futuristic setting. Cline’s dialogue, on the other hand, is as glib and snappy as a dialogue between impassioned nerds should be.

Ready Player One is compelling nerd literature and one hell of an 8-bit-inspired ride through my generation’s collective childhood. Like all good nerd lit, it remembers that nerds are people, too, and ends up telling a very human story about love, friendship, greed and obsession that anybody can read and love.

Bonus: Tomorrow, come back to read Jeff’s interview with Ready Player One’s author, Ernest Cline!

So, I’m reading Javier Grillo-Marxuach’s “My Year Without Star Wars” at the same time as I’m reading Star Wars: Fate of the Jedi: Vortex, the sixth part of a nine-part series of Expanded Universe novels in which a sixty-something Luke Skywalker and his teen son fight a Cthuloid space-monster who is a weird, tentacle-y triptych of every woman Luke has ever slept with, excepting (so far) his dead wife while, elsewhere, a septagenarian Han Solo makes wisecracks and flouts the odds while raising precocious granddaughter while Leia chides in the background and generally seems wise yet totally ignored and the Jedi Council is generally behaving like they are on Gossip Girl because the metaplot is still a ‘what if Star Wars was real and George W. Bush was the president of the galaxy?’ kind of exercise and the Jedi need to have petty internal frictions that exacerbate their conflicts with the overtly space Nazi government and force heavy-handed choices between love and duty and religion and politics and hey laser swords you guys!

Part of Javi’s point in his sacrelicious essay seems to be that there is an entire generation of brilliant creators who subsume their own originality to write, either directly or via winking and referencing, about Star Wars. It’s an inescapable gravity well of culture at this point, a Master Mold that replicates itself self-sufficiently. Another salient point, especially through the lens of my summary of Vortex a paragraph above, is that Star Wars is something that millions of people love, but it’s embittering at the same time and that love can get seduced into hate so subtly and maleficiently that it at times seems incredibly purposeful and metafictive. Don’t love what you hate. Don’t love to hate. Love to love what you love. Embrace what gives you joy.

But Star Wars is so omnipresent and so inescapable. Six films and a Christmas special have become our cultural and emotional shorthand.  At least for my generation. I remember teaching students who had never seen a Star Wars film; it baffled me and it still does.

At the same time as this, I’m reading Patton Oswalt’s incisive Wired column about the death knells of a culture where the geek-as-curator is an outsider, specialized in his or her mania until apotheosizing into ‘other’. The nerd or the geek or whatever you choose to call it is, here, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Poet, trapped in a liminal state, living among his neighbors but never truly with them. Oswalt says we’ve achieved ‘ETEWAF’ – Everything That Ever Was, Available Forever – turning us all into curators of trivia and simultaneously removing the actual need for that curation. There is a constant archive of our childhoods, accessible by smartphone at any moment.  Hell, I can go to YouTube right now and watch The Mysterious Cities of Gold, a cartoon I barely remember anything about:

The outsiders are not the people that can calculate an old-school Dungeons and Dragons encounter without even scratch paper or who know every line of dialogue from Billy Zane’s The Phantom, not anymore; that person is now all of us. The new nerds, the new outsider culture, the new brahmans of our popular culture, are the people who are out there making their own art on their own terms, the geeks-as-creator.  The best advice I have ever been given as a writer is to create things that belong to me.*

That doesn’t mean quit loving what you love. That doesn’t mean stop quoting Star Wars, unless you’re done with Star Wars because it’s not a positive experience for you anymore. Me, I still find joy in it – even in the Expanded Universe and especially in its cuter moments (including dialogue like “And I assure you, the Empire will always strike back” and the like). Instead, consider it an urging to make something of your own instead of simply perpetuating what others have made.

*Says the guy who spent his vacation making entries for Kanye+Comics**
** Mashup culture is problematic to this entire argument, because it can be as transformative and resonant as original work.

“all i know is that they always fail to bring me joy. after many years and repeat viewings in so vast a variety of media, the sad truth is i will probably never understand why they were made, what they are intended to represent, or why i should care.”

TV and comic scribe Javier Grillo-Marxuach talks about walking away from Star Wars. It is unflinchingly honest and full of bittersweet wisdom.

Thanks to Dan, I saw this slightly incomprehensible image today:

It is, of course, a photo of Gandalf, featuring a quote by Yoda, which has been attributed to Albus Dumbledore.  The thing is a trinitarian artifact of nerd blasphemy that defies belief (except that, on the Internet, unbelievability is inversely proportional to its likelihood of existing, which means that this thing has always been a foregone conclusion).

Another Internet friend, writer Chris Walsh, said “I sense a new meme,” and while I know that you can’t force a meme, I can certainly capitalize on someone else’s good idea.

METHODOLOGY: I made a chart, listing these 12 geek sacred cow franchises in varying orders across three columns: Star Wars, Star Trek, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly, Batman, the X-Men, the Chronicles of Narnia, His Dark Materials, Transformers and Speed Racer. I then (using a 12-sided die) randomly generated a value for the photo in each of the images, the quote and the character it is attributed to.

(click to giant-size)

I’ve been quite entertained by what Christoper Bird has been doing with Alignment Chart week, and wanted to make one of my own. I thought about re-doing the Glee chart, because it’s severely flawed (Rachel Berry is unabashedly evil), but figured it would be more fun to tackle Leverage, which is a) about to return this Sunday with a new episode and b) is one of my favorite shows on TV.

If you are uncertain what exactly ‘alignment’ is, the Wikipedia article is embarrassingly exhaustive.

Feel free to tell me how wrong I am in the comments.

1. I go to New York Comic Con every year – have gone as long as there has been one – and I think it’s great to be in one place with a lot of people who are passionate about the things that you’re passionate about in an environment where you can celebrate that stuff, but every year I go to Comic Con, I think that I would enjoy it a lot more if I spent less of my weekend at the convention itself.  The show continues to grow faster than its organizers seem capable of conceiving; with practically double the space it had last year, NYCC seemed more crowded.  The crowd made shopping a joyless, sweaty process and serious browsing almost impossible. In the past, absorbing the totality of the floor was a fun sort of epilepsy game show experience but drinking in the aesthetic takes a backseat to basic survival out of necessity.   Artist’s Alley was particularly onerous and I didn’t really even fully register who was there, let alone take a lot of time to consider their art.  I mostly gravitated toward people I recognized or tables without milling crowds, tiny pockets of air in which I could refill my various lifebars.  Someone, I think it was Paul Horn, told me it was like swimming through meat and that is a horrible and apt simile.

2. Something I’ve very recently started noting about cosplayers is that there are some of them who obviously wear these things when they’re in bed with other people. This isn’t something that I have a lot of evidence for, mostly just feelings, intuitions. Mostly, these intuitions strike me around people in costume as sexy versions of Pokemon and/or Sonic the Hedgehog characters.

3. At some point, I’ve stopped going to things like tweetups to meet new people and instead go to them to spend time with people I already know, which is the antithesis of what the events really started out being, isn’t it?

4. “The Walking Dead” is going to be completely amazing. We saw about 15 minutes of the second episode and it is killer. The first scene showcased the first appearance of Glenn and as soon as he showed up onscreen the whole theater lost its shit.  Glenn is one of my favorites, but I never realized he was everybody’s favorite character.

5. M. Night Shyamalan…wow, what can you say? All questions for Night had to be written down and were pre-screened by the moderator. He comes across as very intelligent, very skilled and incredibly sensitive and anxious. When he wasn’t talking, he was playing incessantly with a ring on his right index finger – removing it, putting it back on. He seems nervous around crowds. He said a lot of really interesting things, but the most interesting is that basically each film he’s made since Unbreakable has been him trying to figure out what audiences didn’t like about Unbreakable. Which explains why his films have gotten consistently worse over time in a very kind of sad way.