Checking The Canary In The Data Mine

We're getting used to the idea that advertisers have a huge amount of information about us, and they can use it to target us with ads tailored to our needs and wants.  You may have seen the story about how Target sent pregnancy-related ads to a teen girl, shocking her father who didn't know she was pregnant.  (Yep, that's how smart Target is in the U.S.)

It often works.  This ad isn't quite what I'm looking for, but it's close:

I'm not in the market for a lightsaber, but if anyone is going to buy one for personal defense or recreational purposes, it would likely be me.

Then I saw this ad:

That's awful specific.  I wonder what Big Data incantations gave them the idea I'm working on a first-generation Mustang.

But then there's this one:

That's right: Nielsen.  The people who study audiences.  Somehow, they served me up an ad in Chinese.

Welcome Hot Qatar

This week, FIFA announced that the World Cup in 2022 - already awarded to Qatar - would be in the winter.  Normally, the World Cup is in the summer, but that will be a problem in Qatar.  If you're not familiar with it, Qatar is a peninsula in the Persian Gulf, so it combines the oppressive heat of a desert with oppressive humidity too.

What's wrong with having the World Cup in December?  It's because most of the places where soccer is really popular are also places where winter is either mild or non-existent.  That means that the biggest soccer leagues, employers of the best players, are active over the winter. 

Of course, here in Canada, we're used to the National Hockey League shutting down mid-season for the Olympics, so we might not be sympathetic.  But the Olympic hockey tournament is less than two weeks, while the World cup is a whole month.  And international soccer is already full of extra tournaments, cups and international games. 

So you have to wonder what FIFA was thinking when they awarded the games to Qatar.  My suspicion is that they were thinking, "What am I going to spend all this bribe money on?" (I have no evidence for this, and am just being cynical, please don't sue me Mr. Blatter.)  The media has mostly been reporting this as just such a mystery: as though FIFA awarded the tournament without considering the obvious climate problems.

But those of us with memories will recall that at the time of the awarding, we were assured that Qatar had technology to cool their stadiums to reasonable temperatures, even open-air stadiums.   However, those promises have been quietly forgotten, and FIFA and Qatari organizers have been presenting the problem as an intractable situation that can only be solved by changing the tournament's timing.

So good on the BBC's website for actually remembering the proposed air conditioning, and bringing up the topic.  It seems it can be done, at least on a small scale, but doing it on a huge stadium is going to be expensive and environmentally irresponsible.  That would violate some of FIFA's other commitments to sustainability.

So it looks like FIFA didn't think it all through completely.  Either that, or the cooling claims were just a smokescreen to get the tournament approved.  Or they're all distracted planning vacations with the bribe money, for which I still have no evidence.

War Sells...But Who's Buying?

It's interesting how the marketing of video games has changed.  In recent years, we've seen an explosion in casual gaming. That means the relatively quick, cheap gaming on apps or social media that has a wider audience than traditional PC or console gaming. For a while those games were either cutesy games like Angry Birds, or social games like Farmville. But the market is expanding and traditional gamers are playing on their phones, and casual gaming fans seem willing to try new things.

I've mentioned in the past how the AAA war games have settled into comfortable clichés for their TV ads. But now the Finnish company Supercell has been pushing their cartoony war game Clash Of Clans with cartoony violence in their ads, and it has lead to a new level in the evolution of game marketing.

On one hand, the ads feature the sort of lightly satirical humour that plays well in our culture. But it still seems odd to see that applied to gaming. I mentioned on Twitter that I couldn't imagine my university friends and I playing Warcraft while speculating that the wizard was having a bad hair day. Actually, no, that is something we'd probably talk about, it's just hard to believe it was on TV. It was like that time SNL did the sketch with Rob Ford: I'm used to that style of humour, I just didn't expect to see it applied to this part of my life.

Now they're doing ads for Boom Beach, which a more modern war game, and thus, a little harder to joke about.  Again, they're making the ads appealing through their humour.  What's interesting is that they are built more around satirizing the experience of playing games:

• Sometimes you do the same thing over and over hoping for a better result.
• Sometimes you find yourself going through the motions against ridiculous odds.
• You find yourself ignoring the incredible violence of the games.
• Apparently gaming has gotten big enough that they feel they can make these references in the mainstream without alienating people.

In contrast, there is the Game Of War ad featuring Kate Upton.  They eschew references to gameplay itself, instead going for melodramatic narration. They also eschew mainstream appeal by going for a monsters-and-hot-women approach that seems to be aimed directly at twelve-year-old boys. I'm curious whether the ad has made more money for Game Of War or for Anita Sarkeesian.  If gaming culture continues to be displayed in the mainstream media, it could accelerate the evolution of that culture.

Things the Teenage Me Would Never Have Believed About Life In The Future, #21

In an effort to turn the company around, Sony will consider getting out of the TV business, and concentrating on things that are making it money: Movies, Video Games, and Cameras.

I'll Just Go To The After Party

It's Oscar time again!  Is it just me, or does it seem like people aren't really looking forward to it this year?  Sure, they're talking about making predictions, and talking about covering the red carpet.  But it feels like they're going through the motions. 

I don't know why; many of the leading movies seem pretty accessible. There's controversy over American Sniper. People can get angry over Selma getting left out - they love to complain about the Academy's decisions. 

I guess it's partly the movies themselves: I'm glad Julianne Moore will finally win an Oscar, but playing a woman facing Alzheimer's disease is such a clichéd way of doing it. It's nice that Birdman is doing well, but it doesn't seem to have the hipster popularity that will lead to Pulp Fiction/Forrest Gump style anger when it doesn't win. And I'm supposed to care whether the best actor is the guy playing Stephen Hawking or Alan Turing? 

So when I consider watching the three-plus hours of the telecast, it seems like seven or eight. I've never felt better about ignoring it and reading the winners' list in the morning.

Fixed Ideates

Sometimes business-speak leaks into ad-speak.  Here, Adobe tries to tell us that their web-design products require less programming:

I've Wanted An Apple Car Since Lowly Worm

With an interest in cars and technology, my internet news sources explode when there's a story that involves both. Normally the tech/car worlds would be talking about Nissan's crazy 1000 horsepower front-drive race car they’re taking to Le Mans. But this week that was overshadowed by the news that Apple is doing something to do with cars.

There have been rumours for a while, and now it comes out that Apple has hired a number of ex-Tesla employees. Now the Wall Street Journal claims that they are working on a self-driving electric car. Supposedly it's called Project Titan. "Titan" happens to be the name of Nissan's pickup, so that's two ways Apple has stolen their thunder.

So is this really happening? I still have my doubts. I stand by my earlier thoughts that fully self-driving cars will take longer than people are now expecting. I'd also add that for any tech companies looking to get into car technology, setting up your own company and doing it all yourself is a really bad move. For one thing, a lot of the things that make cars hard to design and build today - from suspension to safety - don’t go away just because your car is electric and self-driving. Also, you can’t just contract the construction to the lowest-bidding sweat-shop from southeast Asia.

There's some talk that Apple just wants to develop software that would go into other companies' cars. That seems more sensible to me, though others have pointed out that it's not Apple's style to put their software on other people's devices. They like to sell one complete product to the customer.

I think the most sensible thing would be for them to make an Operating System for car infotainment systems. I’m thinking more than just supplying the software for car touch screens, but actually dictating the design of the entire interface between the driver and car’s systems.

The computer interfaces built by the car manufacturers or other tech companies have been widely criticized, and it’s the sort of thing Apple could really improve on. It’s not quite building their own equipment in the sense of building the entire car, but they could be the supplier of the dash/instrumentation. This would allow them the control they want, without the massive investment in businesses they have no experience with.