Gonna Browse Like it's 1999

Your mission this week is to watch this video:

Did you pick the surprise ending? You probably did, firstly because there are only a handful of companies in the world that are presumptuous enough to attempt to link an entire generation with their product (Coca-Cola and Microsoft among them) and secondly because the product name is right there in the video title.

The first time I saw the ad I was at an advantage because I had no idea what it was for. In fact I was quite enjoying the video until the last seconds when the infamous ‘e’ was revealed and I frantically tried clean my eyeballs with sandpaper. Ads are frequently turning to the surprise brending (brand + ending = brending) and it’s an especially useful technique when you want to get the consumer on board before they realise what a horrible thing it is you’re trying to sell.

Column Five, the advertising agency responsible for the ad, have uploaded on their blog an interesting dissection of their creative process. It’s interesting not only because it gives you an insight into the mechanics of designing a successful ad campaign, but also because it provides priceless examples of advertising jargon such as:

To ensure the video was both newsworthy and shareworthy, our creative team worked closely with our strategic communications team in developing the concept with Internet Explorer.

I love this sort of thing. It is my dream to one day to be a member of a ‘strategic communications team’ whose job it is to develop concepts. In order to showcase my skills to any prospective employers, I’ll demonstrate that I understand advertising by translating the above sentence into English:

We paid some people to make Internet Explorer appear less shit.

If you want to hire me you can leave a comment at the bottom of the blog. My demands are that I work from home and get thirty weeks of paid holiday per year.

Make no mistake, selling the latest version of Internet Explorer in 2013 is a tough gig. Despite the fact that IE still holds a significant market share—mostly due to its widespread use in the corporate world where office computers are preloaded with the software and the user doesn’t get a choice—Explorer is definitely uncool. It has suffered from speed and security issues and has been severely hampered by sleeker and more user-friendly browsers such as Safari, Firefox and Chrome.  It is—as Microsoft have gone to a lot of trouble to point out—an outdated product.

Whether or not the new Internet Explorer 10 actually is an improved product is somewhat beside the point of the campaign. Column Five realised that even if Microsoft had managed to develop a product that was much closer to the level of its competitors, years of brand damage couldn’t be undone by a hard sell along the lines of ‘Internet Explorer 10 is NEW and BETTER and you should try it!’ And so they turned to the tried and true advertising technique of blurring the line between product and consumer emotion. As Greg Foyster notes in his article on advertising, there came a point in the twentieth century when ad companies had realised that instead of selling products based on their inherent features, they could make a lot of money by ‘[linking] the consumption of material goods with non-material needs, which were endless.’ The result is an ad like ‘Child of the Nineties’, in which Column Five and Microsoft aren’t selling you Internet Explorer—they’re selling you nostalgia.

I’m guessing that probably close to eighty per cent of the people reading this blog were born sometime between 1985 and 1995, thereby making us ‘children of the nineties’. For most people, the memory of childhood is pleasant—an innocent, carefree time unburdened by the stress of adult life.  I’m sure there are at least a few objects in that ad that you distinctly remember owning, using, wearing, or playing with. The hyper-realistic images presented in the ad help transport you back to a seemingly less complicated, happier time.

Column Five and Microsoft hope that this nostalgia will get intertwined in your brain with Internet Explorer when you watch the ad, and even if you don’t start using the browser, you hopefully will have started to change your perception of it. As Column Five themselves note, ‘that’s the impact we wanted more than anything: a reframing of IE’s relationship with Gen Y.’ Since the 1980s modern advertising has been as much about selling you a brand as it has been about selling you a product. And in this case the brand is of primary concern anyway, because you don’t actually have to buy IE10—it’s available for free. It is brand perception—not price—that has a major influence on your decision to use the Internet Explorer or not.

To an extent the ad has been successful. It has struck a chord with many tech bloggers and online commentators about Microsoft’s ‘creativity’, and has also given the company a great starting point from which to launch IE into the 21^st century. But I do wonder whether the campaign will achieve its longer term goal of actually getting people to use Internet Explorer. Browsers are such unobtrusive things when they work well and many people only made the switch to other browsers when Explorer became virtually impossible to use. To this end, if you’re happy with your current browser, and the new IE offers a similar experience, why would you bother to switch back? Microsoft have done a good job of attempting to wipe the slate clean and starting again with IE, but if they really want people to embrace the browser in the future they will once again have to become trendsetters and not simply copycats of already successful products. The effectiveness of the nostalgia approach is limited, and somehow I can’t imagine Microsoft waiting another thirteen years before they attempt to make Internet Explorer appear ‘cool’ again. 

Types of Likes

Have you ever noticed that your reason for ‘liking’ something on Facebook is very dependent on context? 

Pity like – when you like something nobody else has, because even though you might not care about the content of the post, you care about the person posting it. Has the potential to be embarrassing if your like isn’t supported by others and you’re left hanging.

Flirt like – when you like an attractive person’s post or comment without reading it, and then spend ten minutes trawling through their profile photos.

Politically correct like – when you like an article or video in which you don’t really understand the argument or even care enough to read/watch it but do understand that not liking it will make you appear sexist or a bigot. Deft users can combine this with the Flirt like to appear more intelligent and attractive to their potential love.

Sympathy like – when somebody posts something you actually don’t like (‘My dog just died’), but liking the status is, paradoxically, the correct way to show support.

Peer pressure like - if everybody liked the video ‘Jumping off cliffs’, would you like it too?

Stop bothering me like – when you like something that you didn’t bother to read or watch simply so the person who posted it feels gratified. Can be embarrassing if you see that person in real life and they ask you about it.

Affirmative like – when you like a post that says ‘I’ll meet you at twelve o’clock in the conservatory’ so you don’t have to write a response.

Like for a like – when you like somebody’s comment in a thread in the hope that it will increase the chances of them liking your follow up comment.

Return like – the inverse of the like for a like, in which you feel that you should like somebody’s comment because they liked yours. When the above two are used excessively they have the potential to decrease the value of a like.

Accidental like – when you like somebody’s photo by mistake while stalking them. Can lead to the difficult choice of either surreptitiously ‘unliking’ the picture or, more courageously, letting it stand and seeing what happens.

Phantom like – when you don’t like a post but write a comment underneath that says ‘Haha’ or ‘I love this!’

Self like – when you like your own content. Closely related to the Pity like. 

OCD like – when you like the only comment in a thread that doesn’t have a ‘like’ so that everything looks neater.

Token friendship like – when you like somebody’s post about their life changing moment, but still don’t care enough to be bothered getting into a conversation with them about it.



The word ‘like’ now looks ridiculous and has lost all meaning. 

Do Not Adjust Your Set

New technology inevitably leaves casualties. The DVD usurped the video tape, just as the CD laid waste to the LP record and the wheel surpassed dragging things. One of the 20th century’s greatest technologies, television, is threatened by the internet – the other great technological innovation of the 20th century. Will people put up with ever-lengthening commercial breaks and strict programming times when they know that they can get what they want usually ad-free and able to be watched at their convenience? The advent of the DVR has already changed behaviour in regards to allowing people to watch shows when they want to. The internet can take this idea a step further, allowing the download of whole seasons of television shows, usually illegally. It is possible that in the future we will see the current programming model overhauled and commercial television as we know it might plausibly cease to exist.

But does commercial television have to be at odds with the internet? TV networks have already wised up to a lot of the digital age trends. News and current affairs programs in particular work well with input from social media sites like Twitter and Facebook, and it is common for TV shows to advertise their Facebook or Twitter accounts and encourage users to give instantaneous feedback on the show they are watching. This direct feedback can then be used to further determine target audiences and content, thereby creating better programming—which benefits the viewer— and more directed advertising, which benefits the network. For example, if a particular news program gets an influx of ‘follows’ or ‘likes’ from predominantly single urban women, then they can tailor their advertising accordingly and reap the benefits. Such information has been available to TV networks in the past, but never at such a rapid rate and arguably with less information than a Facebook or Twitter profile can provide.

As of this writing, commercial television is still going strong. It is a worldwide industry that has a firm grip on billions of dollars of advertising revenue and still has enough cultural currency to infiltrate pop culture.  But behaviour is changing. With a lot of television shows now available online – both legally and illegally – waiting a whole week to catch an episode of your favourite show can become taxing. The problem is exacerbated if you live outside the region where the program is produced; American television can take at least six months to reach Australian shores, if not longer. By the time you are watching the ‘latest episode’ of your favourite American drama in Australia the next season is already being shown in the States. It’s unsurprising then that people turn to downloading shows in order to get their fix rather than depend on the often unreliable network programming.

I’m basing a lot of my observations of TV watching behaviour on myself and my friends, which is a small sample size to say the least. But I think the assumption can be made that as members of Generation Y we are much more susceptible to downloading our favourite shows illegally rather than watch them on commercial television. The legality and implications of such behaviour is a tricky issue, and this post doesn’t intend to delve into the morality of pirated internet content. It can’t be ignored, however, that such behaviour exists, and especially that for many people of Generation Y it is generally seen as acceptable.

However, there is still a sizeable market of the older generations who might not do the same and therefore keeps the current model of network television—with its pre-determined programming times and set commercial breaks—viable. The most watched shows in Australia are those which present family situations and domestic life (think Masterchef, The Block, Home and Away, etc.) and therefore are relatable to a large percentage of the population, and not just 20-something students with laptops and University bandwidth at their disposal.

Furthermore, the current model of legal internet programming offered by the networks can be confusing, and at times just as limited as conventional programming. A myriad of ‘online television’ options provided by commercial networks exist, but these range from ‘catch-up’ services of already aired content (usually available only for a certain time), or ‘live streaming’ content which means that viewers still adhere to conventional programming schedules. If you want the liberty of being able to legally watch whole episodes of previous seasons whenever you want, expect to pay for it. And this money generally goes right back into the pockets of the networks. The Hulu service in the United States, which streams shows from ABC, NBC and FOX, pays 50 to 70 percent of revenue generated (primarily from advertising) back to the networks. Don’t expect this sort of arrangement to change any time in the near future. Naturally, television networks want to create a profit, that’s why they have to safeguard their productions and ensure to the best of their ability that they don’t lose money due to piracy.

The relative success of services such as Hulu demonstrates that a market does exist for people who want to watch TV online and pay for it. But how long will that market last? For while there still exists generations who have not been exposed to illegally downloading television shows the reality is that in the future all generations will have lived in a time when such an option has always been available. The technology exists for people to create pirated television shows – and unlike television networks, pirates do not charge for their services because they don’t stand to lose money from doing so. It is reasonable to assume that some pirates believe that they are doing a public good – a modern day Robin Hood, if you will, by taking content from the rich and providing it to the poor.

As mentioned previously, I don’t want to get into the rights and wrongs of online piracy. What I am interested in, however, is the direction that television will take in the future. A pertinent comparison to make would be the music industry, which has been threatened by the rise of the internet and peer to peer sites, and has accordingly had to change its mode of operation, with large stores like iTunes perhaps providing the musical equivalent of a service like Hulu.

So what happens when our society is made up solely of those people who know how (or know somebody who knows a guy who knows how) to obtain content for free? Will illegally downloading television content in its entirety become so common that TV networks are forced to concede defeat? Or will there always be a section of society who shuns online piracy and instead relies on the services that the commercial networks provide? Perhaps we could see an end to conventional television programming as networks no longer have the finances to fund new productions. We might forever be stuck watching re-runs of Two and a Half-Men, while wistfully remembering the good old days where we had access to new television shows, even if they did arrive six months late.