Life without Ads

This morning I was watching a channel that stretched a half an hour documentary to more than an hour. While I was fine with it having it watched on a Free channel and unplanned out of blue. Just thought of a crazy-wild idea. How would life be without Ads. Ads, as in Display Ads, Roller Ads, TVC, Radio, Newspapers, Outdoor, Google Ads, Web Banners, E-mail shots & Newsletters Ads. And not even SMS or Telemarketers. And those annoying brochures left under your apartment’s door or the slips left on your windshield. Clearly no Ads of any sort.

Radio

Imagine driving on a road like Sheikh Zayed Road on a jammed day, traffic ain’t moving. Dial a radio station and listen to your music without no cheesy brand name insert here and there, comes News break then you do not hear that “why stand inline when you can book online, Fly Emirates”, ah so you change to Virgin Radio(104.4) and get that so annoying 5 words weather update, “it’s going to be sunny” and then another insertion, “brought to you by Snickers Ice Cream, your favorite chill”.

Think about this, how much of programming is done to do all the insertions planning. Man! If all that was spent on getting better music and repeating less tracks, we’d have amazing Radio Stations.

Outdoor Banners

Then you get bored of the music played, so you turn on your iPod on your car n’ rock your own tracks. Window down, lite a cigarette take a look around, and you find a jungle of colors and lights. It always reminds me of my room back in the teen days with all the posters in no order. Look right and you see some Hyundai ad, now Hyundai being a luxury wannabe’, look ahead and it’s all about why you should buy cheaper stuff. Air Arabia teaches you that it’s okay to go aged and balled exactly as how you have to accept getting the cheaper Plane tickets. So Air Arabia is something one has to talorate, not something to accept, who got sold on account managers’ crap. So it’s all about the economy weather?

Just like teenager’s posters, you could know his/her music Genre from the posters, you could learn the market from the style of the ads.

Close your eyes for a second and get all that out of your mind, get back to your own music. You remember you’re still connected to the world, hah, got Twitter and Facebook in your car, on your mobile.

You fire up that Twitter client and you find weird @yournickname replies to things you never talked about or related to, snap, spam that is. Star those cool tweets to read up links later on your big screen.

Time to see what your pals are doing, get that Facebook up, oh, got 4 new messages in my inbox. Wow, I feel so popular today, first reads Live invites you to use the Live Messenger App more often. Second reads “Hi I sell iPhone 3G for AED2799, hurry up”, third, “Hey S send me your BB Pin”, forth, “Sponsored by ***** win dinner at… while you’re at it, you get an e-mail notification on your Blackberry, oh, you’d be excited to be receiving replies to some of your earlier sent e-mails. E-mail reads, Lands, Apartments direct from the owner, hurry up.

So what’s up with the “hurry up” is everything on sale and for sale nowadays. Gets darker outside, turn your headlights on, the car ahead has stickers all around it with. Apple’s logo, some Air Intake brand(usually K&N) and when you get tired take a look at your left, there is that ugly public transport bus with AMEInfo all over it, I mean isn’t it enough that we have our inboxes full of AMEInfo already?

By the time you reach your destination you think parking, after a long search you spot a slot and you park. Waiting for the elevator, a screen between every two elevators showing a promotion on ACs? Winter y’all! Yo go in, reach your destination, wait to meet your host, you get coffee in a “Nescafe” mug, cheap bastards. On the waiting table, it’s all classifieds and promotional brochures, people don’t read magazines anymore? Or there’s no more space?

Down the building, reaching to your car, ah, man, another fine for what? Some bastard put up a promotional Brochure on your windshield covering your parking token! Fines remind you of more bills waiting for you, you race to your Post Office, you open up the box and you can’t take anything out, it’s all jammed, because Jutton had to send you a big-huge-brochure that is thick enough to cover up your inbox.

No moral, just a crazy thinking. You see, you can be frustrated about Ads, but can we live without’em? That was a way too negative way of thinking about Ads. I was about to edit some, but hell, that’s some reality.

What’s with du? It’s so dunt!

The buzz around Music on Demand by du, “yeah du’s got some new service for downloading music”, “why iTunes ain’t opening the shop for Music in UAE, du did that, and Nokia too”. All this got me to visit du’s website. I’m there and looking for a link to “Music on Demand”. Can’t find it any where on the homepage.

Being a web-head, first thing I did was typing www.du.ae/musicondemand, no luck. Tried musicondemand.du.ae, no. So I went back to du.ae’s homepage. Ah I get lucky there’s a 3,4 second rolling banner that I have to be lucky to see before it shows the next slide. So I clicked on it, it redirected me to a press release for “Music on Demand”, you joking? I’m a user, not a reporter. So I had to read the press release to find the link somewhere in the article. The worst part is the link looked exactly like this: www.du.ae/MyWorld. But anyways I clicked on it.

You want to show me a service you take me to its press release page? Just, why?

This is so not “du”. That was my first impression on the service before even thinkin’ of using it. Because everything done on the page was unprofessional. Back in the last two years I used to give example of du’s website for information architecture and how usable it was, and most remarkably how it connected the brand and went online with it, all intact.

This portal? Not du to me, that’s dunt. I’ll tell ya why! First let me explain something out here. If all this was seen on a start-up’s page, some guys in a garage or workin’ from home, that’d be forgivable because they can go wrong given they’re resources might be tight and limited. du though, can’t go wrong. No excuse! du ain’t a 10K-capital company, that’s why! So if I was du, I’d be ashamed, because if I was du I could afford professionals.

Here’s some.

Branding

This is the part that shows it’s a team that cannot relate to anything design. Why? I can bet on it, the designer didn’t have a look at du’s Branding Guidelines at all. Reason? None of the type-faces used are correct, nor the style of type used. The only things used out of du’s brand is the Logo, and the color pallete, and that’s it. It doesn’t feel du. While I’m not a du insider nor ever worked on Brand du, creatively du is one of my favorite brands that were born in UAE, that’s why it feels odd when you find it going down the toilet with such an awful artwork/development.

Identity Crisis

They call the service “Music on Demand”. Though you don’t see that name anywhere on the page! No where! Literally no where! Check these awkward details.

• Page title(what appears on top of the tab & browser window) is “du” and only clean “du”.
• Subdomain is “content”.
• Website Logo is “du”.

How am I supposed to know what this is called or get this programmed in my mind? How are you working on the awareness? How would anyone identify this other than being a du service which doesn’t feel like it?

This website doesn’t only drift from du’s brand, but this service has identity crisis too. The page doesn’t know what this service is called.

On top of the page, they called it “My World Beta”. Get your act together. Decide, is it “My World” or “Music on Demand”. With all the ads and branding activities couldn’t du invest in a brand for its new service? I don’t know, personally, I’m disappointed at du.

And the cheap part is how skewed, pixelated, and how badly images are resized. I mean they are artists and musicians, get some good photos or resize them well. Man! Such a cheap work.

It’s Orange, it’s White, it’s Laazi ads

Every Sunday, the appointments section of Khaleej Times gets Orange with daring Whites in words. As simple as these words are to be put are as creative Laazi’s ads are.

Our hardworking great friends at Laazi.com think it might be easier to upload your CV to their portal than punching your Boss!

Refresh your bitching, complaint about a new Job

Weekend was so good? Job’s gonna’ take that buzz away? You need a new Job!

The above ads aren’t just a creative copy well-written, but an image of a team well reflected in Type!

Nakheel’s Spam II

A couple of days ago I posted about Nakheel’s Spam showing the three times that I was spammed. Two more shots added to that.

Oct 3^rd Shot:

Oct 4^th Shot:

Now the difference, the above shots were not signed by Dubai Moon, and the tracking has been shifted to Double Click.

Five shots to the same e-mail address, the same message, and unsolicited. Stops over here, Evast is reported as spam, the fun is over for me, I wanted to see how far it goes, it seems that it won’t stop until cityscape reaches. Such a Media Plan right there!

And the campaign is now directed to Nakheel’s City Scape Page

Nakheel’s Spam

How often does a company get e-mails on info@domain.com? When a prospect has no hold of a contact in a company that he/she is contacting. To inquire about more information, the kind of information that wouldn’t be there online.

When we first offered e-mail campaigns at dots & lines, the first question we were asked was, where do you get your database from. We’d often use other portals’ databases with demography details. Not the ones compiled by a bot from websites. Human managed database of people who won’t receive e-mails from us, nor from our clients, but from the portal that registered its users, and that’s the users who’ve agreed on receiving ads, and sponsored messages.

There’s no one day that we don’t get offered to buy a collection of 100,000 potential databases sent to our “info” e-mail. Now think about it, if a database seller is spamming, and calling that e-mail marketing, then what’s left for the rest of the spammers? Unfortunately that market has falsely grown. It’s very obvious, analyze your “info” e-mail list and you’ll be shocked with how many local spams we have daily.

Now to what’s bugged me for the last three days. Nakheel’s Spam. Nakheel is not the next door furniture shop or the next electronic shop that is trying to sell some knock-off goods to you. It’s the builder of the 8th wonder of the world, the palms.

You’d skip the spam first, you’d delete it the the second time, you might add it to your spam filter the third time, and that’s because it’s from Nakheel, otherwise it’s sent to junk from the first shot. Nakheel’s spam has been sent to us three times, the same message, the same details, to the same e-mail address. So, from my point of view, all they care about is someone actually clicking the links in the spam and/or adding the counts of loading the message splash-image. And that’s where the campaigns get into false numbers, and only numbers, because with such media plan, it’s nothing but spam shots, and the numbers could never ever ever result in any kind of true ROI.

Here’s the web version of the spam shot:
http://www.dubaimoon.com/newsletter/Dubaimoon.html

The funny part is, it is sent form an e-mail address from a company called evast.ae. But the e-mail message is hosted at Dubai Moon.

Another funny point is, the e-mail is signed by Dubai Moon. Here are some of the screenshots.

September 30^th Shot:

October 1^st Shot:

October 2^nd Shot:

We never use “info” to send any e-mails, it’s rather a list that we receive e-mails from. Thus, no one of us at dots & lines would ever use it as our e-mail address while registering anywhere! And no, we’re not registered with Dubai Moon, nor Evast, and not even Nakheel on any portal of theirs. So? That’s spam!

Social and Community with one button

It amazes me how I get this question popping at every web-app meeting. Can we just go social & add up a community? It’s so easy, add that button that shares the page with other apps and web-portals. So simple?

As much as most of us hate Social Software, the title that is, it is often tossed as the end-solution for every portal’s misery. Just add that button and we’re set.

What got my attention back to this is:

It’s more to social than just a badge, a button, or a Facebook group. And sure is more than a Weyak. I’d like to call that the “Online Viral Model”

Translate, Rebrand, and that’s another Web Startup

Online Startups, which are rare, putting the fact that they’re mostly not official nor real business entities in the Arabia, most are just an idea that went online with some HTML and JS, no real businesses around them. Rare is the word, but the handful projects are nothing but a projection of other projects that went very popular in English and elsewhere.

Yes there’s hunger for Arabic content, there are a number of initiatives that are encouraging the growth of original Arabic content. But does that mean hijacking other websites content into an Arabized portal?

Video Sharing, Social Networks, Micro-Blogging, and even sites like Techcrunch have been copied. We’re not saying that’s bad, an opportunity call. Why not? Right? So if you write in English anyways, why don’t you write and post to TechCrunch instead? An Example.

What I find disturbing with Arab worlds startups is the fact that they are a projection of the Silicon Valley. Sure some are really valuable, but the fact that 90% are 100% copies, it disturbs and makes up for a market that doesn’t really exist. Reminds me of how back in the late 90s Internet companies made the investors lose faith in Internet ventures in Dubai, it came to a point that companies stopped even believing that websites are good for businesses at all.

You might be in pressure, need to go and get real famous in a record time, follow other people’s success, but for real man, copying the same steps and publicizing upon it? I wish I could name people and companies and still don’t make a chaos. But for real, no one’s hurt but the industry!

10 Second Car

Out of no where straight away out of bed this “10 Second Car” came into my mind, guess I’ve been thinking a lot about horse power and drag racing. I was wondering how this phrase popped? It’s a kind of Urban word for a fast-tuned car that could do a 1/4 mile in less than ten seconds. So I had to look it up, you’ll be amazed of what I found.

Urban Dictionary, I might be in the dark (and some called me caveman too ) but this was my first time out there, thought I was gonna’ be taken to Wikipedia instead, Urban Dictionary, so here’s their definition for 10-Second-Car.

Photo cortesy of http://www.cardomain.com/ride/364548 did you notice the ride in the URL too? Now that’s the Urban I’m talkin’ about!

Domains of Branding

How much could your brand suffer if it didn’t own the domain name that reads its name? Obviously the number is out of reach. What brought my attention back to this issue is by dialing Showtime.com. It’s a domain name with an automated landing page at Network Solutions. I’ve never dialed Showtime, I’ve always been taken by a link to apparently Showtime Arabia instead.

A quick look at the whois records of the domain name, it reads that Showtime Tours Incorporated, a company in GB owns the domain name since 2003. But then again this website is down.

Now the interesting part, the website showtime.com has a ranking of 157,224 on Alexa and according to Compete Rank it has 64,427 U.S visitors a month. Now you might think 64K ain’t that a big deal? Okay, how about 64K showtime seekers/followers who have to either click/search/type elsewhere and get frustrated till they find the domain name that actually takes them to their beloved cable network Showtime?

Now I wouldn’t say Showtime couldn’t effort the price, that’d be underestimating their size, uninformed marketers? That wouldn’t be true either, in all the cases, that’s a miss!

Outsourced Keystrokes

We often relate the outsourcing to IT outsourcing, specially if you could relate in a way like being in the same industry or an IT related industry, some talk bad about it, some exploit it, some just get it to work. Even comedians got outsourcing as something that happens only in IT & Computer World, well, Mindworks gets outsourced for Copy Editing for Journals & Publishing houses. Neat!

Quoting Business Week:

In a squat, gray building in Noida, a leading outsourcing destination 15 miles from New Delhi, is the headquarters of Mindworks Global Media.

What’s fascinating is that with the rising costs of living in the Gulf in General and the Economic downs in the US, and the War economy, cutting the costs of rent, infrastructure, payroll & insurance is no more a profiting strategy but a surviving strategy. I had both my thumbs down for outsourcing back in the day, hats off now. One thing though, only processing work could be outsourced offshore, non-initiative, non-creative, basically things that do not have to be made from scratch, just rolling the wheel, no brainer right? Yet so hard to accept.

Read the full article on Business Week.