There was a time when you had to change the world for someone to build a museum in your name. Not any more. Intel’s Museum of Me is a clever Flash website that pulls your friend information, status updates, photos and videos from Facebook and turns them into a museum. As you’re guided through the 3D exhibit halls in a three minute film, you see your own life as reflected on Facebook.
It’s an impressive effect: I enjoyed seeing portraits of my best friends hung in the gallery, and ‘entering’ the film gallery to see a recent concert I attended playing on the giant video wall. Each person has a different experience of the campaign, and it’s one that’s likely to stick with them.
Intel is not the only big tech company that’s using innovative software to personalise the way it presents its marketing messages. Xerox has created a plug-in for Outlook called Business of your Brain that analyses your calendar and emails to give you a profile of your working life. It will tell you who you have most meetings with, who is the quickest to panic among your colleagues (based on the use of high priority flags on email), who you ignore the most, who sends you the longest emails, and who clogs up your inbox by using “reply all” for short thank-you emails. The press release (posted at Engadget, underneath the video) includes quotes from Xerox about how their mission is to help customers focus on real business, and how the app is a satirical view of what stops people getting on with real work. Once Xerox has labelled one of your colleagues “motormouth” or “most likely to panic”, you have an emotional investment in the campaign and you’re unlikely to forget it.
Of course, there are challenges with campaigns like these: some people might be uncomfortable with giving away control over their data, and not all campaigns can tap into such readily available pools of information as these campaigns do. One reason these campaigns work is that they present innovative ways to interact with data we take for granted. Any campaigns inspired by these two will need to find new data pools to mine, or re-use Facebook and Outlook in radically innovative ways to inspire people to participate. This is permission marketing in its purest sense: without permission to use data, you have nothing at all.
The union of software and marketing is nothing new. In the mid-80s, I remember playing Action Biker, a pretty disappointing game with a lot of crisp-related advertising grafted onto it. More recently, we’ve seen lots of apps created for Facebook and mobile devices, but they mostly offer everyone the same experience. Interaction makes campaigns sticky, but personalisation intensifies that connection and could give the next generation of marketing-driven apps the edge they need to attract users and engage meaningfully with them.
Is personalisation important? Which branded apps have wowed you, and why? You can leave a comment below.