“Declining toward extinction,” opera tears a page from Newspaper’s playbook

What do you do when your newspaper readership is aging and not being replaced with new readers? You publish online, for one, and hope to recoup some of your lost print revenue by selling ads there.

Now how do you reach a younger audience if you’re the New York Metropolitan Opera? You go digital as well. As this Economist piece reports, The Met is having some impressive success by bringing their opera to other cities throughout the world. The operas are being presented in movie theaters, for special events, using high-tech projection and sound equipment.

Here are some details from the publication.

These “simulcasts” made a big splash. During the 2007-08 season over 600 cinemas in America, Australia, Europe and Japan showed the Met’s live broadcasts. More than 920,000 people in 23 countries watched eight operas, roughly a threefold increase over the previous season, and about 70,000 more than the total audience of the Met proper during that season. For the next season 11 operas will be televised at an even greater number of cinemas.

The cost of admission is roughly $30, and formal attire is optional. It’s a cool idea.

Would you go to one of these?

New use of Wii controller helps you swim through data

The ability of the Wii controller to sense our relative position and movement through space has created a gaming sensation. Here’s an example of using this same controller to interact with a 3D model, showing uncanny perspective.

The implications for how this interface could allow us to explore data are exhilarating. But what data? I have two examples:

Visual Thesaurus Anyone who has used the Visual Thesaurus knows what I mean when I talk about “swimming through data” (the video demo is embedded below). This interface translates all of the interconnectivity of a thesaurus into linked “nodes” that advance, recede and move out of our way as we dig deeper into the connections. One could conceivably move from node-to-node for hours, never reading the same word or phrase twice. And in such an experience, one would walk away understanding not only the meanings of words but how they are interrelated. This is invaluable.

Walk2Web The developers of this application show an appealing way to see how web sites are interconnected through their hyperlinks. In other words, a swim that had you diving off here, at this post, would lead you to both the Visual Thesaurus site and Walk2Web site. The journey would continue to the many sites from which these sites link. The interface shows summary information about each site along the trip, providing context and meaning to the interconnections. Again, you walk away understanding more about this “data set,” and learning a ton!

When Visual Thesaurus arrived on the scene many years ago, the concept was thrilling. The interface, with its enticing movement through two dimensions, was impressive. But how much better to involve the whole body — and a third dimension! — in the exploration of this network of interrelated concepts.

Do you have a favorite example of applications you could see more appealingly “swim-able” using this Wii controller and 3D visualization technology?

Facebook direct response ads prove how little has changed

It’s a common theme among direct marketers: There is little that actually changes as new media spring up and ads adapt to them. Take Facebook. As David Berkowitz discussed in his post today (and also in his MediaPost piece), an ad series that targets people based on their gender and age is making the rounds. And getting a lot of scrutiny. I had seen another version of it last week, and had mentioned it to him via Twitter. (Thanks for the mention, David.)

Significantly, this ad series wasn’t showing when I just visited a few moment ago, nor could I find in on the More Ads page of Facebook. Coincidence?

Here is the ad in context -- circa April, 2008Way back on April 9 this ad series first captured my attention, although at the time it wasn’t testing headlines customized to age and gender, as this newest batch does. At the time I made a number of screen captures, and took some notes, but didn’t blog about it then.

Now this latest twist (featuring headlines such as, “29 Yr Male Overweight?“) is a great chance to share my research into the advertisement — especially for those readers who first caught David’s post and wondered how the subsequent user experience plays out.

The answer is it’s very old school, with some shrewd modern touches.

Like the best print ads of the direct response print ad “Golden Age” (somewhere between the 1960’s and the 1980’s, I’d venture to guess), it is a carefully tuned conversion engine, as well as a massive blight on the advertising landscape.

The ad itself had the headline “Get Ripped.” The photo is smaller than the new versions, but the copy is written with the same economy and obvious care. When you click though to it, you see a page that is incredibly busy, with three different fonts and primary colors, and a ton going on. (Click to open it full size in a new window).

An AJAX layer offers a clever YouTube video player (I don’t recall checking to see if it was truly pulling from YouTube, or was residing on the advertiser’s server — but I’m guessing the advertisers were not counting on YouTube’s cooperation, and this was indeed locally streamed).

Folks who wouldn’t know better would assume this ad is a loser. “Who could possibly respond to something this schlocky?,” they might ask. My answer would be that, like the pattern on the carpeting of a Las Vegas casino floor, everything about it is there for a reason. And it’s all there because it’s effective, as proven over time, with much testing.

But Wait!

The best part for me is shown below. When I tried to close the window, I got a fake system message saying, “Hey Wait!” It goes on to say a live agent would like to give me a “last-minute saving,” Okay then. Points for persistence.

A clever way to stop people from leaving

What do you think of this surprisingly old-fashioned approach? Do you think it will work — with, or even without — the age / gender personalized headlines?

Summize helps marketers peer into the attitudes of a million+ Twitter fans

How is this for stating the obvious? Data mining is helping marketers better understand and cater to consumer behavior. Examples abound — even here, in Digital Solid. But this fact is worth repeating considering this latest example.

As reported and discussed in this GigaOm post, Twitter is likely to purchase Summize, which is a popular third-party application that searches and reports on keywords embedded in these 140-character packets of text. Om Malik of GigaOm conjectures that the reason for the purchase is less about search, which can be interesting, but about understanding consumer behavior, which can be useful to marketers.

This is an understatement.

The biggest question surrounding Twitter has been, How can this seeming toy ever break through and become a profitable business? This week’s news suggests a research product that, in its beta phase, is already quite good. Go to its Sentiment Analyzer and type in a phrase. Malik typed in keywords related to the acquisition of Summize by Twitter. Here was his result:

Analyzing what Twitter fans think of the Summize purchase

Sentiment is “Bad.” Obviously the majority of people Tweeting about the buy-out aren’t Summize’s soon-to-be-wealthier founders! If you want to see really bad, however, type in “Gas Prices,” as I did here:

Twitter Sentiment surrounding \'gas prices\'

It’s a fun toy. But the real time market research implications are huge.

Maybe the web site’s just not into you

Here’s a useful tool for when you try to visit a favorite web site and discover you can’t. As the name implies, DownForEveryoneOrJustMe.com tells you if your inability to browse a “dark” site is a local, regional or universal problem. If the first part of 2008 is any indication, expect to use it more and more.

Surging web traffic is placing bigger demands on sites and servers. So it stands to reason that more frequent outages are inevitable.

At least now you can get a better idea of its origins — whether they are a network firewall blocking your access, at regional internet outage, or a full-out site failure.

And one of the sites this tool gets used for?

The notoriously buggy Twitter, of course. According to a New York Times piece on the frustrations of unexpectedly dark sites, “Twitter was down for 37 hours this year through April — by far more than any other major social networking Web site.”

Yep, it's you

But take heart. Umang Gupta is quoted in the article with some reassurances: “There are millions of Web sites and billions of Web pages around the world … These big high-visibility problems are actually very rare.” I can add to Gupta’s comments that sites managed by groups such as mine are also doing extremely well, in terms of near zero downtime. We are currently using some of the most reliable network connections and web servers out there, so our down times have been almost nonexistent.

Coincidental to his mention in the NY Times piece, my team actually uses Gupta’s services. We use them specifically to catch and minimize these types of problems with a site. He is chief executive of Keynote Systems, which monitors the web performance of client web sites.

Quietly at work 24/7 on all of our sites, Keynote’s Red Alert monitoring service lets us know immediately if any are faltering — often before a problem becomes apparent to users. It’s all an effort to ensure that sites such as DownForEveryoneOrJustMe.com don’t wind up fielding many questions about our sites!