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MS, Information Design and Technology:
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Commercial Work:
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Also:
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Info:
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ENGIN ERDOGAN / Portfolio
xdiscipline © January 2005
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Upon my education in Information Design and Technology, I had the chance to look back at advertising through an interaction design lens. My conclusion has been that current advertising conventions encourage deception: Do whatever it takes to make the viewers pay attention.
This attitude results in viewers skipping or ignoring ads. A commercial break on TV is the time to take a break from the activity of watching TV. A pop-up ad on the Internet should be blocked. Unexpected tele-marketing calls are upsetting. This is an endless cycle of companies spending more money to shout louder about their products, and consumers plugging their ears more tightly.
Approach
I suggest that user-friendly advertising is on-demand and personalized. In other words, advertising begins AFTER people start wondering more about a product that they see in its natural context. You like your friend's new cell phone, you ask her what brand it is. Then you examine how heavy it is, or if it has a camera, or how long its battery lasts etc. If you get more interested, you ask how much she paid for it. If she is not a close friend, you stop by a cell-phone shop instead to take a closer look at it. Or you browse the product website. On-demand information.
Similarly, when you see a product that you like while watching a movie on TV, imagine that you can bookmark/save it using your remote, WITHOUT interrupting the movie. After the movie is finished or whenever you like, you can go to your personalized vault to explore the product's features, to learn its price or to watch its commercial. Your personalized vault serves as the interface for product information, without being intrusive, and convenient to access. This is the base idea of my project.
Method
I propose tagging all the products that appear in the broadcasted content, and having two dedicated buttons on the remote control for bookmarking products and reviewing personalized advertising vaults. When viewer presses bookmark button on the remote, a snapshot of the tagged products on screen is saved in viewer's customized advertising space, to which I refer as the personalized vault. The personalized vault is the index page where bookmarked products are listed and categorized.
In this method, products are not made extra visible by means of highlighting and such. In other words, the experience of watching is not different, and everything happens at the backend. Viewers are informed at the beginning of each program that there is more information is available about the products that appear in the content. Also, when bookmarking button is pressed, a brief message shows up to inform user that the product is saved.
Application
I am prototyping the model as an Interactive TV interface, using Macromedia Flash as the production environment. My prototype will demonstrate how bookmarking works with a variety of TV content, and how the advertising space categorizes information.
Platform
I picked Interactive TV as the development platform because the problem is most visible in this medium. In Interactive TV, viewers have more control on the flow of broadcasted content unlike traditional TV, and they can simply skip ads. Therefore, the concept of interactivity on TV is a major threat to most impactful advertising convention, the 30-second commercial, and a viable advertising solution is needed to encourage the advancement in Interactive TV.
Next Step
As a next step for this project, I am interested in prototyping ubiquitous extensions of on-demand access to product information. For example, I take a picture of a product using my cell-phone camera, and more information is downloaded to my cell-phone with the picture of the product, even its commercial. Technically, this is possible using 2D barcodes, and a reader installed in the cell-phone. But, what would be the scope of information that is downloaded? Is it feasible to have 2D barcodes on products? How can such a service go beyond early adopters?
Thesis committee
Prof. Ian Bogost, Chair