October 09, 2006

Good & Bad Generators

In the holy name of engagement every advertiser seems to be offering consumer generating tools. Lot’s of them fail because the demand to much involvement and too little output.

The advertisers haven’t asked themselves the crucial questions – Would they spent time doing it themselves/their children? Who would spend time doing it at all? Iain Tait wrote a clever post about this a while ago (
http://www.crackunit.com/2006/08/23/a-conversation-on-participation/)

You shouldn’t create your engagement tools because technology allows you to, but because you offer your something that’s worth something for someone.

The audio cassette tape generator (
http://www.says-it.com/cassette/index.php) pictured above is a good example of something that’s really easy and really funny - I made special one for the old members in my high school rock band.

The Staufenberger Repository has a brilliant list of generators with little involvement and surprising output

It’s here:
http://staufenberger.typepad.com/repository/2006/10/the_generation_.html
And here:
http://staufenberger.typepad.com/repository/2006/10/more_generators.html

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for write up!

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