Digital Stuffing

A few weeks ago, at Playful, Roo Reynolds demonstrate how to turn his plastic guitar into a real guitar, or at least an instrument you can play your own music on instead of just following the onscreen cues.

Roo Reyolds plays “Hotel California” from Tom Armitage on Vimeo.

The Idea

The popularity of the games like Rock Band and Guitar Hero may be leading to an increase in sales for the real instruments, a situation the Guitar Centre is trying to capitalise on. They’ve pulled together a nice site where you can personalise a video e-card, by uploading your face or just adding your name, to let your nearest and dearest know that all you want for Christmas is a Real Guitar.

A real Guitar (screenshot from site)

You have 4 videos to choose from, from a cheesy song through to a lovely arty one, so go ahead and decide which one suits you.

What I think

I like the site design, I like the choice of options and I like the very, very cheesy song. It’s topical and works well in the current craze for music games, it has a single purpose and keeps to that. I was a little disappointed that there were not many easter eggs on the site, as the design is perfect for that, but the one that is there at least gives you 10% off your guitar.

The Pitch

A great pitch to the right email with the right sort of information from Cohn&Wolfe (someone I don’t think I’ve heard from before). This was not a full social media Press Release, but a short note that pointed me inthe right direction. I liked the fact that they also pointed me to a similar site as a way to extend the story, more tips for me to follow. The site was Elf Yourself, the subject of a post I’ve not finished yet!

The Idea

TGI Fridays are busy promoting their new loyalty card, Give Me More Stripes. Sign up for the card and you’ll earn points for all money spent, that can be redeemed later for food. When you first sign up, you get given a desert voucher and a ‘skip to the front of the line’ offer. They’re also going to extend the offer over time to things like tastings.

As part of the promotion, they’ve built a widget - Get Striped - where you load up your photo and add the TGI stripes for it.

What I think

It did not start well, with the Stripe card home page having a really annoying carousel feature with bad UI. Click on an arrow to make it go around, I’d expect it to move the next one, but no, it just carries on without any indication of what I’m looking at.

TGI Friday Card Carousel (Screenshot from Site)

One question about the programme itself - you earn points and the SEND YOU A VOUCHER??? What? Why not an SMS, why not directly from the card. Why stick to a paper version when there are far easier ways to manage this?

There's a strange disconnect between the programme on the main TGI site and the promotion, there's no link between them. If I go to the Get Striped page, I land on the widget and then have access to all the other bits around the card, although once I switch away, there's no link back. If I go to the card page, there's no links to the widget. It looks like there are 2 completely different flash files; there's been no overview of site navigation so it all works together.

The same lack of UI appears on the widget itself. You can choose a face shape (all of which look male), then choose to add the facial features or upload your own image. Anyone know where the upload button is on the widget below?

TGI Friday Stripe widget (screenshot from site)

When you click on one of the face 'parts' it gives you the option to upload your image...then you have to go through all the sections and add your own back to it. This is where I got stuck - the idea of the widget is to make up a face out of different stripes, different bits of faces. I was just looking to upload my own face and do something with it. I went back to read the instructions and it did not make it any clearer. But, eventually got it - can you guess which bit is me?

TGI Friday Get Striped (screenshot from site)

You could have a lot of fun with this, especially if you have headshots of your friends, you can mix and match them, do some great guessing games. But it just seems too hard, the benefits are not clear and the 'what do I do' barrier a little too steep. A good idea for a good product, let down by parts of the execution.

The Pitch

The pitch was good - short, friendly and to the point. It's an agency I had received stuff from before (AttentionUSA), but instead of just being stuck on a list, they'd actually re-visited the site and knew I was blogging in a new venue. This is far better than many of the emails I've received this month, so full marks to them