kevin rothermel | meanwhile, behind the façade of this innocent looking bookstore...

Gamers prove that hype isn’t obsolete.

By kevin | Published: March 10, 2010

Ever since I completely flubbed an interview with Rockstar Games a few years ago, I’ve thought a lot about the marketing of games and how incredibly important the game itself is to its success. Bad games will get bad reviews, which people will see, making the marketing of a less than perfect game a complete waste of money. It seems like a fairly obvious thing … video games reviews and ratings are so prominent, and gamers are so plugged in, that a game that isn’t really good is more than likely doomed to failure.

…or so I thought until I ran across this a couple weeks ago:

“Marketing influences game revenue three times more than quality scores. There’s a giant myth out there that reviews scores are the most crucial to a video game. The reason why that is is the information is readily available – we can go to Metacritic – and we see games like Grand Theft Auto and Call of Duty succeed and we see they have a high quality score and we make that correlation. But the truth is, marketing actually has much more of an influence to game sales than high scores.” —EEDAR’s Jesse Divnich, speaking at the Montreal International Game Summit

If this is true, the Big Takeaway (and gigantic, reckless, assumptive leap) on this is that even in a highly engaged and plugged-in audience, rational information like ratings, reviews and community opinion aren’t going to be the undoing of creative marketing campaigns. It’ll more often than not prevent the fraudulent success of the terrible, but at the end of the day, people still make decisions emotionally, despite all of the information they have at their fingertips.

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Posted in Ad Industry, Branding, Communication, Entertainment, Games, Gaming, Interweb, Web/Tech | Leave a comment

Suspend judgement. Learn from everything.

By kevin | Published: March 10, 2010

The world is a funny place. And it get’s really easy to get caught up in that funniness and start dismissing the unfamiliar or the seemingly ridiculous as a waste of time, a threat to the very fabric of society, or just something for other people. If anything, it is growing more and more of a natural reflex as new ideas continue to spew forth into the world at exponential rates, many of which are reaching people that are very different than the people who are the intended audience. And it’s probably a good thing for most people. It helps to filter out the noise. For people that work with ideas for a living, it can be really useful to be good at it, but I think that the truly great creative thinkers in the world, from the greatest planners to the greatest creative people to the greatest entrepreneurs, are unique in their ability to turn that off, suspend judgement, and learn from everything.

I’m guilty of over-judgement in spades. I’ve suspected it for a long time, but it was confirmed the other day when my wife called me a bully after I made fun of someone we saw while driving. It’s sort of my schtick.

But I’ve realized the error of my ways. Moving forward, I’m going to actively try to be less of a curmudgeon. In fact, it might make a swell platform for a weekly blog post series. Time will tell.

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Posted in Diary, Planning | Leave a comment

The Martin Agency

By kevin | Published: March 2, 2010

So Krissie and I once again drove across the country with cats in the back seat. This time we were headed to Richmond, Virginia, where I’ve joined The Martin Agency. My timing couldn’t have been much better.

Now resuming regular service.

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Posted in Diary, Richmond | 1 Comment

Looking for music recommendations

By kevin | Published: January 18, 2010

Krissie and I are driving from California to Virginia next week and are looking for some good driving music recommendations. We have four solid days to fill with music. What albums would you bring on your roadtrip?

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Posted in Diary, Music | 7 Comments

I sort of hope Conan becomes the Howard Stern of the Internet.

By kevin | Published: January 14, 2010

It’s being reported now that David Zucker is planning to “ice” Conan, keeping him off the air at any network, for the length of his Tonight Show contract, which is amazing. I don’t think it would happen, and I would hate it if it did, but if it did actually happen here’s what I would like to see (warning: this is ridiculous):

Conan gets iced, unable to have a show on any TV network, so he takes his show, in some form, to the Internet. Bringing celebrity and production value to the Internet attracts fans to view the show live, or watch back episodes as they are available. Advertisers flock to pay big money to be somehow involved with the show. In doing so, Conan becomes the model that proves TV networks are obsolete, the Internet replaces broadcasting as the primary source of video content, and eventually, crushed and out of a job, Zucker has to approach Conan to borrow money.

Totally unrealistic, I know, but I think it would be incredibly cool.

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Posted in Communication, Entertainment, Interweb | Leave a comment

The Dichotomy of Shelter in California

By kevin | Published: January 14, 2010

California loves to put signs on dangerous thing. But when it’s your home or office, it clashes a little bit with the welcome mat at the door. They almost turn going into a building into a gamble akin to hitchhiking. “Yeah you can come in, but if it doesn’t crush you, it might kill you with the cancer.”

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Posted in Communication, Weird | Leave a comment

Can’t make more people? Make Robots.

By kevin | Published: January 12, 2010

I’ve been reading a lot about how both China and Japan are having issues with their population. I think they are both incredible circumstances that highlight what is sure to be a more regular pattern of societies having to deal with the realities of a world forever changed by human civilization, population growth, technology, and changing definition on what constitutes a resource.

China’s one child per couple policy has led to a preference for male heirs, causing Chinese couples abort female fetus’, and all of that is catching up with them. They are reportedly going to be short by 29 million wives in 2020. The article thinks that this will mean an increase in cross generational relationships: young men marrying older women. But it also makes me wonder if it would be necessary to try to bring more female immigrants into the country somehow. Though I guess it’ll probably resolve itself in less visible ways.

Japan is having an issue of their own, in that they can’t get their young people to have kids. The video below is 28 minutes long, but it’s really interesting and it does a great job of bringing the causes of this issue to life. I came away amazed at the unwillingness of the Japanese to ease immigration regulations to allow more people to move there, their unwillingness to have babies, yet total embrace of the idea that if they aren’t going to have enough people in the workforce, they will just make robots and release them into society. It’s like their entire country is impervious to the idea of the uncanny valley.

There’s always been this idea that one day robots will live amongst us, but it’s always seemed like a really far off, almost impossible thing, like flying cars and space travel. This sort of changes that in my mind. Not only is Japan consistently the most technologically forward country in the world, but now they have a real reason, survival, to fuel the drive to make robotic citizens a reality.

It’ll be really interesting to watch these countries deal with their issues. and it’ll also be interesting to watch as other countries look to them as models to learn from when facing their own problems. Has Japan proven to other eastern nations that westernization is a sure way to doom your way of life and eventually an entire people? Will other nations learn some lessons on population control from China’s current problems? Kind of a strange world we’ve built.

Not sure if anyone is still hosting the Account Planning School of the Web, but it seems like these could be some compelling problems to work on.

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Posted in Culture, Science, Weird | 2 Comments

Digital Natives See the Matrix

By kevin | Published: January 11, 2010

Over the holidays I was given the opportunity to get schooled by my nine year old nephew at Madden football on Wii. I accepted the challenge, not only because I’m a good uncle, but also because I’ve been playing NCAA Football on Xbox and Playstation for a good decade.

I lost.

Partially because I had to learn how passing on the Wii works, and partially because I never learned how to play defense. But I also got the impression that I lost because I was trying to play football, where as he was trying to take advantage of the patterns of a programmed piece of software. I was doing my best to use to proper football technique, while he was doing his best to take advantage of the game. I saw football, he saw the Matrix. He’s a digital native.

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Posted in Gaming, Interweb, Media | Leave a comment

New Year’s Resolutions, for real this time.

By kevin | Published: January 4, 2010

Early in December, I decided that this year I would take on some New Year’s Resolutions to finally take action on a few ideas that I’ve had, and I posted some initial thoughts on what they could be here.

I had two rules: the first rule was that they had to be resolutions with clear finished-states … none of the typical, arbitrary things that people pursue like “be more organized.” The second rule was that I had to post them publicly in order to generate some fear of consequence for not following through. It’s easy to rationalize not doing something if no one else is there to call you out on it.

So after much deliberation and procrastination, and taking into account feedback from comments and real live humans on my earlier post, here’s what I’ve decided on for my New Year’s Resolutions for 2010. None of it will be easy, but I think all of it will be interesting/useful/rewarding.

Finish the two drumming method books I bought last year – Drumming has always been my foremost talent and thing that I love to do, but for the past 10 years or so I haven’t been putting in the practice time that I should to be as good as I can be. Last year I bought two method books. One is called Extreme Interdependence. It was written to help develop coordination between the limbs, and it’s ridiculously difficult. I think I’m on page 3. The other is called The Drummer’s Bible: How to play every style of music, from Afro-Cuban to Zydeco. Originally I planned on practicing 15 minutes a day, but there will be days when that is impossible.
Write two blog posts per week – I once commented to a friend that nothing kills a planning blog faster than having a planning job. I’d like to get this thing back up to full speed this year because I like doing it, I feel guilty when I don’t do it, and it forces me to think about things that I otherwise wouldn’t. This was originally supposed to be one post a day, but I’m not sure that would be good for anyone.
Take a storytelling class – Most of my job really boils down to telling stories, as does most of the things that I enjoy doing. I want to get better at it. And it would be helpful for the next item on my list:
Write a novel – I’ve wanted to write a book for a long time, but I’ve never really had the time, and I’ve been kind of scared to start one. After I learned about NaNoWriMo from Claire, my perspective changed. Get over the fear of writing something terrible, and just write something at all.
Finish Learning Processing – I started this programming book a few months ago, but was sidetracked by some huge projects at work that required some late nights.
Take a web programming class – I want to continue to learn programming so that I might be able to make use of it one day. Maybe Ruby? Not sure where to take a good class for this though.
Build one web thingy – Put that programming knowledge to good use by designing some kind of application for the Web.
Write a business plan – Mike K. has been stirring my desire to start something up since we were back at VCU Adcenter. I have some ideas, now lets see what one looks like on paper. Maybe it will pave the way for more?
Run a 5k – I need to be in better shape, and I think that training for a 5k could help me get there.
Become an early riser – I’ve made an allowance for the arbitrary here. There’s so much more I could get done if I could drag myself out of bed at a decent hour regularly.