First thing you will need to do is come up with a promotion that sounds great. A free movie download, available one day only, is perfect. Now most companies will have to deal with the success of such a campaign, but if your AOL do the following to ensure PR disaster:
- Only work on windows, and only with IE6. Deny FireFox 2.0 users and tell IE7 users they need to "upgrade". Also, exclude Windows XP 64, Windows 2003, and Windows Vista.
- Offer a list of movies no one wants, even if free. Seriously, Star Trek: The Motion Picture should be giving people refunds for downloading.
- Change the phrase "free movie" to mean "DRM loaded files that will only play on your PC and expire after 30 Days".
- Ask for a credit card even though it's free. Beacause we all trust AOL with our data.
- Have the legal team put in some verbiage to show you don't understand the internet at all, like "Offer good from 12/2/06 at 6:00 am ET through 12/3/06 at 6:00 am ET, or until supply of free videos is depleted, whichever comes first."
- If someone is actually able to download a movie, make sure the extra licensing steps won't run on their computer.
Friends don't let friend use AOL. Even for free.
Posted By Mike On Sunday, December 03, 2006
Filed under aol video |
Comments (1)
victor
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Monday, December 04, 2006
1:39:40 PM
I'm not sure what it is with my corporate overlords. I love 'em, and they mean well, but they insist upon driving forward with the same IE-centric deal they've been using forever. They could roll up a killer FF-based browser with all sorts of AIM-goodies, but...
I suspect In2TV (another IE-only, Windows site) and other TV/movie (read: Time Warner) properties were sold the same line from Microsoft: security and DRM. Adult Swim went from Mac-friendly (they were using WMV's, but in such a way that Flip4Mac, a QT component, stil played the vids), to using ActiveX-- making their site totally non-functional for anyone not rolling with Windoze. Irony being most of their staff is prolly not using Winders, but their audience is. Gah!
While the details are another topic of execution (legal boilerplate-- that line about supplies is funny), I really blame MS more than AOL. MS's sales team has done way too good a job of selling this WMV-DRM crap, and we're all paying the price...
