Kyle Sacks

There was a day when web designers had about ten fonts to choose from that they knew would display correctly on the web. It was a dark, desperate time. Don’t get me wrong, some of these fonts are pretty solid screen fonts; Georgia, Verdana and Trebuchet MS being my personal favorites. They read well and look decent. However, a handful of utilitarian fonts isn’t good for designing attractive, unique websites. Up until now, the go-to methods for getting a unique font on your website were to embed images or *shudders* use Flash. Thankfully, modern web technologies are making this a thing of the past.

CSS2 introduced a rule called @font-face that allows browser to download a font and render a webpage with it. However there was never a consensus on which font file format (alliteration!) to use on the web, so @font-face never took off… until now. Modern browsers now include support for most font file formats (I’ll never tire of saying that) and the web is starting to be a much nicer place for us typophiles.

Why is the ability to embed fonts into websites so awesome? Because there are now hundreds of fonts that you can use on the web and the list is growing every day. If one of your clients has a unique font as part of their branding, you can now use that font when building their website. If you want to make your blog have some extra pop, you can use a wild display font for your h1’s and h2’s. The world is your oyster, my friends.

Now you’re asking, “Where do I start!?” First, Six Revisions has a fantastic write up about @font-face and using fonts on the web. Read it. Next, go find some great web-ready fonts! The foundry FontFont makes some of the best fonts around. I must recommend FF Meta as a the most readable sans-serif you ever did see and FF Tisa as a delightfully personable serif. You should check out FontFont’s whole web font offering as well as Google’s open source web font offering. Enjoy.

If you’re like me, sometimes a good toe tapper is all that will get you through a particularly tedious task. This song, *Up Up Up* by Givers is a catchy little pop number with a pretty epic final 30 seconds. If you like this, grab the whole album. It’s a winner.

Traditionally, if someone wants to see content on the web, they visit the site that holds this content. If I want to read an article from The New York Times, I go to The New York Times’s website. The website is the hub for the content and users pass in and out of it when they want to interact with the content. However, sites like Pinterest, Instapaper, Gimmebar and Svpply are disrupting this model. They’re giving users a way to liberate content from it’s original context and aggregate it in their own collections. This is causing a shift.

Gimmebar is a web application that gives users the ability to capture content from almost anywhere on the web. Pictures, videos, tweets and words can be torn out of their original website and saved into Gimmebar. It doesn’t just bookmark the content either, it actually copies it from its original context to Gimmebar’s servers, available forever. It’s a fascinating concept and I’ve been happily using Gimmebar for the last few months. Anything I want, saved for all eternity in my own curated collection. Why am I talking about this on a marketing blog? Because when content is pulled out of its original site and shared around the web, the advertisements don’t follow it.

Right now, most websites monetize by placing advertisements around their content and trying to get as many eyes to see those ads as possible. This photo of Steve Jobs on Apple Insider is a good example. Notice all the flashing ads around the page? However, if I save that picture into my Gimmebar and share it from there, it looks like this. Apple Insider isn’t making any money off the people viewing the photo from inside my Gimmebar collection. Are you starting to see the implication here? The more ubiquitous content liberation tools become, the harder it is going to be to monetize that content.

I’m not writing this to offer a solution to the problem of monetizing content removed from its original website because well, I don’t have one. Nor does anyone at this point. Video could be done by embedding ads into the file, however once that file gets passed around, you have no way to know how many people have seen it. Photos could possibly be watermarked with little advertisements, but that’s a terribly inelegant solution. What about articles? Do we hide little text ads within the article itself that will follow the article even if it gets copied? This could get messy, fast. There are two things I know for sure.

1. Attribution is key for monetizing content after it has been liberated from its original context. Now matter where content ends up, it must remember where it came from and who created it. If this is lost, the creators receive no compensation or credit for their work.
2. We can’t ignore this trend. No matter how hard content providers try, they’re not going to be able to stop users from liberating and sharing content. The key now is not to fight it (are you listening RIAA?), but to figure out how to monetize within the new model.

As advertisers and marketers, some of the burden is on us to figure out new ways to promote in an increasingly unstructured internet. No pressure, right?

Are you ready for a fun example of creative marketing? No, it’s not from a big national agency, nor is from a young, spry two person shop either. It’s from a group of baristas at my local Starbucks.

I walked in for my usual iced grande cinnamon dolce latte (because it’s only the manliest drinks for me) and noticed that the baristas had their tip jars arranged next to each other in an unusual way. As you can see from the above picture, both jars were sporting Post-it notes. One read, “Batman vs.” and the other read “Ironman”. The tip jars, which are likely to be near invisible to the every day customer, were visually and mentally catching. Putting money in either jar was a way to not only tip your barista, but a way to voice your opinion (this is my vote of course). And who doesn’t love a little superhero humor? I think this is brilliant.

But being the marketer than I am, it got my wheels turning. The baristas had taken a tip plea and created a benefit for themselves AND their customers. It heightened the Starbucks experience for the coffee purchaser and was a way to get more tips than usual for people behind the counter. Each day there was a new matchup and the previous day’s winner was posted. It just shows how a little thinking and creativity can create lasting impressions and experiences for your customers, AND benefit your company in a real way.