Posts tagged “microwave”

ChittahChattah Quickies

  • Optimal Microwaving with Fitt's μλ-Number – I had an idea to blog about this myself, funny that someone else did. I try to enter microwave times that require minimal thought (or "mental operator" as they say in Fitt's Law): "2:22" is about as good as "2:00" when reheating and is provably faster. It obviously doesn't add a lot of time savings to your day, but it's been one of those little habits I've observed in myself. It's funny how math education, our money, and the way we tell time and structure our day conditions us to favor certain types of numbers, even when our interfaces don't.

The power of pervasion

Last October I blogged about NBC’s use of “fusion marketing” with the show My Own Worst Enemy.

Are they at it again? A recent episode of the NBC show 30 Rock revolved around a mini-microwave, “The FunCooker“…

fun-cooker_microwave_b

…and then a week later in some webvertising I saw an ad for this-

iwave-cube

-the iWave cube, a tissue-box sized microwave.

I couldn’t help but wonder if there was another fusion marketing approach afoot.

Marketing is both ubiquitous and stealthy, and in this mashed-up and pervasive environment, any piece of communication in any medium could be a marketing effort. I find this simultaneously intriguing and disquieting.

Pervasive, cross-context marketing is producing some creative and thought-provoking experiences (the recent Skittles/Twitter (Skwitter?) campaign, for one). And it can be fun to spot marketing easter eggs–I felt a little thrill of potential discovery about the two microwaves.

At the same time, this lack of clarity about whether any particular piece of communication is company-sponsored or not adds another level of opacity to an already Filo-dough-like world of layered information. Will bionic critical thinking skills become the new common sense?

Related posts:
Interacting With Advertising
Collateral Damage
Crossover Hit

Series

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