Graeme Sutherland

software development is a craft

Unlogo.org -- excellent idea

Unlogo is a web service that eliminates logos and other corporate signage from videos. On a practical level, it takes back your personal media from the corporations and advertisers. On a technical level, it is a really cool combination of some brand new OpenCV and FFMPEG functionality. On a poetic level, it is a tool for focusing on what is important in the record of your life rather than the ubiquitous messages that advertisers want you to focus on.
via unlogo.org

Very nice piece of work, this. Unlogo removes logos and corporate signage from video. What a great experiment. I haven't had a look at the videos on the site yet, but I have great hopes.

One of the things that I notice particularly about the UK countryside is that there is a complete absence of billboards, and that's almost worth a sigh of relief every time there's a stretch of road with green either side and no advertising signage.

Why you don't need a new 'fridge.

For some years now, I've been, on occasions, having a good rave about wanting to start a (print) magazine that had neutral or balanced advertising.   I'd want a magazine that devoted equals space and effort to advertising to sell things to people, and advertisments to encourage people not to buy things.

So, on one page you'd have an ad for a new 'fridge, and on the other side, a similarly high-quality ad encouraging you to maintain and keep the old one or share the neighbours.  There are two sides of every buying decision, we just don't get to see them very often.  And when we are trying to save carbon, not buying appliances does help reduce the CO2 in the atmosphere.

So, you get the idea:  A nicely designed magazine with rules that mean that advertisers need to somehow ensure or allow or fund the for and against cases for their product.  Would anybody care to advertise? Would anybody dare to advertise?  It'd be an interesting experiment.

It would be mad to start a new print magazine right now.  So, what about something online -- and this is the new bit of my thinking.  Presumably, once can buy banner ads with the keyword 'fridge' or whatever and promote not buying a new fridge.  It's be easy enough to make ads like that, and they'd get nicely delivered onto pages where people were looking to buy fridges or were searching out a new 'fridge to buy.  Perhaps the click through rates wouldn't be that high, so it wouldn't cost too much, but who knows?

This has to be against ad placement terms and conditions, you think?  Well, I've just had a look at the google adwords policies, and I can't see anything in there that make it wrong to suggest not buying something might be a good option. Actually, under the 'Anti' and Violence section of the Content Guidelines, there is a specific allowance for "Consumer awareness ads (positive and negative) that don't violate the basics of the policy".   That sounds ok for now, but there's a lot of details to work on.

Okay, so, to make this thing fly, we need:

  • funding for some ads
  • destination website(s) with the reasons for all of this, or useful consumer information on 'sharing the neighbours fridge' or 'how to survive without a car' or similar.

And that probably means a charity or consumer organisation that wants to try it out. An initial experiment would be very interesting because it would yield click-through information about how consumers react to these messages, and could give a charity or similar a quite high profile.

Anybody interesting in trying this out?