Global Peers

It's very odd to go on a plane and to your hotel and have people meet you there. Very odd. Probably it is about getting connected, about people who have mutual desires or getting organized. When I broke my ankle, they took a picture when I came out of cab, in general, to me, it is not that big of a deal. [ ] And if people want to meet me, please , not on purpose. Hopefully it will be a pleasurable encounter, that you won't be crazy and that I won't be crazy. (Keanu Reeves, 1/4/98)

In imitation of Frigyes Karinthy's insight (1929) that people are linked by at most five links Stanley Milgram (1967) came up with his study of 'interconnectivity.' He wanted to study the distance or social links between any two people in the United States. Thus, how many acquaintances were needed to connect any two individuals? The answer turned out to be six and the well-known term 'six degrees of separation' was born. A famous example is the Kevin Bacon game: In 1994 the actor Kevin Bacon was joked to be God on The Oracle of Bacon Website where he could be connected to any other actor through less than six links by the movies he appeared in. Not only can other actors be connected to Kevin Bacon, as Milgram's study has shown, any other individual can be linked to him as well. However, it may take some more degrees (Barab si, 2002; Johnson, 2002; Watts, 2003); one should not focus on the number six too much, but the meaning that any person can be reached through a limited number of steps (Rosen, 2000). These steps can best be seen not as persons apart, but as 'circles of acquaintances or structures' apart (Milgram, 1967). The study of interconnectivity is a useful tool to explore how digital technology and consumers may be connected and how corporate practice has tapped into these networks to use them for their own good.

A network is a set of interconnected nodes that may refer to a network as technology - i.e., computer networks ^[4] - and to a network as social system (Barab si, 2002; Castells, 2001; Negroponte, 1995; Robins, 1996; Watts, 2003). The introduction and fast succession of digital technologies led to the come about of a network logic where a network is seen as an integral part of a continuously evolving and self-constituting system in which real people are represented who actively engage in gathering and exchanging information. Accordingly, patterns of media consumption altered profoundly. Jenkins (2002) writes :

We should document the interactions that occur among media consumers, between media consumers and media texts and between media consumers and media producers . The new participatory culture is taking shape at the intersection between three trends: (1) new tools and technologies enable consumers to archive, annotate, appropriate and re-circulate media content; (2) a range of subcultures promote do-it-yourself (DIY) media production, a discourse that shapes how consumers have deployed those technologies; and (3) economic trends favoring the horizontally integrated media conglomerates encourage the flow of images, ideas and narratives across multiple media channels and demand more active modes of spectatorship (p. 157).

The relationship between a technological and social network structure is then meaningful to grasp the impact of blurring boundaries between production, consumption and distribution for marketing purposes, because it helps to understand a network as a 'conduit for the propagation of information or the exertion of influence, and an individual's place in the overall pattern of relations determines what information that person has access to or, correspondingly, whom he or she is in a position to influence.' ^[5] The corporate world has found its way to these online participatory networks and is attempting to use these networks to work for them.

Advertainment

Advertisements in the form of games , movies and the like are created to promote a company's product or service and are freely provided on the Internet. Among these types of advertisements is the 'advergame,' the most popular one followed by the 'adverfilm.' ^[6] These terms refer to 'the integration of advertising messages in respectively online games and films and [are] increasingly being used as an integral part of Internet marketing and advertising strategies to promote goods and services to potential consumers' (Buckner et al., 2002). ^[7] Well-known advergame campaigns include the US Army game ^[8] , MTV's Winterjam ^[9] , Coke Music ^[10] , and Mercedes-Benz ^[11] .

BMW ^[12] , Budweiser ^[13] , Volkswagen ^[14] , Reebok ^[15] , Virgin Mobile ^[16] , and Greenpeace ^[17] have gained much credit for their adverfilms.

These types of advertisements, often referred to as 'advertainment,' are being heralded as the future of Internet advertising where they build relationships between consumers and products by transferring the emotion of the game or film to the brand that is powering it and creating an engaging and interactive experience.

Advertainments are strategically placed on the Internet, that is, on a company's or officially affiliated Web sites. If it happens that fan sites are built around advertainment, they are usually incorporated and directly linked form the official site. In case the content of such sites is not condoned, legal action may be undertaken (see further). Whether by playing games with embedded advertising, or inadvertently sending marketing information back to advertisers, or simply by passing advertising texts within one's circle of friends , the target audience and the larger dynamic of participatory networks are 'used' by corporations to achieve their ends. This linkage of technological and social networks gives way to a network where a shift in production and distribution practices opened up participatory networks for commercial purposes. A company is always looking for a profitable way to meet its target group that based on a company's product, service or brand encompasses a network of like-minded people ('peers'). The latter may perhaps be referred to through the notion of peer-to-peer (p2p), which is a rather diffuse term (Leuf, 2002; Oram, 2001). Generally speaking, p2p refers to a network of individual computers that communicate directly with each other and share information and resources without using central servers (Shirky, 2000) ^[18] . There are several variations to the distributed file sharing (DFS) system in terms of purpose, moderation , control access, search options, file transfer and protocols ^[19] . Napster for instance, was server-based but p2p in terms of file transfer while Gnutella is p2p in terms of search options and file transfer. The main promise of p2p features for market-oriented institutions is the offer of large-scale groupware, which makes collaboration among peers - whether business-to-consumer (b2c) or consumer-to-consumer (c2c) - possible. This type of distributed computing puts the business as content broker to the foreground and employs p2p features ^[20] such as central processing unit sharing (CPU), storage sharing, local caching service and resource discovery as means to actively push online marketing activities. Central to the p2p-concept is then that equals are communicating with equals by being 'networked in technology, peer-to-peer in organization, and collaborative in principle' (Uricchio, 2003).

Commercial Traps of p2p

The popularity of p2p networks among peers or consumers is not necessarily shared from a commercial perspective. Issues like copyright infringement (e.g., Napster) make businesses shy away from or undertake legal actions against peer networks. However, current online advertising opportunities that use peer networks have successfully relied on changed distribution practices. Engaging advertisements give way to the content and should actively push the distribution of the ad among peers. For example, the advergame America's Army: Operations can be downloaded through Bittorrent, a p2p software that only allows people to download one file at a time but once one is downloading, peers can immediately start downloading it from the 'downloading host.' The game is about 500 MB and has been downloaded 5.9 million plus times. ^[21] People continue to download it (including new patches) which results in server overloads. Therefore, p2p software is often used to share the files relatively fast. Another good example are demos. Businesses promote the latest music releases or games by distributing demos for free through p2p networks, e.g., The Beastie Boys offered their latest single online for free, Madonna - although not free - sold her single 'American Life' on her own Web site for just $1.49 and at the same time allowed end users to resell the single on sites, while Trymedia uses digital rights management technology ActiveMark to encrypt games but at the same time, allows people to play a short version for free. Trymedia tested Infogrames' BeachHead 2000 that was put on KaZaA and Morpheus. Eight hundred thousand demos were downloaded and 16,000 people seemed to like the game because after trying it out they bought the full version ^[22] . Although many companies still shy away from using p2p networks - also many online advertisements may not be p2p in the sense of being networked in technology where computers share files using decentralized servers ^[23] - for advertising purposes, some have found studying these p2p services like KaZaA, Morpheus and Grokster very lucrative within the business-to-business (b2b) context. BigChampagne for instance, offers a tracking service that tracks when, where and what is shared and sells this data to the music industry among which includes Maverick, Warner Bros., Interscope, DreamWorks, and Elektra ^[24] . Although many are rather silent about their interest in p2p networks since it would undercut their zero-tolerance stance against file swapping which is seen as an act of infringing copyrights. Businesses have thus found another way to connect with their online customers by on the one hand, providing engaging advertisements that may be passed on within one's circle of friends, and on the other hand, studying the dynamics within the larger dynamic of participatory networks - that may be p2p - in order to cultivate the relationship with their customers. Tapping into participatory networks by using its features for marketing purposes is generally known as 'viral marketing' and has been described by Wilson (2000) as 'any strategy that encourages individuals to pass on a marketing message to others, creating the potential for exponential growth in the message' exposure and influence. Like viruses, such strategies take advantage of rapid multiplication to explode the message to thousands, to millions. Off the Internet, viral marketing has been referred to as ˜word-of-mouth', ˜creating a buzz', ˜leveraging the media', ˜network marketing'.'

^[4] Nicholas Negroponte (1995 p.170/1) writes, 'computer networks form a raster of heterogeneous processes, that function as both source and destination.' For example, sending an e-mail means unpacking it, addressing it with headers and sending all the packets over various channels. In between, headers are changed into new ones as well and at its destination the packets are put back together and arranged into an e-mail.

^[5] Watts, 2003, p. 48.

^[6] Film as online entertainment-as-advertisiment ( ˜adverfilm') is the oldest and most linear one - i.e., not (very) interactive - and is rather similar to the old medium in the cinemas, the game is recently remediated as an ad ( ˜advergame') on the Internet and is interactive though structured, while a blog is new, completely computer facilitated and the least structured ( ˜adblogging'). So far ˜adblogging' has not been very successful (e.g., Dr. Pepper, see http://slate.msn.com/id/2081419/), but corporations are still trying to find ways to use blogs to reach their target audience to achieve their ends (See http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger; http://www.ojr.org/ojr/glaser/1055879147.php; http://weblogs.jupiterevents.com/blog/; http://www.blethers.com/blog/archives/00000237.html). Since blogging is a rather upcoming phenomenon on the Internet, there is not a solid, extensive theoretical framework to be built upon. A blog can best be described by having a format of a diary in which its author publishes regularly (preferably daily), is marked by a date-stamp, is of a reverse chronological order, and links to other blogs. There are different forms, e.g., photo blogs, celebrity blogs, and corporate blogs.

^[7] There are many sites that use free games to encourage traffic; advergaming however means that brands are incorporated in the game environment itself. Thus, the ad is central to playing a game. Another interactive trend that might attract attention from the business world, is a cross-over between online games and games to be played in the 'real world.' For example, a ' treasure ' - often a box with a present, a logbook and disposable camera in it - can be found somewhere on the face of the earth but hints and coordinates (global positioning system) are posted on message boards or websites (www.geocaching.nl and www.bookcrossing.com).

^[8] See http://www.americasarmy.com. America's Amry: Operations can now also be played for money, see http://www.ultimatearena.com/games/cmspage.jsp?body=inthenews_merc

^[9] See http://winterjam.european.mtve.com/ss/

^[10] See http://cokemusic.com/home/newindex.jsp

^[11] See http://www.tdkm.com/games/mercedes-benz/

^[12] See http://www.bmwfilms.com

^[13] See http://www.completelydifferent.co.uk/collections/wassup/

^[14] See http://www.boardsmag.com/screeningroom/commercials/795/

^[15] See http://www.terrytate.reebok.com. See also Superbowl XXXVII Community Research and Analysis: Advertising Study pp. 6, 15-16. (http://www.emerging.com/newsletter/bbi/Superbowl_Advertising_Research_021203.pdf)

^[16] See http://www.brandrepublic.com/digitalbulletin/news_story.cfm?articleID=181803&Origin=DB04062003

^[17] See http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/ aliens /

^[18] See also http://www.law.uchicago.edu/Lawecon/WkngPprs_151-175/162.ls.fileswapping.pdf

^[19] Ying-Dar Lin (November 1, 2000). P2P Operational and Business Models. Retrieved October 3, 2003, from http://www.cis.nctu.edu.tw/~ydlin (National Chiao Tung University, Dept. of Computer and Information Science, Taiwan):

	FTP	NFS	Web	Napster	Gnutella	Freenet
Purpose	Remote file sharing	Local file sharing	Remote file sharing (portal)	File sharing community	Decentralized file sharing community	Decentralized anonymous file sharing
Moderated?	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	No
Access control	Yes	Yes	No	No	No	No
Search	Server-based	Server-based	Server-based	Server-based	P2P	P2P
File transfer	Client/server	Client/server	Client/server	P2P	P2P	P2P
File transfer protocol	FTP	NFS	HTTP, caching	Proprietary	HTTP	Proprietary, encrypted, caching

^[20] Ibid 16.

^[21] There are no numbers available regarding downloads of the America's Army: Operations at Bittorrent. Source: http://www.movesinstitute.org/openhouse2003slides/Wardynskiopenhouse2003.ppt

^[22] http://www.nwfusion.com/newsletters/filehsare/2002/01175586.html

^[23] Note: within marketing literature c2c and p2p are generally used interchangeable. However, I would like to argue that c2c does not equal p2p. On the contrary, p2p as expression of being both technologically networked and peer-to-peer in organization and it calls into question the usage of concepts such as ˜participatory' agency within a commercial context. Although p2p and c2c are both a means of distribution, their conceptualizations we know nowadays may complicate an equal exchange among concepts. More research is needed.

^[24] http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.10/fileshare_pr.html