November 5th, 2006 by Justin Oberman
The announcement before the Blue Man Group’s “How To be A Mega Star” apparently asks the audience to leave their cell phones on even, G-d forbid, take pictures of the show with their camera phones. The Blue Man Group has apparently teamed up with a company called Counts Media which uses a technology they have dubbed Mobkastr. I have not yet seen the show or the technology live but Cnet reporter Daniel Terdiman was in the audience and had some interesting things to say that everyone exploring the mobile medium for marking purpose should read.
The point of Mobkastr is to enhance the live show experience allowing audience members to opt-in to to receive an interactive stream of text messages that tie in directly to the How to be a Megastar Tour 2.0 live show. According to Puck Quinn, Blue Man Group’s artistic director, the concept of Mobkastr in the context of “How to be a Megastar” was to offer viewers some extra explanation of the symbols and metaphors on display during the show, and to do so in a way that enhances their experience. Seems simple enough.
However, when Terdiman opted in to the system by texting “Blue” to the shorcode 62578 he thought the message “Get 60 texts and replies. $1.99 to opt in. Standard msg rates also apply. T&C’s mobkastr.com. Send STOP to opt out, or HELP for help. Send NEXT to begin now,” was an advertisement and ignored it. This prevented him from taking part in the text message part of the show as the show went on. What happened here? Well Terdiman thought it was an advertisement. I would have thought it was excessive. 2 bucks more to take part in the show! 60 text messages with standard msg rates also applying!” Are they nuts! I have enough trouble getting college kids to receive 1 or 2 text messages from their favorite political candidate. 2 bucks I could go for but not paying the standard messaging rates as well.
The interactions are very cool and, if you have seen the show, very Blue Man. One interesting bit information was how the Mobkastr system knew which messages to send out and when. According to Pyle several additional prompts to the entire audience to text in codewords were meant to signal specific points in the show’s progress to the Mobkastr servers, since rock concerts don’t always proceed with precise timing.
Thus, Pyle said, the codewords were meant to alert the Mobkastr servers that those specific points in the show had been reached and that it was now appropriate to proceed with a new round of messages.
All this is great… but if it is not ubiquitous enough for a reporter from CNET to get it what does it mean about its usability level.
But perhaps this fits the Blue Man Group philosophy of technology. “We both worship technology and we’re technophobes,” Quinn said. “We’re the first to love a new technology and point out that this is worthless.”
Don’t you love these bad names for the SMS marketing infrastructure.
This is not the first time Blue Man has played with the mobile medium. Also check out this.
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Technorati Tags: blue man, blue man group, how to be a mega star, sms
