Ben the Bodyguard: The Perils of Promotion That's Better Than the Product | Hacker News Reader

Ben the Bodyguard: The Perils of Promotion That's Better Than the Product

fastcompany.com

99 pointshornokplease26 comments

It's the app store equivalent of the "big box" VHS craze in the mid-late 80s. Video stores had precious shelf space and wanted to cram as many titles face forward so customers can marvel in the variety. To make themselves unique, dubious movie houses made their box art more elaborate: Larger (often twice the size of the tape it held) and more "artistic" (textures, reflective surfaces, holograms, blatantly explicit or exploitative covers, eye-popping colors etc.).

I have a theory that computer book companies do their toned-down version of that as well: Horrifically large and heavy books with large font sizes and images inserted apropos of nothing. Sometimes I look that the O'Reilly Head First or Wiley Dummies books and have trouble keeping track of the actual content with all of the little margin drawings and asides and endless admonitions festooned throughout (not to mention the little one-panel cartoons that often don't make any damn sense at all). They are either large in size or so thick that if displayed spine-first, they still take up a honking amount of shelf space.

The Ben Bodyguard site is the big box/book phase of the app store: Visibility at all costs = Sales (no matter how fleeting).

Sometimes I look that the O'Reilly Head First or Wiley Dummies books and have trouble keeping track of the actual content with all of the little margin drawings and asides and endless admonitions festooned throughout (not to mention the little one-panel cartoons that often don't make any damn sense at all).

Undergraduate textbooks, too. There's no reason why a first-year physics textbook should be a thousand pages long; the same information presented sensibly could fit in two hundred, maybe one hundred. But it sure does look impressive to the committee in charge of choosing the textbook (and they never have to carry it around or see the pricetag).

On my "to do" list is to write the 150-page freshman physics textbook. (But of course if it existed we could only charge twenty bucks for it, whereas if I threw in five hundred pages of unnecessary pictures and repetition I could quintuple my commission...)

But even if you made the book available for free, you'd have a hard time getting colleges to use it.

When I was in first year I went through my father's old university physics textbook and compared it to mine (we both studied engineering). His was a quarter of the physical area of mine, but covered essentially all the same topics. The writing of his was terse, clear and compact, whereas mine was generally verbose and meandering (though this is of course a subjective analysis). As far as I can tell in the 30 odd years between our university experiences the quality of textbooks has seriously declined.

One thing that _why mentioned a few times is that textbooks should really be more like 80 pages, max. We don't need index sections or setup directions, those just get out of date quickly... present the information at a reasonably high level, then get out.

What do you mean by `index section'?

I find an index to search for keywords at the end of the book quite useful, but that's probably not what you meant, or is it?

Not keywords, but often books will come with what's basically `man foo | lpr`. A big old reference section that'll just be bad with the next point release.

Of course, that means there needs to be an updated version of the book...

A good index needs human hands; a great index can be invaluable. At one point the indexer of Gray's Anatomy was appointed the editor!

I guess you did not get what steve was talking about.

I don't know what he's talking about either.

Tech books often come with a section in the back that basically just reprints the manual that comes with the software. It's not as bad today as it once was, but you'd often see these big huge books that were essentially 1/3 API reference. Publishers love to do this because it forces new editions to be made with new revisions of the software.

> Sometimes I look that the O'Reilly Head First or Wiley Dummies books and have trouble keeping track of the actual content

I'm not sure I'd be inclined to put both series into the same category. Admittedly I haven't looked at the recent Head First publications and I'm not their target audience but from reading some of the theory behind the style on http://headrush.typepad.com/ (of "Creating Passionate Users" fame) the original motivation was definitely to communicate effectively.

But either way, I suspect most non-technical people learn technical things in a very different way to technical people.

Even if it doesn't live up to expectations of the cartoon, I can guarantee more people will download this app than would have without that promotion. How would that be a failure? Unless they spent a ton of time making the cartoon, which they don't mention doing.

The OP mentions that they spent a lot of time on making the app and putting in the secret movie. But, yes from where I am sitting it may be a success. There was a story on HN a little while ago about how Angry Birds is projected to make $1m/mo on Android from ads alone. There is no way that it would be self sustaining. But who cares? As long as expense < revenue, you've got income and you made money. Look at the million dollar home page or the red paper clip for brilliant examples.

Unless they spent a ton of time making the cartoon

I'm thinking that promotional site cost somewhere in the five figure range to produce (perhaps less out of pocket, but if they were charging at their normal billing rates, certainly).

Edit: Crikey, I may be underestimating.

Seems too early to consider it a failure. Maybe customers will be just as vapid about their security apps as the creators?

Is this a good thing? People getting a sense of safety from an app made by people who this article mentions don't care very much about security?

Definitely not, but on the other hand I don't think it causes too much harm either.

That feels like the promotion article that tells us the story of the promotion website that failed (or not) to promote the app.

EDIT deleted stuff which was in the linked article. Leaving ..

Of course the real product might be iPhone app marketing services.

This article assumes that people don’t want aesthetics, narrative, or style. It might be over-the-top, but the app has a point of view and a valid function.

If it was to deliver, it would need to be a mobile version of trueCrypt - not something you can do through the iOS API.

seems like they are ignoring an opportunity for a pivot - their promotion created demand for their web design services, but they want to be an app maker so they don't pay attention to customers for anything other than apps.

That's a good point, but moving from selling products to selling client-based services is a regression in the eyes of many.

Maybe it would be time to turn Nerd Communications back into Nerd Films. They could use the app to promote the comic. How ironic.

tl;dr http://images.fastcompany.com/upload/benclipsmall.jpg

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