Jonathan's Card revealed as viral marketing campaign
coffeestrategies.com
coffeestrategies.com
I have often used work technologies/clients at play and play technologies at work.
A company he works for, in a completely unrelated capacity (application architecture != marketing) has in the past, at least, worked for or with Starbucks. Whether that's ongoing or not is between Starbucks and Mobiquity, but even if they are it's no indication of a professional or personal relationship between Starbucks and Mr. Stark.
Jonathan's a friend of mine, so I'll take him at his word on this one.
It would make no sense for them to remove the entire page when they could just remove the Starbucks logo, so it could ell just be a restructuring of the site.
I don't think it's unreasonable that they'd have responded by deleting the page, though. It's the fastest and easiest option, (perhaps the website admin isn't available) and excising the Starbucks logo alone would look awfully suspicious. Seems like exactly the thing someone would do on the spur of the moment during an "oh shit" moment when they realized a viral marketing campaign might be compromised.
In this case, you've got multiple people sharing what should be an individual account and the potential for damaging mainstream media stories if people feel like they're doing a good turn for strangers, only to have scammers empty the card. Not to mention that if Jonathan's Card is genuinely unconnected to Starbucks, his use of their trademarks would make the lawyers uncomfortable.
This may not be a full-fledged viral marketing campaign, but I'm skeptical that Starbucks would be so enthusiastic about it if the guy responsible didn't have a preexisting relationship with their marketing department.
Somebody who loves your company showing initiative and doing something interesting that creates headlines for your brand? And you're not paying the tens/hundreds of thousands that it would have cost to get some firm to think of this idea? Hell yes we'll take that.
Assuming you've jumped from correlation to causation, trying to guess at the reasoning behind it is just that, a guess.
I don't see marketing as a sin.
However, I do appreciate full disclosure and some level of honesty.
His blog post twice mentioned that it was "totally not affiliated with Starbucks.". However, if Starbucks had been paying his company for marketing, imo he would have been better off in mentioning this fact.
But if you're just having a bit of fun doing something as a hobby, it doesn't neccesarily even occur to you that people might care what your link to Starbucks is. It's quite possible that the thought process in his head was "just in case anyone knows I've done work with Starbucks in the past, I should put up disclaimers that it isn't affiliated with them so there won't be any confusion", and not thought any more about it.
I'll say this: if it's truly a corporate sponsored viral marketing campaign, it's a very good one. I'm not convinced by this random blog post though that this isn't just someone genuinely doing what he says he's doing.
http://jonathanstark.com/blog/2011/07/14/broadcasting-mobile...
Edit*: about -> client
Conspiracy theories are fun to think about, but too many things don't add up for this one. Thin evidence of it, a potentially anti-Starbucks agenda by coffeestrategies, the fact that Jonathan is a real live person with tons of professional credibility, and the fact that in order for it to be true, Jonathan would have had to pro-actively lie to all those of us who follow and trust him.
That's strikes me as exceedingly unlikely.
https://www.facebook.com/notes/jonathans-card/the-real-deal/...
Peace, j
The main question is whether he is affiliated with SBUX in any capacity, because that's a statement he made from the start and it's provably true or false.
My guess is that the truth is somewhere in between. That it was a hobby project. But that as Starbucks is a client, he figured getting some goodwill from them through it would be frosting on the cake. He didn't intend to make money directly, but obviously, if it was a success, SBUX's benefits and so does Stark's company, indirectly.
This is his website's traffic on the day of the HN mention: https://twitter.com/#!/jonathanstark/status/1005925637146624...
The card had been active for more than two weeks previous. My guess is that a project that is intended to be a mass-viral ad would not wait for someone to randomly submit it to HN.
http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/10/the-vast-starbucks-conspira...
I hope the author knows, this is a clear violation of ToS for AdSense and will likely jeopardize his account status.
Edit: Sent the author an e-mail, hopefully he fixes it before it becomes an issue.
2) Calling those `Pay it Forward` posts "fictitious" isn't merited. I would not be surprised to see an employee of any company posting a defense of the company they work for.
3) Anyone on HN who read "but unfortunately failed to anticipate that I can see the originating IP address of incoming comments" and didn't say to themselves "how does OP know they were trying to obfuscate their identity?" should be embarrassed.
It's always a good idea to read posts critically, and it's always a good idea to accept the least cynical understanding of a situation until compelling evidence is provided to the contrary.
I'll consider this submission as bait until something substantial is posted.
http://www.coffeestrategies.com/2011/08/08/starbucks-and-the...
Response from Starbucks: "We think Jonathan's
project is really interesting and are flattered
he chose Starbucks for his social experiment"
Either way, I'd rather 'assume good faith' as mentioned elsewhere in this thread. Currently I'm just curious, as I've been following the card story since before it got picked up by the more mainstream media.
This to me is the most surprising and questionable aspect of this campaign being legitimate, but since nobody else is surprised I'm guessing it's normal? It seems like a total violation of the physical security embodied by requiring the purchaser to physically possess the card. Furthermore, depending on the transaction processing model they use, it could subject them to be fraud.
I thought the image was pretty indistinguishable from the app when viewed in an image browser. Most of them don't show any borders, so if you walk on the desk with the image ready, you probably couldn't tell the difference?
It's an experiment, exactly as he says it is. I discussed it with him the very first day he started the project.
I'll choose to believe my friend on this one.
Apparently, Starbucks is a client of theirs, and Stark is a VP: Mobiquity Vice President of Application Architecture.
It makes no sense for them to remove the entire page when they could simply replace the Starbucks logo with that of another clients. Couple that with the fact that we have no idea when the page was changed and it sounds more like removing the client page was part of a decision regarding the overall content of their site and not an attempt to hide anything.
A past affiliation between Starbucks and Mobiquity has no bearing at all on the current situation if it is not ongoing, and still doesn't imply any personal affiliation with Mr. Stark.
See? Un-founded accusations can work both ways.
Out of curiosity, is Jonathan on HN too? It would be interesting to hear out of the horse's mouth here. I see a user with an ID of "jonathanstark":
http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jonathanstark
P.S. Not all Starbucks cafes accept this card/image. I tried it this morning and was told they don't accept this method of "payment."
pg- Feel free to edit the title if you want.
put the pitchforks down please.
It's win-win-win.
I think this was the former, honestly. Maybe I'm just not jaded enough yet.
Also, I think it's worth pointing out that the people at Metafilter were on it from the start. I don't know if that says anything about liberal arts and social science types being more cynical and skeptical or if the science and technical crowd types here are just easily entranced by the technical implementation of something and don't see the forest for the trees. It's probably both.
Browsing the comments, it's clear that a lot of people are jumping to conclusions without reading the full blog post (as is the wont of many on the web), which suggests /some/ link between Starbucks and this campaign-- but is circumstantial at best. It's anything but the smoking gun that the title would have you believe.
What really happened is another story (I'm inclined to "assume good faith" in this instance), but I'm tired of seeing disingenuous titles of articles around the web that are used to blatantly misinform.
Even if the guy does work Starbucks (directly or indirectly) it's a clever idea, I enjoyed looking at it (and wish I could have taken part) and this won't change if it was some "viral marketing".
On the other hand, this man appears to be a marketer, so I assume that he has plenty of opportunities to try out his marketing ideas at work, and doesn't do them as a side project. I think the biggest question I have isn't "did he do this on his own time, or during his 9-to-5?", but "were 'real' people putting money on the card, or did the Starbucks marketing department just refill it when necessary?" As long as it was real people putting the money in and taking the money out, it's still an interesting social experiment, even if it was crafted as a marketing campaign.
It makes sense though if Starbucks is running it though since it never stays empty for long and never gets too much of a positive balance. They feed it just enough to keep people interested but make it empty enough that people still have to pay half of the time because its empty.
(amending this: after reading up a bit I don't agree with my own original post. It's a very odd thing to do -- I don't ever see anyone on HN post like that -- but he's not a fictional person or anything like that.)
I just wish they didn't pretend that they had nothing to do with it.
Furthermore, you hopefully gained something from those few hours of work, whether it's knowledge, satisfaction, or just a little more experience.
We all love building cool and interesting shit, and it's more fun when people open up APIs and datasets and services for us to tap into. I did learn something in my few hours of hacking, so I thank Jonathan for the inspiration. I don't feel foolish in the slightest - only empowered to unleash one or two of my own experiments into the public.
Did anyone else experience this?
My guess would be that it's just not updated in real time and they just happened to go at the wrong time. If we're giving the benefit of the doubt...
My proof! http://twitpic.com/62shre
Then someone contacted me via Twitter to say that they used my credits: https://twitter.com/#!/PinoyxJay/status/100455783979954176
Believe what you want.
When I worked at Blizzard, I'd occasionally post pro-Blizzard comments on random blogs; sometimes I'd do it while at work on break. So what? They were still my own honest opinions and not some campaign by Activision to defend Blizzard's honor or something.
Response from HN could be: "...we are flattered that he chose HN for his social experiment"Meh, either way. I don't do SBUX. I can make my own caffeination much cheaper.
Now that I know this is Starbucks-funded, I suddenly feel the urge to buy Frappucinos using the card and make a giant pyramid.
Do you?