Tag Archives: advertising

Retro Tech: Beagle Bros

Back when I was trying to figure out this whole technology stuff, The Great Migration happened. For me, that was the migration from a mainframe you had to drive (or, in my case, take the bus) to see and use to a computer you could just go to your room to use. And my first computer (before the TI, before the CoCo, before the C64, before all the rest) was an Apple ][.

Now this is not the time to rhapsodize nostalgic for the Apple ][ per se. But the environment around that computer encouraged hobbyists, students — and it encouraged fun. And one of the leading fun-makers was a software company called Beagle Bros.

They were weird. They were fun. They were whimsical. They’d put code snippets or bits of hexadecimal in their ads that would reveal funny lines, or a previously unknown feature in the computer’s code. Their whole purpose seemed like it was to enable hobbyists to dig ever deeper into the machine and get ever more out.

Take, for instance, their Apple Mechanic software. With it, I could create my own shape tables to use in my little hobby games. I could make ‘em look like they were professionally done. And this was in 1982!

Who else (before Clarus the dogcow) could teach you how to make your computer moo? (CALL 985, by the way.) Who else released so much professional software that was unprotected with code listings available, so you could see how it was done and try it yourself? Who else ran their own comic strip in their catalogs?

And perhaps most tellingly, who else had a software company (now gone) that inspired its own online museum? There aren’t many. And few had as much an impact on an entire generation of today’s programmers.

Perhaps it’s nostalgia, but Beagle Bros was ahead of its time in creating and putting forth a culture that engaged its customers (contests, for instance), respected them (no copy-protection, just a request not to pirate), and supported them (the PEEKs & POKEs poster alone was huge support). Many a company today could take a page from their playbook.

Advertising Saturation

I was at a restaurant the other night, and needed to use the restroom. As I was doing so, I could not help but notice that there was an ad in the restroom (for neither the restaurant nor its restroom services). That was a little offputting by itself, but moreso was it’s location: the bottom of the urinal.

Upon further checking (advertising research, not checking bathrooms), it appears this is quite the growth location for advertising — some entrepreneur has even come up with “interactive” urinal advertising. My, oh my.

It got me thinking (no pun intended) about advertising saturation. There has, for many years, been an evolving science of determining when one’s ads have reached as many people as they’re going to. This is the point, it’s theorized, that you can stop spending money on that campaign — to do more reaps diminishing returns.

But what about the saturation to the viewer? It is increasingly difficult to go through a day (let alone a few hours) without seeing ads. Surely this overload of messaging dilutes its effectiveness.

This comes up with our clients regularly. When working on commercial sites that wish to advertise their own wares, or publishing platforms that feature the advertising of sponsors, there are always conversations about placement, frequency, and the balance of content vs. ads. The initial tendency is often to create as many ad placement opportunities as possible — to really “get the message out.”

In our usability and interface testing, though, we find that there is a balance point, after which additional branding and marketing messages simply aren’t seen, and by that time, the effectiveness of the ones that are seen is also diminished. While we haven’t studied the results of our testing over the years, my guess is that the balance point has shifted over the years, as viewers get both more sophisticated and more tired of seeing wall-to-wall selling.

It’s a reinforcement for doing user testing, to be sure. But it’s also an incentive to look at more integrative ways to communicate advertising — and more restrained ways of papering it across the Internet!