You’ve heard of the American Standard Code for Information Interchange, otherwise known as ASCII, right?
No? Maybe you’ve seen text-based art like the following Star Wars T.I.E. fighter?
Credit: chris.com
…or so-called word portraits, like this one of Albert Einstein?
Credit: Jeff Clark at Neoformix
…or ASCII videos, like this one of Chris Pirillo?
As companies attempt new ways to differentiate themselves from their competition, I wonder if ASCII can play a greater role in online marketing.
Done right, the combination of dashes, underscores, slashes, brackets, parentheses, arrows, and other assorted keyboard characters could potentially be created at a much more affordable rate than traditional advertising, no?
Add in viral videos through YouTube, Vimeo, and other markets, and it can’t take that long to create a final product, can it?
Perhaps you need some inspiration.
The new player in the medium, courtesy of Adam Ostrow at Mashable, is Australian rock band AC/DC whose new music video is designed in Visual Basic and entirely shown inside of an Excel spreadsheet.
Check it out:
Who’s ready to step up to the ASCII bat and market their company or product online?
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Comments:
Ari Herzog is an online media strategist and Newburyport City Councilor-Elect.
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Interestingly, about three years ago I assessed the viral potential for ASCII art in Facebook. The profile Wall has always been limited to strictly text-only messages (until the Publisher interface launched with the new design, at least), so ASCII art represented an opportunity for brands to create unique viral messages. There were already a couple of ASCII art memes floating around at the time (do a google search for “you’ve been hit by the beautiful truck”), so the environment was at least reasonably conducive to a viral ASCII campaign. These days, though, there are fortunately many other channels for engaging users on Facebook, particularly through the development platform, so the potential of ASCII art has been diminished. Still absolutely love what AC/DC has done with it though.
Jamie Scheu´s last blog post..The Bubble Bursts for Facebook Applications
Since you brought up Facebook which has the stigma for attracting a large high school and college user base, I wonder how many of the above *use* Excel, let alone know what Visual Basic is even if they’d never used it.
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