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Shopablogic

Sober IT truths from the island-state

by Suzanna Low, Singapore

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N82 storytelling site is a yawn

Jan 22, 2008 13:37

I caught the latest Nokia Nseries television commercials over the weekend and was captivated by it. Although I have seen several phone commercials with the same storytelling concept--Sony Ericsson and Samsung--the Nokia N82 TV commercial weaved a magical tale of princesses, unicorns and knights.

Just like how we loved our stories to be told when we were young. Therefore, I was curious enough to check out its Web site when the url, Nseries.com/storytelling, was flashed at the end of the commercial.

To my dismay, the microsite was a letdown. After viewing the commercial, I was expecting the microsite to have the same magical touch and fabulous interactivity. However, the site was just a waste of Flash application as it was as static as it can be.

After you've entered the url, you are greeted with a very plain-looking microsite. With so much space and grayness, you wonder if the designer who did this was color blind or just lacked color sense. I didn't know where to click on to go to the actual storytelling campaign site until I noticed a small thumbnail on the bottom right with an image that looked like Mother Earth shot from space, and with small text that said "Storytelling rediscovered".

After I had clicked on it, I was presented with an short introduction that looked like a few screenshots from Google Earth, stitched together with a short version of the television commercial.

Ok, I was trying to be patient as, having worked on Nokia campaigns when I was freelancing at an agency in Singapore, I knew that the Nokia microsite had no boundaries except for file size issues, so to prevent painful download time for the users. But I was again filled with disappointment in the next stage of the microsite.

The designer was obviously trying to recreated a travel map feel to the microsite, obviously by promoting the phone's GPS and map functions. Unfortunately, the design interface looked vaguely like recreated versions of Streetdirectory.com's maps.

It showcased four real-life urbanistas (good for them not to use a celebrity or an influencer) and their travel diaries. Unfortunately, the microsite did not make use of Flash's capabilities to showcase N82's fabulous applications. It should demo how to create a digital scrapbook and sharing functionality such as showing how the urbanistas uploaded their photos onto the Web.

As I clicked on all the call-to-actions I could find, hoping that one would bring me to a magical domain, there was no such luck.

The concept of the N82 microsite is pretty straightforward. I cannot say the concept is original as using the theme of real-life urbanistas to form their diaries with photos reminded me of my dotcom days when live Webcams and photo food tours were popular.

Maybe the phone is really cool, but with a microsite like this, I am certainly not enticed to buy the phone at all.

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About Suzanna Low

Suzanna Low has more than a decade of hands-on in interactive and graphics design, e-commerce and online marketing. In fact, true to the Singapore culture, she's a diehard shopaholic and fancies herself a pioneering e-retailer who learned the painful way how to set up store back when ecommerce emerged on the Internet landscape. Low also claims to speak feline language and sometimes seeks approval for her blog topics with her two house cats.