Miller Beer Pager (2000)

Social Networking Desktop Application

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Before Facebook, before the advertising trend "Social Network Marketing", there was: the" Miller Beer Pager", the Internet's first branded, social network marketing, desktop application (widget).

This was a fully functional desktop application. Not a web site. And this app was designed to do one thing very well, allow working desk-jockeys to connect with friends and schedule real-world social events - usually beers after work. And hopefully, Miller Beer.

This piece was hugely successful. The app was free and was downloaded, and distributed rampantly - despite limited seeding. In part this was because in addition to providing honest to goodness value (still the absolute future of interactive marketing), and it's built in send this app to your friends features, it did all of the above with style.

We created a virtual device that coolly, if impossibly, transformed with every new function.

It's important to note that there are two separate aesthetic conceits in this piece, one is the virtual device

itself, the 3-D modeled silver transformer. This was painstakingly animated to be as sexy and smooth as operating systems at that time would allow.

The second conceit was classic Clay Jensen, the lead creative on this project, and one of the funniest guys I know, it's the animation that you see on the virtual device's screen. It's intentionally chunky and funky, a throw-back to the old one-color LCD displays used in some of the lamer games we remembered owning as kids. The contrast of intentionally lame animation, and intentionally awesome animation, give this piece surprising depth.

There is a fact that we discovered later - something you won't find in any of the press releases - not only did this piece hit the target audience effectively, but we later discovered that several large companies distributed our Miller Beer Pager across their staff, and used the app as a meeting scheduler. No kidding. Instead of entering local hangouts in the "Places" list, they entered each office in the building.

I guess that was a good thing.