The New York Times recently reviewed Toyota’s Scion brand’s online marketing efforts: Scion Speak. What I can’t believe is the surface level evaluation by NYT.

“With an eye to the social networking ethos that made Facebook and MySpace wildly popular”.
What eye is that? The lack of social connection and a sense of place?!?!

“Harnessing, imitating and creating social networks to promote a brand.”
This is a social network?!?

What they fail to see is that the logo application is not integrated in anyway. Yes you can download it and if you wanted to put it as an IM icon you could but what are we talking about here? Well this is a car company, why can’t this logo be integrated with parts or decals for my vehicle? Why aren’t groups formed around these logos to create a sense of purpose or collectiveness? Of course these groups would need goals but even at the very base leveraging existing social networks to proliferate whatever message they’re trying to proliferate. You can’t even see how well your creation is doing amongst the vast valley of other logos: a high priority item of an ego surfer.

To me it seems like a lot of bloat that people may come to dwell on, even create a logo but there is no reason for someone to stay or return. The tool itself only allows for a limited range of creativity.

In the end, if this is the bar of a satisfied client, marketing agencies will be happy to know that they will be gainfully employed for the foreseeable future.

A new prototyping tool on the horizon from adobe:

” ‘Thermo‘ is an upcoming Adobe product that makes it easy for designers to create rich Internet application UIs. Thermo allows designers to build on familiar workflows to visually create working applications that easily flow into production and development.

Features:

• Use drawing tools to create original graphics, wireframe an application design, or manipulate artwork imported from Adobe Creative Suite tools.
• Turn artwork from Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, or Fireworks directly into functional components that use the original artwork as a “skin”.
• Define and wire up interactive behavior, such as what to do when a user clicks on something, without having to write code.
• Easily design UIs that work with dynamic data, such as a list of contacts or product information, without having access to the actual data source. Design-time sample data can be used as a realistic placeholder when laying out an application, testing interactivity, and choreographing motion.

Applications created in Thermo are Flex applications that can be loaded directly into Flex Builder, providing a great roundtrip workflow for designers collaborating with developers. The designer’s work can be incorporated directly into the production application with no loss of fidelity, and designers can continue to refine the design throughout the iterative development process.”

See a demo from Adobe MAX Chicago. I haven’t looked through it yet but thought I’d share