I have a theory that there are only about 14 faces in the world, and we’re all just a sub-set of them. I’ve seen a girl in Thailand who looked identical to a friend in Melbourne except she was Asian. I’ve seen black versions of chinese friends. And I think I have quite a common face as I’m constantly told that I look exactly like someone’s friend [insert name here].
So I was excited to see someone on Twitter point me to a facial profiler, which scans photos of you and finds your facial match.
Alarm bells started ringing when I came to a Coke Zero branded site that was done completely in Flash, with autoplaying audio. It’s not that it should be inherently bad but I don’t think there are many corporate flash sites that have been done well.
It’s utilising Facebook Connect, so once you start the process it connects to your Facebook account to find photos of you. It has a great little animation as it scans through your photos and feels very Mission Impossible.
It gets to the end and then…. nothing. You would think that after taking 5 minutes to scan through 20 photos, you’d then be presented with photos of people who look like you on Facebook. In fact, that is what the premise of the whole app is.
But no, you’re taking to a “Congratulations you’ve been successfully added” page and then NOTHING. There is no finished product, you just get to invite your facebook friends to join in by getting their photos scanned to get no result at all.
Really poor form, I was looking around the site for ages to see what to do next. I noticed in the terms and conditions that by participating in this social experiment you authorise Coke to use your images for whatever purposes it wants unless you delete the app. So I went straight into Facebook to delete the app and… nothing. It’s nowhere.
Back to the stupid facial profiler site and there’s no information there either. Great, thanks Coke, you now can use my images without a way for me to delete you.
On going back, at least there was a better message, saying once the database is full, they will give me my results and to invite everyone I know in the meantime.
Fat chance Coke Zero, that was a really sucky experience and as soon as I can find out how to delete you, you’re gone. A sad case of a great idea with crap execution.
This post is tagged under: customer experience, innovation, social networking
it is not about social networking.it is a way to get you to volunteer to have your face in a worldwide database accessible by corporate and government entities.
You got even farther than I did. I saw an ad for it on my iPhone, and it linked to a video that wouldn’t play on iPhone!
http://bit.ly/7Sztw
You’d think Coke would have enough marketing chops to demand better execution than this. What a bush league campaign.
Fuck Coke! They pissed me off with that shit.
Cheryl, have you become so completely saturated with popular culture trends that your common sense is now defunct? Why would you actively volunteer to upload your FACE to this machine?
Now, you can argue that by simply registering into facebook, that your face is forever cataloged into the grid due to Facebook’s terms & condition policies, so what does it matter?. They own your data, photos, likes, interests, friends.
Just by registering facebook, you have been tagged. Perhaps not by your own accord, but someone you know know has tagged your face at some point. and you are now subject to being part of the facial database.
So what? Well, instead of writing an article about how bad the “service” was, maybe you should be discussing WHY this is something that anyone should be interested in, and furthermore, WHY would someone allow this kind of thing from spreading into the populace? Absolutely NO good can come from this, other then better facial recognition software. I may even argue that, that is a horrible thing as well.
I got it to “match” my face and the guy that popped up next to mine looked INFINITELY different than the picture of myself. What a rip-off!