Detonate

CHAPTER 9Stomp Out Platitudes: Celebrating Failure Is an Excuse for Mediocrity

In 2000, Forbes, which had always been celebrated for its irreverent, flamboyant style, was getting ready to launch a concept the advertising world had never seen before. It had recently purchased and mailed nearly one million :CueCat barcode scanners to its subscribers.

What's a :CueCat you ask? Well, you have to imagine yourself back in the world of 2000 – Pets.com was still “thriving” (though not for long), your friends were flocking to the world of start‐ups looking for the big payday they had always dreamed of, and New Yorkers were getting primed for a Subway Series. And a now extinct company, Digital Convergence, had created a device that allowed magazine readers to scan a barcode on an ad to take them to a website for more information. It's the same concept as a banner ad on a standard webpage, except that the content comes from a magazine.

The name, :CueCat, came from the fact that the device was designed to look like a sleeping cat. Creating a mechanism for people who wanted to get more information on an advertisement wasn't a silly objective (in fact, most e‐zines today with advertising hyperlinking have this feature naturally embedded). But many critics were quick to highlight the main flaw in the design: To use the product, the reader needed to plug in the device to their computer and be connected to the Internet. In the world of 2000, this meant you had to assume magazine readers were ...