Hill+Knowlton Strategies

The old joke goes, how many psychiatrists does it take to change a lightbulb? Only one, but the lightbulb has to want to change.

I’m left with a similar feeling after viewing Gap’s new viral, Watch Me Change, although the general reaction in this corner of the office is Make Me Stop.

You can’t fault the execution. It is slickly produced with some excellent work in Shockwave, including some impressive dance moves if you can make it to the end. The concept is that you recreate you own likeness by creating a virtual you, even down to your age, eye width and muscular definition. You then dress yourself and you are ready to go.

You then have the bizarre experience of watching the new virtual you perform a strip-tease to music, although fortunately you keep your underpants on to spare yourself total embarrassment. Then the advertiser is revealed as the Gap telling you that ‘Change. It feels good.’

Perhaps it was thought that the appeal to the more voyeuristic elements of the internet would make the viral more, er, viral. Certainly the concept of inviting you to select a new look for yourself from the Gap catalogue is fine, it’s just what you do with yourself that bothers me. It suggests the design agency wanting to strut their virtual stuff with their impressive dance moves. I know dance is a common theme in Gap’s stylish advertising and that this is about shaking off the old you, but I’d rather watch Madonna strut her funky stuff anyday.

This year has seen an ever increasing usage of Windows SharePoint Services as one of the knowledge management solutions we develop for our clients. On the surface, this allows the developer to create tools such as extranets with surprising levels of flexibility. For someone brought up on the art of HTML coding, the ability to create navigation items and sub-directories on the fly through a simple Content Management System is particularly liberating.

I say ‘on the surface’ because that is where the fun really starts. For example, to customise the look and feel there are a series of preset colour themes to chose from to almost instantly transform the extranet stylesheet. However, if the colours and fonts on offer do not match the client’s branding requirements, then you have the option of entering the complicated world of editing SharePoint stylesheets in FrontPage.

FrontPage offers its own complicated interface for customising the stylesheet properties of the chosen theme. For more traditional coders, there is the option of finding the correct stylesheet (out of many!) and editing the property manually. However, if you go back and use the FrontPage theme to make a change then it will overwrite any manual changes that you have made, much to your frustration. Thanks to some quirks of the product there are usually one or two changes that need to be made manually and thanks to the inevitable quirks of development work, there are always one or two final tweaks that need to be made in FrontPage, thus overwriting the work you have done.

Don’t get me wrong, SharePoint remains a valuable tool and contains many notable improvements over the previous SharePoint Team Services. No doubt the next version will address some of its little quirks that can turn an afternoon’s customisation into a very late night.