Inadvisable Adverts: "Very Positive" Studios
Inadvisable Adverts is where I wax poetic on an ad that I find to be distasteful, or ineffective.
Previous Entry: Shaq Keeps You Steady
“Very Positive” Studios reminds me of the Viceroy butterfly, famed for mimicking the poisonous Monarch butterfly to fool predators. Mimesis, the act of one species imitating another, was a childhood interest of mine. It comes in many forms: when edible species imitate poisonous ones, like the Viceroy and its Monarch, it is Batesian mimicry; when two poisonous species imitate each other like the many species of poison dart frog, it is Mullerian.
So does advertising have different breeds of forgery, and what “Very Positive” Studios did, like most effective scams, was but draw inspiration from a rich and varied genus of antecedent marketing mimesis.
For those unaware of the “Very Positive” Studios controversy, let me take a moment to explain.
Steam is a popular online video game retailer. Like Amazon, Steam includes user reviews. Steam aggregates these reviews and, based on the percentage of them which are positive, summarizes the user reviews as “Negative,” “Mixed,” “Positive,” “Mostly Positive,” “Overwhelmingly Positive,” etc. These rankings are serious business, and an “Overwhelmingly Positive” review is often featured in the marketing materials for games, much like “Certified Fresh” from RottenTomatoes is used for movie marketing. Gamers trust these scores when purchasing games.
One of these rankings is “Very Positive.” And one crafty developer realized that by changing their name to “Very Positive” on Steam, the splash page for their game would look like this:
How deceptive! If you don’t look twice, you might believe that Emoji Evolution has a coveted “Very Positive” ranking rather than a poisonous “Mixed” rating. Mimesis at its finest! The Viceroy Butterfly would be proud!
This got the developer banned from the Steam store.
Mimesis is all about parasitizing credibility. In nature, the Monarch Butterfly’s bright orange color lets predators know that its diet of milkweed makes it biohazardous. The color proclaims that it’s not bluffing: that’s the function of aposematism, or warning coloration, to tell predators that you’re so unafraid of their teeth and claws because you know they’ll regret eating you, that your threat is credible. The Viceroy Butterfly wants this swagger, this moxie. Through its coloration, it bluffs, it lies on its resume, or at least steals the Monarch’s letterhead when coming in contact with its next predator.
Credibility, too, underpins advertising knock-offs. A piece of sponsored content, displayed in-line with actual articles in the Gray Lady or The Atlantic, written by an actual journalist on occasion, provides the credibility of the fourth estate (the press) to the second estate (nobility).
Knock-off Yeezys and Rolexes hope to steal the credibility of those brands, though their mimicry is more like rye and wheat. Weeds, which rye used to be, are famous for mimicking a plant that humans cultivate—this ensures they will be sewn in fertile fields, to the farmer’s chagrin and the weed’s delight—and then accidentally finding themselves cultivated and domesticated themselves, selected to have better taste. We call this Vivaldian mimicry, when a plant domesticates itself. A knock-off Rolex may not have the same quality as a real one, but for the person who buys it, like rye whiskey as opposed to wheat’s beer, it does the job of projecting wealth.
My favorite example, though, of stolen credibility is the mockbuster. A mockbuster is a shoestring-budget film whose title and branding are meant to trick a potential buyer into buying it instead of the real deal. Ratatouille has Ratatoing, Transformers has Transmorphers, Snakes on a Plane and… Snakes on a Train. They’re abysmal to watch, but the actual filmed movie matters little, and is but a pretense to create a DVD case that might accidentally make its way to the checkout counter by bamboozling a buyer.
With “Very Positive” Studios, I’d like to trace its ancestry as much as I would like to discuss the novel modifications it has made in the lineage of advertising mimesis. To me, the mockbuster seems the most common ancestor, though I think it has stolen a little bit from the sponsored content species.
What is novel about “Very Positive” Studios is that this is the first mimic that I’m aware of to weaponize the user interface of a web store, namely, the limited color palette of the Steam store and its algorithmically selected review aggregations.
Modern UX (the practice of making user interfaces) likes simplicity and the Steam store is no exception. As shown in the image above, everything in Steam is a shade of blue or gray.
This presented two advantages to “Very Positive” Studios.
Different review rankings are displayed with different colored fonts: “Mostly Negative” is a deep crimson, “Mixed” (shown above) a light yellow, and “Positive” some shade of blue.
“Very Positive” happens to display in a shade of blue quite similar to the one reserved for the developers and publishers. If you follow the links in this paragraph, you will be able to compare the colors yourself. Most eyes, I warrant, could not distinguish these colors. Because Steam opted for such a limited color palette in order to remain easy on the eyes and to consolidate its blue brand identity, “Very Positive” Studios knew that its name would look just like the algorithmic review aggregates. At first glance, they wagered, it would be indistinguishable.
The second fact that allowed “Very Positive” Studios to hijack the user interface to its advantage is that the labels Steam uses to identify each data element in its display are a very light gray. It’s meant to blend in: most gamers know that “Rockstar” is a gaming studio and “Overwhelmingly Positive” is a summary of reviews, so the UX designers decided not to steal attention by presenting the labels in a more readable color. Modern UX design likes minimizing information that users can easily infer. This assumed inference, that there is no algorithmic ranking called “Sonic Team” and there is no studio called “Very Positive”, was safe for some time. But, as those who work with data know, any constraint not made explicit on a piece of data will be at some point violated. No data will keep its assumed shape forever. The solution here seems to be for Steam to have made their assumed constraint—that studios will never be named “Very Positive”—into an explicit one by banning “Very Positive” Studios, and likely creating restrictions on the actual data entry form where studios make their Steam accounts.
The reason I see sponsored content as an ancestor, or inspiration, is that “Very Positive” Studios’s gambit is the attempt of an advertisement to mimic a non-advertisement. Sponsored content looks like journalism. Here, “Very Positive” Studios has found a way to make their name look like review aggregation. This is novel in itself: review aggregation is an algorithmic process of tabulation. We trust it for the opposite reason that we trust a journalist: we see a journalist as a knowledgeable and human writer who can get into the nuance and detail of a situation. We see an algorithm, for better or worse, as cold and objective, credible due to mathematical truth. “Very Positive” Studios has made themselves look like an algorithm’s output, a truly novel form of Internet camouflage.
But their weaponization of the user experience of a store reminds me most of the mockbuster, and so I see that as its true parent. While this is the first time I have seen the UX of a web store hi-jacked, the original mockbuster expertly weaponized brick-and-mortar store design.
For those who don’t recall, Blockbuster, the video rental company, used to store all DVDs in the same bland DVD case, like below. This made it easier for mockbusters to fool consumers. Without Optimus Prime on the cover of the Transformers DVD case, Transmorphers could more easily fool a distracted shopper. Additionally, since stores sorted their DVD selection in alphabetical order, mockbusters always picked titles that would place them in the same block as that which they mocked, sorted as closely as possible to the real thing so that consumers would have no choice but to walk toward its trap.
Both “Very Positive” Studios and mockbusters, I think, have the same core assumption: that buyers purchase things on autopilot and do not thoroughly inspect their purchases. They don’t think that the studio is pretending to be a review aggregation, that some movies solely exist to trick them out of renting Transformers. They assume that nothing in the store could hurt them, that shopping couldn’t be turned against them.
Of course, this is predatory and I’m glad they’re banned and yadda yadda yadda. But I do respect its painterly hustle. As someone who designs dashboards for healthcare professionals for a living, I think a lot about user design decisions. Never before had I realized how easy it might be to weaponize fonts, names, and colors. My data background also keys me into the fact that Steam made this problem for themselves: by not creating explicit constraints on the developer and publisher field, they were, in some ways, asking for its abuse. There’s something quite artistic here, and in the same way I respect a well forged Rembrandt for the care and detail put into its production, I can’t help but feel somewhat positively about “Very Positive” Studios.