A trip I made downtown today started off as a quest to update my passport. I’ve never been to the government building here before. However it’s becoming obvious I’m getting more comfortable with driving around Saskatoon. I generally know where most of the places I need to go are now and I’ve almost completely stopped looking at street signs to see where I am. So as I approached the government building based on the address I had, I noticed it was right by Market Mall. However, navigating in this area become complicated with police cars everywhere for some reason. I finally made my way into the mall parkade and headed towards the gov’t building, which also happened to be the same street with all the police. Apparently I had arrived minutes before the Olympic torch was to be run by. So a little added bonus to the trip.

After seeing the torch go by and getting my passport renewed, I headed into Market Mall. I just sold a textbook this morning for $70, so I had some cash to burn. I made about 60% back on the original price of $122. I spent some time looking for a new pair of shoes as my mine are almost completely worn out but to no avail. Since I was at the mall and had some extra cash, I decided to grab some food from the food court. I noticed something strange in the food court at New York Fries specifically. They have an ad for their Twitter page on their menu. A fast food restaurant tweeting!

I’m not sure if people think about this much, but it struck me as something completely out of the ordinary immediately. My immediate question was “Why would a fast food restaurant tweet?” I pondered for a while over my Arby’s curly fries with horsey sauce. I immediately think of advertising. I follow my friends, entertainers (musicians, writers, comedians, etc.), tool-tip sites for Mac, and the like, but I could never imagine following New York Fries or even Arby’s whose food I was enjoying at the time. I couldn’t imagine what possible value you’d get out of following some place that mainly sells french fries, except perhaps coupons or announcements for new products, if a french fry vendor has new products often even. How viable is this form of advertising? A possible validation for it could be the inevitable change in media delivery.

Let’s face it, my generation and younger – and some even older who have caught on – download a lot of media, either legally or illegally. Even videos on YouTube can be posted in conflict with their copyright agreement. Clearly more obvious are torrents. When you download a movie/video/TV show there are usually no commercials. Who ever has taken the time to make them available has taken the time to edit out the commercials. Millions of dollars go into commercials annually, even daily for a lot of events like the Super Bowl. I don’t think events like the Super Bowl have anything to worry about. People tend to watch it live and, so far, most media on the internet isn’t available as a live feed. But downloading a TV show is so convenient. It’s basically like PVR or TiVo, but no commercials to fast forward through. Eventually TV networks are going to have to address it and I am going to see TV made available completely over the Internet in my life time.

This leads me to believe that New York Fries is addressing it by starting a Twitter account. Getting in on the ground floor so to speak. Although I don’t think Twitter is a very effective form of advertising. No one is going to see it unless they seek it out specifically. But I have to say I give them credit for trying, plus it is free to start an account anyway, so no loss. NYF aren’t the only ones to do this and it isn’t only with Twitter. MySpace, Facebook, Google and even just advertising any where on the web is very popular and I think we are going to see a lot more of it in the near future and a lot less of traditional TV in the next 10 years.

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