Herd mentality can sometimes be a good thing

6 Aug
2010

We have been talking about building brand engagement a lot over the past few weeks and one of the key things about social media is that it builds engagement by allowing people to form their own positive associations by allowing individuals to participate in activities, as opposed to simply being bombarded with messaging. So I’ve been looking around for other examples of activities and campaigns that require (and get better with) user participation. Crowdsourcing, User Generated Content, Collaborative Marketing: take your pick. They are all here today.

Oh, and while you’re reading, you might enjoy playing this (beware, its hideously addictive)

Enjoy

The SMS slingshot
We recently got very excited about the advances in Out of Home advertising and our illustrious creative director recently wrote quite a nice Friday mail about projections. I came across this video the other day, which combines urban/Guerrilla advertising and digital projection and takes it to another level. I love the fact that viewers get to participate in the activity and thought it would be a lovely idea for Events…

Billabong  runs competition with user generated content
I’ve just picked up a canoe from Oscar, so have been looking for some new beachwear and in doing so, came across this competition from Billabong. Users submit photos or videos of themselves surfing and complete a statement starting with the catchphrase  “I surf because…” Prizes are awarded on a weekly and monthly basis.

The idea isn’t new, but as a low cost brand raising initiative it is nicely executed. All I need is the bleach blonde hair…

Collaborative playlists
At a recent session with Staples, we talked about using sites like Spotify to allow employees to create their own music playlists for internal events. It’s a simple idea and is easy to do and music has the power to cross linguistic and cultural divides in a way that not many other things can. As is the way with these things, some bright spark has already beaten us to it and songvote is the result. SongVote’s purpose is to provide a place online where users can take their varying musical tastes and collaborate with others to create a unified playlist. They call it “collaborative playlisting.” I call it a playlist.

Prepare for Olympic victory. Eat chocolate.
I’m getting quite excited about 2012, especially with our recent performance at the European Championships. As a result, I’ve been looking around to see how licensed suppliers are starting to leverage their sponsorship. One such sponsor is Cadbury (Official Treat Provider to the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games). In an attempt to “rekindle the spirit of playing games”, Cadbury created a challenge to develop the next pocketgame. Lots of ideas were shortlisted and the esteemed judging panel have now selected a shortlist of 10 entries. Judge for yourself.

Crowdsourcing for social and political causes
As user interaction becomes mainstream, we are going to see a lot more crowdsourced-led initiatives. I came across one such initiative the other day: Avaaz, a global online advocacy community that “brings people-powered politics to global decision-making.”

Named for the word meaning “voice” in several European, Middle Eastern and Asian languages, Avaaz has actually been working since 2007 on a simple democratic mission: organize citizens everywhere to help close the gap “between the world that exists and the world most people want.” Toward that end, it uses online and offline advocacy to empower its members to take action on pressing issues of international concern, from global poverty to the crises in the Middle East to climate change. In the past three years, Avaaz has grown to include 5.5 million members from every country on Earth, becoming what it says is the largest global web movement in history.

Achievements to date include more than 20 million actions taken online and off, including messages sent, phone calls and petition signatures, with more than 70 million friends told; raising more than USD 10 million online, including millions in funding and high-tech support for human rights and democracy advocates in Burma, Zimbabwe, Tibet, Iran and Haiti; and organizing nearly 10,000 rallies, flashmobs, vigils, marches and other online events for the climate change movement. Just recently, Avaaz used a petition with more than 2 million signatures, 500,000 online actions and tens of thousands of phone calls to score a major anti-corruption initiative in Brazil.

A brand that captures your mind gains behaviour. A brand that captures your heart gains commitment.

30 Jul
2010

In the mail I sent previously, I quoted Chris Yeo, “People will forget what you did. They will forget what you said. But they will never forget how you made them feel.” A great ad or campaign goes beyond simply touting a product or service and come up with something that taps into the human psyche – quite often using music to reinforce its message. Anyone remember Levi’s using Babylon Zoo’s Spaceman to promote 501s back in 1996? Or British Airways using the Flower Duet from Delibes? Or The National Blood Service Do Something Amazing campaign?  In fact the relationship between music and advertising is well established, but that’s another mail… anyway, this week’s diatribe is dedicated to things that tap into our emotions.

Enjoy

A

Where the Hell is Matt?
This hit the internet a while ago and I thought it was one of those nice stories for a Friday afternoon. Every holiday, Matt Harding used to take a photo of himself dancing badly and upload it to a blog. People started following. He changed the medium to video.  The number of followers increased. Then he managed to persuade some sponsors that what they really wanted was to pay for him to go on a round the world trip, videoing himself dancing by famous monuments and try to get people around the world to dance with him. The results, as you can see, are endearing,  have been viewed over 60 million times and has now become a full time job for him.

http://www.digdeepmoments.com/#/Explore/athletics
There was an online discussion yesterday about great emotional moments and the conversation quickly moved to sporting examples, like Derek Redmond being helped across the line by his father in the 1992 Olympics, or Kerri Strug winning the team gold in the 1996 Olympics gymnastics vault with a broken ankle. Anyway, I was trawling around and came across this site by a clothing manufacturer, DigDeep. It pulls together great sporting moments into an interactive timeline, which I thought was a nice execution of a simple idea. Makes for engaging reading, as well…

Out of a forest
A charming short animated film that focuses on isolation. Charming. And terribly sad.

Adidas Match Tracker
I’ve talked previously about my admiration for adidas and their advertising exploits. I came across this a while ago, and thought it was worth revisiting, purely because it’s a great app that gets under the skin of what drives football fans. Whilst Dixy may mock my view that modern life is all about quality data and how you respond to what it tells you, this site uses data about football matches in the 2010 Champions league to allow fans to deconstruct games in all their glorious detail. It may not appeal to you, but to football fans who live to analyse games in all their minute detail, it’s a godsend and the sort of thing I could easily see sitting on top of live TV commentary as a future application of Augmented Reality.

The land of the free

23 Jul
2010

One of the wonders of the modern world which has been fuelled by the internet, is the amount of hugely valuable information that is freely available. It is possible to go to university or to learn a musical instrument, listen to music or watch TV, to learn languages or research cultures, to teach yourself how to use particular pieces of software or learn parenting skills, all from the comfort of your armchair. So entrenched is the model of freely available content, that Murdoch has seen online readership of the Times plummet by 90% since the Times has recently introduced a paid-for-content model. And we learnt at Boo! that Spotify’s business model is based on only 5% of their user base ever paying for content.

We are already seeing a shift in the sort of content that Recruitment Sites are offering, with added value content really helping to drive and support attraction campaigns, specifically the race to produce more and more content by the Future Talent market. I think the more intelligent recruitment models will shift to a more complex community based value-exchange model (Social Media Marketing is a step towards this) and we have already been talking about such approaches with two major Blue Chip clients. So this week’s mail is dedicated to freevertising – interesting examples of free-to-market distribution models.

Enjoy

OhMyGodWhatHappened is a book that was released last month, by a company called Innovative Thunder. The book can be purchased from Amazon, but if you want to download it for free, all you had to do was send a Tweet advertising the book. The distribution model makes sense (they are exchanging the value of their thought for the value of an individual’s network) and relies on what I often refer to in teaching courses as ‘reciprocity’ – the notion that if someone gives you something, they expect another thing back in return. It is classic human psychology. It will be interesting to see how much money they actually make, but its certainly done a lot of good for their Brand Awareness.

Swiftly following the release of OhMyGodWhatHappened was What Matters Now, a collection of thoughtpieces from recognised thinkers throughout the world, which was released by Seth Godin, a globally respected planner. The only difference here is that Seth doesn’t ask for money, only your network. For those who want to read it, it makes an interesting read.

On a slightly different tack, my sister-in-law recently attended the Social Media Measurement Camp. I had never heard of it, but looking into it, the camp is a global open-source movement to encourage knowledge sharing and industry collaboration towards answering ‘how do we measure engagement in social media?’. It has hubs in the UK, USA (Bay Area) and Ireland. Attendance costs nothing and the sessions are well attended. The content is managed and distributed via a wiki, so the entire business model is based on freevertising.

Particularly useful is the list of measurement tools. I receive about a zillion requests for these types of tools and this site has collated them into a useful, constantly updated source.

Finally, not necessarily free, but something that uses free content in an intelligent manner, Lab42 is a survey platform with the ability to dig through social networks to find your target consumers and enable them to give your company feedback. Low cost, broad in reach and highly customisable, it is a fantastic idea that makes market research much more accessible at significantly reduced costs in quick turnarounds. As with all these things, it will be interesting to see how long the business model remains viable, but I love the concept.

Seth Godin

22 Jul
2010

I’ve just finished reading What Matters Now a free book recently released by Seth Godin. OK, its less of a book and more of a selection of thoughtpieces by different people, but I like the notion of freevertising, so thought it might be worth reading. Anyway, amongst the various articles, were some nice quotes, which I have outlined below.

Great Leadership is more than influence. It is about reminding people of what it is they are trying to build – and why this matters. It is about painting a picture of a better future. It comes down to pointing the way and saying, “C’mon. We can do this!” When times are tough, vision is the first casualty. Before conditions can improve, it is the first things you must recover.” Michael Hyatt, CEO Thomas Nelson Publishers, Leading with Purpose

“The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it.” From Tom Peters, The Little BIG Things: 163 Ways to Pursue Excellence

It’s not good enough to be “pretty good” at everything. You have to be the most of something: the most elegant, the most colourful, the most responsive, the most accessible. William C Taylor, Founder of Fast Company magazine, Practically Radical

Obtaining power requires will and skill – the ambition to do the hard work necessary, and the insight required to direct your energy productively. Power comes from an ability to build your reputation, create efficient and effective networks of social relations, act and speak in ways that build influence, and from an ability to create and employ resources – things that others want and need. Jeffrey Pfeffer, professor at Stanford Business School, Power: How to Get it, Use It, and Keep it.

It’s easy to recognise a really smart new business concept as just that. What’s hard is recognising the idea you think is just plain dumb is really tomorrow’s huge breakthrough. Dave Balter, CEO BzzAgent, The Word of Mouth Manual: Volume II

People will forget what you did. They will forget what you said. But they will never forget how you made them feel. Chris Yeo

“When the best leader leads, the people say ‘We did it ourselves.’”, Lao Tzu

There is no such thing as boring knowledge. Only boring presentation Dan Roam, The Back of the Napkin

Friday mail – Projected Earnings?

19 Jul
2010

This week has seen a whole host of emailed links pinging back and forth between Creative and Digital featuring  the latest trickery in building projection and I promised to share some of them more widely. If anyone watched the opening ceremony of last year’s Winter Olympics, you’ll have seen just how far animated projection has come as a technique. Buried in amongst the Inuit acrobats and grizzly bears on stilts was a great demo of just how realistic projection now is.

And building projection has taken the advances in animation a step further. It wasn’t that long ago that BBH were getting into trouble for projecting an image of Gail Porter onto the Houses of Parliament. But as I reminded the creative team last week, technology has moved on, and as Aerosmith have discovered, you can do this sort of thing on the outside of Rochester Castle.  (Fast forward to the end – 3 minutes plus – for the jaw-dropping stuff.)

For the technically minded, the way it works is that real buildings are mapped and modelled in 3D and then animations are created from them and projected back on to the building. Clever stuff, not least because as well as being incredibly lifelike, the animations incorporate the quirks and characteristics of the buildings that are their backdrop. So now it seems almost anything is possible, from this interactive building-size pinball game to this  wonderful examples of a 3D building projection for Samsung.

Now projection is a fairly under-used technique in our industry. PwC picked up a RAD award a few years ago for projecting their campaign logo on a student union, but after that the channel seemed to stop developing. All of which suggests the time might be ripe for introducing a little BMW-type projection  magic to people comms.

And if you’re interested in the area, then you’re be able to learn more about Seeper the people who developed the BMW and other animated extravaganzas at their site.  Or, alternatively, you can listen to them in person, as they’ll be coming in to chat to the agency in late  August. More details to follow.

A happy weekend to one and all – I just hope your break isn’t as full on as mine. The evidence suggests those Latvian stag dos can be quite eventful (scroll down the page for the full Lederhosen mankini horror.)

Britain’s digital ambitions laid out. Again.

12 Jul
2010

For those who are unaware, earlier today, Martha Lane Fox released a manifesto committing to get everyone in Britain online by the end of the Olympics.

Whatever you may think of the report, or Ms Lane Fox’s motives for publishing such a garish document (her government quango was cut in the first round of Government cutbacks), it is worth you being aware of both the manifesto and the site.

Nice ad placement…

9 Jul
2010

Yahoo! places ad for Shrek 3 next to article on Wayne Rooney

Need I say more?

Gongs and Wrongs

9 Jul
2010

After Wednesday night’s celebrations (and deliberations over Agency of the Year) it seemed like a good week to focus on awards and judging angst.

In a week that saw both the CIPDs and the AGR being announced, I thought we’d take a break from our part of the world and look over the fence into consumer. Tom started the discussion last week with his links to some nice work to be recognised by D&AD, the Designers and Art Directors Association.  A D&AD pencil is the award most consumer creatives in this country aspire to, but it’s a different story outside the UK. In the US, The One Show rules the roost and opinions are divided whether the UK or the US produce and feature the best work.

Take a peek at some of the work below and see which you prefer? English Mustard or New York’s Finest?

First up is We Choose The Moon,  a site that Russ pointed out a few months’ ago. This has recently won a Gold Award at the One Show Interactive and apparently the little Lynchs have been unable to tear themselves away from this for many weeks now.

Closer to home, D&AD were awarding a Black Pencil, their highest award, to the Apple website, which has baffled many but you may see the method in their madness. (Easy on the eye and simple to navigate, but is this really the best the web has to offer?)

Meanwhile, over in New Yoick the recently awarded One Show was attracting a lot of great work, including one of my favourites – a site for HBO,  the American TV channel. If like me you’re a Robert Altman fan and like your stories told from many angles, this is a thing of beauty.

Finally, I’m going to point you in the direction of GoodBy, Silverstein and Partners and a campaign for Crest.  Goodby are a San Francisco-based agency who consistently top the Gunn Report, a ranking of the world’s most creative agencies. Their site, which interestingly focuses entirely on their clients and says very little about themselves, is packed full of well-observed, funny, engaging and brand building work – which are exactly the qualities displayed in the very lovely Crest campaign.

All of which suggests the Americans are going to edge it on humour – or does it? Oh no, the angst….

Not the Andy Hyatt Friday Email!

6 Jul
2010

As you may have noticed I am not Andy Hyatt, I am Tom the new digital designer who started last month, and Andy has asked me to guest produce this weeks Friday email. I may not know quite as much about the world of digital as Andy but I hope to bring you some interesting creative insights!

Last month saw the annual D&AD Awards take place, where the very best in design and advertising is celebrated and showcased. Their focus is commercial creativity, wherever and however it is produced, so categories are wide and numerous, awarding little yellow pencils to the best work and little black ones to the ones that are that little bit better than best. The awarded work is all featured on their website and I always take time to browse the winners, with something for everyone to appreciate, some of the stuff you will be familiar with but a surprising number of campaigns you won’t be. This stuff is obviously not directly related to recruitment marketing but it does show us what we can achieve with a little creative thinking, and can inform and inspire our work over the next year until the 2011 awards come rolling along. Here are two bits I found particularly interesting but do have a look through yourself, the work is all sectioned up so you can just browse by which medium you are interested in, and its all awesome.

The Main award winners are here

Digital Advertising/Integrated Campaigns
Title: The Best Job in the World
Agency: SapientNitro

Watch the video of the campaign here:
“the campaign that began with a classified ad and ended with an Oprah Winfrey interview”

An amazing way to use recruitment as a creative solution to a brief, the objective was to raise international awareness of the great barrier reef islands and they succeeded with their task in such spectacular style, the numbers shown at the end of the video show how powerful PR and a creative idea can be. This won the coveted black pencil and really makes you think about not always approaching a brief in the traditional sense, doing things within tried and tested frameworks, taking a moment to think about weather there could be a more innovative and interesting way to do something. Won the coveted Black Pencil for truly groundbreaking work. In case your interested the guy who won (an English bloke called Ben) is still there and you can find out all about him on the campaigns site which shows you what he’s been getting up to.

TV & Cinema Advertising
Title: Tips
Agency: wieden+kennedy
Client: CareerBuilder.com

Watch the Ad here:

Wonderfully simple and silly ad for US based recruitment site CareerBuilder.com. The ad is original and funny and will get people laughing about it at work and probably viraling it about to their friends too. The use of repetition and comedy make it memorable as well as keeping you watching to find out where its going with all the sillyness. Wieden+Kennedy as you may or may not know are one of the top ad agencies in the world and all their work is amazing, their site is worth checking out too if you are stuck for inspiration or just want to see some wonderful work.

I hope you enjoyed my email as much as I enjoyed writing and researching it, please reply if you have any comments or thoughts about any of the D&AD work, or if you have any other issues of an unrelated nature!

Good data, great ideas, intelligent interpretation

25 Jun
2010

This morning I received an early call from a friend who had seen me post an update to foursquare at 6.20am and thought I was waiting for a train. We got to talking about how it is easy to misinterpret things in these days of the 140 character status update and it got me thinking about data. Those of you who know me, know my mantra about the need for good quality data. Anyway, Matt’s retort was that data without intelligent analysis was meaningless and I have to agree. So this week’s focus is on companies and people who have generated a platform for intelligent interpretation of information to good effect.

Enjoy. Oh yes, and good luck to England for Sunday.

Google has been pretty active of late. First came the announcement that Google Voice has shifted from Beta to freely available. Then came the news that the Google Street View team are now sending photographers out to capture the inside of business premises for Google Places. With the ever increasing mix of acquisitions, this means that on pretty much a live basis, Google now has the to identify who you are (from a combination of search and facial recognition), where you are (from Google Maps, Street View, geo-tagging) and intelligently guestimate what you are doing (looking at status updates from Facebook, LinkedIn and sites like foursquare). That a hell of a lot of information for one company to hold… (and powerful for our clients if they know how to use it).

I came across this site a couple of weeks ago: Mixergy is a social networking site for Entrepreneurs. It seems to be a philanthropic counterweight to Venture Capitalism, which is an interesting notion. I have nothing against the notion of VC-funded firms, simply that the goals of a VC firm and those of entrepreneurial management tend to be very different. I’ve worked with some entrepreneurs before and they can be a tough bunch to work with – passionate (zealous even), determined and in many cases highly destructive. Most entrepreneurs will have gone bankrupt more than once in their life… and they tend to drag other people with them . However, their zeal can be incredibly infectious and I think that people like to work somewhere where the owner is truly passionate about the ideal. And as they quite poetically state, the world isn’t changed by people who have an eye on the exit.

A few years ago, I left my bag on a tube train. It was one of those dozy daydreaming moments when you walk out of the carriage, realise you’ve left your bag inside, sprint back only for the doors to glide firmly shut in your face. Anyway, I was concerned about the tube network being shut down (it was pretty soon after the July bombings and it WAS a dubious-looking rucksack) and dutifully reported my error to the tube station manager. Unconcerned, he simply accessed a section on the TFL Intranet which showed exactly where my train was and then called the driver in the relevant train to let him know what had happened. I pointed out that having such information (specifically live data of exactly where tube trains were at any point in time) readily available would be fantastic. We then had a chat about terrorism and why the management at TFL were worried about releasing such information. Anyway, I digress. Some smart Alec has now done exactly what I suggested back then – provided a live map of all tube trains running in London. OK. The interface is quite ugly but as tends to be the case with such things, the creators have provided the source code for all to see, so expect to see modifications on the horizon.

Finally, you can’t move anywhere without someone asking you about social media these days. Given the breadth of applications out there and the pace of both adoption and cast-off, it can be pretty tough keeping up with the game. Anyway, I came across this blog that is pretty useful, outlining what you need to know in easily digestible chunks.

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