A home on the web for all my things; from old podcast episodes, to advertising, gaming, travel, books, skiing, roller coasters, and more. My professional website is over at www.playfulbrandstrategy.com
It doesn't happen very often but yesterday I came across a pretty cool MPU while browsing the Internet (So not from a link or a blog about advertising ;). It's an ad I spotted on College Humor, (While showing this video to someone; it's really good check it out) so it's probably still playing on some pages if you want to try it out - refresh to cycle through the ads served.
I haven't checked yet but I imagine most certainly this is CP+B at work here for Burker King who as far as I know about created the first augmented reality feature in an online ad. And while you could argue how useful it is; what's most interesting is that the symbol used for the AR to display is something most people [in the USA] would have in their pocket: a $1 bill.
Now whether anyone outside of complete geekiness and/or who works in advertising would wait and play with the AR and go shuffle in his pockets to find a $1 bill is also arguable, but you don't need many people to start showing others how neat this little feature is (I'm also guessing you need a good bandwidth)
Matt Nadeau of RockArt Brewery is facing the bullying of a much larger corporation. Seriously check out the video and hopefully choose to boycott Monster Energy drinks after that - there are plenty of other energy drinks to choose from aren't bullying a 7 man company making specialty great craft beers.
You can use #BoycottMonster as a hashtag, seems to be the most popular at the moment.
For a bit of background, I've been appreciating small craft beers and ales more and more recently; I'm also against corporate bullying in general and that seems to be exactly what they're victims of. To finish, if ever this works and Monster gives up, I would have been a playing part in a worthwhile experiment and I quite like the idea of that too.
Update (26/10/2009): I just received an email from the Hansen Beverage Company who manufactures Monster Energy Drink, apparently they have settled for a happy agreement with RockArt Brewery, so I'm also happy. Also glad the beverage company followed up my email and responded to it, congrats to them for that.
Hansen Beverage Company and Rock Art Brewery Reach Trademark Agreement
October 26, 2009
Hansen Beverage Company and Rock Art Brewery today issued the following statement in connection with a recent trademark issue:
Hansen Beverage Company and Rock Art Brewery have reached an amicable agreement under which both companies' respective products will be protected - Hansen's Monster Energy® line of energy drinks and Rock Art's Vermonster beer products.
> Rodney Sacks, Hansen's chief executive officer, said: "We are pleased that we were able to resolve this matter expeditiously and put the concerns that had arisen behind us so that both parties can concentrate on their day-to-day businesses, selling their respective high-quality products. Our intent in this matter was simply to protect Hansen's trademarks and prevent any likelihood of confusion arising in the future through potential product extensions and was not to prevent Rock Art Brewery from selling their Vermonster beer."
> Matt Nadeau, owner of Rock Art Brewery, said: "Once Rodney and I were able to talk to each other we quickly appreciated each other's points of view and he acted reasonably, which allowed us to rapidly come to an agreement we are both happy with and allows both of us to move forward positively."
You may have seen the Eurostar's advertising campaign called 'Little breaks make a big difference'. Beyond the posters I've seen in the tube, activities are being run across experiential, social and digital media (Created by Fallon, Vizeum and We Are Social). I was lucky enough to be invited for one of these little breaks mentioned in the tag line and went off to Paris on Saturday, along with about 43 other men and women in total for a romantic singles day out in the City of Lights.
Before we go any further, I'd like to point out I'm completely biased here given I love Paris and I love the Eurostar already and have been an advocate of both for a long time.
I lived most of my life in and around Paris, and am really Parisian more than anything - which is where my charming arrogance comes from; in case you ever wondered. It was quite funny going back for a day and with a group doing touristy stuff.
The Eurostar is simply awesome for a variety of reasons:
It's a train. Traveling by train is much more sophisticated and relaxed than the plane - unless you have your own private jet (Of course your own private train would be even better).
It goes from city centre to city centre, without going through the airport outside of town and several hours of humiliating security checks
This is an important one that tends to be taken for granted: It travels by way of a tunnel under the sea. Sure, managing to have a few tons of metal carcass crammed with people flying is a feat human beings can be proud of, but building an underwater tunnel is definitely badass [technical term].
it's fast and comfortable - now just about 2h20min from London to Paris
Great food served with champagne in first class
Did I mention it crossed a tunnel going under the sea?
I've been thinking about experiences a lot lately, it's interesting to note that advertising in the traditional sense cannot generate an experience, but that an experience can cause advertising.
At best, traditional advertising can generate an emotional response [Oh that's cute / clever / funny / etc], a thought [Sounds like a good idea], which might lead to an intention [Maybe I should try that out], and in an ideal world end in an action [buy something]. Nothing wrong with that and it does a great job for awareness and such like, but no experience there.
Now I think taking a similar scenario and adding your money where your mouth is by providing people with an experience demonstrating what the brand is claiming on the adverts can enhance all those marketing efforts.
The tagline for the Eurostar campaign is Little breaks, big difference. I saw the posters of laughing couples on a Parisian café terrace in the tube over the summer with that line and thought it seemed nice. The line would make sense to anyone, though not necessarily Eurostar specific (A little break flying to Barcelona or driving to the Cotwolds can also make a big difference). It doesn't matter that much because as far as I know in terms of positioning nobody had used the line before so they have a good chance owning that idea.
Now I think what really anchors that position is the experience.
So the cycle becomes something like: See the advert > These people look happy > Think it's a good idea > Get a real life experience consistent with that idea. Now if I share that with other people, it's not conceptual, it's real. And people relate to real experiences more than they do with lines we all know were written up to sell more stuff.
I had a brilliant day out in Paris so I talked about it. With the cab driver on the way to St Pancras in the morning who told me he was going to check out prices because he was just thinking of going on a weekend away. To the cab driver on the way back home, to five different friends yesterday, to about 10 colleagues already this morning, and now I'm writing about it in my blog. Sure, I'm not a TV channel and I don't have an audience in the millions but I provided Eurostar with personalised brand interactions of at least a couple of minutes with each of those people.
Unless you go all #6weeks over it, difficult to say what it's all worthspecifically; but I would say it's worth going through the effort of proving that your brand can deliver on the advert tagline or slogan in reality.
It was a brilliant day out and got to meet with a great bunch of people, though I have to say one disappointment was that we stayed indoors doing speed dating for almost the whole afternoon.
We had good fun but when I realised at least a couple of people had never been to Paris in their life I thought it was a missed opportunity. Speed dating is something you can do in London and we were already spending the whole day together and getting to know each other so it wasn't really needed; we could have gone walking somewhere, visit a museum, whatever something more Parisian - and speed dating is kind of the opposite of romantic. But then the tourist bus ride (courtesy of myself talking complete nonsense at the mic in front of the bus as we drove through town) and the boat ride were really cool and relaxed.
And on the romance front I hear you ask? Well there seemed to be at least one couple getting together, several dates scheduled and definitely some phone numbers exchanged so that sounds pretty successful too.
All in all probably the longest post I've written to answer yes to a question. Little breaks do make a big difference and good on Eurostar for being a brand demonstrating what they stand for rather than just telling us.
I got really excited this morning. I arrived in the office a little early and the first thing I saw in my inbox was a message from FourSquare announcing that London was open to the service!
I had been waiting for a while to be able to experience it on this side of the Pond. It first started from the few people I follow on Twitter in the US. A few random tweets announcing they were in this bar / club / pub / venue with a link back to FourSquare. It seemed pretty intriguing and of course given I try to be all over anything catching online to make sure I stay one of the cool people in the know [read as something like, so hopelessly beyond geekness that it comes out as utterly cool on the other side of the spectrum].
In short, I'd say FourSquare is part Qype / Yelp / Tipped like reviews, part social network (and/or integrated in other social networks), part location based service and all wrapped up in a gaming / playful context. Of course, give it that last note along with some booze given the whole concept is about showing off where the party's at; and I'm all over it.
In the space of 45 minutes I had a bunch of friends signing up and over a few hours over 30. I don't know how many people are already signed up for London in total but it must be quite a few as they need a certain critical mass before starting the service in a given city.
Check it out, it's fun and you get points for going out and being at places out and about in town. All for bragging rights at the moment but as the number of users grows they intend to create other value out of those points.
Maybe think of a Top Table and the way they are now operating a stranglehold over the restaurant business - get points for booking through Top Table and more points if you post reviews afterwards. After a certain number of points, you can receive gifts. Sounds like a brilliant idea altogether though Björn, my chef brother, hates them because every restaurant has to pay to be registered on the site and moreover the site regularly almost forces restaurants to provide special deals for the site's users.
Anyhoo, I'm getting off the point. It's fun, there's no advertising, it's spreading like wildfire (in my world anyway) and I'm loving it. And now you can know everything I'm doing online with Eyebrowse, so can you know everything out there offline with FourSquare.
We'll worry about business models later; que sera, sera.
eyebrowse is an add-on for firefox that lets you easily record, visualize, and share your trails through the web in real-time.
I'm always interested in data visualisation and research tools so I installed it and have been adding a lot of sites to it over the past couple of weeks or so. It's all a bit weird but kind of exciting too. I'll admit I don't actually understand everything and I'm not sure it's always correct or what it measures or not, but given there are lots of nice colours to look at and a variety of cryptic graphs to ponder upon I'm happy with it so far.
Apparently I visit more sites [recorded by Eyebrowse] on Saturday. Thursday is kind of low, but I think I had lots of meetings at work during the day for the past two Thursdays. Apparently my top three sites are Facebook, Wikiedia and Twitter. I'm not sure what the size of the boxes exactly means (time dwell or number of visits to the site?).
This one displays my top urls by time of day:
That's where it's strange because there's nothing for 10pm, 11pm, 12am, 1am. I'm pretty sure I've surfed the web at these times in the past few days. Otherwise it seems my peaks times for visiting lots of sites are 8am and 2pm.
I don't know if it keeps recording visits to the same urls when I leave the same tabs open, close my laptop and come back later... Apparently there's only four hours in the day that don't have online activity yet. It's at night so it might be all those porn sites I haven't included in Eyebrowse so far :D
This one looks pretty cool, it's my recorded online activity for the past 20 days:
Another strange one here, the note says on Sunday 27th September I spent over 16 hours on one user's Facebook profile, but I know I was out all day and not online at all. Before you go thinking I'm some kind of crazy stalker, I assure you I was out. I even have friends who can testify. I've paid them well and they have a whole cover story, including a visit of Tent London with Ume and a random lunch encounter with Darika.
I could go on, but it's pretty fascinating and I recommend joining in the fun. And it will also save time when Big Brother comes knocking, I'll just give him the url.
Prezi has been on my radar to try out properly for months, I'd seen the videos and read about it but hadn't yet done a whole presentation. As for a lot of other people, Umair, Twitter's Jack Dorsey being a couple of them, I think the concept is definitely awesome.
I finally got round to spending a little bit of time playing with the free version today and created my very first Prezi, check it out here. Mine is still pretty linear here, but I'm telling a really (very) simple story here as it's a first test.
I feel it's a bit disconcerting to not have tools to place objects in certain places and have very limited fonts, colours and styles but that might just be the free version.
I'm interested in trying out the pro version, I think there are more features and functions; and I need to practice. Although really simple, the interface doesn't come naturally for some reason - could be I'm too used to a complicated system to create presentations.
I'm pretty inspired right now and thinking not only about presentations but perhaps some other stuff it could be used for, one of the logical ones could be storytelling in some way. I'm thinking of a project in particular I just had the idea for, I need to get moving on it...
I would be great to be able to embed Prezis in Slideshare, I don't know if that's possible yet..?
I might be slow for never having noticed, or perhaps it just proves the extent to which I generally ignore the usual online display advertising, but Amazon offers users the possibility to give feedback about the ads served on the site:
I was browsing for a few books, notably Leila Johnston's Enemy of Chaos (Leila talked about the book and read a passage of it at Interesting last week and it sounds excellent and hilarious) which is where I saw this HSBC ad.
A really simple and pretty boring flash animation in a rectangle MPU, just like countless other online ads.
Too many people still don't get that:
1. Taking a poster and turning it into an animated online display simply doesn't work. When the advertising industry started making ads on TV, they started shooting video for them. I doubt anybody thought broadcasting radio ads on TV would be a good idea. Same difference.
2. Online display advertising can be great if thought through, it really depends of the objectives of the activity. It can be as seemingly simple such as this Pringles ad that won several awards, or pretty extravagant like this Burger King ad (And it rarely happens but I saw this one and played through the game while browsing on The Onion, as opposed to seeing it on Bannerblog for example). They are rare occurrences, but these two examples are brilliant, fun, quirky, entertaining and memorable - all advertising should have at least some of those qualities.
So what does this mean? I like Amazon, have shopped with Amazon for years and will continue to do so. I'm really glad they care enough about their customers to ask their opinion about the ads served on their site when I'm visiting. They probably won't be able to do that much to improve the quality of the banner ads appearing there, but being able to send my feedback about the ad really made a difference to my shopping experience.
Result: I like Amazon even more and I'm even writing a whole post here about it. All of that because of a little 'Ad feedback' link.
But wait, who was advertising again? Oh yeah, HSBC. Could have been anyone. I didn't even get if the ad was specifically promoting something, but I assumed they would like me to open an account with them.
Well, as for a lot other banner ads out there, I would say this one was money wasted. And I'm not sure I want to entrust my money to a bank that's wasting theirs...
In short, here are a few opinions I have included in there:
As I pointed out in my previous post, I don't understand why all the four contestants have concentrated on displaying a range of Panasonic products rather than the TV but then again if those were selected finalists, I guess that's what was wanted.
'A Panasonic advert by Romaine Reid' was the entry I thought was closest to a finished advert telling a nice story and showing pretty clearly what is being talked about. Though it also feels like it may lack originality at the same time, I like the idea of showing the HD qualities and relationship between the different products and they work all together.
I thought 'Electronic devices coming to lights via their on lights by Daniel Childs-Clarke' was the most interesting from a creative and visual point of view, there's something original and special about the way it looks and I like that. On the other hand, I feel it doesn't say much about the TV itself, or Panasonic and might be a strange way to show HD but there might be potential there.
These are the two finalists I selected for the next round of the competition, but I just wanted to add one more note about an idea and I what I thought was a good proposition that I liked from Steffan Harrison: Little things make the big picture happen. I feel it could be a rich creative territory to explore.
Congrats again to everyone participating and I'll be curious to see who wins over the next few days.
Such a shame, I had heard about the Antony Gormley's One & Other project a few times before it started and then once again in July, but somehow managed to pretty much avoid it over the past two months.
I got into it today watching the live stream and reading the blog and Twitter comments; and absolutely love it. It's freaking brilliant. Moving and awesome. It's late right now so I'll write some more about it within the next couple of days. In the meantime, I leave you with Clive_L who is on the Fourth Plinth right this minute, reading some Shakespeare out loud. Clive_L also plays the spoons pretty well.
Check it out! Such a shame I missed out on the draws to get on the plinth myself...
I wrote about Next Generation Talent at the end of last year, a competition organised by Panasonic where students are given a brief to create an advert for one of their products. It was set during an event as a social media panel then, and I'm participating again this year though there's no event.
The task this year was to create an advert for the G10 Viera TV and with the 'Everything Matters' strapline. Four people have been preselected as finalists with TV ads that are available to view on a dedicated Youtube channel.
I have been asked to judge those four preselected finalists and send some feedback, it would be great to have your opinions about them as well.
I'm going to embed the videos here and write my first impressions about them. For anyone reading this who doesn't know me, I'm fairly direct and straightforward so I'll be writing in a similar fashion. Doesn't mean I'll be mean but it's just so you know it's not personal if ever you're offended by anything (Which could perhaps apply to the contestants). If ever you are, apologies in advance and please tell me in the comments.
To start with, congratulations to all the students participating and well done on the finalists for getting there. I'm guessing this is all extra-curricular stuff (Or maybe not..?), so kudos for getting involved.
One general impression telling me I need to check the complete brief the students had on is that I was told in the document sent to me that the advert is for the TV, but most of the finalists created an advert for a range of Panasonic products so I feel like I'm missing something.
One more thing I'm adding. My comments could be seen as harsh but they're really just my fairly raw first impressions. Also, I realise it's pretty tough to realise a full blown video / TV ad with what likely was limited time and resources - another congrats for that.
I just watched it twice and read the snippet alongside the video. I don't get the flashing / stroboscoping blackness. It hurt my eyes. I think it might be some kind of first person blinking eye, or is it a cinema reel..? The author explains this is meant to be like an opticians examination with a phoropter. I understand the thought behind the explanation once I read it rather than when I saw the ad. From my perspective, I was lost after two seconds and ultimately this isn't an artwork and the business purpose of the ad seems lost too. I feel the flashing takes away from the stop motion animation behind which I think is unfortunate because it looks really nice otherwise.
I get the idea there's an evolution, today's equipment is better than yesterday's but what does that tell me about the product itself? Or about Panasonic? It feels like any TV could be in this spot and it would be the same thing.
Nice. Really nice animation. There's a flow and a story told visually linking all the range of HD Panasonic products (But that's also where if it is supposed to advertise the TV in particular, then I don't get it). On the other hand, it feels sort of done before and time again. It's concentrating on the products themselves, images and colours. Every competitor in the market has been saying that at some or another.
To most people, if they look the same, are about the same size and have a similar looking image quality, one TV is the same as another TV. Sure all the ads will tell us they have nice colours and images. What's different about this one?
There's definitely a very particular and artistic visual style here that I personally like, so I'd say as an interpretation that's what differentiates this ad and by association, this product. That said and again, I'm not sure that's what is intended to be conveyed here and I don't even get it's an ad for a TV at all. Or any specific product, just generally about Panasonic perhaps.
Now wondering even more if students were asked specifically to focus on the products. The idea of focusing on the four colours of the Freesat logo is interesting but the task seems like it was about HD and Panasonic rather than Freesat. Wasn't it..? Actually what I like most is the intent written of showing the TV as a bigger whole than the elements associated with it (the other satellite products, camera, etc)
I'll write another post with a more thought through opinion in a couple of days.
