The Razorfish Digital Brand Experience Report 2009 Key Findings

This sums up succintly what many of us have been saying to our clients for ages. More to the point, they've backed it with their own research and then made it available to all of us gratis. Big round of applause for Razorfish. To be fair, there's many similar presentations out there, but this one is to the point, based purely on facts and presents the odd challenge here and there (think consumers don't want brands encroaching in their social life? think again).

It's timely. I've just come back from a client meeting where they've said that digital is going to be big for them next year. It's taken them a long time, and a few terse discussions, but it's happening. I'm sure it will take them a while to grasp the implications and understand that this isnt just a change in marketing, but a change in the way they need to organise their business and invite participation from consumers.

We will see...

FEED: The Razorfish Digital Brand Experience Report 2009 Key Findings

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These are the droids you're looking for....

Chris Heg is in this, so it must be cool. One of those "why hasn't this been done before" lovely pieces of brilliance, that warms the cockles of your heart and sends you off to the pub feeling all friday forced up....

Ladies, gentlemen and droids Star Wars: Uncut!

Star Wars: Uncut Trailer from Casey Pugh on Vimeo.

The vinyl countdown....

Quick post, following a brilliant blog post from Shake & Vac and a great blog post on the NME site, referencing respectively the death of the music business and the growth in vinyl sales.

The bit that really jumped out for me was this beautiful quote from Roger Daltrey, fish farmer, TV presenter and....oh, he's the lead singer in The Who - still the greatest Rock and Roll band in the world.
“With a CD, you start with a nice plastic box and end with a scratched plastic box. It has no character whatsoever. But with vinyl, we threw away an art form that was so much more than the record… Sometimes the covers were more important than the music. The more fingerprints you got on it, the more it was a part of you.”

He got to the heart of the matter succintly and poignantly - in a proportionately declining market, abandoning or trying to reinvent your product isn't always the sensible thing, it's going back to the heart of what made your product so special in the first place and celebrating it's innate values.

Vinyl sales are steadily growing, with a wealth of beautifully produced releases (think Radiohead In Rainbows and most recently the gorgeous and comprehensive Warp 20 retrospective) for which people are more than willing to shell out substantial amounts for.

That's a success story in my terms.

Please sponsor me....

Yes, I love digital stuff, but some things in life are better off analogue.

As you may or may not know I'm up in Manchester these days and, in a bid to become a good citizen, I'm joining my fellow Code Computerlovers (my wonderful employer) and taking part in Byte Night Manchester on 10/2/2009 to raise money for Action for Children. I'd really appreciate your support and, if you have a look at what Action for Children do to support and speak out for the most vulnerable children and young people in the UK, you'll see it's an important and very deserving cause.

It's easy to donate online with a credit or debit card - just go to my JustGiving page:

http://www.justgiving.com/Alex-Comyn

JustGiving sends your donation straight to Action for Children and automatically reclaims Gift Aid if you're a UK taxpayer, so your donation is worth even more. I hope you'll join me in supporting Action for Children.

Thanks for your time.

Alex

Come fly with me...

Netjets, the private chartered airline service for the busy exec in all of us, have a campaign running on FT.com extolling their investment in pilot training, no matter the cost. The ad bumps you through to a microsite called "A Culture of Safety" that offers a few pages of content detailing their investment in safety. It's good to see high value elite brands bothering to advertise themselves, and finding a point of differentiation in a sector not always at the mercy of price wars. It's equally good to see them hone in on the real value of any airline - we get you to your destination without death or delay with people who really do know what they're doing. So, why the post? Well, to be honest I couldnt see why this was done as an online campaign.

The execution is pretty old school, and could have been carried out much more effectively as a high quality DM piece (think something akin to the wonderful Mercedes Benz luxury mailer from 2007). We're talking about 4 pages of nice imagery and a bit of copy, with a call to action to request a call back from one of their client services team.

Essentially, it's brochureware for a brand that I'd have thought would have a better grasp on it's marketing channels. Like I say, as a piece of DM, done to a high standard and sent to CEO's (or their assistants) it would have been perfectly acceptable. Now, if it was a matter of budget, and for their media agency digital offered the best spend in terms of reach, then I would have hoped for something...well...a bit more digital. Others are using digital admirably, not least in the area of health and safety (see this great post form The AirSafe.com news discussing the adoption of social media on this very issue).

Bear in mind that the airline is part owned by the reknowned Warren Buffet, and has Bill Gates (you know, keeps trying to invent the internet we don't know we want yet) as one of it's shareholders. It's got the right messages, but hasn't really exploited the medium in the storytelling, interactive manner I might have hoped for:

• Eight safety staff (their competition have none) - What do they do? How do they do it? How do I see it when I purchase my jet from them or charter a plane? Can I book a visit to their HQ?
  

• They select only one out of every 14 qualified pilots who want to work for them. Can I meet them? Can you tell me anything about them? Names? Some nice footage on YouTube? (again, Mercedes did some nice work for their AMG campaign a couple of years back celebrating the engineering team who make some of the finest cars in the world).

• Their pilots train longer and harder on flight simulators and have around (50% longer than most commercial pilots) and average 5000 hours flight time (3500 hours more than EU regulations). Wow! That's commitment for you. Tell me more! Show me the money!

Digital is a brilliant and interactive way to tell stories and to help your customer understand and demonstrate why you're better than your competition in an immediate, tangible and interactive way. High value elite brands, as much as anyone, should be embracing this to an audience increasingly connected to the internet 24/7. There's a ton of stories waiting to happen in this piece of work, I'd quite like to see them teased out a bit more is all.

One, two, free....

First audiobook on Spotify and guess what? It's free!

How to....part 2

Saw this in the book shop the other day. A Haynes manual for building a website! They've got one for building your own computer as well. I always thought they were just about Morris Travellers and changing the headlights on your mate's Ford Capri. Oh my! They've even got one for a lunar lander! Where can I buy one of those?

It's the banner that keeps on giving....without having to take you anywhere

Brilliant, a banner that let's you keep on clicking without taking you anywhere but proving immensly enjoyable all the same. I'd love to see that stats on this. Hat's off to Pringles for doing it. Lovely stuff!

Janet & John me

Common Craft offer simple, easy to understand 3 minute video explanations of common internet things (How Twitter works, What is a blog, How do you elect a US president?) Very simple, and deceptively smart.

True story - my old Technical Director once had to explain to one of our Account Directors "where the internet lived". This would have been a lot simpler, and avoided the obligatory post explanation self harming....

Smile for the camera....

I'm going to stick my neck out and say that Augmented Reality is up there with smellovision and holographic television as a gimmick led techonology with no lasting appeal and little useful contribution to the user experience.

I say this because I've been doing some research of late into how to bring a holiday resort experience online and came across the new Nissan "Good Decision" website via The FWA. Great and thoroughly well trodden idea in principle - answer some questions and the site comes back with a recommendation for the perfect Nissan vehicle for you. Then it gets tricky. You print out a sheet of paper, hold it up to your webcam and get a 3D scene rendered onto your screen that you can interact by moving the sheet around. Except it doesnt seem to work. Whenever I held the printout up to the camera, the scene would keep trying to re-render itself, and whenever I turned it to get a different angle it would disappear and then try to re-render itself. A phone call from my nearest dealer would have been more effective, no? ("hello sir, that pink Micra is ready and waiting for your test drive").

I thought that maybe it was something to do with "me" so tried out a similar use of the technology via the funky website for the new Star Trek movie. Again, in principal a nice idea, but i had to print out the screen, then install a plug in, reboot my browser then find the url again, then get the install to initialise and load in more content etc etc.....

By the time I got it working, I couldnt really tell what it was doing other than showing me a 3D model of the Enterprise that I could wiggle around via my webcam. It asked me to press some buttons but when I did that the model disappeared, I'd have to wiggle it in front of the webcam (this all sounds a bit saucy) and the whole process started again.

Has anyone seen this technology used in a good way, with a simple and easy to use interface and user experience?

Don't tell anyone....

Secret Tweet is an online confessional, allowing you to tweet those tweets that under your own name would lose you your job or alienate you from your friends. It's a simple idea, beautifully executed, and full of disturbing and frank submissions from the dispossessed, the forgotten and the frustrated. Interesting if unsettling reading for those voyeurs amongst you...somewhere to let off some steam or spill your innermost thoughts if you're not...

Going Dutch

This is nice, in a kind of old school web kind of way (!)

KLM are playing on that old riff, travel starts as soon as you leave your home, with an online campaign and microsite that brings to life the experience of travelling with their airline. The banners are very subtle - no shouty shouty, just some nice imagery and lovely copy. The campaign site breaks down every step of your journey with them, from check in to destination. It's old school in that it's not trying to do anything particularly innovative from a marketing point of view, but it gets the most important thing in marketing spot on - a good story well told



The banners are all over Linked In at the moment (nice bit of media planning there - I wander how well they've done?)

The campaign site, Journeys of Inspiration, can be found here.

Brain game...

I'm sure someone else has said something about this already but, as this blog is primarly for me to remember things, I had to make a quick note of this campaign from Sage accounting. Yes, Sage Accounting and a creative campaign - who would've thought it! Don't watch much telly these days, but by all accounts they're something to do with The Krypton Factor these days. To celebrate, they've created an online brain training arena called Train Your Business Brain, which pits you against other intelligentsia from around the UK. Two things I really liked about it 1 - It uses Linked In as it's primary source of traffic - nice bit of relevant social advertising within the right environment 2 - It pits you against a small team of opponents and immediately brings a tangible human touch to the proceedings.

So, whilst I my General Knowledge prowess may be up there against Gordon, a research student from the Midlands, I havent a hope in hell of bettering the mathematical genius of Carol, a marketing executive from the South West.

The kids are alright

Great program from the BBC about the influence of the internet on "digital natives" - people who have grown up with the internet and are using the internet as their first port of call for information and entertainment over and above more traditional means. Lots of discussion ensues as to whether searching and the skimming of information is to the detriment of deeper study and retention of information through more traditional means. You know, reading...in a library...and searching by getting up out of your chair and having a proper dig around.

Program is here

Article is here

The local library (if you're interested) is here

Can I have a word....?

I came across a weird contrast over the Xmas break whilst shopping for presents. Not sure if WH Smiths are alone in this, but they've created a section of their book department purely for those seeking comfort in other people's misery.

"TRAGIC LIFE STORIES" is a cornucopia of tales from scarred individuals dealing with long held issues generated through a childhood in social care and an adulthood in shame. It's a living I guess, and in some instances I would imagine it can prove quite liberating in a cathartic kind of way...but I'm not sure lumping them all in under this one catch all category does them justice. If anything, it just makes me feel that someone is trying to make a buck out of unhappiness, and it kind of leaves a bad taste in the mouth.

I'm hoping that some of the larger stores also have a "HAPPY LIFE STORIES" to provide the Ying to the "TRAGIC..." shelf's yang. Somehow I can't see it. I'm thinking of opening my own bookshop with no categories and no real order to anything. First come first served - you'll get what you're given and the synopsis simply states "may contain words and phrases. Page numbers are a guide and not a guarantee of logic or story progression".



Contrast that with this scribble found on the back of a bus seat on my way into town over the same festive season. Have no idea who wrote it, or why, but the simplicity of "I'm scared more than I will ever let on" opened up a torrent of speculation in my otherwise Christmas drenched head. I'm sure that somewhere in it's origin was a tale that may or may not end up on the shelves of WH Smith in said category of despair, but in truth I can only guess as to how it got there or under what circumstances this ended up being the only option for the scribe.

For all I know, it was some poor sod who'd forgotten that their holiday homework had been left in their locker at school and there was no way they'd be able to get it done and handed in on the first day back after the holiday. On the other hand....well, I'll never really know now will I?