Life and death and everything in between......

I had to give a talk last month to some clients of our sister agency over in Brussels. The talk was one of those "how the internet works this year" type of things, but what was interesting and challenging was that the clients weren't your usual collection of brands and marketeers. This being Brussels, most of them were lobbying organisations, their jobs being solely concerned with reputation management and the spreading of ideas. So, talking to them about brands, customers and conversion rates registers a nice big blank stare. Showing them how this one idea can start "there" and then spread "to there" however gets them sat up and asking all sorts of questions.


So, was interested to catch sight of this last week, a great film about influencers and how ideas are spread. It's been blogged about loads already but, as this blog is in truth my own collection of bookmarks, then I wanted to stick it down here and share it with my future self.




INFLUENCERS FULL VERSION from R+I creative on Vimeo.


The other thing that caused some nice oohs and ahhs was this great film about life and death on Facebook. It's a simple story, well told, and reflective of the fact that Facebook is beyond being a website and is now, for many, the very fabric of the web.







So, worth keeping up your sleeve when your potential client from the Federation of Chemical Farmers and Gamekeepers Association asks you why digital is worth more than taking an MEP out to lunch and slipping them an envelope full of promises.....

Free lunch.....

People like vouchers being sent to their mobile....people don't like marketing messages being sent to their mobile (unless there's a voucher / payoff involved).


This is good news if you're thinking of using Voucher Cloud or even Foursquare in any upcoming retail campaigns (I am). 


Brand Republic survey here


More mobile research from Lightspeed Research (who conducted the survey) here


By the way, there is now a healthy market in "vintage" mobile phones. A Motorola 8000x sold on eBay for $5000 last year. I feel so old....and poor. Relive the glory of vintage mobiles here

We sell or else.....

There's simply not enough talks these days that include the words "idiotic" and "lunacy"....


This is still relevant because the thrust of it is really very simple...we're here to sell, one way or another, and to pretend that doesn't matter is ignoring why clients bother to give us money and give us so much grief when what we come back with doesn't fulfil that primary criteria.


I like...a lot

Leave your name and number and we'll call you right back.....

One Hello World is a great idea, like Secret Tweet, but with heart. Call the number and leave a message, the chap on the other end will compose some music around it. It's even got it's own Facebook page, with some nice discourse around some of the entries.


There's some great examples of this happening through curation (We Feel Fine and Twistori spring to mind) but when it's flipped over to something more overt and prompted the results seem to acquire more of an edge and resonance to them. I wonder what message Tony Blair would leave if he knew about it? In fact, if Rory Bremner fancies phoning in a few impressions then I think we'd have something. 


It's always nice to see how the web, with the right prompting and guarantee of anonymity, can allow people to open up and talk about what's on their minds. It's the internet as global wailing wall, confessor and silent counsellor.


Do hope this becomes massively popular.
Don't hope this ends up as a sponsored branding exercise.

That's longer than you said, it isn't what you told me and it's not really free....

Three things to say about this ad and the landing page it takes you to...

1. There is no website.....it's actually to sell you ad words

2. It doesn't take 20 mins, they say they'll get back to you in 2 to 3 days

3. It's not free....there's a £30 credit but after that you pay

Click here to see that landing page in all it's glory

Google....you should know better

I'm just saying.....

Pull up to the bumper baby...

Haven't posted for ages, and I'm sure the few of you who read this won't necessarily care, but I have been rather busy sorting out a new job, going on holiday, dealing with errant children and generally getting many a priority straightened. The lesson learned, above all else, is to please yourself and don't worry about anyone else...they can't be helped but it might help them to see someone helping themselves.

So, to get back in the swing of things, I'm just

going to post up this little gem. It's called Bump and it's a social network site for car owners. Whilst their promo video is cheesy as hell, the service (and in truth it's a service built around a social network) is very neat. It relies on the drivers of the world to play nicely and show a little altruism. Your number plate is your ID and means that if someone sees there's a problem with your car they've got a quick and easy way of letting you know by tapping your registration into the site and sending you a message.

Anyway, you've got @Documentally to thank for this, via his excellent blog here

I'm only posting this because I've spent the last couple of months researching car drivers and wondered why no one had thought of this before....turns out they had (as Documentally's post will attest). I'll write up the whole car driver research thing for a future post as it was very insightful and a lot of fun.

The moral of this story is....if you've got a great idea, do it before someone else does....

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

View more presentations from Razorfish Marketing.

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