Pepsi Joy It Forward

Pepsi’s digital strategy in Canada is centered on www.joyitforward.ca, a web site that encourages people to participate and spread the positive culture and energy of the brand online.

On the site, visitors can explore “Joy Meters” which aggregate content to measure what people are doing online to spread the feeling of joy. Joy Meters include Mentions of Joy on Twitter, Results for Joy on Google, Joyous Word of the Day, and Bundles of Joy Born today.

Joygles, Joy-filled games, include Bubble Blaster, Make an Old Man Smile, Staring Contest, Dance Party Dino, and the most recently added game 3 Card Pepsi.

The Pepsi Facebook Fan Page, with over 91,000 fans in the first three weeks, provides a discussion forum on all things Pepsi and another place to play the Joygles. Pepsi Canada’s Twitter feed (@PepsiCanada) provides a steady stream of conversation around the feeling of joy.

Equally impressive, is that in the usually quiet world of corporate fan page Walls, Pepsi fans have been tremendously engaged with the brand with over 9000 interactions to date on the Facebook fan page.

Credits

The Joy It Forward campaign was developed at BBDO and Proximity Canada by creative director John Gagne, associate creative director Dave Stevenson, copywriter Jeff Middleton, art director Theo Gibson, project manager Karan Deepak, Flash developer Jeff Vermeersch, technical developers Addictive Mobility, account managers Tim Welsh, Stephanie Wall and Paul Lin, engagement planner Dino Demopoulos.

Vodafone:::Who Killed Summer 2009

Vodafone are bringing together 6 music lovers from around Europe to embark on an extreme summer of festivals, gigs and parties. Following them will be a TV crew, capturing every moment on their incredible journey.

But at the end of the summer, one of our six will be dead and one will be a killer...

Who Killed Summer? is a groundbreaking multi-platform drama set against the backdrop of an online reality show.

Vodafone wanted to put across the idea that a mobile phone is more than just a functional device, that it contains a world of intimate details about the owner’s life. Its solution was to commission the world’s first truly-interactive soap opera.

Who Killed Summer 09 follows six beautiful young things through a summer of love – and death – around Europe’s top music festivals. Professionally written, the series is formed of 20 short (3 to 4 minute) episodes screened over a two month period. Six additional pieces of footage – or B-rolls – accompany each episode and provide a backdrop to the group’s adventures.

The B-rolls sometimes feature members of the group or can be footage of one of the real-life music acts at the festivals. The advantage of the latter is that those short music videos are then seeded onto Vodafone’s own music site, as well as websites such as You Tube, and provide an alternative route into the drama for viewers.

Fans of the series are able to watch episodes and B-rolls online and on their mobiles as well as read blogs written by each of the six characters and the production team. A Vodafone application gives users constant updates, telling them when an event has taken place or new footage has been added online.

• Tweet WKS09
• Facebook WKS09
• Flickr WKS09
• Youtub WKS09
• Website

BRAND:Vodafone

BRAND OWNER:Vodafone

CATEGORY:Telecoms/ Mobile

REGION:UK

DATE:Aug 2009 - Sep 2009

AGENCY: Mworks,Bigballs Films

MEDIA CHANNEL

Mark Malkoff ( AirTran +Ikea) brand engagement cases

Ikea

http://www.marklivesinikea.com/

live on an AirTran plan

Now that AirTran Airways has become the first major airline to outfit its entire fleet with WiFi, the airline and its longtime agency of record Cramer-Krasselt/Chicago are offering passengers a few do's and don't's. For example: Tip #134: The lavatory is not your personal conference room.
Internetiquette – A Guide to Keeping Everyone In-Line, While They’re Online – is a part of the humorous new marketing campaign focused on in-flight WiFi etiquette. And, who better to give the etiquette tutorial than the foremost authority on all things air travel: Peter Graves. Featured in three webisodes, Graves discusses the rules of surfing in the sky such as not auctioning fellow passengers' belongings and making sure photos in your online gallery are SFF (Suitable for Flights).

PAYPAL::: EVERYWHERE

PayPal is opening its Platform to Third Party Developers. How will you change the way we pay? Submit your ideas via Twitter with hashtag #changehowwepay and view responses at www.changehowwepay.com.

Engaging Today's Fickle Customers: How to Become 'Their Brand'

Published on April 14, 2009

Marketers today understand that consumers think, feel, and react in ways different from June Cleaver some 50 years ago. We use descriptors like fickle, indecisive, and disloyal to describe the modern consumer.

Just what do these terms mean? Mainly, they mean that consumers have too many choices—multiple brands, brand extensions, and sub-brands—and too much stimulation, especially online, making it nearly impossible to predict their next move.

And yet, marketers continue to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on segmentation analysis and other research, hoping to understand and predict the behavior of these fickle consumers.

Rather than predicting a consumer's next move—which is not only imprecise but also impractical—marketers should focus on forming meaningful brand relationships by listening to and actively engaging consumers as they negotiate the major changes in society and their lives.
Identity Crisis
That no two consumers are exactly alike is a given in marketing. And now, marketers are starting to realize that individual consumers bring with them a whole new set of complexities:

Each person has several identities that shift with context. They may, for example, represent themselves one way in the LinkedIn business network, and another, very different way on Facebook with friends.

Each of those identities has its own idiosyncrasies and behaviors, so when they are in one context—e.g., a busy mom chatting on onechicmama.com—they're more receptive to some brands, perhaps recipes from Kraft, and totally closed to others that don't appeal to that persona.

Let's consider the busy mom further. A typical mom has sub-personas that may include "household manager," concerned with efficiency and convenience, and "gracious homemaker," focused on entertaining friends in Martha Stewart style. These two personas—efficient manager and elegant homemaker—can and must coexist dynamically, even though they may clash on a daily basis. And those are just two of many personas a busy mom might have.

So what's the secret to understanding our modern June Cleaver, she of multiple personas, morphing from context to context? The answer is simple: Listen to her.

Listening is critical for a more meaningful relationship between brands and consumers. First, however, brands must embrace today's epic cultural shift toward more open, flexible, and adaptive communications across the social Web.

What Won't Work
Traditional research—what may have once helped identify, segment, and target June Cleaver—just isn't well-suited to understanding and engaging consumers on the open, flexible Web. To build relationships with ever-evolving, persona-shifting consumers, marketers need new strategies and approaches that are built around listening. Not just once, but continuously and programmatically.

For companies getting started, it pays to rethink how and when to approach consumers. The short answer is continuously. But how can a company sustain continuous connections to customers? Would a purpose-built social network or public online community work? What about an integrated marketing campaign that uses state-of the-art Web and site analytics along with newsletters and customized email?

While those approaches have merit and can be part of a larger marketing effort, they can't help brands truly understand, engage, and sustain long-term relationships with today's dynamic, multi-contextual consumer.

What Does Work
If you want to understand, engage, and sustain, you'll need to embrace three tenets of new consumerism: listening, relationship-building, and empowerment.

Relationship-building, as a process, is misunderstood by many marketers. Too often we confuse willingness to buy as evidence of a relationship. It's not. Brands must earn the right to have meaningful relationships with their consumers, and that isn't accomplished by special offers and personalization alone. Like personal relationships, brand relationships are built on trust that is earned over multiple exchanges and eventually feels natural instead of contrived.

If all you're doing with customers is surveying them periodically, you'll never build trust or a relationship. But if you establish some intimacy with your customers—providing an ongoing, intimate forum to dig deeper and share the many facets of their different personas—you're entitled to ask more of the relationship. You've earned that.

Listening—real listening—is one of the most powerful and often misunderstood "disciplines" of marketing. Social-media monitoring, for example, is a great early warning system, but it isn't really listening. Effective listening can't be keyword-driven alone; it must be done with sensitivity to nuances and with a finely tuned ear for discovering unexpected insights.

One way to effectively listen to customers is through private online communities where brands can begin to understand how customers negotiate changes in their lives. Through communities, brands have the means—like never before—to be with consumers over time, building relationships and being present so that they can really listen. The trick is to isolate the multidimensional voices of the consumer, nurture them individually, and channel what you're hearing into meaningful changes that send a clear message: "We're listening."

Empowerment is the final, misunderstood tenet of new consumerism. Giving consumers a public forum to voice, vent, or vindicate—perhaps a public social network or your blog—seems like empowerment, but it's not. When you master listening and build a relationship with a consumer, you owe them something in return. And, contrary to conventional wisdom, what they want isn't coupons, free stuff, or other remuneration; they want to see the impact they're having on your brand and hear their own voices in new products and promotion. That's real empowerment for today's consumer.

In the end, consumers are most engaged when they realize that a brand—perhaps yours—is actively helping them negotiate the changes in their complex lives, from how and where they communicate to what they consume. Give them that, and they'll be empowered to dig deeper and explore more on your behalf. Moreover, eventually you'll offer more than simply a product or service to them: You'll become "their brand."

FreshBooks::: grow customer base by 150%

How a Company's Word-of-Mouth Strategies and Customer Focus Helped Grow Its User Base 150%
by Kimberly Smith
Case study published on 4/7/2009

Company: FreshBooks

Contact: Saul Colt, 'Head of Magic' at FreshBooks
Location: Toronto, Ontario Canada

Industry: Small business services
Annual revenue: Confidential
Number of employees: 28

Quick Read
What's the quickest way to a small-business owner's heart? Make his or her life easier.

Toronto-based FreshBooks was founded on that idea—specifically, taking the pain out of small-business expense tracking, billing, and invoicing. That service, however, is not all that has made the company what it is today.

While businesses around the globe have been faltering, five-year-old FreshBooks has grown from close to 300,000 users to over 750,000 in the past year, and much of that can be strictly attributed to word-of-mouth.

How'd they do it? Through a level of service that might best be described as refreshing.
"We treat our customers better than they've ever been treated, or expected to be treated, and we live up to everything we say we're going to do. We're overly attentive to listening to our customers, and we do fun and interesting things. That surprises people, and they talk about it," explained Saul Colt, who leads the company's word-of-mouth marketing efforts under the official title of Head of Magic. "It's so simple and ridiculously obvious, but for some reason more companies don't do it."

Read on for specific examples of how this online service vendor is keeping customers and winning over new ones, and getting a healthy dose of personal endorsements in the process.

Challenge
FreshBooks is an online invoicing and time-tracking service targeting freelancers and small businesses.
"It's not the most interesting thing in the world…not something people will likely run around and talk about on their own," admitted Colt.
Yet, the company has set out to make it just that: something everyone can—and does—talk about, whether they actually use, or even need, the service.

Campaign
The true success of FreshBooks has come from its commitment to forging real relationships with customers, potential customers, and others.

Online connections
FreshBooks uses social media, especially Twitter—where it has over 3,300 followers—to make connections with users on the Web.

On Twitter the company uses movie-quote contests and party invites to engage with customers and non-customers alike and to open the door to new conversations and relationships.

Moreover, FreshBooks has found Twitter to be an effective platform for listening to customers and other users and for getting to know them as real-world people. It then goes out of its way to respond to those people's needs, whether personal or professional.

Examples include making donations toward users' walks for charity, sending small gifts when someone has a baby, or flowers when someone has a bad day, or even just mailing off a funny story to brighten someone's day.

"Our goal is to make our customers happy, personally and professionally. We're available for advice, friendship, everything," said Colt. "The value of this is immeasurable if it is coming from a genuine place, and you make a connection with your customers."

Face-to-face interactions
Company employees traveling on business regularly host dinners for up to 30 local customers and influencers in the cities they visit. They've also been known to drive, rather than fly, to conferences in order to meet up with as many customers as possible during the trip.

At one such conference, they also used the company RV as a party shuttle and offered attendees hangover kits, along with a free pancake breakfast in the morning.

Client-centric promotions
"We don't make it about us, we make it about other people, using whatever small influence we have to prop up our customers," said Colt. "If they have better results, they will tell everyone about our service."

For instance, in March the company made up a series of "Internet All-Star" baseball cards featuring many of its customers with "shiny Internet personalities," then handed them out at the South by Southwest (SXSW) 2009 conference.

Customer involvement
FreshBooks also uses various opportunities—including its on-site user forums and weekly email newsletter, as well as in-person meetings—to garner feedback and solicit recommendations from its users.
"We rely on them for advice and suggestions, too. We make them a part of our company, and that makes everyone feel good and spread the word," said Colt.
Results

FreshBooks had close to 300,000 customers about this time last year and now has over 750,000 users, according to Colt.

"We have amazing relationships with a lot of our customers, and through these relationships we have helped to grow the company exponentially," said Colt. "It all came from treating customers as best we could."

Lessons Learned

• Customers are a business's most valuable resource. "Never take them for granted," said Colt. "If they care about your product and are passionate about it, they will champion it everywhere they go."


• Non-customers can prove to be just as valuable. "We care about people, whether they're using our service or not, and nothing stops us from talking to people who will never ever use our service," said Colt. "They can still tell ten friends about something cool we did."


• Generating great word-of-mouth is not a distinct marketing campaign; it's an everyday, ongoing part of the business. "It's our lifestyle," said Colt. "There's never a time limit or an expiry date. It's a lifetime commitment."


• It's okay to ask for referrals. "We ask people to please tell a friend," said Colt. "We don't take for granted that it will happen by itself."

Cruise Line::: Gets Into the Digital Fish Business

Comcast Town

March 10, 2009

I think one of the brands that uses interactive in a really wise way lately is Comcast. The awareness they've gotten since their 2005 fantastic Comcastic (not online anymore?) and other pieces like Tripleslanguage has made the brand being known even in places where Comcast services are not available, so i'm always kind of expectant what they will be releasing next.
These days, and again done by Goodby Silverstein and Partners, working together with Nexus Productions and Unit9, there is a new campaign called Dream Big. Presenting a fantastic website using a look-alike of isometric view Sims-style games, you can join the so-called Comcast Town, choose a neighborhood and then build your own space, using the capabilities of the Triple Play feature (tv, phone, internet) and inserting the product in a really smart way inside the experience.

Also i liked very much the way in which user interacts with others in the website and also through social networks like Facebook making a good use of Facebook Connect to get users logged onto the site, and doing it in a way that really makes it not so disruptive as i once wrote.

I won't extend very much, just visit the site and discover it because it's worth a good time spent on it. I found that there's also some TV commercials:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYWxV_gR9ro

100 Pieces

This March sees the return of Havana Club’s 100 Pieces initiative, which brings artists from around the globe together to create pieces inspired by the Cuban rum brand. However! in a neat live twist, this year Havana Club will join forces with the Secret War art crew for ‘100 Minutes of Havana’, in which two teams will go head to head a live, one-off art battle at East London’s Village Underground on March 4th.
Each team will have 100 minutes to create their very own interpretation of Cuba using only coloured acrylics on a 200ft white wall. The freestyle masterpiece will be created without the help of sketches or pencils, and must be completely improvised on the spot.
Then, the efforts of the 10 different artists will be judged by a Havana Club and Monorex (the crew behind Secret Wars) representative as well as the crowd vote, which will be decided using a decibel reader. The winning team will receive mixed cases of Havana Club and have their profiles displayed on the 100 Pieces online gallery together with the winning artwork.
Key pieces from the 100 Pieces of Havana initiative will be exhibited alongside the ‘100 Minutes of Havana’ mural. The exhibition including the winning mural, will be open to the public for four days. Entry is free and Contagious will be there, itching to get involved with a bucket of paint and a burnt sienna Crayola.
Art and alcohol have always enjoyed a close-knit relationship, and this seems like a fun way to harness some messy creativity in the name of a good, Cuban knees-up. There’s a website coming soon, so watch this space.
http://www.havana-club.com/