6.8.09
Absolut| "Doing things differently leads to something exceptional"
Catherine Zeta-Jones:::Horndogs in T-Mobile ads
New strategy by the carrier of showing horny guys drooling all over the actress...
T-Mobile Mobile Makeover "Invisible"
T-Mobile Mobile Makeover "Dinner"
Google These Billboards
By buying billboards along well traveled routes in four cities (the Massachusetts Turnpike in Boston, MA; the Eisenhower Expressway in Chicago, IL; the West Side Highway in New York City, NY; and U.S. 101 in San Francisco, CA), Google is making sure it reaches as many people in its target audience as possible.
As reported in Mediaweek, the campaign focuses on the internal monologue of a business professional who is frustrated with other, more expensive software offerings. Over the course of a month, commuters will see the fictitious businessperson come to an epiphany and switch to Enterprise.
The campaign is accomplished through daily vinyl copy changes. Workers change the copy between 6:30 and 7:30 am, guaranteeing the next installment is ready for that day’s commute.
It’s not the first time Google has gone outdoor. The company has used bus ads and poster size billboards in the past to raise awareness of new offerings. This is, however, most likely the highest impact campaign from the search giant yet.
The campaign generated massive media attention, with coverage in major newspapers (such as the Boston Globe) and in the trade press (in publications such as PC World).
It serves as an excellent example of outdoor advertising being the premiere way to reach busy commuters, and make a splash doing it.
One has often heard this in client conference rooms: ‘why can’t we build a brand without any advertising? Like Google?’. One can, if everyone had a Google-like product. Thanks to a heady mix of great product and PR, Google rarely had to use advertising to promote it’s search engine. With Microsoft offering some serious competition via Bing, Google has perhaps seen the need to get back at Microsoft. Google is now taking billboards across several US cities to promote Google Apps – a bundle of business applications that sells for $50 per worker annually, in a campaign labeled ‘Going Google’.
The cloud-based, free Google Apps have been around since 2007 but have not been a serious threat to Microsoft’s Office suite. Even though the paid version is ‘a fraction of what Microsoft Exchange costs’ it still hasn’t been able to break the big business’ preference for MS Office. With new ventures like Chrome OS, Google may have to rely on a lot more than word of mouth to promote it’s applications. The advantage it has is that Google being Google, it gets written about for anything it does. Even if it is a pretty average billboard put up in Boston.
Do yo think Google needs advertising to sell it’s wares?
5.8.09
Prius flower power
The hybrid Toyota Prius has long had a reputation for being a “greener” car and wanted to promote the fact that a sun roof is available in the 3rd generation Prius which is due to launch in 2010 as well as emphasise its latest marketing theme: "Harmony between man, nature and machine." The idea is that people still want to be able to have personal vehicle to travel - they don't want to give up their cars - but they are willing to find a more sustainable way of doing so.
Prius has formed a partnership with various North American cities to provide enormous flowers in public squares. The flower sculptures, which stand at up to 18 feet high, collect solar energy through panels on the back of their petals and
the base of their stems. Each flower also has seating for up to 10 people. They offer people the chance to charge their laptops or mobile phones while sitting outside in the sun. The flowers also provided solar-powered WiFi, enabling people to surf the web at the same time. The message on the flowers read: “it’s all powered by the sun like the optional Solar Roof in the 3rd generation Prius”.
Boston bus riders are also treated to solar ventilation bus shelters in the downtown area as part of the “Harmony Installation” campaign. The special shelters feature solar panels on the roof that run fans to circulate air within the shelter. The shelters aim to imitate the Prius’s Solar Ventilation System.
The flowers are touring cities including Boston, New York, Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco and Los Angeles between July and October. All of the activity will be documented on Twitter and Facebook.
Fiat| Open source car
Turning conventional car-making wisdom on its head, which says keep your designs close to your chest, Fiat has launched a website encouraging the public to submit designs for its next model, the Fiat Mio.
This is not the first time Fiat has called on the public to collaborate. Back in 2006, the car manufacturer challenged Brazilians to come up with ideas for the next 30 years of Fiat vehicles, as a celebration of its three decades in the Latin American country. So impressed was Fiat with the ideas generated, it challenged the public again; this time to come up with ecologically friendly car designs. The Fiat Concept Car 2 was showcased at the International Automobile fair in 2008.
And now the call has gone out once more. A dedicated website (www.fiatmio.cc) has been set up that will act as a forum for automobile enthusiasts to put across and debate their various dreams of what the future of car industry should look like. All suggestions on the site will be trialed and facilitated by the Fiat team, along with its own engineers’ ideas. The resulting vehicle will be showcased at the International Automobile Fair 2010. The project falls under the Creative Commons License, allowing participants to own their contributions, but for the community to distribute, modify and share their ideas.
The campaign is part of Fiat’s push to embrace the digital age head-on. By creating an open forum, it acknowledges that all ideas generated might be used by other individuals, or by its rivals. A bold step that might spell the beginning of the end for closed-shop car design.
BRAND:Fiat
BRAND OWNER:Fiat
CATEGORY:Automotive
REGION:Brazil
DATE:Jul 2009 - Dec 2009
AGENCY:AgenciaClick
MEDIA CHANNEL
Chevrolet | Cruze control
Chevrolet has launched a campaign in China to promote the release of its new Cruze model. Consumers can personalise an online ‘Chevy’ and share their designs with friends.
Not a market known for ‘macho’ advertising campaigns, Chevy’s Chinese offering definitely bucks the trend. The idea is a direct take-off of popular western programmes such as MTV’s ‘Pimp My Ride’ and comes in conjunction with the car manufacturer using anti-authoritarian American TV star Wentworth Miller in its Asian campaign.
Users can go online, pick a model from the Chevrolet range and virtually ‘pimp it’. A wealth of innovative customisation tools mean users can let their mind run wild and go way beyond a basic paint job. Once finished, cars can be entered in online races, shared with friends or saved as wallpaper on computers and mobiles.
BRAND:Chevrolet
BRAND OWNER;General Motors
CATEGORY:Automotive
REGION:China
DATE:Jul 2009 - Sep 2009
AGENCY:McCann Erickson/ZenithOptimedia
MEDIA CHANNEL
Doritos | Identity Crisis
Doritos is known for maximising technology in its promotions, and its latest advergame is no exception. Integrating the real-world release of a mystery crisp flavour with a virtual spy mission, the campaign aims to drive up sales.
The crisp manufacturer is no stranger to empowering consumers, having run many
UGC campaigns in the past. ID3 involves a first person narrative, with players
trying to complete three separate online missions -
the first being to discover the mystery crisp flavour.
When consumers buy a packet of Doritos,
a code on the back of the packet gains them entry to the first episode and gives the user six lives with which to complete it. If players use up all six lives, well… they have to buy another pack of Doritos. The second and third levels involve different missions, each following on from the previous, tying the threetogether into one coherent story.
Prizes on offer for those who complete all three missions include the chance to win a cash prize of £50,000, plus additional prizes such as a trip to Las Vegas, an X-box and other assorted goodies.
BRAND OWNER:Pepsi Co,
REGION:UK
DATE:Jun 2008
AGENCY:AMV BBDO London
MEDIA CHANNEL
Momentum Insurance |Seconds
4.8.09
social-media monitoring tools
by Clay McDaniel
You're a marketer who's hip to the idea of social media: You have a blog for your company or client, you know Facebook inside and out, and you can Tweet with the best of them. So you've got the communicating part down pat.
But the big question is, Are you listening? If you have customers, chances are they're talking about you to their friends, to their coworkers, and to anyone else who will listen.
Here are some of the top tools for listening to and monitoring the online chatter about your brand:
Free Apps
Google Alerts is the steady rock in the sometimes white-water world of monitoring. You can easily target keywords that are important to your brand and receive streaming or batched reports—choose your own adventure.
2. Technorati
Billing itself as "the leading blog search engine," Technorati has been helping bloggers and those with their fingers on the blog pulse stay informed for years.
3. Jodange
Tracking your brand or a product is one thing, but turning that tracking into a measure of consumer sentiment about your brand or product is something completely different. For that, Jodange has TOM (Top of Mind), which tracks consumer sentiment about your brand or product across the Web.
4. Trendrr
Want to know how your brand or product is trending compared with others? Trendrr uses comparison graphing to show relationships and discover trends in real time. Use the free account, or bump it up to the Enterprise level for more functionality.
5. Lexicon
What are people talking about on Facebook? Lexicon searches Facebook walls for keywords and provides a snapshot of the chatter volume around those terms.
6. Monitter
Everyone is talking about Twitter, but what are people talking about on Twitter? Beyond the integrated search of Twitter apps like Twhirl and TweetDeck, Monitter provides real-time monitoring of the Twittersphere.
7. Tweetburner
In the world of Twitter, URL shortening is the Obi-Wan (it's your only hope) for effectively connecting with the public. Tweetburner also lets you track the clicks on those magically shortened links, giving you some hard numbers.
8. Twendz
Public relations shop Waggener Edstrom recently launched its Twitter-monitoring tool, Twendz. The tool piggybacks off Twitter Search to monitor and provide user sentiment for the real-time Twitterstream—70 tweets at a time.
Paid Apps
9. TruCast
TruCast by Visible Technologies provides in-depth, keyword-based monitoring of the social Web with an emphasis on blogs and forums. Its dashboard applications provide visual representations of sentiment and trends for your brands online.
10. and 11. Radian6 and Cision
Radian6 pulls information from the social Web, and analyzes and provides consumer sentiment ratings for your brand. When paired with CisionPoint from Cision, the evolved Bacon's of today, Radian6's dashboard can provide a wealth of information.
12. Techrigy
Techrigy's SM2 is a social-media monitoring and analysis solution for PR and marketing folks. With a focus on complete analysis and comparison, the SM2 experience draws information from all major social-media channels.
Collective Intellect (CI) is a real-time intelligence platform, based on advanced artificial intelligence. Its solution provides automatic categorization of conversations based on CI’s proprietary filtering technology. According to CI, its technologies provide credible groupings and reduce the "noise" seen in other keyword-based searches.
* * *
Listening and making sense of how your brand lives on the Web is only part of the equation. How you use that information to interact with the public is the next step.
Clay McDaniel is principal and cofounder of social-media marketing agency Spring Creek Group (www.springcreekgroup.com).
7 Skills for a Post-Pandemic Marketer
The impact of Covid-19 has had a significant impact across the board with the marketing and advertising industry in 2020, but there is hope...
-
Stretching 60 metres across and featuring blue halo lighting, sculptured front-lit lettering 2.5 metres tall and a variety of 2D cut-out cha...
-
Creating online content is easy. However, creating actionable online content without using the right tools can be quite challenging. The g...