Facebook, saved a local restaurant

To see at the happy crowd at Bistro 17 (facebook|website) on Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, you’d never think that just 3 months ago, they were close to shutting down for good. Owner Anna Buckingham says,

“Business was so slow at that point, even during the tourist season, that we were wondering if we should call it quits.”

But now this French-themed restaurant with mouth watering brie and an obsession with containers and dogs is a word-of-mouth sensation and always busy. In fact, they’re one of the few restaurants doing really well in the off-season

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From closing to thriving… To what do they owe this remarkable turnaround?

Fortunately for Anna, one of her regular patrons runs a Hilton Head Island Facebook page with 65,000 fans.  Anna tends to make friends with all her customers. So they teamed up, and created this winning combination:

• 
  
• Promotion and contests on the Hilton Head TravelTell Facebook page.
• Radio-style call-in contests
• Free mimosas

Partner With Large Facebook Pages

I’ve used this tactic myself in the past. When I was helping a Myrtle Beach hotel group grow its fan-base, we partnered with a large (200,000+ fans) Myrtle Beach destination Facebook Page to run a contest. The hotel group only had about 2,000 fans before this co-promotion. Within 24 hours we had crossed the 5,000 fan threshold and had 1,000 new emails from people who had indicated they were interested in receiving discount stay offers.

And it’s worth it to partner with smaller pages, too. Previous to this contest, we met another local marketer who had a Myrtle Beach themed page with 8,000 fans. He generously re-posted our contests for a few weeks and helped us gain hundreds of new fans.

Radio Style Call-In Contests

You’ve heard these all your life. I had too, so it was kinda thrilling to participate in one. And they work surprisingly well on Facebook. This means we should try to repurpose tactics that worked before the Internet and find out they work with the Internet.

Watch a video of how to answer Facebook contest call-ins!

Complimentary Alcohol? How Can You Go Wrong With That?

You have to be careful. Choose the wrong alcoholic drink, and you attract the wrong crowd.

But Bistro 17 chose to give away bottomless mimosas with breakfast. They’re not the first restaurant in the world to do this – in fact, none of what we’re talking about is completely new, but it all fits together and it gets more business. Fortunately, people who just want alcohol don’t tend to be attracted to the bottomless mimosa concept. It’s a common brunch item, and it fits the Bistro 17 menu. It’s also the kind of sparkly incentive that attracts more people and adds to the social lubrication that makes it fun restaurant to spend time at.

Passions and Promotion

Anna would shoot me if I didn’t mention her passion – Bistro 17 is dog friendly. They have dog bowls and treats on hand. She says,

“When people have their dogs here, they talk to each other more, and it’s a completely different place.”

For the business, it provides a unique advantage – one that increases social activity, which will solidify customer devotion and increase chances for word of mouth activities.

For example:

What can we learn from this to apply to promoting other local businesses? Having a secondary passion helps promote a local business.

Lessons: Social Is The Common Theme

If you haven’t noticed, being friendly and building relationships is core to all of the strategies mentioned above.

• Make Friends: People with large Facebook pages don’t post your stuff for free if they don’t like you.
• Focus on Service: No matter how much you promote a service business, if the people aren’t friendly, you don’t have service, and you won’t be able to keep or multiply the customers.
• Alcohol makes people friendlier – generally 
• Use Social Objects: Both the Bistro 17 doggie dishes and the patrons’s dogs are social objects – they make conversations easier to start and they warm the heart. Smiles are more likely. And smiles at restaurants are good for business.

Men, women, and flavored condoms

This print campaign for Kama Sutra Excite, developed by 1pointsize, India gives us reasons for admiring the idea

The copy reads- Kama Sutra Excite!

Vanilla

Flavoured Dotted Condoms

CREDITS
Advertising Agency: 1pointsize, India
Executive Creative Director: Sharad Haksar
Creative Director: Anantha Narayan
Copywriter: E.Prakash
Art Director: Shanmugha Vel
Photographer: Sharad Haksar

In Assland...Where do good Ideas come from?

Kamchatka| A Site in a Tweet!

Argentinean Digital Agency (Kamchatka) migrated from the web to Twitter.
just like a BANK , advertising agency  .

Absolut Vodka: Glimmer

Absolut Glimmer
Make the present exceptional

Latest global campaign for Absolut Vodka, Absolut Glimmer. It's a global initiative where brand have changed the iconic bottle shape for the first time since its conception. The campaign concept is "Make the present exceptional" and the design idea is about dressing the bottle for this moment in time. In today's world, where everything can be recorded, copied or streamed by the press of a button the "here and now" is the new super exclusive. To celebrate this Absolut created a glimmering Absolut Bottle that only will be available for a short time.






Advertising Agency: Team Family Business, Sweden
Creative Directors: John Lagerqvist, Mårten Knutsson
Design: John Lagerqvist, Fredrik Lindquist
Copywriter: Tove Norström
Original: Christian Styffe
Fotography: Jens Mortensen

Nike Argentina| Flying trainers at the Nike Air Show

Nike’s clever involvement of in-store and online players in the Air Show demonstrates perfectly the potential of customer facing brand activity.

If someone told you to blow into your computer’s microphone to make a shoe fly in Buenos Aires, you’d either think they’d been drinking heavily, or had fallen for some new internet hoax. However, Nike’s latest in-store promotion in Argentina requires visitors to do just that, and take part in the Nike Air Show. 

Without wanting to spoil the magic, Nike has used microphones, magnets and a little bit of internet magic to promote the Nike Air identity in a very literal sense. 

JDate Israel|Someone to zip you up

JDates's stroke of genius was to team up with a popular women's fashion chain, and promote their services in a fun, useful way that afforded customers a level of discretion in a potentially sensitive area.

Valentine's days are the perfect time of year for dating sites to advertise for subscribers to their services.  In Israel, the Jewish equivalent of Valentine's day (called "Tu B'av") occurs in July, which coincides with the end of season sales period for retailers.

JDate, a local dating agency decided to take advantage of the fact that the sales period means increased traffic in stores, and so teamed up with clothing chain Mango in an inventive in-store promotion partnership.
Like all the best ideas, JDate's idea was simple: To provide assistance in the one area that Israeli women still needed help - zipping up the backs of their dresses. JDate provided this assistance with the use of specially branded tags which acted as a coupon for a free one month subscription to the dating site. The tags helped single women zip up the clothes they tried on - meaning that JDate could help single women find a date, and an outfit. The tags were removable, in case customers decided they already had the perfect outfit.

The activity ran for the two weeks immediately prior to Tu B'av, and more than 300,000 Mango customers were exposed to the campaign nationally. 2,000 tags were taken by customers and JDate saw traffic for this period increase by 13%, with new subscriptions increasing by 15% - a new high for the summer period.

The activity was also covered heavily in fashion magazines, blogs and social media networks.

BRAND:JDate

CATEGORY:Internet

REGION:Israel

DATE:July - July 2010

AGENCY:McCann Erickson

MEDIA CHANNEL:Out-of-Home,PR,Retail/POS

Hell Pizza New Zealand|Deliver me to Hell!

Pizza and zombies - not a combination that immediately leaps to mind, but then Hell Pizza is not a company that adheres to the conventions of its category.
Recognising that consumers spent more money online, Hell Pizza have wisely created strong content to pull customers into that environment. Adding vouchers to the end of the video journey was a brilliant way to link video activity to sales.

Brand names in the pizza delivery sector tend to be fairly uninspiring. Outside of the big brand names like Dominos and Pizza Hut, most cities around the world are home to at least one pizza delivery firm with a vaguely Italian sounding name. Hell pizza had already marked itself out from the crowd with its unusual name, but when it came to engaging its consumers it still needed something different.

Most food delivery companies focus on their products. TV and online activity tends to be little more than another expression of the outlet's menu, but Hell Pizza recognised that online orders tickets were on average 30% more than telephone orders  - so devised a purely online strategy to shift consumers from their phone to their laptop.

What separated Hell Pizza's viral video was the interactive element. In "Deliver Me to Hell", viewers watched as the brave Steve attempted to cross a city full of zombies to deliver his pizza. At the end of each clip, viewers were given a choice of what should happen next, sometimes sending Steve and his consignment of pizza margaritas to a gruesome end.

Anyone who could successfully direct Steve safely through the zombies received a voucher for free bottles of Coke, and they were entered into a draw to win a year's supply of free pizza - powerful incentive to complete the mission!

"The first point of the campaign was to make a wicked innovative adventure online that had never been done before, and the second was to drive sales", said a Hell director Stu McMullin. "Hell Pizza has always been a tech forerunner and we employed good local kiwi talent and directors. In NZ we are one of the largest online companies.  We average 22% online for total pizza sales and 35% of that is in town centers. Our web average ticket is 30% more in value - so we are all about getting customers online."

Since the campaign started Hell have seen a strong spike in sales online and of those people that were ordering and using the free coke vouchers, 43% were new customers.

BRAND:Hell Pizza

BRAND OWNER:Hell Pizza

CATEGORY:Food

REGION:New Zealand

DATE:July - July 2010

MEDIA OWNER:YouTube

MEDIA CHANNEL:Branded Content,Online,TV

Niqabitches|Two French students protest Burka Ban in face veils & hot pants

Two anonymous French students in their 20s recently donned niqābs and short shorts and strolled through the streets of Paris, making sure to hit several government ministry buildings. The women, one of whom is Muslim, call themselves "Niqabitches."
"We were not looking to attack or degrade the image of Muslim fundamentalists – each to their own – but rather to question politicians who voted for this law that we consider clearly unconstitutional," they said. "We want to de-dramatise the situation."
On the news Web site, rue89, the women, students in their 20s, write, “We asked ourselves: ‘How would the authorities react when faced with women wearing a burka and mini-shorts?’”
The French senate passed the law last month. It is due to go into effect early next year. A woman who chooses to defy the ban will receive a fine of 150 euros (£125) or a course of citizenship lessons, according to the Telegraph. A man who forces a woman to go veiled will be fined 30,000 euros and serve a jail term.

Brands recharged

I always looked at brands redesign as internal-external rejuvenation exercise where brands publicizes refreshed expressive attributes while maintaining core beliefs and values.

Brand are reflection to contemporary society wants, needs and hopes, they speak same language and dress same as well otherwise will disconnect and becomes absolute.

Brand viewpoint continues transmitting assures connection and interactivity , whatever tone of voice and graphic language for packaging, merchandise, clothing, and mobile apps or any expressions of the brand for off air, online use must clearly communicates what is the brand all about today and what aspire to be in the future.

Mission Possible: LOGO/ Identity relevance

Two municipalities — Gamvik and Lebesby — have come together to promote tourism to the peninsula and worked with Oslo-based Neue Design Studio to create an identity that, literally, reflects the nature of this destination: Visit Nordkyn.

The visual identity is based on two main ingredients; our newly developed payoff, "Where nature rules," and weather statistics from the Norwegian Meteorological Institute. A feed of weather statistics affects the logo to change when the direction of the wind or the temperature changes. On the website, the logo updates every five minutes. We developed a logo generator where Visit Nordkyn can download their logo to the exact weather conditions of that particular moment. Nordkyn is truly a place where nature rules, even over the visual identity.

Structure of the changing icon.

Colors cover a range of temperature from -25°C (-13°F) to 25°C (77°F).

Animation showing the logo changing direction and colors.

Sample iterations of the logo. Click image for bigger view.

The icon itself is deceivingly simple, with a single point that stretches in the direction the wind blows, giving it the appearance of extensive flexibility that, when paired with the muted rainbow of colors, makes it feel infinitely mutable. The typography goes almost unnoticed but provides just enough personality to make the logo feel scientific and official.



Stationery.


Business card.