I’m pretty much a classic case of the kind of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. Perhaps not the clinical kind but the kind caused by the modern western society - with the overflowing abundance of things to do with our lives. I usually feel the need to try just about everything that comes in my path just for the sake of having tried it. Usually, this ends up e.g. in trying and abandoning a new hobby after just having scratched the surface.
There are two exceptions though. In private my love for martial arts has not waned over the years (there was a big gap of not training though - because I was busy with ‘other things’). At work my interest for marketing and business through active participation and two-way interaction with customers, employees and partners continues to be a source for inspiration so grand that I’m now starting my dissertation on the subject.
However, the point was that in the midst of all this activity overload, it’s really refreshing to see some people that can truly drench themselves into an activity that has no function whatsoever, other than the search for balance, beauty and perfection. One such person seems to be Bill Dan, who’s clearly devoted to setting rough-shaped and amorphous rocks standing in full balance in perplexing configurations.
Reminds me of the zen masters of old and their search for enlightment e.g. by pursuing the perfect way to conduct a tea ceremony. Although anybody having tried standing a stone on its head knows that tea-making is easier to get started with…
Do you think that marketing your product is something people simply can’t get excited about en masse? Sure, it works with music, movies and fashion, but never you product. Your product is boring, low-interest, utility-like - more like a mobile phone price plan. Now really, who would care?
You might have even experienced with crowdsourcing or other forms of crowd engagement in the past with little or no results. And that’s another barrier facing marketers everywhere: didn’t work before (say 10 or 5 years ago) so it can’t work now.
Whatever the case I urge you to check the video below. Of course, it’s not about a product per se. It’s about finding the right Language to talk about with you customers, prospects or even people who would never buy your product but can be willing to join your marketing efforts given a well-framed opportunity. It’s about letting people do something unique and amazing, show it others and take credit for it. It’s about sharing.
As everybody knows, despite it being commonly cited as a ‘creative’ industry, advertising is in essence collecting, analyzing, recycling, fusing, mixing and matching existing events and phenomena in pop culture, music, current affairs, movies, great moments, comedy, horror, job, relationships - life in general.
Sometimes advertising can also be directly recycling other advertising. Or what do you think (click images for larger versions):
How do you thrive when all other companies are downsizing or going bankrupt. Why, by collecting the company signs and logos that are taken down and turning them into led-lit design objects, of course.
That’s at least what Finnish Character is doing. The ability of human creativity always finding light in darkness (in this case literally) never ceases to amaze me. Brilliant!
Can you say which company’s premises this character used to mark (click image for answer)?
Disclosure: one of Character’s workers works with me at TBWA\Helsinki (no personal connection, though)
Nestea just published the Liquid Awesomeness campaign site to promote its beverages. On the site, the protagonist Steve believes he can gain magical powers by enjoying Nestea products. To test these powers, the visitor / player gets to challenge Steve to different kinds of tasks, from bear-wrestling to cobra-fluting. Funny. Well developed. All well and good.
nestea
As I wonder through the site however, I get a strange feeling. Liquid Awesomeness is like a self-sufficient eco system, a hermetical vacuum, in which everything is polished and perfect as regards production, but something is wrong. I’m used to reading a two-minute old blog post and already seeing three comments in it. Even if I refresh my Facebook front page once in a minute, I get a flow of new stuff on display every time (a friend’s comment, another one’s quiz result, a third one’s shared video). I’m not used to being alone on the web anymore. Yet on the Liquid Awesomeness site, I’m awesomely alone.
Sure, there’s a ‘Share the Awesomeness’ button on the site. Pushing it, I get a request to prove my humanity by entering a code, after which they provide me with tools to send an email. An email! If I want to send an email I can just copy and paste the URL by gmail - and it doesn’t ask me to prove my humanity. On top of it all, the core target group of this site doesn’t even use email for private communication!
Why can’t I record a brag clip of conquering the cobra? Why can’t I compare my results to others’ on ranking lists? Why can’t I challenge my friends to take on the mechanical bear on Facebook? Why are the nice Gallery of Awesomeness posters available on Flickr? Why isn’t the Hamster Rockfest band present on MySpace or Spotify?
Somebody sometime said that the web is a cemetary for empty campaign sites. These kinds of campaign sites are one reason for this proverb. Even if it attracted a hundred million visitors, every one of these visitors is - and feels - alone.
Marriot has made a decision, that delights environmentalists but awes newspapers, such as USA Today and Wall Street Journal. The hotel chain has made a decision to discontinue its custom of offering its guests a complimentary newspaper by default, unless they specifically ask for it. Especially USA Today, the readership of which consists largely of hotel travellers, is shocked for a reason. If other chains follow suit, the newspaper could be pretty much done for.
But so it goes. Old, unsustainable and useless habits die (some hard) and are replaced by new, more efficient and better ways. Like Robert Scoble said: “I will never again buy a newspaper - nor will my kids” (or something along those lines - can’t remember exactly). After the initial shock, which for newspapers might admittedly take a while, everybody will however be better off. And its not only newspapers. Change is a constant and ever accelerating force in any business nowadays. Do you still cling to your old habits or are you already looking for new opportunities?
BMW launches their new Z4 (a beauty, although I am lukewarm to private driving) using augmented reality. The TV ad was produced with artist Robin Rhode attaching paint sprays to the wheels of a real Z4 and driving around over a white floor. After a few rounds, joyful figures emerged:
Participation is also utilized. By printing out a fiduciary marker icon and placing it on a surface in front of your webcam, you can command a virtual BMW around your living room or desk and paint it with vivid colors that are imposed on the video footage on-screen. Naturally, the idea is to then upload and share the video with your friends.
Fun and creative, but you need to download a software for this and it is available only in Windows version. As regards the nature of the campaign, it would probably have paid off to produce a Mac version as well as this kind of playing around and tinkering is usually more natural to Mac owners than Windows users. Nevertheless, a fun and bold take on how to use the latest tools in marketing (and I am telling you about it, am I not?)
I, like many other people I know, like writing short stuff, but writing material longer than one page is often painful. I currently have two short-term (a section on FLIRT for one North American and one Finnish book), one mid-term (my own book about FLIRT) and one long-term (a dissertation on participation in business and marketing) writing projects at hand and producing content is hard as ever. This although I have everything quite clear in my head and have already written a 160-page master’s thesis on the subjects mentioned!
This is why it’s always good to have input on how to improve your writing techniques, like this one, shared by Mukund Mohan on Facebook. Very compact but very helpful.
As the world lies in financial turmoil, also web startup activity is going through the motions. The Economist has in its latest issue a couple of articles to the topic. These writings very well describe the similarities and differences between the dotcom bust and present crisis, but all the same predict hard times for the web entrepreneurs.
Above all the writers remind that advertising, which until now has been seen as the golden calf in internet business, was also the model for the first wave of (mostly failed) enterprises. Even as web usage has grown to in some cases neurotic proportions among also the general public and is finally likely to go also mobile, advertising funded business, which relies on building a massive user base and then serving hypertargeted ads to this base, has not been massively successful except for a couple of cases (such as Google’s). Most of the actors, such as the mighty Facebook and the new darling Twitter (which Facebook aims to hurt with its twitter-esque front page redesign) have yet to turn a profit for their owners.
However, I at least don’t see a deep post-dotcom-esque ‘nuclear winter’ as regards web startup activity looming on the horizon. It seems that at least here in the North there’s an ever increasing activity on the startup front and the local reporter Arctic Startup hardly has any mention on the recession in its recent posts. The social web has so far and especially in recent years enabled also other forms of revenue in addition to advertising, such as bringing together sellers and buyers through better search and recommendations, aggregating shopping services, more flexible tailoring and manufacturing of products and services, acting as infomediary etc.
It has also been noted that although people are not crazy about paying for e.g. news content, they do it more likely if they receive the same content to their mobile devices in an easily readable and usable form. Also other forms of paid mobile applications have taken air, thanks to Apple’s AppStore, and all other mobile device and OS providers have followed suits and have already or are at the moment opening up their own appstore equivalents.
A new research by Nielsen has on its part raised a form of mobile fever, as in the research as much as 71% of Americans predict that they will use the mobile daily during the next year. How the operators can benefit from this growth remains to be seen, but nevertheless it seems that although the basic web might not be blooming as it was still a year ago, the year when mobile web took off might at last be at hand.
I’m constantly reminding that in participating your customers, one of the things you need to think about are the Tools of creation (under Tools in the FLIRT model - which is to be updated in the near future as I start my dissertation on the topic). These tools of creation can include web tools (such as the ideation and ranking tools of Dell’s Ideastorm), other digital tools offered by the company (such as the Digital Designer software of Lego Factory) and the customer’s own tools (digital camera,
desktop design and publishing tools), but also physical tools (such as the empty Red Bull cans used in scupltures for Red Bull’s Art of the Can competition).
As a very clever example of the last category, the Japanese Sofa manufacturer NOyes appeals to those who consider recycling old stuff ecologically sound but who don’t have the necessary skills to create new from old. NOyes simply asks you to send in a pair of your old jeans and they will in an instant create a stylish and unique stool out of them. At a starting price of nearl 300 euros (around 36.000 yen), they are likely to also turn a nice profit on the side of helping nature. At least I have a spare pair somewhere in there…
My name is Sami Viitamäki and I'm a partner and strategist at TBWA\DIEGO in Helsinki, Finland. With many years' experience in marketing, media and the internet both as a practitioner and an academic, I now help organizations to better invest their marketing and development budgets by utilizing the full potential of the social web.
