TechCheck Q1 2009 is now available!

TechCheck Q1 2009 is now available for your perusal.  Enjoy!

techcheck-q1-2009-cultural-fuel3

Snowing Billboards

Promotional billboard at bus stops in Norway that alerts you to skiing conditions at the Tryvann Winter Park Resort – by snowing.

When it snows on the mountain at the ski resort (located 15 minutes outside of Oslo), they send an SMS to the billboard and the signage starts snowing in the window area  A second message stops the snow show.

Source: http://www.toxel.com/tech/2009/03/21/tryvann-snowing-billboards-invade-norway/

Ego-branding benchmarks: Will strip for Penthouse if 100K people join my facebook group

Today, I was one of the last 10,000 people to be invited to join a group on facebook which has a sole topic: the lady who started the group will take off her clothes for Penthouse if she gets more than 100,000 followers.

It’s a pretty straightforward strategy of the “Lonelygirl” variety:  use combination of social media plus male insight (in this case: i don’t care if I am being used to make someone else famous, as long as she takes her clothes off). That’s the oldest value propositions in the book. Still, it’s a pretty cheap and effective way to raise awareness for your career as a model, or actually to raise awareness for Penthouse (or whoever is behind it).

Homelessness Crisis in the UK by Radiohead and Leo Burnett UK

Using Wii remotes to do, like, awesome stuff

I’ve been watching Johnny Lee for a while on youtube. Now this stuff might be inspiring only to the techy readers of this blog, but I certainly dig it quite a lot because it gives you a source for an number of new ideas of what you can do technology.

Johnny shares practical and prototypical ideas and uses of standard Consumer Electronic equipment, for free for everyone to innovate with. Here are three examples of him using the Nintendo Wii remote to do new things.

Johnny, you rock!

Digital Lifestyle Taken Too Far

When digital Lifestyle starts twitching my face, I am gonna slow down, I think.

Classical Music in the digital space: Symphony Orchestras on YouTube

Someone had a great idea. Take the most famous Orchestras in the world and have a worldwide competition of musicians on YouTube, where people vote for the musicians who should play a finale at Carnegie Hall.

http://www.youtube.com/symphony

Stop branding start participating?

In his coverage of Renny Gleeson of W+K, entitled “Stop branding start participating,” Rich Cherecwich quotes

“Agencies are built to make ads, not come up with marketing solutions and solve problems,” he said. “Marketing teams are built to approve ads, and publishers are trying to sell eyeballs, but what they need to sell is relevance.

and, citing social media as a way to deliver relevance:

In the search for the shared experience, brands have an incredible role to play,” Gleeson said. “They’ve always been the glue that binds. Now they have the opportunity to be the glue and part of the shared experience for the people who buy them.

How very true. Many, including us have said similar things. “The brand era is over, it’s the people era.” and “Acts, not ads!” are Leo Burnett mantras.  However, concerning the headline “stop branding”: really?

Before looking at Social Media as a solution to make brands relevant again (which it can be), I wonder why agencies and brands have had a hard time reinventing themselves.  Because I believe, regardless of what tools (such as social media) you are using, it will be a crap-shoot in terms of relevance for your brand, until brands and agencies have consummated and internalized one very basic mindset shift. It’s not so much about having to “stop branding” and “to start participating”, but it’s more like:

In the people era, it’s about doing something that makes a qualitative difference in people’s lives, not just saying something. Because delivering deeds and experiences that make a qualitative difference (however big or small), is branding for the people era.

Yet, agencies and brands haven’t adapted their business models and “creative delivery systems” to actually be doing something  instead of just messaging. And to top it off, even when they are doing something, it is usually so brand-centered, that it becomes a backfiring farce.  There are many such examples of brave attempts by brands and agencies to use “innovative” digital channels, such as social media, in the hopes that it will engage people with their brands again. The ones that happen to work, we all hear about. But there are many more attempts we don’t hear about. Why don’ t they work? Because moving to the people era doesn’t just mean picking the digital channel du jour, and applying your brand message.  Fact is, agencies and brands that have not internalized what their brand can mean in the people era, and will continue to try to use channels to force-feed their brand message. Brands are so used to being the sender of a message, that they don’t know how to let people message for them, but that’s what the ultimate consequence of the people era is. This is what Gleeson refers to when he says, “what brands need to do is grow the campaign out of an existing community, rather than simply drop it on top of a community.” 

So I agree that brands and agencies need to reinvent themselves. But it’s a shift that needs to happen, not a replacement of things.

• Brand era SHIFTS TO People era
• Doing things to people SHIFTS to doing things with people
• Brand message SHIFTS to Brand experience
• Reason to Believe SHIFTS to Reason to Interact
• Single-minded propositions SHIFT to allowing fragmented, multi-faceted experiences 
• Branding SHIFTS to delivering experiences that make a qualitative difference
• Creativity in formulating messaging SHIFTS TO Creativity in designing experiences 
• Brand Metrics SHIFTS TO People Metrics
• Consumer Insight SHIFTS TO Behavioral Insight

So, in summary, yes, stop branding the old way but start branding with an understanding of shifting brands into the people age. Only with that in mind, social media and other digital channels, as well as the traditional channels can serve purposeful strategies that are not left up to luck to succeed.

Image Impact Of The Super Bowl Commerials And Cross Viewing In The Internet

As follow-up to my post last week  “The TOP TEN Super Bowl Commercials” , I found today an article published by MediaBuyerPlanner about the image impact of the tv commercials which were aired during the Super Bowl.

According to the annual Super Bowl survey from comScore , TV commercials for Doritos helped PepsiCo’s tortilla-chip brand achieve the highest net improvement score of all Super Bowl ads, while GoDaddy.com’s ad did the most damage.

Press release from  comScore :

comScore also asked respondents in the post-Super Bowl survey whether the various Super Bowl ads improved, damaged, or left unchanged their perception of the advertised brands. Doritos scored the highest net improvement score of 42 percentage points, followed by Bud/Bud Light (40 percentage points) and Denny’s (39 percentage points), whose offer of a free Grand Slam breakfast to everyone in America on Tuesday, February 3, apparently resonated with the public.

Q: For each of the following brands, please indicate whether their ad during the Super Bowl improved or damaged your impression of the brand in any way?   February 3-4, 2009; n=1,042 Source: comScore Post-Super Bowl Survey
Brand Advertiser	Improved	Damaged	Net Brand Improvement Score
Doritos	46 %	4 %	42 %
Bud/Bud Light	43 %	3 %	40 %
Denny’s	41 %	2 %	39 %
Coca Cola	40 %	3 %	37 %
Pepsi Co.	37 %	5 %	32 %
GoDaddy.com	28%	15%	13%

GoDaddy.com had the highest brand damage score (15 percent), which resulted in the lowest net brand improvement score (13 percentage points).

Cross media viewing:  Interestingly  15 % of the Super Bowl viewers claim that  they visited an advertiser’s Web site after viewing their Super Bowl ad.

How to get started on Facebook

Talking to our clients in these days, these questions always arise:

- How can I integrate Facebook into my campaign?

- What about an application or an ad?

- How does it work? And what about the costs?

Well, here is a quick introduction by ecommerce-guide.com that walks the reader through setting up a Facebook page for their brands.

But please note:

Being on Facebook doesn’t automatically mean that your brand wins. Even not instantly. It needs huge efforts to create a valuable network effect and to build a strong relationship with people. Thus, brands still need an engaging idea and have to give people a seat on the table.