Amazing Roger Federer trickshot on Gillette ad shoot

Fantastic example of how you use genuinely engaging content that furthers brand equity without involving the brand! Total production cost = next to zero.

LOOK AT YOURSELF AFTER WATCHING THIS.mp4

Social media is more engaging than online advertising - how incisive!

I was moved by a couple of stories over the last week. The first was a clever piece of social media work by Pedigree for its Adoption Drive Campaign which is usually fronted by a TV ad campaign and an extensive on pack campaign. Not this year....The brand says that while traditional channels deliver reach they don’t encourage engagement or direct action....well no change here - they never have! 

Display advertising creates look and feel, it imbues personality to the brand but very few people have ever got up from their chairs to go buy things cos they've just seen them on the Telly and that's not a bad thing.

It allows people to form their opinions about the brand over time and adopt their favourites. The difference now is that people can interact with the brand online and tats great too but it’s unlikely that most of the Worlds biggest brands would have been built purely online - not yet anyway. Once they are built then they can afford to put themselves in the hands of social media.

Back to Pedigree where the results of the campaign appear to be over a million people 'liking' the brand which is great - I'm not sure that their tactic of releasing frankly quite average videos for every 25k views was particularly strong although the conation of 25k for every 25k views was certainly a good PR story....now perhaps that's the point?

www.facebook.com/pedigree

The second relates and I saw this morning with the trumpeted headline that online ads annoy rather than appeal - well of course they do! More interestingly is the fact that young web users will react positively to online ads as opposed to the over 55's who apparently were brought up on intrusive advertising so therefore are less likely to engage than those who are used to content online - Sounds like one great big cycle going round and round and round!

Marketing in Greece pt.1

I've been away on holiday staying in a wonderful small Greek sailing/fishing village called Paleros on the west coast. We have family there and my Brother in law Kosta runs a bar on the beach (yes it's one of the tougher things I have to deal with in my life). It was great to just forget about marketing things and to kick back and relax, enjoy the fabulous hospitality and spend some time thinking about the more important things in life.

It was weird though as I saw a real example of the effects of the recession that to be honest haven't really hit home while at home. It's a great place to go as it really is an authentic Greek town, its beautiful and it feels unspoilt although there is plenty to see and do there so you dont feel isolated. It does however rely heavily on tourist trade. mainly English, Greek and sailing types. Last time I went three years ago it was buzzing every night, the bars were packed and I could hardly get to the bar to get my free drinks! This time it was a very different story.

There were two main holiday resorts in the town and one of them went bust last year leaving an unimaginable hole in the local economy. It went bust due to the parent companies over ambitious Worldwide expansion plans that got scuppered by the downturn. While there are still plenty of people there  it is noticeable how difficult thing have become. Not only are they down on numbers of tourists but the staff at the resorts who are major customers of bars like my Brother in laws now have far less money to go out with and so their custom is at a premium.

The feeling of competitiveness between the bars and resaurants in now palpable as they struggle to come to terms with a local downturn the likes of which they havent seen for a long time, if ever. New innovative ways of marketing their hostelries to those punters out there have had to be devised and this is where the natural form of marketing has started to show it's face.

If you mentioned mar comms to these guys they'd look at you like you were mad but dont think for a minute that they are not sophisticated in their approach. They play the same games as major multi nationals such as P&G do when they launch new and possibly unnecessary baby/child products to head off the decline in the birth rate and therfore profit (Kandoo anyone?). They are well versed in PR, Sales promotion, DM and a host of other techniques that we study at marketing school but they use naturally as a way of boosting sales.

I even managed to get in on the act while I was there. Kosta was running a promotion to attract the young English staff to his bar on one of his quiet nights, A free Watermelon Vodka punch night. He showed me the flyer. It was intricate and interesting but not very clear and so I set about producing a club style flyer with dodgy watermelons in various states of intoxication making words like FREE and VODKA and THURSDAY NIGHT leap off the page.

Our head designer would have murdered me if he'd seen it - not very sophisticated! Kosta thought it was ok and we plastered it in all the relevant places. The place was packed. I daren't take credit for this but it did get me a new client! I am now putting together some flyers for the Punch night on Saturday followed by some others to be briefed.

I'd like to say that this is pro bono work for a family member but actually it is going some way to pay off all the free drinks I got on holiday - They're pretty shrewd these Greeks!

Pringoooals football celebrations

Pringoooals football celebrations

Our contribution to helping repressed England Football fans express their true feelings on scoring a goal. Hopefully the England football team will get a chance to use some of 'em!!

The Distant Future. The year 2000

"I write this blog post on my phone while travelling on the train. When I'm done I'll email it to a central data hub which will then distribute my waffle to a goodly number of destinations....my blog, micro blog, social networks, business networks, The Big Shot website. It will also mail it to those lucky blog snorkellers who subscribe to my RSS feeds. Then once it's 'out there' on the Internet the spiders will come looking for the meta tags and links compiling all that search data ready for people to find on google or maybe that other engine. When some one finds the information they need they'll read it and they may the share it with others through a range of specialist social bookmarks and they may contact me directly to offer their opinion on mine."

It amazes me that if you wrote that paragraph just 15 years ago it would have been as an intro to a science fiction novel.

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What will the iPad do for us? - A thought piece written by our guest blogger Mr. Rick Sareen...

Recently 'mobile' has been much talked about as the next big thing. Mobile agencies have sprung up like wild flowers in spring, some have already sold for millions, multiple mobile operating systems have arisen (Apple, Windows Mobile, Android, Blackberry), and the mighty iPhone has been the standard-bearer throughout.

 

This latest platform, like those before it, is seen as some kind of stand alone entity; experts in this platform arise in agencies, large clients will create individual managers for the discipline, reporting in to a digital manager, up through a marketing manager and so on. And this is reflected in the way media is structured, owned and sold.

The segregation is usually by media in other words. Always was. TV dept, DR, Shows and Exhibitions, PR, Print etc.

To this you must add web, search, email, social media, games, apps…. (there will be another one along in a minute). And you can now watch TV and read your newspaper on a (mobile) screen.

Thus all media are in play as they compete for the ad pound that pays the bills and keeps it all afloat.

And now we have a new player on the block. The iPad. Already whole industries are frantically re-evaluating their business model, their marketing strategies and much more besides. Has there ever been an example of an industry (telecoms) collectively waiting to see if the arrival of one product will be a game changer?

I'd like to offer a slightly different way to look at the effect of the iPad by considering the way we use these new devices.

Generally we see the desktop PC as sitting at the top of the pile. The most powerful, the mother ship, the most connected, the biggest, the most expensive. Then comes the laptop, now universally able to connect with wifi, which is becoming ever more pervasive, fast and free.

Mobile was the dividing line at this point. And mobile meant phones. The dongle has now given that capability to laptops. Smartphones, led by the iPhone have stolen people's time away from the wider web and desktops as apps provide more and more functionality and access to specific content e.g. YouTube, BBC, FB. iPhone watchers were also surprised to discover that a significant percentage of users were happy to read books on the small screen. Which brings me to my point…the screen size

The iPad is a bridge that will allow us to see screen size as a new discriminator in marketing. The screen size determines how and sometimes where you use the device. And that means what you do with it. Already many are describing the iPad as a couch device. You can spend the evening with it listening to music, watching video, playing games, using social sites and so on. But it's not (yet) much of an inputting tool for anything beyond reference data or status updates. For that you will move to your larger desktop or laptop. Out and about, in the evenings, in your social world, you are likely to use a (smaller screened) phone.

Already content is configured for the device it will be viewed on. Dot mob sites are not what you look at on your laptop. Equally, www does not play well on traditional, small screen Nokias.

The screen size governs the nature of the communication and how advertising will adapt to these varying sizes; small single line ad units at the bottom of any app are not the place for Big Strategy; it's a signpost that you are best advised to point to your shop or website. On the other hand the web is the place to put thoughtful, commissioned content that draws users to watch and spend time in your brand space.

And if you have produced or are thinking of producing an iphone app, consider this - an average smartphone user will tolerate up to 5 or so full screens of apps. After this it becomes too difficult to manage (folders are coming to iPhone 4 to help with this). So if you want a user to give up some of this most valuable screen space on a device which has such an intimate relationship with its owner, your app had better earn its keep.

Posted via email from oliversrussell's posterous