Marc Ecko, he of ‘Tagging Airforce One‘ fame, has come up with another big noisy stunt.
He’s bought a baseball for 3/4 million dollars. It’s a controversial baseball. It’s the ball that was hit by some dude (Barry Bonds) who got 756 home runs (which is a record). But rumour has it he’s on ‘roids so there’s lots of debate around the legitimacy of the record in the US.
So Ecko has a newsworthy baseball. And in his words he’s going to “democratize the ball”. Basically visitors to http://www.vote756.com can vote for what they want to happen to the ball.
Stick it in a museum
Stick it in a museum with an asterisk on it
Or blast it into space
So far 1.5m votes have been cast. And lots and lots of people are talking about it, online, in the press, on TV, and all the other places that people talk about sports (and marketing and culture).
“He’s stupid. He’s an idiot,” Bonds said. “He spent $750,000 on the ball and that’s what he’s doing with it? What he’s doing is stupid.”
And they go on to say:
Bonds’ issue with Ecko was not that one of the three choices on the 756-ball ballot is sending it to Cooperstown branded with an asterisk, an implication that his record is tainted by alleged steroid use. Bonds merely suggested the guy could have found a better use for three-quarters of a million large.
I’m not so sure. As the guys over on the Fallon Planning Blog rightly point out, $750,000 don’t get you all that much coverage in the US. And the website looks like it costs peanuts.
Based on the number of votes cast, let alone the PR impressions that he’s had across the US (and the wider world). That ball wasn’t such a stupid investment after all… (But as Igor just pointed out to me Mr Ecko could have tried to do something actually good with the money like cure AIDS, which is true also…)
I was really getting on well with this Blogger Outreach Code of Ethics – Take 1 from Ogilvy’s 360 Digital Influence Blog. It seems to have some decent principles that make sense whether I’m wearing a blogger hat or a marketing hat (which is nice). They’re asking for comments and are going to refine the thing (and, by the sounds of it, share the refined version at the end) which is great. But then I got to this bit at the bottom:
While you don’t need to use your name in commenting, please identify yourself as a blogger and/or as an agency representative. Also, feel free to repost the current draft of the Code of Ethics on your own blog and solicit feedback from your readers (just give us a link back so we can follow the conversation too!). If you have any questions, or want to share an opinion privately, please feel free to contact me at kaitlyn.wilkins@ogilvypr.com and Alison Byrne Fields at alison.byrnefields@ogilvypr.com
For some reason it just made me feel a bit icky. I’m not really sure why. I just got a massive whiff of PR-ism. It’s like they’re trying to make sure that feedback and opinion can be ‘looked after’ in the correct way. What they’re asking for is totally fair and reasonable and I’m sure I shouldn’t have a problem with it at all.
Does anyone else get where I’m coming from? Or am I over-reading again? Or maybe I could just never openly like anything that was posted on a blog called ‘360 degree digital influence blog’ ;-)
It’s interesting that people are using YouTube as a way of sharing audio. Obviously it’s not designed as an audio sharing site, but it does the job pretty well.
I’m guessing that people are using it this way because:
1. YouTube has a bigger audience than most of the audio sharing sites
2. People know how to upload to YouTube
3. The embedding on YouTube is very very simple (and understood)
But I think generally it’s about familiarity and top-of-mind-ness.
Here’s an example of using YouTube to share audio.
Not really very exciting right?
All it takes is a tiny bit of imagination and a teeny bit of video (on a loop) and all of a sudden your audio enters a whole new freaky dimension…
It follows on from the really nice Cravendale ads that are on TV. You can see them on YouTube here. I’ve always liked them, but this is a rare thing. An online extension that really does extend and build on the creative and allows people to get involved.
It steers clear of lots of the usual traps that people might fall into. And does a lot of things amazingly well:
It’s completely intuitive.
Rather than starting from a point of deep interaction it gets people involved at a very simple level. Put in your name and start moving about. Easy.
Then you can get deeper and deeper into the world (if you fancy it). Get friends in. Edit multiple clips. Etc.
The attention to detail is phenomenal.
The routes through the different interaction paths are nice.
A piece of work I’m genuinely envious of. Nice one. I’m sure it’ll be picking up the odd award or two…
I clicked on a banner today. I probably click on 2/3 a month. I’ve no idea if this is low or high or average. I’ve never seen any stats about the number of banners that the average person clicks on. Has anyone else?
Anyway, I digress.
Here’s the ad I clicked on.
It’s probably not that hard to guess why I clicked on it: the promise of 4 free lagers. Now I guessed I’d have to submit some details or something so that I could get a coupon on suchlike. I was prepared for that.
I wasn’t prepared for this:
A user generated competition where I can upload cool vidz of my mates mucking about. Woo hoo! UGC at it’s very lamest. AND NO FREE LAGER! No mention of free lager. Not even a ‘sorry all the free lager is gone’. Just nothing.
That made me a bit cross. It’s the kind of thing that gives online advertising a bad name ;-)
I’ve got lots of thoughts about FaceBook, some positive some negative. And I was trying to come up with a way to encapsulate it all. I sort of think I have, but there might be some holes in my analogy…
For me, this is FaceBook:
It’s like one of those ‘integrated midi systems’. Basically it’s an all-in-one music system. Lots of features and easy to use straight out of the box. The sound quality might be a bit rubbish and if it goes wrong you have to bin the whole lot. Plus options to extend it or customise it are limited (there’s no way to open the box, but you could put stickers on it or use input jacks on the back).
Doing something similar to facebook by glueing together lots of Web 2.0 type apps. E.g. a WordPress Blog with Last.fm, Flickr, Twitter, del.icio.us, etc. Is much more like putting together a hi-fi separates system.
Is much harder to get up and running. It takes much longer to plan your system. Sometimes it’ll work great, other times it won’t. And you might need to get help from a geek / expert to get the most out of it. But when it works it’ll be fantastic, and you can swap bits in and out to make sure its future-proof. And you can tinker with it to your heart’s content.
But separates are more geeky. And people do get obsessive. And in hi-fi land, just like web land, some people enjoy the putting together of the system almost more than they enjoy playing it.
Comparing FaceBook to a midi hi-fi is not intended as a slur. It is like a very good midi hi-fi. And just as midi systems are a good way for people to start enjoying music perhaps FaceBook has a similar role…
Motorola just did a very nice ‘sponsorship’ of http://explore.twitter.com – the tone of it, the way it’s been done and a genuine feeling of connection between the sponsor and sponsoree. And it feels like something that could legitimately be ‘in beta’ for a while.
It’s basically Twitter Labs, a place where Twitter experiments get posted. Especially cool is Twitter Blocks. Nice.
[Please note: none of the brands mentioned here have ever done anything like this (as far as I know), it’s a purely fictional story of an imagined future from my slightly fuddled brain]
Imagine if last night everyone who worked in the wider world of marketing all drank from the 2.0 Kool-Aid. We’d all be fucked and the world would be more rubbish…
What we used to call ‘ad breaks’ would become a bunch of signposts driving us to somewhere where we can ‘get involved’, ‘have our say’, ‘tell someone what new chocco-weety-bix should be shaped like’, ‘find out how to get to NappyStock this Saturday’ or ‘create a new ad’ (or being as ads don’t exist any more the call to action would have to be something like: ‘create our next participatory engagement experience’).
Then after the ‘call to participation break’ we’d get to watch lots of (interactively enabled) branded content. Perhaps an episode of NotLost (TomTom’s never ending drama about a bunch of people who are going somewhere).
Or ‘My House Is Cleaner Than Yours’ a new self-help/gameshow hybrid where people compete to make their house the most sanitary, this week the Cillit Bangers from Dagenham vs the Mr Sheenies from Wakefield.
Alternatively ditch the TV as literally hundreds of other people have done over the last year or two.
TV off, what now? Xbox game? Tomb Raider VI – Lara in search of cheaper car insurance (well the game was only £4.99, what do you expect!). It’s a quest that’s jam packed with ‘real world stuff’. Billboards full of user generated content (Tomb Raider V had advertising billboards, but that’s just not ‘realistic’ anymore). And products are neatly integrated into the gameplay (use Pantene’s 2-in-1 shampoo and conditioner to get Lara in-and-out of the shower and back to her mission in double quick time). But unfortunately you get stuck at the first doorway, Sheilas’ Wheels have trapped Lara in a conversation about some new no-claims bonus for adventurous chicks. You’ve got no time to get into this now it’s bedtime, and besides you’re a man playing a woman in the game, so unless you want in-game car insurance for your female character… Oh hell, it’s all a bit confusing.
You shut down the Xbox, vowing not to visit the gate of Sheila ever again.
It’s not the first time today that you’ve been tricked into a ‘dialogue’, in the good old days you used to have to deal with thousands of marketing messages a day. But that was fine. You’d learned how to filter those out: iPod + staring into the middle distance seemed to do the job. But now everyone wants to have a bloody conversation. You haven’t even got time to talk to your friends let alone your toothpaste (which you didn’t really choose anyway, you only bought it because it was on 3-for-2 at Boots).
You manage to brush your teeth without getting into a discussion with aforementioned toothpaste and climb into bed. But not before setting your ‘Alpen wakey-wakey-yodel alarm’ on your mobile.
Sorry I got a bit carried away with my little 2.0 world, and I could go on (for far too long). I just wanted to hint at a vision of a Marketing 2.0 future that’s more depressing and more worrying than what we’re living right now. I often think about it when I see brands out there doing wholly inappropriate things like trying to engage in conversations that no-one wants to be part of, creating nuggets of branded utility that solve fictional non-problems, and so on…
The problem is that all of this can be justified using one of the most compelling of 2.0isms – the ‘always in beta’ mantra. Not only is it massively compelling (and commendable) as a principle it’s also incredibly dangerous when put in the hands of evil.
Used in the wrong way:
It basically means that you can never really be wrong.
It means that you can get away with nothing ever being properly finished. In the olden days people would just ‘fess up and admit that they’d not had time to do the work, deadlines would get pushed and the work would get done and go out a bit later.
It means that you can trick clients into doing bad stuff. “Oh go on… We’ll just do it as a test, if it works we can build on it. If not we can always sweep it under the carpet…”. I’ve alredy sat in some meetings where it feels like people are practically calling each other ‘chicken’ for not doing something preposterous in the name of beta.
I can just imagine smart kids all around the world telling their teachers: “No miss, I really have done my homework, it’s in beta…”
Of course I really love most of the principles of Marketing 2.0, I just wanted to make the point that with much power comes much responsibility. Oh, and it might not be the solution for everything.
