Tag: marketing

Plundering UGC Cash, Who’s In?

I’ve just been flicking through New Media Age. And after my earlier comment about User Generated Content, I was dismayed to see how many column inches have been given over to terrible UGC ideas – but with MASSIVE cash prizes. I did a quick count, and I reckon that this week there’s about £20k up for grabs. Not to mention holidays, TVs, etc. I reckon there’s probably cars and things out there too if I were to go and look. (Doritos just put up $50,000 in cash for their ‘Crash the Superbowl Promotion‘)

Suddenly a really evil plot hatched in my brain…

  • Most entries to those things are not very good – I know from bitter experience of being on the receiving end.
  • Most of them don’t get that many entries
  • If you were good at writing, making short films, photography, etc. it wouldn’t be that difficult to win a lot of the contests that exist. They’re all being judged by marketing departments after all. And we all know what clients want to hear (or at least we’ve got a reasonable idea).

Anyone fancy forming a loose ‘A-Team’ (or a rubbishy B-Team) of creative types with a single-minded ambition of seeing just how much we can extract from UGC campaigns? I’ve got a fantasy of releasing a story to the marketing press with a bunch of people swimming in a pool of ill-gotten cash?

Anyone up for it?

I Got My First Haters…

I knew it would happen someday. It was only a matter of time. But I’ve got my first haters!

Sam and Highly Miffed are upset about the post and subsequent comments around on the Youth Marketing conference that I didn’t like. See their comments here.

A couple of highlights:

Clearly you’re all sad little creatives who have no alternative outlet for your ‘talent’!!!

And:

If you guys were actual ‘conference design’ critics, your opinions may hold some weight. But since you are all in fact, what is it The Lounge call thamselves?…oh – ‘experiental marketing agencies’, the fact you even took the time to ‘diss’ a competitor is so laughable.

I’m sort of happy in a perverse way. It was all a bit ‘nice’ round here ;-)

Semacode Update

Blogs are great. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. I asked a question about semacodes on websites. Went to bed. Then I woke up and someone’s left me a great answer. It’s like a big huge collective brain that goes on thinking throughout the night ;-)

Anyway, thanks Roger for some great thoughts. In fact if this is a topic that interests you, you should head over to his blog ‘All About Mobile Life‘ – which incidentally is QR code enabled ;-)

He makes a great point about QR Codes being used like RSS feeds. You can just snap a picture of the code on a site and boom, you’ve got a subscription to the site on your phone. Or a ‘takaway’ version of the site. Or simply a bookmark. So yes, I can see the point of codes on websites now.

I guess I’m just a bit behind in my cross-device behaviour at the moment.

And James from Collaborate Marketing has chimed in with:

The codes are also used for promotional offers – like coupons. So maybe Nike are saying – take this along to a store or some other Nike event. Also, in Japan the phones have special readers to take the information from screens, posters or instore, which we don’t have yet. I understand Nokia are testing them on the N-series.

Also a very valid use for these codes.

I guess in both examples it’s about transportability. In the ‘olden days’ people would have printed stuff out, now your mobile is easier to carry about than piles of paper (for some of us).

CMOs on Digital and Traditional

CMOFollowing the BBH Lynx win post I thought this research into the attitude of CMOs(commissioned by Sapient) reported some interesting stuff. LIke the fact that 68% of CMOs prefer to work with multiple agencies, to derive the benefits of specialisation, and that 49% of survey respondents believe that traditional advertising firms have difficulty thinking beyond traditional print and TV media models. But then again it was commissioned by a digital agency ;-)

via: Fallon Planning Blog: The CMOs Weigh In

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My Mini Adventure

I sort of wrote myself an unwritten rule that I wouldn’t blog this.

But when I did a search for Mini Adventure London and nothing came up, I felt a bit bad. Mini have obviously spent a lot of money on an awesome piece of experiential marketing. Actually I’m not sure it is. It was an awesome experience. But I’m not sure how good the marketing actually is, given that I couldn’t find any mention of it online. And I reckon they can only have managed to give about 100 or so people the experience per day.

I’m not going to give the whole game away as I’m sure that they’re touring this experience. If you see a bunch of new Minis that look like shrunken black cabs you should try to get a go.

Basically a guy asked us if we wanted to go on a Mini Adventure. We were on lunch break and said yes. We got taken on a test-drive around East London showing off all the features of the new Mini, in a fun way, lots of local history, chit chat, etc. Then at the end there was a section of freaky performance art/drama that culminated in a big surprise. I shall say no more… For now…

It was fun though. And I did quite like the car. Even if the dashboard did look a bit Noddy.

Aaaargh!

Ms DeweyCould this be the most pointless thing ever? Probably not. But it’s a massive folly of some description.
Someone has spent a whole heap of money creating a video based ‘human face’ to a search engine. Type in your search and Ms Dewey makes pointless and irrelevant quips. Then you get a badly presented list of search returns.

It’s got to be a marketing campaign for something. No one else would waste money in such a stupid fashion ;-)

Netflix Prize

This must be one of the most blogged about stories of the last week. But I’m going to do it anyway because I think it’s really interesting and it spans the worlds of geekery and marketing perfectly…

Netflix are offering $1,000,000 to someone who can come up with a way of improving their recommendations engine. All you have to do is increase the accuracy of their recommendations engine by 10%…

A really smart, noisy promotion. Not sure how it works in terms of driving sign-ups, but in terms of making Netflix a very very talked about (and innovative) brand it works a treat. I was thinking to myself what a Marketing 2.0 type idea it was.

But, thanks to the collective smarts of the blogosphere I’ve changed my mind a bit. As pointed out on the O’Reilly Radar, if they’d just opened up their API in the first place so that people could do interesting stuff with it, the million bucks could probably have been saved and they might already have the answer they’re looking for.

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When good ads go bad…

I like the new advert for 3. The one for free Email and IM on your phone. If you’ve not seen it, here it is:

I was really really disappointed when I opened up my weekly Zoo magazine (it’s a work thing, honest) to see this press version of the ad. Actually I wasn’t disappointed by the advert itself, the press ad is fine. See below:

What made me almost spew was the thing they’d stuck over the top. A postcard. A postcard with stickers on it where you can ‘create your own message’. A bit of a horrible thing in it’s own right. Pointless and fiddly. And just another thing to drop on the newsagent’s floor.

I’m guessing that the Zoo audience is at the younger end of 3’s target. So of course the natural content for this postcard is skateboarding!?! I mean what else could it be? (Apart from breakin’ of course).

Here’s the front:

Here’s the back (the stickers are the words on the left):

Completely at odds with the rest of the creative. And ‘Grind to Email’, what on earth is that about? Next they’ll be asking us to “Ollie down to your local 3 store now”, or “Nosebone over to three.co.uk”.

Looks like someone’s been to the Youth Marketing conference I blogged a while ago ;-)

I don’t really enjoy negative blogging. But sometimes I can’t help myself. Especially when I see something nice get reduced to something horrible.

Youth

Ooooh oooh yes please. I’d love to know how to grab youth attention using these new fangled new media channels and technologies. Sounds exciting.

Damn! I should have guessed, breakdancing kids on mobile phones. The answer was staring me straight in the face all along. These photos are from a marketing pack I’ve just received for a conference.

Anyone know where I can get the ‘urban youth cliche clipart vol 7 cd’? I’m searching for a bmx-ing blackberry user and a skater grinding a PSP.

(If you fancy going to the conference, it might be ‘wicked’, it’s at: www.youthperspective.com)

Dell Blog

I’m a bit behind on this one but Dell have started a corporate blog. It’s getting very mixed coverage:

Looking at it I think they’ve got a lot of fundamentals right. They’re not moderating too hard, they’re letting real stuff through. They’re looking at links in and links out. They’re responding to comments. And fair play to them, there’s a huge volume of stuff to deal with.

It mustn’t be easy for someone like Dell with customer service issues to stick their head out of the trench. So good luck to ’em I say.

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