Art for good - New York artist asks Londoners how they feel about street crime
June 26, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Profero have teamed up with New York urban artist Paul Notzold to create two events for Channel 4’s Disarming Britain season. The events will show Paul’s work projected onto the side of buildings around London showing images relating to street crime accompanied by questions such as “How can we get weapons off our streets?” encouraging the public’s response. The public are invited to text in their answers which are displayed in real-time alongside the image. The events will be held in Brick Lane on 26th June and Shepherd’s Bush on 27th June between 9:30pm and 11:00pm For more information on Channel 4’s Disarming Britain week click here.
The Orange balloon race
June 9, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Something good from Iain Tait and the guys at Poke, a balloon race across the internet ad the furthest one wins a prize. Site owners can sign up at playballoonacy.com and register their site to be part of the fun (see balloon in the corner of this site). The one that goes the furthest in 7 days wins a £20,000 VIP trip to Ibiza for you and 7 friends. I was planning to have a year off from Ibiza this year, but couldn’t resist taking part.
Brand tags
May 26, 2008 | 1 Comment
Noah Brier writes one of the best blogs around and has developed an experiment called Brand Tags. The interface displays a brand logo and asks users to insert the first word or phrase associated with that brand. Noah has included a list of all the brands added to date on the site, and if you click on a particular brand, you can see a tag cloud of all the words entered surrounding that brand. To date over 700,000 tags have been added. Great work Noah, I know this is keeping you really busy so hang in there!
Rockstar Games takes product placement through to purchase
March 31, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Rockstar Games (Grand Theft Auto 4) is allowing players to link through to Amazon and purchase each track they hear within the game. The mechanism is built into the game’s mobile phone system and as the character drives around listening to the radio, they can bookmark a song by dialing the number ZIT-555-0100 to get sent a text message back with the artist and track details. Via PSFK
BBC Worldwide sees both sides of the story
March 31, 2008 | Leave a Comment
The majority of great advertising campaigns are often conceived from simple ideas, and BBDO New York have created a really great but simple campaign for the BBC Worldwide service. The campaign brings together both inspiring creative messaging and works because of the great media placements. The message “Show both sides of the story” is placed on corner billboards, showing a different take on the same situation.
Do brands feel my love?
March 30, 2008 | 4 Comments
Recently I have been pondering how brands treat their consumers and measure their own successes given that it is now harder than ever for a brands to really command any brand loyalty. It is a thought that I have been discussing in person with some of my fellow likeminded Twitterers (Joseph Jaffe, John Dodds, Mark McGuinness to name a few), as although of course I would love to think of myself as the font of all knowledge, I am interested to hear other peoples views on this subject. Kevin Roberts describes consumers showing their loyalty to a brand in Lovemarks, where a consumer will happily buy a product because they love the brand. However what I would like to know is, are any brands starting to look at a consumers Lovemark when it is not associated back to a sale?
So to put it into context here is an example. If I had a choice I would prefer not to drink Becks beer. I find it too bitter and I don’t really like the taste so in that respect Becks would not acknowledge me as a consumer. However, Becks created Becks Fusions a really great series of events covering music and the arts. This series enabled me to see The Chemical Brothers (i’m a big fan) play a gig in Trafalgar Square. My feelings for the brand in creating these experiences although I never had any real negative thoughts towards it, changed. The brand speaks to me in my areas of interest and at my level, therefore my feelings for the brand are very strong and I will happliy place my Lovemark against it for creating these rewarding experiences for me. Although Becks do not see my love within their sales, they will see it through secondary sources for example; I excitedly shared my feelings and recruited new lovers to the Becks brand by telling a lot of people within my network (Becks audience) about the great experience. I purchased Becks at the events and didn’t mind drinking it as they had already won me over. I will always be on the look out for future events that Becks lay on and will undoubtedly want to be a part of it and show Becks how I love them so. I am now openly endorsing them within my own blog.
So what do I mean to Becks? I would hazard a guess at `bugger all’ since I probably wouldn’t feature within their marketing presentations showing sales going up on a colorful bar chart, but should this be the case? Do brands quantify their success based purely on direct sales or, do they actually look at their Net Promoter Score to see who is recommending the brand? Are they reading what is being said about them amongst consumers?
As we start to see more and more brands fighting to win us over by entering into new territory and offering us experiences as a way of saying “thank you”, is the outcome of these experiences being measured and fed back into the organisations long term objectives? I have given this topic much thought and would really love to hear your views so over to you. Photo
Cadbury follow Gorilla with vanilla
March 30, 2008 | 1 Comment
It was never going to be easy was it? Everyone has been waiting for Cadbury to launch their follow up to their drumming Gorilla but after seeing it I can’t help but think….Vanilla.
The ad features a great song (Queen), but the ad left me feeling a little flat and I can’t help but think the song is the hero rather than the creative thinking or even the product. Fallon were always going to have a difficult time following up the Gorilla ad which was a brilliant execution but Trucks didn’t make me smile and I didn’t feel rewarded but maybe I wouldn’t have felt like this if my expectations hadn’t been so high?
Asics dress up drains as ads
March 30, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Asics in Sao Paulo are currently running a campaign called Face the Streets. The campaign decorates Sao Paulo’s drains and turns them into ads featuring the hero of the show itself.
Graffitti artist hacks into Digital Billboards
March 28, 2008 | Leave a Comment
18 year old graffiti artist Skullphone has successfully hacked into 10 of Clear Channel’s digital billboards in LA and replaced the advertising with his trademark skullphone imagery. I want to hire him. Via: Supertouch
Penguin gives you an adventure telling stories
March 20, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Yesterday afternoon the rather good brand marketer who actually gets it Jeremy Ettinghausen alerted me to the fact that Penguin were launching a new site called We tell stories. The site shows a series of six stories, one launched each week that includes an interactive layer in the form of Google Maps. The user follows the authors journey through Google Maps, seeing the places referred to in the stories themselves. That in itself is a very nice campaign. If you are fairly observant, you will see a hidden code. I am not going to give anything away but the journey it takes you on completely turns it from a nice campaign, to a “wow” campaign that I just loved. Some of you I know are reading from outside London so if you want to know how it ends up, send me a message and I will share with you. The site was developed by Six to Start and if the first adventure is anything to go by, keep checking in every week for the other five installments.
