Digital Stuffing

Today is the day to ‘celebrate’ Earth Hour, or rather mark it. The World Wide Fund for Nature promotes this day as one ” for people to unite and make a bold statement to show they are concerned about climate change and convincing the world’s leaders that it is possible to take positive action”.

As 8.30pm rolls across the globe, there’s a call for lights out, in your home and in the streets. It’s the lead trend in Twitter, starting off in Australia with many talking about what they have turned off and through the day. Flickr is another great source of information, with images being added throughout the day.

Civic Square (Auckland) Concert by candlelight

Image used under CC from Earth Hour Global

The WWF are doing a brilliant job of marketing this, getting well known landmarks to turn off their lights, such as the Sydney Harbour Bridge, the Eiffel Tower and the London Eye. Individually we’re all asked to turn off our own lights. It’s all about getting people thinking about it – it’s easier to do one gesture of turning the lights off for an hour than to not put the TV on standbye, but over time, these behaviours will start to become the norm. They’ve got advertising, national press and blogger outreach, all to raise the awareness. They’ve even got Google, which is one of the most visited web pages to put a link onto the home page,. something they rarely do, linking through to a page of useful resources, including this one about efficient computing

Google Earth Hour (screenshot from site)

So what are you doing this evening? Turning your lights off, turning all the electrical items off and just relying on candlelight? You can even turn off my site if you want…just pull the light switch up in that top right corner

I was at SXSW last week so missed doing a video blog post. I also missed posting about the top ranking video form last week that popped up in my inbox from my friends in the Viral Factory. Now I’m annoyed that I did not see this before as it is absolutely brilliant and I could have had great fun in the US trying to explain this to all the tech geeks (although, they may have seen Babe and know what sheepdogs do!). This is all in aid of Samsung and their LED TV. I’m a big fan of Samsung and would love a Series 9 TV as promoted by this campaign; pragmatism reigned though and I bought a Series 6 a few weeks ago. It’s been a lovely TV to date, all that I expected

That’s the only product video in the list for this week – but you have to admit it’s a good one.

An interesting email came through today, about Idea Bounty, where brands can put forward briefs for creatives to send in their ideas for a reward. The blrub says:

Clients: Get thousands of minds thinking about your brief and only pay for what you use.
Creatives: Get paid for your best ideas with no long term commitment from you.

So brands are basically crowd-sourcing the creative process and probably paying a reduced amount of money then employing an agency. I’m ambivalent about the concept, I can see that for a brand it is a great way to get a huge variety of new ideas and for creatives it means they may be able to work on brands they normally would not because they don’t have the brief. Subverting the agency process can be a good idea, I’d be curious to see if the brand think they miss something or if this a sustainable process. You don’t actually have to produce any materials for the entries to the brioef, it’s just the idea that they are after.

The last bounty was for Levi’s who paid a grand total of $3000 for the idea, which is pretty cheap but fromt he brand but may be more than the creative would normally get, so it can be a win-win for both parties.

The current brief is for Red Bull, which I think is a pretty exciting brand to work on. For a bounty of $5000 you get this challenge:

Red Bull has been available for 21 years in several countries and has always remained the number 1 Energy Drink since its launch. Drinking Red Bull in your favourite club, bar or restaurant symbolises fun, activity, open–mindedness, and an eagerness to meet people. We want you to develop a concept for a new Red Bull drinking ritual that captures all these values.

I’m guessing they want to move away from the vodka-Reb Bull tag and introduce something different.

They’re also announcing the winner of the last brief, which was for BMW cars. Gary Willmott, of creative production company Urbian, won $3,000 for his idea to answer this brief:

BMW – asked for ideas to create a branded BMW activation and mechanic that would entice potential new drivers to opt in for future BMW communication

I’d tell you more, but the press release (which is embargoed until now) has little information on what was actually presented and lots of puff about the concept!

What I think

As a pitch, it was a little short on social media aspects, I got a press release which was short on details and a link to the site. As an idea, I liked it; I’d not seen it before but I can see the advantages for both parties. The proof is in the development and I’d love to see how the previous winning ideas have been executed.

The highest rated product video this week is this one from Vanilla Ice, saying Sorry. On the surface, it’s not a product video at all..but it’s been grabbed from a Virgin Mobile campaign called Right Music Wrongs

Next up is one for Playstation, where “2008 American League MVP, and MLB 09 The Show cover athlete, Dustin Pedroia debates with PlayStaiton (sic)whether he can hit the high-and-inside fastball.” I copied and pasted that as I actually have no idea what it means. It’s nice to see even ‘professionals’ can do typos, considering the ones I have on this blog!

That’s it for the week, pretty quiet overall.

Cadbury announced today that all of their coca beans would be Fairtrade certified, a result of the work done by the Cadbury Cocoa Partnership in Ghana. And to help promote this, they ran a live webcast at Cadburylive to answer your questions.

A very simple site, with just the video and a form to add your name and question, it seemed to work quite well.

Cadbury's Webcast (screenshot from site)

The video above got passed around the office and was well liked. What I like even more about the Pert Plus brand is the tie-in into the website, where the drawing with hairs is carried through very nicely. There’s not really a lot to the site, but what is there is done well.

Pert Gallery (screenshot from site)

The other week I attended an evening networking event connecting bloggers with Not-for-Profit PR people. Most conversations were about connecting the groups directly with their customers/enthusiasts/supporters but some were about using social media for marketing. One such charity that is doing both is the RSPCA.

The RSPCA have recently launched a campaign to remind you about your Animal Welfare Footprint, a deliberate reference to the carbon footprint. Through a combination of online advertising (Lateral) and social media outreach (Immediate Future), they are looking to raise the profile of their new site.

The ads take a look at a common situations to see of you can spot the ‘problem’.

RSPCA Animal Welfare Footprint (Screenshot from Lateral site)

Clicking through takes you to the site, where you can take a quiz to test your own awareness.

RSPCA Animal Welfare Footprint site (screenshot from site)

The quiz gives you tips to reduce your footprint, reminding you of all the areas of your life that potentially has an impact on animals. You can also go to their YouTube channel, their Facebook page, which is a more general group not specific to the campaign. There’s also links out to other campaigns, such as the one about Supporting Chicken Welfare.

What I think

I like all the bits, but I’m a little underwhelmed here. For me, there’s a lack of consistency across the elements, even within the one campaign. I love the creative on the online ads and was disappointed when I hit the site not to find that continued. The site itself is very nice, especially the way you move through the quiz. But overall, I’m finding that there is a disconnect; I think I’d like to be able to easily see if I’m on an RSPCA site without looking for the logo.

This part of the campaign is using social media as a marketing tool, but the RSPCA do foster 2 way, longer term, dialogue through their Facebook page, with over 100k members and are continuously looking for new ways to connect with their supporters. I look forward to seeing how they do.

There’s a few product videos last week. Highest ranking was this from adidas, with David Beckham and Kevin Garnett playing footbasketball

TurboTax has Tay Zonday, of Chocolate Rain fame, pimping out the brand’s Super Status competition as well as his latest song

Nordstrom, a new name to me for online videos, have this one about boyfriend jeans. This video is not your usual type to be highly viewed, so I’m guessing there was an ad buy to promote it.

The Blackberry Bullet is the hero of this ad, taking on Apple, or rather an apple. This is a repost, not from the original brand

The chatter all over Twitter this morning is Skittles, not the game but the Mars sweet/candy. last night, the brand launched their new home page, copying what the agency Modernista has done previously.

In essence, the Skittles site is now (mainly) a frame that pulls in other sites on the web. In what is their most risky move, the home page is a Twitter search. As well as pulling up people’s comments about the new site, it is also being ruthlessly gamed. I’m not sure how long this will last; they’ve obviously thought about this as you go through an age check before you hit the site, I assume to ensure you are old enough to be there is there is going to be swearing etc, UPDATE: two days later, they’re now using Facebook as the homepage, with Twitter relegated back to chatter alone. I suspected they’d do something like that

Skittles on You Tube (screenshot from site)

Skittles on Flickr (screenshot from site)

The rest of the site is more controllable. It shows the Skittle profiles on YouTube and Flickr for their images and videos. They also have a Facebook page for their ‘friends’, where you can join the group. This also has a nice little mixing game, to create a song for your favourite Skittles.

They only seem to have 2 pages which are on the Skittle site – the overall product page with nutritional information (the other product pages are Wikipedia ones) and the contact us page.

What do I think?

It makes a change for an agency (in this case agency.com) to borrow from another agency site instead of from YouTube or Facebook. They’ve done a nice job of the site, as well as what I’m guessing was a very interesting internal discussion with their client, who has to be congratulated for making such a bold step for a consumer brand.

In most places, the idea works; the videos, images and Facebook links are the most useful for a brand. I’m not 100% convinced it works for the products, as the Wikipedia page does not really give much information out about the product (and will now be subject to vandelism). The home page is the most interesting choice. At the moment, with the novelty, Skittles is trending number one for mentions, the word is being gamed and all sorts of stuff is up there. I’d love to understand the normal level of Twitter mentions – is it actually regular enough to justify having the page as your home page? Or, as I think they will, once the immediate buzz has died down they’ll leave the Twitter on the Chatter page and put something else up on the home page?

I like this. As a campaign idea to raise the profile of the brand it is currently working superbly and as a long term idea it has legs. The brand can focus it’s efforts on building portable content and easily feed into the main site, something I think could be a far more effective way to use brand marketing budget. Hopefully the brand will hold tight over the first few days until it settles down and then start really working it.