Digital Stuffing

Vodafone have been doing some interesting things with their sponsorship of the McLaren F1 team and I really like the latest manifestation of their marketing. It’s a simple idea, executed well.

To promote the launch of their mobile broadband in the Netherlands, they’ve conceived a race between the dongle download speed and Lewis Hamilton in a F1 car (from 2 years ago). they’re looking for 28,800 people to join in and connect with the Vodafone vs Hamilton Facebook app. At an average of 10kb per profile picture, they’ll attempt to download all of the images quicker than the car can race 2.7km. Now obviously, the distances and numbers have been calculated so that I’m pretty sure the download will win, but it’s certainly a great idea to promote the speed of the new service.

They have a cool visualisation of all the profile pics, with a 3D rotating car made up of the pictures and it’s incentivised, at least for Dutch members, with prizes of computer and free Mobile broadband service. (Although personally, I think I’d rather attend the race!)

• It’s a great idea perfectly expressing speed and leveraging the sponsorship
• Although it’s a Dutch promotion, it’s open to anyone to contribute to the race, so having a wider branding reach than just the new product launch. Vodafone have mobile broadband in many countries, so it works just as well for them
• There’s a risk if they don’t reach the numbers required. As of now, they have 4.7k participants, only 16% of the required and it’s 11 days to go. I’m sure they’re promoting through social ads and in-market collateral, as well as the auto-posts to Facebook Wall. The latter is a minor annoyance, as they are posting without informing specifically what they will say

I like what we did here. I’d have loved to have played games whilst out at sea, but couldn’t get on the shoot

This is the new Sony Ad for their 3dTV, the obligatory football ad. I’d love to know if it actually works if the ad works in 3D if you have the glassesm meanwhile it just gives me a headache. There’s going to be up to 25 matches from the World Cup broadcast in 3d this year and Sony are going to be busy providing venues for you to watch the games, according to their Facebook page. They’re definitely going for the early adopters…the glasses themselves cost £99

As far as I can see, there’s no other digital marketing around the product, just the TV ad and mentions on the Facebook page, plus content promotion on the main site, although with a distinct lack of prices. Looks like they’ll be available just in time for the football though.

Make something fun, make a game of it and more people will do it. No surprises there then. What is a surprise is that this video and The Fun Theory (the site is in Swedish) is done by Volkswagen

Definitely non-typical car marketing, but I love it. The sense of whimsey surrounding the activities is great; a brand that shows it can have fun is one I’m far more likely to interact with

Police, the fashion house rather than the force or the band, are looking for “a new face for the next international advertising campaign 2010!” You can submit your entry to the Be Younique contest up until Aug 30th and every 2 weeks, a new set of finalists will be chosen, with the winner being chosen from the 60 finalists in early September. The first stages use user voting to determine the winners, the winner is chosen by a panel.

The Viral Factory have produced a video are helping to promote this contest,; it’s definitely a unique video, mildly amusing I’m guessing mainly men were involved in the creative process, as it definitely seems to be focused on a particular male challenge. The video was produced by 1861United,Italy.

It’s shown on the front of the site as well. However, I really wish they wouldn’t do this – calling something viral when it’s not really racked up the views (around 4k at the moment) is a little flase advertising.

Be Younique

I’ve finally caught up with the Prototype Experience, a promo for a new console game that has been exciting so many marketers on the blogs. It looks like a great game, one I’ll end up buying (and as usual playing really, really, badly) so it worked for me as a enticement to purchase.

But I was sold on the gameplay description and the trailers, not the actual experiential elements. They’re a little less successful in my case, but I’ve seen they are definitely catching the eye of many.

The experience is a variation on uploading your photos and appearing as part of the trailer/video. The difference here is that you don”t choose which photos to upload but that it grabs them from Facebook. To take part, you have to link your Facebook profile to the game page, using Facebook Connect, a variation on OAuth where you don’t have to give out your password to anyone.

Prototype Login (screenshot from site)

It then runs a trailer for the game, pulling your photos in from the service and interspersing them throughout the action. they also include all your details, the personal information. As I only have 1 image on Facebook, I thought they wouldn’t have much luck but what it does it goes and trawls your connection and brings in their photos as well. You can’t share the video or embed it anywhere as far as I can see, so I think they’re mainly avoiding the copyright and privacy issues that this ‘borrowing’ of images and use of personal details entails, but I was surprised that the system would do this.

After watching the personalised trailer, you get to answer some questions to win a game copy and an XBox360 and then you’re then asked to spread the word, using your choice of network – Facebook or Twitter. This seems to be a requirement of the competition entry, but as I can’t see any terms and conditions, I’m not sure

Prototype Spreadability (screenshot from site)

This is the second campaign I’ve seen this week that has built in the ability to autopost to your status stream, so it’s looking like it’s this quarter’s hot trend. It’s a savvy call to action, although if too many in your network do it, I can see it not quite having the desired impact. Making it compulsary is problematic; the experience should be good enough to get people to want to share it, not making them do it because you don’t trust your stuff is good enough for sharing.

Elsewhere on the site, you can get a story overivew, see some trailers and get some great artworks to download. Most importantly, you can pre-order, but only from specific retailers (Smartoys which is French, fnac, Game Mania, both Belgium.Dutch). So despite being able to see the site in English and it being big in English blogs, you can’t actually by in the UK. The site has been done in Belgium by Sponge and 1MD, so it looks like it is for that market only, although there’s no indication until you’re deep into that it does not apply to you, but again, no T&Cs so I’m not sure if I can enter or not.

Prototype Scene (screenshot from site)

I like poetry, or at least some poetry. I prefer short stuff, nothing too difficult; I dip in and out of the various anthologies I have, working through my favourites. At the moment, I’m loving the promos the BBC are running for their Poetry season. They continue the tradition of bring poetry to all, mainstream focused and just good fun. As well as the TV proms, they’ve also put together some specific web one.

First, we have Jerusalem by William Blake, turned into the strange quotes from a footballer. Although I’m not sure you’d have all these people watching a press conference, the strangeness definitely fits.

We’ve also got The King Blues, quoting Byron, a moment of stillness and contemplation in the midst of a rock gig. (you can also find the video on their MySpace)

As well as the two above, the BBC YouTube channel has a whole bunch of interviews with various celebrities, talking about how poetry has influenced them.

On the BBC site, you can vote for your favourite poet (my vote went to Yeats), find out about the many programmes they are doing on the subject or the live events. According to the email I received, there’s also supposed to be a widget I can embed, but that seems to have failed to arrive at the moment.

What I think

The email pitch was nicely done, polite, all the information required, from someone I’d previously met. Definitely not a mass emailing there. The videos are lovely, then again it’s the BBC, so you’d expect that.

The site itself acts as a hub to all the other content that is being offered, an information hub. At the moment, the only interactivity is the voting. I’ll take a look at the promised widget when it arrives. A solid site, nothing spectacular, but supporting the season well.

With all the posts I write about Samsung I think it’s time I got to play with one of their gadgets! But the different bits of the company keep producing great stuff for online marketing.

Here’s another one from the phone division for their new I8910 HD phone, a camera trick. I’ll have to admit, if I hadn’t been in a discussion with someone recently about something very similar it would have taken me time to guess what the trick was. What do you think it is?

They’re going to release a ‘making of’ video in a few weeks, explaining it. Meantime, join in the conjecture about how they did this.

The first challenge this week is to get though the multitude of Susan Boyle videos, of which there are a lot. She’s definitely hit the big time in terms of online (and offline) attention – she totally owns YouTube this week.

Highest ranked product video is this one from Patrick Doyle, President of Domino’s USA doing damage control after a video was uploaded of two employees adulterating pizzas. They’ve also launched a Domino’s Twitter feed which seems to be doing a good job of being conversational

Another fast food brand and another controversy, this time Burger King upsetting Mexico with its ad for the Texican Burger. Apparetnly, it’s because they are using the flag incorrectly; they’re replacing the campaign, used in Spain and the UK, as soon as is ‘commercially possible’.

Finally, the Microsoft PC ads are currently making enough of a stir to have a parody made, always the sign of an ad that has hit home one way or another. Here’s Homeless Frank trying to find himself a laptop for under $1000, from Landline TV

Here’s yet another ‘flashmob dancing’ video, this time from the Centraal Station in Antwerp, in what looks like an ad for a TV show to find a Maria (I’m guessing for the stage musical, similar to what happened in the UK).

Yes, it’s another one, they’re becoming unoriginal, but for some reason, I still like them, as do many of the commenters on the video People get surprised and have some fun watching them, even when it seems that almost all the people in the place are there for the dancing – the cameras seemed to have to look hard for spectators in this one.

However, where’s the follow up, where’s the website. I’m not sure this asset is working as hard as it could be to let people know what it is for and when the TV show is without some online content to support it.