Digital Stuffing

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 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.

The NMA this week has a special about social media – so I’d thought I’d comment on some of the comments. They’d spoken to some of the heads of the top digital media agencies to get their opinions.

I really ought to set the scene – this is an advertising journal talking to people who buy advertising space for a living. Everything they see is through a lens of paid media, something that doesn’t always sit well alongside the social aspects of the online world. I came to this business from a social media perspective, how tools and sites can be used to foster a dialogue between customers and brands, so my point of view probably starts off the opposite from many of the quoted people. (Update...given that, as Stefan says in the comment, I do agree with some of them. I should really write these in 1 session instead of over the day!) Given that context, here’s my favourite bits and my response.

the best social media campaigns are ones which add something to the user experience and therefore leave people with a positive brand association….we take it on a campaign-by-campaign basis. Josh Krichefski, BLM Quantum

Entirely agree that a paid media campaign should focus on adding to the user experience, to give something back. But treating them on a campaign-by campaign basis can backfire, if people think they are being used again and again without the chance to feed something back to the brand. Listening is as important, if not more so, than broadcasting.

People are figuring out that social media isnt’ just a media buy… Andrew Walmsley, i-level

People who are not in the advertising space figured that out a long time ago. Social media for them is more about the social site, the media (especially the paid stuff) is secondary at best, downright annoying at worst. A brand may do better participating in the social side than trying to dominate the media.

There’s a genuine lack of understanding from clients as they don’t use the sites themselves. Robin O’Neill, GroupM

Social networks are in the same place the web was in the late 90′s/early 00′s. Many brands could not work out why they should be on the web as the people holding the budgets did not use the web. we’ve got the same now with social networks and will have the same with whatever comes next. It’s a long hard slog to get that understanding.

…two uses of social media: generating huge numbers of impressions through display and as part of a campaign, which is the exciting part. Stefan Bardega, Director of Digital, MediaCom

The former can be useful – lots of brand measurement figures improve when online advertising is in the mix of a campaign. Providing some utility, some piece of fun, something else to do can have a far bigger effect (and be more fun to create!)

Find the right insight and develop the right idea, then look at how to implement it. If it happens to require social media, then great. We don’t want to a return to the old online obsession of using a medium just for the sake of it. Keven Murphy, Zed Media

As someone who has spent far too much time on the receiving end of being pitched the latest agency obsession, amen to this (just look at the current lust for Twitter). You have to have the right idea, audience AND brand culture to use social media effectively.

The other articles are really just about social networks – Facebook, Bebo and mySpace, which are only a subset of the social media out there. But I guess you can only mention so much in a dead tree format.

(As an aside, I wonder how many of the people mentioned do ego searches?)

I quite like this ad, having seen the real Bellagio fountains – but most importantly because it looks such a fun ad to make, as the behind the scenes video shows. I want a coffee bean shooter NOW!!!!!

The add is by McCann Erickson London, for the UK market. They seem to have forgotten the digital component, as the Nescafe site has no reference to the campaign. The YouTube channel is there, but I’m not expecting anything else to appear on it, it’s a one off. And, most annoyingly, searching for what I would think would be a pretty obvious search term ‘Nescafe Beans’ (the name of the YouTube account) just presents me with loads of ‘money off vouchers’ sites, not even a paid search ad to take me there, although searching for the More Beans, More Taste (the ‘official name’) does bring up the video

Hamleys (screenshot from site)

Databases, they can cause all sorts of problems. Somewhere, in the depth’s of Hamleys listing, someone has missed a field!

Alfa have produced an interesting game to support the launch of their new car, the Alfa Mito, it’s the Mito Rally

Alfa Mito. Screenshot from site

The game is spread across 10 sites, such as TopGear, Maxim and MSN. Each site basically has the same flash game, with different stages of a racing game. You have to compete in all 10 stages to be in with a chance of winning one of the prizes – a Wii, iPod Touch and IPod Nano each week and a Alfa Mito for the overall winner of the 9 week contest.

Lovely idea here, taking the common flash racing game idea and adding a great media spin to it – I’m guessing there’s all the placements are ‘added value’ instead of straight media buys. At each point, there are reminders to test drive the car, find a dealer or get more information, pushing the idea that you have to get out and drive the car.

When you go to play the game, you get offered the chance to login/create an account – or just play as guest. This reduces the barrier so that you can play before you commit to giving away your information. The race itself is pretty straighforward, each version just having a different background. I was a little disappointed with the game itself, there was no real crashes or bangs when I drove into things! But the concept and general execution is very good.

Alfa Mito Race - Screenshot from site

Watch the above ad, then go take a look at the Computer Tan site. Have you done, have you seen the brilliant products they’re offering and did you take up their free offer? I so want the mobile version.

I hope you weren’t taken in, that you know that the whole product is a complete hoax? It’s actually part of a campaign from SKCin, the Karen Clifford Skin Cancer Charity.

Their aim is to raise the profile of skin cancer in the country, a disease that kills 5 people in the UK everyday. They’re looking to attract the attention of people who wouldn’t necessarily seek out information, moving away from the straight information driven sites to something a little more fun. The risk of skin cancer can be reduced by following sensible tanning guidelines, so it hits the right spot.

I like this, the video and site are both well done, hitting that slightly cheesy infomercial spot right in the centre. They’ve got online banners and a more traditional PR campaign as well. The reach out has been done well, evidenced by the number of sites where the video is appearing. It’s all been done for free by Rubber Republic and other agencies – a great set of ideas.

The new Cadbury’s ad, from Fallon, is over at the Guardian Media section (can’t find an embed yet).

It’s a whole lot of fun, the rabid eyebrows contrasting to kid’s stoic faces. So how was this done?

• the kid’s are chosen because they have ninja-style eyebrow manipulation skills.
• it was all done in post-production
• there’s a bunch of eyebrow puppeteers sitting behind the kids, pulling them around with invisible string

For some reason, I just like the last explanation

Many of the videos in the YouTube lists for last week are TV grabs from the US Air plane ditching in the water, there’s plenty of copies from different news broadcasts. The highest ranked product video is this one from T-Mobile. Filmed on Thursday 15th, on the TV on Friday, Saatchi’s use the idea of a flashmob to bring a few minutes of manic dancing to Liverpool St station, the location for many a previous real flashmob. Here, they work with the station (well, I assume they did) to get the music played over the system so everyone can here it – and join in. The video below is not actually the one with the most YouTube views but is a higher quality version from the T-Mobile Channel Life’s for Sharing
. The higher views are from a grab of the ad shown on TV; JonJonBaker suddenly had a hit on his hands with the ad and got luckier with the search results. Although looking at the numbers later, the official version is increasing its views, probably due to the ads on the YouTube:

TMobile Dance (Screenshot from site)

They reached out to local bloggers such as @flashboy to get them to come along and did a heavy outreach to bloggers with the video later:

Twitter about T-Mobile Ad

And has annoyed some people such as @qwghlm

Another Twitter about the T-Mobile Ad

Ulike Chris, I like this, I smile when I watch it. Yes, the flashmob thing has been done before and this is a blatant rip-off of the Improv Everywhere events but it’s done well here, it’s fun and you can see people getting involved. However, I feel they could have been slightly more transparent with what they are saying in the YouTube commentary:

Watch the moment hundreds of commuters danced in a train station and see how they pulled off the event with exclusive footage from behind the scenes

Given they give you rehearsal footage it’s obviously not a random group of commuters as is implied, it’s a group of professionals. They could put the right slant on this and give credit where credit is due for the idea. Interestingly in the blog post from Richard, a commenter discusses having seen scripts where they use the freeze idea, from Improv, so there’s been a few attempts at this.

With what looked like none of the same PR push, a Spanish ad for what Eristoff Black Vodka is up there as well. I was going to take a look at the brand, but it has such an annoyingly, huge, slow loading flash file that I gave up looking for product information as it took too long to find things. A brand that definitely needs to rethink the digital part of the marketing.