Digital Stuffing

I love this Christmas Card from AKQA. At the start, you have no idea where it is going, but it builds to a satisfying conclusion.

AKQA Christmas Card (screenshot from site)

Gothamist point towards an offer from Mini USA to try out their new Mini E, the electric version of the car. This is not a hybrid, but a fully electric one, using new lithium-ion batteries.

They are after 500 people to trial the car for a year. But take a look at the conditions:

• You have to have a garage. Mini will pay for the installation of the box for the car to be plugged into, but if you have older wiring that needs an upgrade, you have to cover that.
• You have to live near the participating dealers and register the car in NY,, NJ or CA.
• You have to pay $850 a month as a lease of the car, which you don’t get to keep. BUT, there are no gas costs (just increased electricity costs, or collision insurance
• You have to bring the car in for scheduled maintenance – but it’s free
• You’re going to have to keep records, offer feedback and potentially have a recording device fitted to the car.

Unlike Gothamist, the cost for driving a new car on a lease seems in keeping to other costs I’ve seen and, as long as you meet the requirements, the benefits seem to be pretty good, especially if you are keen on helping move towards a new kind of car. Although not everyone agrees, as there is definitely a reaction against the cost, with some that as you’re doing them a favour, you should get it for free

It’s interesting that the FAQs address blog rumours:

Contrary to some rumors out there in the blogosphere, we’re not simply giving the vehicles to well-connected celebrities

I can’t find many of those posts, but I do find a lot of posts from people very, very excited about this, such as MPGomatic and this from Tronbikes who talks about the type of questions that are asked, such as your favourite inventor and how you are changing the world.

One of the reasons they chose LA and NY area for the trial is because they’re urban and you’re not necessarily going to be doing long journeys and would return home at the end of them to plug back in. Apparently the USA has no suitable charging stations – I wonder of the ones I see around London would work for the Mini, if there are standards, or if you have to build new ones for different car types.

Image by Rain Rabbit

The Mini site goes into a lot of detail about the offer, laying out all the issues and concerns. They have also got themselves a lot of coverage, both in the specialist car blogs and in the environmental, green blogs, which can only be positive for the brand image. Many of the blogs had been emailed with the news, to get the word out there and attract applicants, a nice use of social media PR.

I wonder how many of the 500 will do an online journal of the trial or if they will be allowed to. Keeping ongoing coverage of the trial going could be essential in driving sales when a production version does come out, a huge body of online information for when some one is doing the research about their next car to buy.

Some brands dream of having an active, passionate community, providing feedback and commentary on what they are doing, to talk about the message and the product. They try all the tricks in the book, all the viral stuff, the keywords, the linking, the reach out to bloggers to start the ball rolling with the influencers. They push the boundaries, trying something outrageous just to start a conversation.

However, you have to be careful what you wish for – sometimes you can do the simplest of things and it takes off beyond all belief, beyond your control.

Case 1 – Motrin.

Motrin (a brandname for ibuprofen) posted a video on their site last Friday a month ago*, a seemingly benign one that talked about how ‘wearing your baby’ could be a fashion statement too far, that it could lead to backache for which the drug would be perfect to fix.   Unfortunately the subject and tone were a little close to the edge and they stirred up the wrath of mommybloggers who protested on Twitter and blogs all over the weekend. David Armano has one of the best write-ups of what was happening.

He has 3 pieces of advice

1. Design Your Website For Rapid Response
2. Think Like A Blogger, Tweeter, Community & Citizen Journalist
3. Have A Google Strategy In Place

Whilst there was a lot of outage, Motrin (J&J) actually reacted with commendable speed for a weekend. Within 36 hours. the video was down (well the whole site was down, it seemed to be the only way they could remove it) , there was an apology on the site (even if Seth Godin thought it was too corporate) and they were reaching out to various bloggers. The company and the ad agency managed this pretty well, even dealing with bloggers calling them at home on the weekend when they were with their own children. There are lessons to be learnt here for all brands, what seems to be the most innocuous things can blow up and you need to be prepared and have the same sort of plan that you put in place for business interruptions and other crises.

Ad Age have a good review, with timeline. The video caused little trouble until it got posted to a BabyWearing newsgroup

Case 2 – Strictly Come Dancing.

The BBC have a popular Saturday evening show – Strictly Come Dancing. John Sergeant, regarded by the judges as one of the poorer dancers, has been taken into the heart of the public and was being saved by the voting when bottom of the judges. He finally decided that it had gone to far and decided to leave the series – which generated the kind of comment storm the BBC had never seen before. According to Tom Van Aarndt, on the BBC Internet Blog, they had over 170,000 comments on the topic, most of them on the one day (makes the Motrin strom look tiny in comparison). As new commenters are mdoerated, the backlog for the team was growing all the time, even with changes in place to the policy.

To give you an idea, we get worried when a queue reaches 500-600 unmoderated comments. By late afternoon we were running at over 2000 coments. This was in spite of putting all mods on there together along with all the temporary rule changes.

This was a team that is set up to deal with constant feedback, one of the most active sites on the web and they were completely overwhelmed even with all the planning. More lessons to be learnt – and as a product brand a situation that you never really want to be in.

So comment hell or comment heaven – what’s your choice. Even the best prepared can be caught out, but having nothing in place is far worse. So get out those planning hats and talk about what you’d do in that situation.

I love this ad, it looks brilliant and I keep watching it and every time find new things. The facts behind it are pretty impressive.

• The TV ad was shot using 200 Toshiba Gigashot Cameras: the highest number of moving image cameras ever used in a film sequence
• This particular technique, viewing looping action in 360 degrees, has never been done before
• The rig was custom built weighing approximately half a tonne, including 200 cameras and electronics
• The rig measures 14m diameter circle and 1.8m high
• The 200 cameras were all triggered using a single remote control
• Once the rig was built, four focus pullers spent three days focusing and aligning all 200 cameras
• The time spent processing footage from 200 cameras was over four weeks – 24 hours a day seven days a week!
• New offline and online editing software had to be specifically built for the job
• In terms of data, this is one of the biggest jobs a post-production house has ever taken on – 20TB of data

But I’m not sure how the ad itself ties into the products it is advertising, which are ‘upscaling’ products from Toshiba, TV, DVD Players and laptops that take a standard TV signal and upgrade it to something close to high definition, so you can watch all the standard programmes a better way. A cool ad, a cool product, but how do they connect for you?

For the last 2 years, I’ve been writing all my marketing posts over at Behind The Buzz, for b5media. I started writing there following a suggestion from a friend and I moved all my marketing writing from my personal blog Licence to Roam to a specialised one. But it’s time to move on, so I’ve decided to start again here. There’s be a lot of the same things, but I’ll be trying something new occasionally – which may not work of course. So, looking forward to writing here and having some fun.