Digital Stuffing

Vodafone have pulled together a lovely little competition to tie in with the Formula One races, calling it the Vodafone Taxi Grand Prix. Vodafone are a sponsor of the Mecedes McLaren team.

• First of all, you need to sign up
• Then, pick your team. You have a choice of 10 drivers across 5 different cities. You need to pick 2 for your team.
• When the race starts, Vodafone track the taxi drivers – using the GPS in their HTC Magic phones. The miles are totalled up. The idea is to complete the race distance in the shortest time. The race distance is that of the target F1 Grand Prix, it was the British one last week, next it’s the German one. Over 5 races, you score points for distance and time, so the person with the highest points wins a trip to the Italian Grand Prix (there’s lots of other prizes too)
• Keep an eye on your drivers. You get lots of statistics about them, so if your driver is not travelling enough, you can swap them around to improve your mileage.
• Come back again and again!

Vodafone Taxi Grand Prix (screenshot from site)

This is a pretty nigty idea. A contest connected with the real world and real people. You get brief bios of the drivers, who are also twittering, so you see what they are getting up to, so over time, you’ll get to know the drivers and what they are like. The mechanic is simple and the interaction allowed keeps you coming back

Spot the Bull with Orange (image from Poke)

Orange are again doing their Spot the Bull competition, giving away tickets to Glastonbury if you can predict where a bull will be in a field at a certain time of day. I played this last year and it was good fun; it got launched yesterday, starting off with an email, I’m guessing to all of last year’s participants. Later on, I got a lot more information about the competition from Poke.

• They’re using a new bull this year, called Desmond, a 5 year-old Charolais Apparently last year’s bull was a little quiet, they’re hoping for more action this year.
• In another change, they’ve adjusted the tech they’re using. Instead of a complicated set up using GPS and satellites to follow the bull action, they’ve got people in the ground, posting the position every 5 minutes and getting great pictures using a mini-dv camera. In a further extension, they’re also tweeting throughout at spotthebull
• They’ve gone mobile this year; go to the same URL on your phone’s web browser and get a sweet mobile version of the site. You can play direct from your phone or SMS your chosen square. There’s also a html version
• Return visits are encouraged. Statistical information is being built up around where the bull will be over the day, plus the tweets will let you know what Desmond’s favourite places are. You can start to predict the bull’s behaviour. Another tip is to play at weekends, which were quieter last year so you have a higher chance.
• There’s an embeddable widget, which brings all the bull action to your blog or profile.

What I think

It’s a successful mechanic for a competition, that obviously worked well last year, enough for them to bring it back. What I’m most impressed about is how ‘solid’ the campaign is, with all the elements connected. There’s a html version, a very nice mobile version, a chance to connect with SMS, the sharable elements. They’ve connected all the dots from a digital perspective. My biggest issue is with the flash version, which is heavy, takes a while to load and slows down the browser. It’s very, very good, but just a little too much of it. All in all, I love this campaign/

As a blogger, they connected with me well, a polite first enquiry about writing about it, then a whole load of imformation that is just lovely. It was done by the Poke team, so thanks to Dylan for the info.

Here’s what T-Mobile were up to on Thursday, a sing-a-long. The ad is the crowd singing Hey Jude, with some glimpses of Pink, but she’s not the focus, the crowd is. The first video is the full 4 minutes of the song, the second is a recording of the 2 minute ad that appeared on TV (the official channel does not have it yet). At some point I’m guessing there’ll be a 30′, digital billboards and all other stuff. (just as I was writing this, the 30′ was on TV)

I like this, it’s far more authentic than the dance ones, where they’ve hired a bunch of professionals to turn up and do the dance. This really was a flash mob, called together through teaser videos, some judicious seeding and word of mouth. Apparently 13,500 people turned up to sing-a-long. As demonstrated by the many videos on YouTube and images around, many of them had cameras and phones. I;ve seen a lot of buzz about this, so I think it worked for them, at least from a brand awareness side. Given the current company situation, I think they need it!

Miss Geeky points out the T-Mobile are planning something new, following their Liverpool St Dance Flash mob.

They’ve got the Facebook Group and the YouTube channel promoting their next event. Cue dramatic music and a call to action – be at Traflagar Square in London 30th April at 6pm to see what they have in mind.

Update: there’s seems to be some desire to flashmob the flashmob. I’ve suggested taking signs for other networks, others like Chris are suggesting something more

Update2: It happened and looking around it seemed to have been fun. T-Mobile brought along the singer Pink, performed karaoke with the crowd and the big screens . So the new T-Mobile advert with Pink, Trafalgar Square and ‘you’ will be shown on Saturday at 9.

By osmosis (well, me talking about it a lot) the New Business Team in the office have been using Twitter more and more. This afternoon, they took the initiative to do a real time marketing response following a Tweet from MarketingUK

Marketing UK Cupcakes (Screenshot from site)

They dashed out, bought a bunch of cupcakes from Patesserie Valerie, stickered them all up and delivered them to the Marketing UK‘s office. The response:

Marketinguk Cupcake Response (screenshot from site)

YouTube is still full of Britain’s Got Talent and the odd bit of Miss California. But highest rated product video is this ‘flash mob’ from Trident, with 100 Single Ladies dancing to Beyonce’s Single Ladies. Yawn. Another ‘flash-mob’, made up of the most un-casual group of people hanging around Piccadilly circus with what looks like press already invited. I would have just done this as an ‘event’ with out the pretend surprise element. It’s time to move on!

This is to promote Trident sponsoring a Beyonce concert. Add the last 4 digits of your barcode and you get entered into a ballot to get one of 3000 pairs of tickets to an exclusive concert at the London 02 arena.

That’s it, a most uninspiring list this week, with multiple versions of the same thing. I need some more creativity.

Update: Just realised that throughout this piece and when I’ve been talking to people I’ve been calling this Smart Thinking Soldier when it’s actually Start Thinking Soldier. Think my way is better

In the past, the Army have delivered some really smart campaigns that take you from the TV ad (or other offline channel) back to the website where they can immerse you in the story and get you spending a lot more time with their content in an effort to sign you up.

Their latest campaign, Smart Thinking Soldier, does exactly that again. The TV ads leave you with a scenario for you to choose what to do next. Online, the story continues with some smart gameplay in tagging IEDs and navigating tunnels. But that’s as far as I got. In a similar way to Lucy, writing in The Guardian, I’m defeated by technology. A combination of too heavy content that freezes my machine on occasion, a very fluid mouse interaction that leaves me sea-sick when I’m hunting around a room for IED elements and a navigation system that leaves me not being able to direct my player round a maze.

The site looks good, has great content, brilliant interactive elements, downloads a lot of information for you but leaves me wanting more – wanting to actually play it! I’m wondering if they would have been better off making the whole thing a downloadable app?

Twitter Partners (screenshot from site)

Update: It seems that NMA just got far too excited about this story and forgot to check with Twitter, who have issued a statement saying there is absolutely no affiliation between them and this new company.

However, the name, branding, and suggestion that Twitter has some kind of equity partnership or an agreement of any kind in place is misleading and wrong. We’ll be working with Peter and his team to clear up this confusion.

Twitter backs first UK partner. Or so says the front page headline on the New Media Age (no links to them..they do not appear to like links). It’s all about a new company called Twitter Partners, which is ‘affiliated’ with Twitter and has apparently signed up some UK companies such as Gorillaz, Paramount, Universal Pictures and Lionsgate.

From the site they are:

building a suite of apps, tools and services to help brands, media companies, and celebrities harness the power of the Twitter ecosystem

So it’s a high profile launch of a branding and social media consultancy agency, which will be building stuff on the Twitter API for companies to help manage their reputation on the service. The only reason I see this being front page news is that it has a lot of interesting people on the ‘About Us‘ page and NMA have got blinded by the word Twitter. There are a lot of tools and companies out there that already do what they do. But with backing and a profile, they are in a position to go out to brands and sooth them, tell them it’s all OK, this Twitter thing is scary but they can help them through it.

Help and outsourcing of experience and skill is the reason why companies employ advertising and marketing agencies in the first place – but is there any reason to have a Twitter agency only? No, not really. Twitter is just one tactic in a whole sea of social media; it needs to be seen as part of the larger communication structure and built into the communications plan. Hiving it off to a separate agency can only lead to difficulties if they don’t work well with the others or if it’s not considered as a customer service route (that’s in towards the company) as well as a marketing route (out towards the customer). Although, if they are focusing on consultancy, maybe that’s one of the messages that Twitter Partners will be saying.

PS: it’s obviously a new company that has not yet got enough Googlejuice to register on search yet. But they’re at least savvy enough to buy the ad

Ad for Twitter Partners on Google (screenshot from site)