BRAND NEW WORLD…NOW FREE!

A friend of mine who teaches at ad school wanted to have his class read Brand New World. Trouble is, the publisher wasn’t able to get 20 copies together. Can you believe that? 20 copies. What utter incompetence!

So then I thought: “Jeez, I should never have published this with Harper Collins Canada. What a dead business model. I can’t believe they pulp books they don’t sell. And then when you need them, they are all sold out. Old school publishing sucks. I should give away my work. It would prove to be a better model.”

And so I am. Do with it what you will.

BRAND_NEW_WORLD_PDF.

THE BEST OF CANNES IS EXPERIENTIAL

Many may disagree, but I think the Titanium and Integrated Lion awarded at Cannes is the most important (not the most prestigious) award. It is a thoroughly modern category, one that looks at a campaign holistically and not just as executional pieces like film, print and cyber. A Titanium award is also often very experiential in nature, so I look at it with a loving eye. 

This year, the Titanium and Integrated Grand Prix Lion was awarded to Droga5 for its Bing campaign with Jay-Z. I wrote about it here on this blog when it first came out. I gushed, actually. Totally fell in love with the grandeur of the idea, and the way Droga5 wove in something so square as Bing with someone so hip as Jay-Z. Here’s a rather lengthy explanation:

Microsoft’s search engine, Bing wanted to connect with a younger audience and needed to make their Search and Maps technology more culturally relevant. The primary objective was to increase “Intent to Use” Bing products and improve perceptions of Bing as a culturally relevant brand to a coveted younger audience. Bing’s core users were middle aged women in the Midwest and the brand wanted to make real inroads with the coastal youth population. We used the launch of Jay-Z’s autobiography “Decoded” as a relevant moment in youth culture and an opportunity to create a deeper experience with it through Bing technology. The target does not differentiate online from offline, so we built the program across existing media formats and channels but in a new way that wove them together and added interactive to everything. The unique partnership brought Bing to the forefront of pop-culture and gave millions of Jay-Z fans a reason to use Bing Search and Maps.

The average online player engagement was over 11 minutes per visit – Jay-Z’s Facebook fans grew by one million during the campaign launch. – Decoded went straight to the New York Times Best Seller list at #2 its first week – Bing.com saw an 11.7% increase in visits the month of the campaign with no other media in market. – Bing.com entered the top ten mo

cst visited sites in the US. – Bing earned 1.1 billion global media impressions. – Bing’s “intent to use” scores were higher than any other Bing marketing initiative ever according to ComScore. – Online Buzz and Social metrics were above average for any Bing marketing program according to Nielsen BuzzMetrics.

We started by putting every single page of Jay-Z’s autobiography into media spaces around the world. The pages weren’t randomly placed; all 350 pages were put in locations relevant to each individual page’s content. Fans around the world could actually walk Jay-Z’s path, experiencing his story right where it happened. The campaign used a variety of media. And if the media didn’t exist, we created our own. Everything from pizza boxes, plates, burger wrappers, jigsaw puzzles, t-shirts, to name a few. Fans sought out, discovered and interacted with this collection of unique small scale pieces. Even the smallest, traditionally overlooked items became precious collector’s items.

Another campaign that got a Titanium Lion was also experiential (out of the three Titaniums, two were definitely experiential and the third was very, very close). Check it out here. This work for VW took place in the real world, with only a hidden camera capturing people engaging with a brand in a deep and meaningful way. Here’s the write-up for that:

Our challenge was to drive interest for Volkswagen BlueMotion – a range of car innovations that lowers environmental impact without compromising on the joy of driving. Our original solution to this was The Fun Theory – that fun can change human behaviour for the better – a global success we wanted to build on. Our competition, The Fun Theory Award, had previously received hundreds of amazing competition entries from over 35 countries. But the winning idea had come from Kevin Richardson, a San Francisco-resident who came up with the Speed Camera Lottery. Kevin’s idea revolved around fining speeding drivers and rewarding those that obeyed traffic regulations through a lottery, where the winnings came from the speeding drivers fines. We decided to give back to the Fun Theory community and test if the Fun Theory could make a difference in keeping drivers safe, by making Kevin’s idea reality. The Speed Camera Lottery was launched in Stockholm.

The Speed Camera Lottery reduced the average speed of traffic on a busy Stockholm road by 21.6% – equivalent to 6.8km/h. The campaign sparked debate around how fun could change behaviour on the roads for the better, both in Sweden and around the globe – generating amazing PR for Volkswagen. And Volkswagen’s share of the eco car market in Sweden grew by 84%. (source: bilsweden.se) We had increased the Fun Theory’s momentum, rewarded our loyal fans by realizing an idea directly from the global Fun Theory community, and continued to reinforce the visionary thinking behind BlueMotion Technologies.

The Speed Camera Lottery was implemented in collaboration with Sweden’s National Society for Road Safety on a busy road in Stockholm. Over a 3 day period, 24 857 cars passed our speed camera. In a sense, this was our only media channel. But as we had planned, the idea was picked up by the media and the blogosphere, who were also inspired by the idea of using fun and rewards to increase traffic safety. The Speed Camera Lottery was discussed in leading local newspapers, the local TV news, the New York Times and automobile blogs. The Fox News morning show did a special feature on the Speed Camera Lottery. The Lottery was also covered on the BBC World Service, reaching 45 million listeners. A Google search on “Speed Camera Lottery” gave 0 hits before the campaign started. Just one week after it gave 36.600 hits. Today, it’s 287 000 hits.

The more I dive into the other categories at Cannes, the more obvious it becomes that all future brand communications will be based on experiential — or at the very least, have an experiential philosophy deeply integrated into the ideas. If you haven’t checked out the winners, please do. You’ll see what I mean. The list is found here.

Happy reading.

SAMPLING FROM TV…FINALLY

Leave it to Pepsi to finally make TV marketing somewhat useful. According to Ad Age, here’s how it works:

Consumers download the iPhone check-in app IntoNow and hit it while the commercial plays on TV. Audio-fingerprinting technology then recognizes the ad and a coupon gets downloaded to your phone for a free 20-ounce bottle of Pepsi Max.

Hopefully, for PepsiCo, that transaction then gets shared out to the user’s connections on the social TV app, as well as to Facebook and Twitter. Pepsi has agreed to honor as many as 50,000 such coupons as an experiment in both driving trial of Pepsi Max, as well as the potential for interactive TV ads.

You’ve heard me before how television advertising is increasingly becoming an experiential vehicle. And in this case, it’s a sampling experience that starts with people watching ads rather than ends with it.

Full disclosure: My agency CP+B did something very similar with our Old Navy client:

IntoNow is not the first to give consumers a reason to check in to TV commercials. Shazam, the original audio-tagging service for the iPhone, powered a giveaway where the first 1,000 users that tagged an original song during an Old Navy TV ad got a free pair of jeans. The music video spent several weeks on Ad Age’s Viral Video Chart due to its popularity on the web.

But that wasn’t sampling. It was more of a promotion.

That’s why if this thing works with Pepsi, get ready for an entirely new way of watching commercials. And an entirely new reason to make ads.

SCHWAG OVER SUPER BOWL!!!!

Can this be the study that finally shows traditional agencies to get with the program? Or at least gets the creatives to spit out their coffee when they find their work outdone by tchotchkes. According to this AdWeek story, a new study released by the Advertising Specialty Institute "found it's not TV, print or radio that gets consumers' attention, but good old promotional swag.

This includes coffee mugs, pencils, retractable solar-powered flashlights or any other product bearing a company logo. Promotional products made up a $19.6 billion industry in 2007, per the ASI. Through surveys conducted both online and in-person in major cities, such as New York and Los Angeles, the institute also found that promotional products generate a cost-per-impression average of $0.004, compared to $.033 for national magazine ads or $0.019 for prime time TV ads."

Wait, hold on, please, stop. Does this mean that spending billions on TV spots is worth less than slapping a bunch of logos on mugs and t-shirts???? Let me catch my breath…..

But there's more:

The surveys asked 600 participants (who were mostly businesspeople over the age of 21) to recall promotional swag received over the last 12 months. Key findings include:

– 84 percent of consumers remembered an advertiser based on a product they received.
– 42 percent had a more favorable impression of an advertiser after receiving a promotional product.
– Nearly one quarter (24 percent) indicated they are more likely to do business with an advertiser based on items they receive.
– The majority of respondents (62 percent) have done business with an advertiser after receiving a product.
– Writing instruments are the most commonly owned tchotchkes, with 54 percent of respondents owning them, followed by shirts, caps and bags.
– Most (81 percent) promotional products were kept because they were considered useful.
– More than three-quarters of respondents have kept their items for about seven months.
– Among wearables, bags were reported to be used most frequently, with respondents indicating that they use their bags on average nine times per month.
– Bags deliver the most impressions, with 1,038 impressions per month on average.

I particularly like the notion that 81% of promotional products were kept because they were considered useful. Ask yourself, can the same be said of a TV spot? I thought so.
 

THE NUMBERS LIE

For a few years now, the two advertising and marketing mediums that have been showing the best growth and acceptance is online marketing and experiential marketing.

So it's time to get down to brass tacks. The money may be flowing into Internet marketing, but the results have not. Can the same be said about experiential marketing?

According to this article:

Click fraud continues to plague online advertising, but many just want to sweep it under the rug. Radar Research managing partner Marissa Gluck calls it "the dirty little secret of the online ad industry that no one wants to talk about."

Perhaps that's because data released Thursday in a study conducted in July reveals that more than half of ad impressions and 95% of clicks in online ad buys were fraudulent. Gluck compiled and analyzed the findings published by ad optimization company Mpire, Seattle, Wash., with help from its AdXpose technology.

Nearly all the fraudulent traffic was hidden behind numerous layers of nested I-Frames — ad units pulling ad content from other sources that can hide URLs and in-view data. The test shows significant impression fraud and URL padding in standard run-of-network (RON) online ad buys.

"There's an enormous amount of budgetary and impression waste taking place because of click fraud," Gluck says. "Ad networks, which have traditionally been seen as suspect, need to eliminate click fraud if they want to be taken seriously by advertisers."

MY FAVORITE EXPERIENTIAL SPOT

Jim Stengel, former CMO of Procter & Gamble admitted in this interview that this is his favorite commercial.  I write about this because ever since it came out a few years ago, this has been my favorite commercial as well, a spot that is as experiential as it gets.
It may have something to do with the fact that I just had my first child at the time, but this work from Saatchi & Saatchi sort of changed my life through a deeply personal experience. I thought I’d share it with you here:

ONE OF THE BEST STUNT CAMPAIGNS I HAVE EVER SEEN!!!

PRODUCT PLACEMENT GETS EXPERIENTIAL

Readers of this blog will know my interest in product placement. It stems from my experiential bent for engagement and context. There’s nothing worse than bad product placement — overt and reeking of commercialism. It’s eyeball hunting at its worst.

However, contextual product placement is a different matter altogether. It espouses engagement, and in doing so, is adopted by the viewer as a benefit rather than a detraction to the viewing experience. Marketing messages therefore are welcome, because they are embedded when and where the viewer is most responsive and receptive to them.

This story from MediaPost describes an evolution of product placement, one that is quite experiential in nature:

“Storyline placements are growing as the industry becomes more sophisticated about product integration deals,” says Annie Touliatos, director of product development, Nielsen Product Placement. “Meanwhile, we’re seeing a steady decline in background placements.”

Nielsen’s first-half product placement data demonstrate these trends, at least on cable networks, which accounted for 82% of the nearly 249,000 total TV placement occurrences logged by Nielsen.

Products being incorporated in the storyline accounted for 3,500, or just 2%, of the 204,000 total placements on the five cable networks tracked (A&E, Bravo, HGTV, MTV and TLC). But that represented a leap of 143% for the period, compared to first-half 06.

Foreground placements, representing 24% of the total, jumped 29%, to 49,181. Getting a brand shown on a T-shirt or other piece of wardrobe was the most prevalent tactic, accounting for 54,973, or 27%, of occurrences (up 4%).

Okay, other than the fact that the most popular tactic is probably the most lazy one, the rise in storyline product placement only strengthens the argument that marketing must add to the experience, not detract from it. Also, marketers have to work harder. Storyline placement is leaps and bounds beyond t-shirt placement in terms of sophistication, engagement and context.

And another quick note:

Overall, however, incidences of placements were down 7% on cable but up 40% on broadcast.

Is it no surprise that viewers are flocking to cable?

Blowing In the Wind

Well, the Internet has finally surpassed radio. According to this article:

eMarketer, a firm that tracks and analyzes spending trends across various media, is pegging Internet ad spending at $21.7 billion, compared to $20.4 billion for radio. eMarketer’s report comes as the Internet already has surpassed outdoor ad spending, and as a recent report from equity firm Veronis Suhler Stevenson predicts that the Internet will displace television as the No. 1 ad medium by 2011.

In other non-related but equally telling news:

New consumer research from Leichtman Research Group, Inc. based on a survey of 1,300 households throughout the United States, found that over one in every five households in the United States now have a Digital Video Recorder, up from about one in every thirteen households just two years ago.

Other key findings include:

The mean household income of DVR owners is 33% above average
53% of DVR owners say that they have an HDTV set
45% of DVR owners record five or fewer programs per week
84% of DVR owners rate the ability to skip commercials as very important
Only 8% of DVR owners say it is the greatest benefit of having a DVR

Does anyone still believe that traditional forms of advertising are going to be relevant in 10 years?

SMART OR DESPERATE?

What do you think?

Last night, KFC aired a national TV ad for its new Boneless Variety Bucket in which it placed a sound you might have missed, especially if you are over 30.

Only people under the Big 3-0 are expected to be able to hear the Mosquito Ringtone, a frequency of 17.6kHz, since hearing deterioration begins at 20.

The Mosquito Device was invented by Howard Stapleton of Compound Security Systems and is now a popular ringtone among teenagers who don’t want nearby adults to hear incoming cell phone messages.

KFC is offering $10 Boneless Variety Bucket gift checks to the first 1,000 people who tell the Louisville, Ky.-based company, via its Web site, where the tone was embedded. It’s just another way the company is working to keep viewers watching its ads.

Keep reading here.