READING JUST GOT EVEN MORE EXPERIENTIAL

Ever since high school, I have studied with music playing in the ambient background. That has translated to pleasure reading as well. So this news is pretty cool. Apparently, we will soon have a soundtrack that goes with a book.

In the film versions of “Pride and Prejudice” the music jumps and swells at all the right moments, heightening the tension and romance of that classic Jane Austen novel.

Will it do the same in the e-book edition?

Booktrack, a start-up in New York, is planning to release e-books with soundtracks that play throughout the books, an experimental technology that its founders hope will change the way many novels are read.

Imagine how much more spine-tingling an Edgar Allen Poe story can be with a spooky soundtrack to it, one that morphs and changes with every turned page.

Pretty cool. And wholly experiential.

Here’s the link.

Tags: experiential reading

BEST CAR CAMPAIGN OF THE YEAR…EXPERIENTIALLY

Absolutely awesome way to prove a point! And it's a great example of spanning the digital-to-physical bridge.

HUMANISM IS THE NEW MARKETING

When the New York Times conducted a study on the reasons why people share news among each other, a ray of light into marketing may (or may not) have been released. You see, according to this study, the five reasons why we like to share digital content rely more on our humanity than digitization and ease-of-use.

• Altruism. We share to bring valuable and entertaining content to others. We think about what our friends want to know, and try to help them out.
• Self-definition. We share to define ourselves to others. Perhaps this notion is better phrased as, “you are what you share.” People consciously shape their online persona by the types of things they share.
• Empathy. We share to strengthen and nourish our relationships. Sharing shows someone else we’re thinking about them and we care.
• Connectedness. We share to get credit and feedback for being a good sharer, to feel valuable in the eyes of others.
• Evangelism. We share to spread the word about a cause or brand we believe in.

In these five reasons we can find how we should approach our marketing disciplines. Most importantly — and if you’ve read Experience the Message or Brand New World, this will sound very familiar — marketing must have an inherent benefit to it. It must be altruistic in some fashion. Not surprisingly, then, it’s a major component of why we want to talk and share information among ourselves. Just like a marketing message.

Get the full study here.

DIGITAL TO PHYSICAL: A BILLBOARD POWERED BY TWEETS

The future of our business is in building the bridges between physical and digital experiences. This billboard does just that. Check out the description here.

And the campaign — in which tweets that are punctuated with a frowny face will be remedied with free Kraft Jell-O pudding.

Check that out here.

FULL DISCLOSURE: I work for the agency that did this (CP+B).

WHY BORDERS WENT BELLY UP

Interesting read here about why Borders imploded. The quote I took away is this:

If you’re a retailer, loyal and engaged customers are six times more likely to visit your locations. Consumers are looking to be delighted, and only real brands that can engage customers can do that. Loyal customers follow “The Rule of Six”: they’re six times more likely to rebuff competitive offers, and six times more likely to invest in your company.

Delighting people. Engage them. Create authenticity by being real. Become indispensable. Render experience. And you will be rewarded six-fold.

That’s a pretty good reward.

Tags: borders, experiential, max lenderman

APPLE’S EXPERIENTIAL SECRETS REVEALED!

Well, sort of. Here’s a great paper from “customer experience authority” Mike Wittenstein. He’s good folks. Solid thinking. You should get the report here and read it thoroughly.

MICROSOFT IS ALL HARD FOR EXPERIENTIAL

Yeah, I said it.

Check this out: the universe’s biggest proponent of digiterati is getting physical. According to this article, Microsoft is getting all experiential:

…the world’s largest software maker, will open 75 stores within three years, expanding a retail effort to promote products directly to consumers, Chief Operating Officer Kevin Turner said…

..“They can’t stand back idly by and watch Apple infiltrate from a consumer perspective,” Miller said. “This is Microsoft’s idea of how they counter that.”

Well, yeah. No shit.  And then the kicker:

Microsoft also said it will give partners tools, training and incentives totaling $5.8 billion to help them sell its products during the fiscal year that started July 1.

Billion? You know that customer experience is at the heart of this strategy.

Am I the first to pick up on this? Folk this is huge. Microsoft has woken up to experiential marketing.

Welcome. Let’s party.

Tags: experiential, Microsoft, retail

Oi Vey! A Yiddish Phone Is An Experience In Itself

We tend to think of experiential marketing as a “physical” activity — events, demos, sampling, retailtainment, etc. Progressive marketers are now building bridges between the physical to the digital — just check out all the Cannes winners this year and last.

But we tend to forget that the product is an experience, too. At CP+B, we always took on creative challenges by starting with the product first and working out. Not the message. Not the brand positioning statement. Not the demo studies. The product. 

That’s why I love this story from Israel. Apparently, there is now a Yiddish phone.

Hundreds of thousands of mobile phones, popularly dubbed kosher because they block access to services frowned upon by ultra-Orthodox rabbis, have been operating in the Jewish state for years. Last month, Israel’s second largest mobile provider, Partner introduced what it hailed as the world’s first Yiddish cell phone, manufactured by Alcatel-Lucent

Marc Seelenfreund, CEO of Israeli Accel Telecom which imports and distributes mobile phones to all Israeli operators, had a special team of translators work for months to develop an interface entirely in Yiddish. The language, a mixture of medieval German and Hebrew, was spoken by millions of European Jews for centuries, but it is now used mostly by elderly Jews and in some Orthodox communities.

How cool? How smart! By creating an entirely new interface language, the phones as products are delivering an unparalleled experience. IN being first to market, Alcatel-Lucent has immediately carved out both a market and a message that they understand the needs of their consumers. Great PR. Great buzz. Totally experiential.

AN EXPERIENTIAL APP THAT LITERALLY PLUGS INTO THE PRODUCT? I’M IN LOVE, BABY.

Please, just witness the experiential awesomeness of this. 

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.

Tags: bad marketing, branding, Cannes, Droga5, event marketing, experiential