Archive for Advertising

Olympus Augmented Reality

// Monday, February 14th, 2011 12:36 pm GMT -5 // No Comments » // Advertising, Random

There is a problem we see time and time again: brands using technology for technology’s sake rather than using it to actually add value to the brand or product message. The biggest culprit in recent years has certainly been Augmented Reality.

Agencies have been swarming to use Augmented Reality (AR) in every campaign, plastering on QR codes and praying that their consumers will actually use them. And hey, if it doesn’t produce positive ROI it will win an award…right?!

We’ve seen very few genuinely useful examples of AR. Crispin and Porter used it to demonstrate the value of a $1 note promoting the Burger King $1 menu and Rayban gave consumers the chance to virtually try on their new range of sunglasses (as demonstrated by our very own Nick Hearne).

Now Olympus is entering that exclusive club of brands using AR to great effect. They have created an AR demo of the new PEN E-PL1 to allow users to virtually test drive the camera. The user holds the special Olympus QR card in front of their webcam; on screen it’s replaced with a dynamic 3D Olympus E-PL1. But the experience goes even further; allowing the user to interact with the camera controls, take photos (of yourself!), shoot video, try the flash, remove the lens and even play with the in-camera effects.

What makes the Olympus AR experience so good is just how useful the virtual experience actually is. It’s sure to engage a more techy audience, and is publicised in consumer mags such as Wired and Popular Science because of this, but it’s a great product demonstration for any user.

It’s refreshing to see Augmented Reality being used for a genuinely useful purpose rather than just another tick on the digital check list. To see the product demonstration in its entirety visit http://www.getolympus.com/pen/

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How the OldSpice YouTube videos are being made.

// Thursday, July 15th, 2010 09:22 am GMT -5 // No Comments » // Advertising, Social Media

How do you take the social web by storm in a day, winning over even the coldest of hearts and gaining international acclaim – with commercials?

A team of creatives, tech geeks, marketers and writers gathered in an undisclosed location in Portland, Oregon yesterday and produced 87 short comedic YouTube videos about Old Spice. In real time. They leveraged Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and blogs. Everybody loved it; those videos and 74 more made so far today have now been viewed more than 4 million times and counting. The team worked for 11 hours yesterday to make 87 short videos, that’s just over 7 minutes per video, not accounting for any breaks taken. Then they woke up this morning and they are still making more videos right now. Here’s how it’s going down.

Setting the Stage

Old Spice, marketing agency Wieden + Kennedy and actor Isaiah Mustafa are collaborating on the project. The group seeded various social networks with an invitation to ask questions of Mustafa’s character, a dashing shirtless man with over-the-top humor and bravado. Then all the responses were tracked and users who contributed interesting questions and/or were high-profile people on social networks are being responded to directly and by name in short, funny YouTube videos. The group has made videos in response to Digg founder Kevin Rose, TV star Alyssa Milano (now big on Twitter) and many more people, famous and not.

It is well done and it appeals to peoples’ egos – but there is something more, too. It feels very personalized, even if it wasn’t directed at you. Those people that got responses, and many people who didn’t, have Tweeted, Facebooked and otherwise shared links to the videos back out across their social networks.

Iain Tait, Global Interactive Creative Director at Wieden, is leading the effort. “In a way there’s nothing magical that we’ve done here,” he explained by phone this afternoon. “We just brought a character to life using the social channels we all [social media geeks] use every day. But we’ve also taken a loved character and created new episodic content in real time.”

How They Are Doing It

Tait says that the primary differentiator between this campaign and others is how closely technical and social media specialists are working with the creative team. “We brought social media experts right into the creative process,” he told me. Tell that to the next person who claims that all so-called social media experts are just hot-air. Tait’s own savvy no doubt played a large role in the success of the campaign as well. He’s just been at Wieden for 3 months, after leaving a UK agency he co-founded 8 years ago. He was voted the Most Influential Person in the UK’s New Media Age Top 100 Interactive Agencies Guide last year.

oldspice“In the room there are two social media guys and a tech guy who built a system pulling in comments from around the web all together in real time,” Tait says. (Right: Inside the studio, around noon today.)

“We’re looking at who’s written those comments, what their influence is and what comments have the most potential for helping us create new content. The social media guys and script writers are collaborating to make that call in real time. We have people shooting and we’re editing it as it happens. Then the social media guys are looking at how to get that back out around the web…in real time.”

The videos aren’t being posted in chronological order immediately after the Tweets and comments they are in reply to. They get moved up and down a queue in a deliberate, orchestrated, if very fast way.

Tait: “Those people are having more fun than I’ve ever seen anyone have in a shoot like this. That’s part of why it’s doing so well. It’s genuinely infectious, it transmits itself through the internet in a massive way.”

Freedom

Tait says that Old Spice’s parent company Proctor & Gamble exhibited incredible bravery in allowing his team to write marketing content in real time, with little to no supervision.

“There is such great trust [between the companies],” he said. “But we are being very responsible. They have given us a set of guidelines and if we get close to the edges we contact them.”

That trust is all the more necessary because of how new this really is, in some ways. “If the message that comes out of this is that you can make TV commercials in 30 minutes, then we’re all out of a job,” Tait jokes. “This is something new. We’re operating on Internet time but with a level of quality you’d get on a TV slot. That combination was what really got many peoples’ attention.”

Old Spice continues to post new, personalized videos to its YouTube channel. How long can they go? No one knows, but Mustafa’s sure to smile seductively and make a goofy-macho joke about it once the team is done.

The campaign itself is unlikely to end even then, though. You can already get an Old Spice Man voicemail message generated for your phone. The coolest thing about that? That system wasn’t even created by Old Spice or Wieden – it was built by a crowd of users at social news site Reddit this afternoon.

Update: At midnight Wednesday night, a very tired looking Mustafa posted the following conclusion.

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Apple’s iAd Mobile Advertising

// Monday, April 19th, 2010 12:03 pm GMT -5 // No Comments » // Advertising, Design

Apple is set to deliver a mobile ad platform by the name if iAd to one billion devices (iPhones, iPads and iPod touches). This ad platform isn’t just banners and text links. It is robust brand advertising that is as fully functional as a website or an app itself. Yes, ads that are apps within an app. iAds will be defining mobile advertising and will definitely shake up the mobile market. People aren’t searching on mobile devices, they are using apps so it only makes sense to enhance this experience. No one is happy clicking a banner and leaving their current site/app. This alone is brilliant. The ads have been hinted to be “premium” which sounds expensive. Sure they’ll make money from all this but I think it’s more for Apple to be the leader in this market. They want to to be the innovator in mobile advertising, reshape the industry and stick it to Google. Another tidbit is they’ll offer 60% of the revenue back to developers (ala Google Adsense) to help the creation of great apps on the App Store. And then HTML5! Every Flash shop in the country better be sharpening their HTML5 skillz. Anyway you see it, Apple’s new iAd is an exciting move.
Only problem is Apple will now massively once again control something else. Will they approve our anti/parody Apple ad?

Digital Agency Personnel

// Thursday, April 1st, 2010 11:00 am GMT -5 // No Comments » // Advertising, Social Media

Read a great article recently by Phil Johnson on understanding the people behind a digital agency. The post is spot-on and basically talks about the kind of people needed in today’s shops in order to stay competitive and succeed. Phil mentions the culture, personality and thinking behind digital natives like myself. Here’s a great excerpt.

Specifically, digital natives are people who have spent their entire lives using the internet as an extension of themselves, and there are some good descriptions of the attributes that these people possess. Without the influence of these native speakers, most of us are doomed to clumsily translate conventional ideas into a digital format, rather than creating original ideas unique to the digital medium. We may master the outward forms but not the soul of the digital world.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not advocating hiring some kid that spends 80 hours a week leveling his “World of Warcraft” character. I’m talking about a specific set of traits and insights that help transform an agency into an innovative digital marketing organization. Here’s why every agency needs these people on staff.

They understand what happens under the digital hood. They see beneath the user interface to the underlying technologies. This gives them the ability to assess the true capabilities of a tool or platform and often manipulate it to their own purposes. They can define the digital experience on their own terms and not let it define them.

Digital natives have the skills to conduct their digital lives across many digital platforms with the ease with which an international traveler moves across continents. They can jump from platform to platform depending on its utility. This means that when planning marketing campaigns they can leave the beaten path to create more highly customized online experiences for consumers.

Digital natives treat their identity in the physical world and online as one entity. This makes their online personalities multidimensional and gives them better communications skills than the occasional visitor to Facebook and Twitter.

Because they conduct so much of their lives online, digital natives have a rich collection of experiences with brands in the digital world and a solid understanding about what kinds of communications are effective. With this fluency, they can expand an agency’s vision for what is possible when developing strategies and campaigns.

Above all, digital natives get gaming. It’s in their blood. As advertising and marketing agencies continue to adopt more of the principles and psychology of online gaming, all of us will need digital natives to help lead us through the maze of opportunities.

Agencies don’t just need digital natives working in technical functions. We need them working throughout the agency in planning, media, account, and creative. They need to be allowed to experiment and explore and not be forced to work within old job titles and structures. If you’re really serious about a digital transformation, these are the people who can shake up the organizational structure and push senior management to see the world in a fresh way. We’re in a business that encourages clients to take big risks on change. We should be willing to do the same for ourselves.

Zappos Celebrates Customer Service w/ Puppets

// Tuesday, March 9th, 2010 05:00 pm GMT -5 // 2 Comments » // Advertising

In a campaign scheduled to begin on Monday, Zappos will celebrate its customer service representatives, whom the company refers to as the customer loyalty team. The intent is to demonstrate to potential customers — and remind current ones — how the employees make it easy to order or return merchandise, either on Zappos.com or by calling a toll-free number.

The campaign, by Mullen in Boston, part of the Interpublic Group of Companies, has a budget estimated at $7 million. The ads reiterate themes that have appeared in previous Zappos campaigns, which include “Powered by service” and “Happy to help. 24/7.”

There will be television commercials, print advertisements and video and display ads on Web sites, along with a presence in social media like Facebook and YouTube and on Zappos.com. The ads will also appear in an unusual place where Zappos is already advertising: on the bottoms of plastic bins in airport security lines, reflecting the origins of Zappos as a seller of shoes.

The campaign is centered on the interaction during phone calls between Zappos employees and customers. The employees are represented by puppetlike characters who are based on and styled after actual Zappos workers.

The characters, called Zappets, resemble Muppets who have been to the theater several times to see “Avenue Q.” The idea is to evoke the offbeat company culture for which Zappos has become known.

The genesis of the campaign was in observations by Mullen executives who, while competing last year in a review for the Zappos account, visited the company’s headquarters in Henderson, Nev., to spend time with the customer service representatives.

“We sat with them, and we had headphones on, and we listened to the calls and heard how much of the company’s culture seeped through,” said one of those visitors, Alex Leikikh, managing partner and director for account services at Mullen.

Another visitor, Mark Wenneker, managing partner and executive creative director at Mullen, said of the employees: “They would stay on the line for as long as you wanted to talk. They would talk about anything.”

According to Aaron Magness, director for brand marketing and business development at Zappos, the approach reflects that “our customer loyalty team is not scripted and is not measured on time of calls.”

“The goal is when you see the ads, in TV, print or digital, you’ll say, ‘That’s the Zappos I know,’ ” Mr. Magness said, “or, ‘That’s a company I want to do business with.’ ”

Some of the commercials use recordings of calls made to Zappos employees, whose voices are heard in the spots. The words “Actual call with Zappos” appear onscreen. The customer service representatives were not aware that the calls were potential fodder for an ad campaign.