A brief interlude for some marketing japery – Old Spice Guy was challenged to an Internet Duel by New Old Spice Guy, Fabio. He accepted and the Duel took place yesterday at the Interwebs Stadium.
Brilliantly executed campaign. Hundreds of thousands views in a few short hours, thousands of tweets, hundreds of blog posts. Simply awesome.
p.s. I’m backing Old Old Spice Guy. Fabio is creepy.
Our digital team points me to the below video, another totally impractical but very fun use of AR. After Kelly Brook appeared in Victoria station, it seems that marketing is once again pioneering cool new things.
Sadly, I haven’t had a chance to work on any AR projects yet, although some of my colleagues have.
I’ve tweeted at a few brands recently to satisfy my blog-curiosity about one thing or the other. @amazonuk to ask about packaging, @mini to point out that its website wasn’t working properly in Chrome, @duracelluk to ask about its AA battery charger, @qwertee_com to let them know about my t-shirt review (and give them an opportunity to defend the quality of the cotton) and possibly one or two other media programmes (the Apprentice, Game of Thrones et al).
Now I know that the media programmes will be inundated with mentions, and perhaps even Amazon might get more tweets than it could cope with, but Mini was the only company to get back to me. The theory of having a direct connection to a business is a good one but it seems that not everyone is coping as well with providing an outlet to direct interaction as you’d hope.
I think brands should stick a disclaimer up there if the account isn’t monitored, or if people don’t intend to respond. It’s only fair to set expectations…. You can understand why even slightly arbitrary studies like this one come to the conclusions that they do… Or maybe it’s that – as a mere customer and a PageRank 2 blog writer – I don’t merit their attention…
Chris (and Tom and Damian) came to visit this weekend, and as is inevitable when {heavy irony} social media gurus {/heavy irony} come together, we brainstormed new business concepts.
Well, maybe not entirely new, but ‘Baby Social Media Management’ seemed a concept worth exploring, so we checked if http://emi.ly was available (it wasn’t, already registered to some doting Bavarian dad, apparently) and considered other stratagems for maximising my 7-month-old daughter’s social graph. Knowem seems particularly well named for my daughter’s use…
As part of this discussion, Chris pointed me at this case study – which, needless to say, is dynamic, interactive, synergistic, integrated social media success.
It’s ‘Looking forward to Feist‘ month. By posting the embed below I’m in with a chance of winning the new hardback, out – you guessed it – early next month. Although given that Voyager sent me his entire back catalogue a few months ago, I can’t help but think I might not have the best chance of winning this one…
Whilst the various Midkemian adventures have in some ways got increasingly more ridiculous (how many more levels of bad can there be – they keep facing off the ultimate evil!) – it’s still a wonderful universe and I’m looking forward to the next instalment – which I gather may be the beginning of the end…
Update: the embedded countdown ticker below doesn’t seem to render in Chrome. Sorry! It works in (shudder) IE.
I reviewed a couple of M&S soups a while back which are getting disproportionate traffic thanks to the new ad and PR campaigns the company is running for its Simply Fuller Longer food line.
Happy New Year, dieters! My diet restarts soon, although my running has already restarted.
Who says nobody wins online competitions? I entered a competition from Voyager Books, which I learned of via their e-newsletter (sign up here) and last month received a large box of books from the publishers with Raymond E Feist’s entire backlist! Of course, as a loyal fan I already have many of these but there’s a few titles I was missing and it’ll make a great gift… Pics may follow when I’ve finished sorting out boiler issues.
Thanks to Voyager, and do sign up if you’re an SF / Fantasy fans (the next competition will let you win Robin Hobb’s backlist, which I read my way through earlier this year). They also give a bunch of good stuff away via their Twitter handle, but I’ve not had the good fortune to win there…
@tim has a big piece in today’s FT about Augmented Reality and its potential in advertising. In addition to trying out the FT’s AR app, you could also try Intel’s thin laptop app and check out the AR magician on YouTube. The former two require flash, a webcam, printer and miscellaneous plugin. The latter requires flash, headphones and some imagination.
Augmented reality is awesome and full of practical potential – in design, medicine, gaming and no doubt a dozen other fields – but I’m not surprised its kicking off in marketing first. We seem to be a good test bed for this kind of stuff and have a few people willing to take chances on reasonably nascent technologies.
Charlie Stross’ Halting State has a number of interesting applications (Google Maps overlays, WoW overlays, police grid overlays amongst them) and is well worth a read if you’re into the topic (and Sci-Fi).
Apparently, this it the 618th best technology blog on the web. Which seems unlikely. But thanks, Blogged.com marketing director, appreciate the email ;-).
I’m off to see the LoTR musical tonight (through, no less, a Lastminute.com 50% discount offer), so was amused by the below viral which was forwarded to me today.
Very fun. Great idea. Well executed.
Update: LoTR musical was ok. A little too camp for LoTR and a little too fantasy adventure for a musical, but some of the songs were pretty strong and the experience as a whole was lots of fun. The staging was very creative, too. I have ordered the CD.