Filed under: Emergent media, Future of Media, Innovative advertising, Innovative marketing, Innovative promotions, Innovative retail | Tags: conversion marketing, Eightbar, future of retail marketing, hursley park, IBM Hursley Park, retail trends
I’ve also just come across another piece from eightbar. For those of you who only know eightbar as the common eightbar blues chord progression, eightbar here is the unofficial blog of cool and interesting things from the creatives and techies at IBM’s Hursley Park Laboratories in the UK.Filed under: Advertising, FMCG innovation, Innovative promotions | Tags: confectionery, have a break, innovative promotion, kit kat, Marketing
Check out this new website from Kit Kat. Following on from their famous and fabulous ‘Have a break campaigns, here they present us with just that. A complete and total break. A break from Twitter from Facebook from email from being bombarded with advertising messages, banner ads and Flickr boxes. No widgets, no downloadable icons or message boards. No forums, no email newsletters no avatars no handles. A complete and utter break.
And that’s not the best bit . . at the bottom it reads, ‘If you detect something happening on this website, it’s probably a bug and we’ll try to fix it’.
Love it.
Check it out
Thanks to Stephanie Branston for the pointer
Filed under: Advertising, Genius, Innovative promotions | Tags: Burger King, facebook application, Social media, viral marketing, whopper sacrifice
I just found this cheeky little app on Facebook courtesy of Burger King ‘Friendship is strong but the whopper is stronger’. You simply download the application and it asks you to ‘sacrifice’ 10 of your contacts in order to receive a free whopper.
You simply select your victims, cancel them from your friends list and watch their photo go up in flames but the fun doesn’t stop there. Burger King then sends a message to your deleted friend telling them you gave up their friendship for a Whopper. Bloody brilliant.
Check it out here
Filed under: Designers, FMCG innovation, Food trends & info, Innovation, Innovative marketing, Innovative promotions, Innovative stimulus, Marketing, new product, Nice Design, Nice products | Tags: FMCG, Innovation, innovative packaging, new product
While you can’t judge a book by its cover, we often judge food by its packaging. One dollars worth of spaghetti sure looks a million dollars with a bit of fancy pants wrapping doesn’t it…Never underestimate the importance of appearance when it comes to food, or anything for that matter…
Why do pet care companies always put an animal on the front of their pet food? The dog can’t read but the owner can. Why are we packaging pet food for the pet? They know what dogs look like, talk to them in their own language.
I’d take a premium supermarket pet food brand & stick it in a stylish black tin with silver labeling & discrete branding with no visual reference to animals. Risky you say? I doubt it.
And another thing… why do washing detergents all use bright colours & show water or clean clothes? We make our decisions on what detergent to buy on the perceived quality of the brand. In the absence of any
laundry powders which don’t present pictures of clouds or water gushing through logos, let’s be honest, we pick the one we think looks more sophisticated or innovative or expensive than the rest.
Why not take washing powder & stick it in a metal canister that sits proudly on the laundry shelf instead of embarrassingly in the cupboard? Or better still, cook some good looking detergent granules &
put the stuff in a stylish transparent container.
For a fresh spin on packaging, make it design-orientated not product-orientated. Just because you’re selling pasta doesn’t mean you need a fat Italian & a bunch of tomatoes on the front. Lord, this is 2008.
Filed under: Advertising, Brand, creativity, Digital culture, Gen Y, Innovative advertising, Innovative promotions, Street art
Well Scion have done it again. After being the first car manufacturer to stage a virtual care launch in Second Life in 2006, this time they’re letting users design their own crests for the car. A new campaign put together by Strawberry Frog [based in NY & Amsterdam], lets users pick from a range of graffiti inspired symbols designed by Triston Eaton and put together their very own coat of arms. Users can print out the images, save them to a gallery or [for for a few thousand dollars] actually get them customised for their cars.
Check it out at scionspeak.com
Filed under: Advertising, creativity, Innovative promotions, Work Futures | Tags: 12:20, ann summers viral academy, faris yakob, supervirals, viral marketing, virals
It wasn’t so long ago that viral marketing was all the rage. It was trendy, irreverent [wasn't everything irreverent for a while there?] and we even thought consumers could just make it for us. After all, isn’t Generation C all about user generated content? Clients wanted it and agencies delivered it. Then some clients had the idea that they could get the consumers themselves to create virals which could be shown on TV or posted 
online. Further to this, we’ve seen the advent of Super Virals created by the guys at 12:20 which I believe has had great success. Courtesy of Faris Yakob I’ve just stumbled across Ann Summers Viral Academy and what a great idea it is.
Here’s the explanation on the website of how it all works:
In A Nutshell
Viral advertising is a very important part of Ann Summers communications strategy. However we don’t retain a creative agency; instead we welcome ideas from talented creative people who contact us directly. These are people who want to bolster their show reel with some advertising that will be seen by millions (it’s not unusual for our virals to be seen by 20 million people), or want to do some work with an ideas led brand they can have some fun with – or just people who have a cracking idea.
However the ideas we get are not in response to a specific brief – are not necessarily true to our brand values or business objectives. We have created the Ann Summers viral academy to formalise the process – and to give people with great ideas more of a chance to get their work made.
Briefs will be posted up to 4 times a year and we have committed to making a production budget of up to £25k available for each brief to make the winning idea or ideas happen. We are also going to be awarding soon to be covetable black and gold rabbits. As well as that we will create a lot of trade PR for the winning submission, the creative mind or minds behind the submission and their agency homes – so professional kudos shall be forthcoming.
We expect most of the ideas to be for short films – like the ones you can find here but we don’t want to limit you in any way. If you have a great idea for a game, a song, a comic – anything at all – we’d love to hear it.
Our Commitment
We will make up to 4 new ads a year, for which we have put aside a significant production budget. We will then seed/place/distribute these ads. They will be first be seen as exclusive content at handbag.com, who are our online partners in this venture. They will then feature on our website and be sent to our sizeable database. We will work with you to try to ensure that the winning viral idea is a success and is widely seen.
Unlike other user-generated viral campaigns which invite the average user to create a viral for Jeans West or some other FMCG client, Ann Summers opens her briefs up to the creative industry, to those people who are keen to get some cutting edge work on a reel or try a new idea for their own portfolio.
A well considered approach to viral marketing and worth a look.
Filed under: creativity, Digital culture, geek, Geek stuff, Innovative promotions
In Japan, they have replaced the impersonal and unhelpful Microsoft error messages with Haiku poetry messages. Haiku poetry has strick construction rules, each poem has only 17 syllables; 5 syllables in the first, 7 in the second, and 5 in the third. They are used to communicate a timeless message, often achieving a wistful, yearning and powerful insight through extreme brevity (and are much better than “Your computer has performed an illegal operation.”) Here they are:
Your file was so big.
It might be very useful.
But now it is gone.
The Web site you seek
Cannot be located, but
Countless more exist.
Chaos reigns within.
Reflect, repent, and reboot.
Order shall return.
Program aborting:
Close all that you have worked on.
You ask far too much.
Filed under: Digital culture, Geek stuff, Innovation, Innovative advertising, Innovative marketing, Innovative promotions
There are some girls whose dream would be to walk past a newsstand one day and find themselves on the front cover of Vogue or Elle or some other beauty bible. I myself, dont’ dream of such happenings (which is lucky because the chances of it occurring are about as high as the dams in Melbourne these days….) But…if I did come across the Tim Tam geenie and had the opportunity to have such a wish, I have to admit that the front cover of Wired magazine would just about do it for me. Sound familiar?
It just so happens that I came across this cute little promotion for Xerox; they’ve created a mini design site where you can create your own Wired front cover and download it, print or send it around…Great promotional idea for geeks I thought (myself included). So of course I made myself a cover..
Check it out :: Xerox Promotion
::Del.icio.us
::Stumble! this
::Digg this
