Hill+Knowlton Strategies

Nice wrap up on the Old Spice Man phenomenon. Listen-respond works, especially if you’re half naked.

Nice work from the magnificent bastards in Oregon.

Like 60,000 others in Australia, I’m quite partial to Foursquare, currently the largest of the geolocation platforms that have sprung up around the world. Basically, users check in to locations as they travel around the place during their day, sharing advice, earning badges and competing for mayorships. There have been a few businesses who have started to use the brand pages to deliver tactical offers and encourage their social mejia advocates to be as engaged and as vocal as possible.

Shopkick looks to be taking this one step further, rewarding visitors with kickbucks, a loyalty currency that appears to aggregate across all of your destinations. It’s definitely early days as yet, but I love the way that these technologies are linking existing sharing activity with loyalty and truly delivering a “place” for digital. I ccan’t wait to see what happens next and start using these concepts in the work we do here in Australia.

In a world where creation happens everywhere, the Mash Up is probably the easiest example with the lowest barrier to entry. It has its roots in music, where editors would mash two songs together to make a conglomerate of the two (as opposed to merely using a sample.)

Now part of the mainstream of consumer generated content, Mash Ups happen when you take two elements of pop culture and combine them to make something new. Its considered fair use from a copyright perspective and often the results are funnier and more shareable than the constituent parts. The cartoon above is from the New Yorker, but has been given a line from one of Kanye West’s twitter account.

Love the fact that creativity can come from anywhere and be shared more easily than ever before.

This one has to be my favourite:

Here’s an interesting presentation that was pulled together by Paul Adams, a UX (User Experience) researcher from Google. It is 216 slides, but Paul has identified some of the issues in trying to manage different groups of people on one channel or Social Network.

The problems he has identified aren’t going away any time soon, as more and more websites open up to social graph interactions, more of your life, your decisions and opinions will be spread around the interwebs than ever before.

The point Paul makes about users massively underestimating their potential audience is very true & from a comms planning perspective trying to ensure a campaign remains relevant, or even better - becomes more relevant as it moves between users and reach increases is our big challenge.

I also love his ideas about the different values of weak and strong connections and what type of influence they can affect.

Spend some time  and have a read.

Well, maybe not completely, at least not yet. A study just released by Roiworld, an online gaming site, says that one in 5 teens are losing interest in the platform.

Teens Study June 2010

Probably not time to write the whole thing off just yet, as the survey only polled 600 teens and Roiworld doesn’t make use of the platform to connect users and spread their games. The result are interesting all the same, and I especially liked the 16% of people who have left because their parents have turned up on the site.

Old school marketers seem to exhibit a desire to find the next aggregation network. They had it when everyone watched TV and got lazy, force feeding ads down peoples throats. As TVC’s seem to be moving back to a position of ‘part of the mix’ instead of ‘king of the castle,’ the search is on to find the place where everyone will be, the place to concentrate investment and wipe out the competition through the tried and tested use of frequency and repetition.

It seems to me that with the rise of new platforms and their ability to reach a couple hundred million people increasing at a geometric rate (TV took 13 years to reach 50 million, facebook took 9 months), we should rationally expect that the lifespan of the channel is not going to be as long. High levels of investment in the platforms return lower ROI as the lifespan of the platform diminishes.  It seems like every agency in the comms industry is talking about social media, gurus and experts launch themselves on the success of a little SEO, some aggregation of trends and knowledge that most of the market knows there is an opportunity, but that’s the extent of their knowledge.

I believe the conversation we should be having is how to make media social. Planning and developing content for a world where stories move across media networks, both new and old, seems to be the strategy to try and develop. You have to go where the audience is, but also, as a brand you have to develop a meaningful relationship with people and not their online profile. The brands that provide the most seamless experience across the networks are going to win.

I’m excited as hell to be involved.

If you needed yet another example of the shaky ground Paid media platforms find themselves on you need look no further that the Football World Cup, playing out in South Africa as we speak. Traditionally, the headline sponsor of the Cup itself has bought itself an unassailable platform on which to push its product messages. FIFA protected the brand inside the stadia and ferociously chased down any brand foolish enough to mention their trademarks, let alone show an image of the Cup itself. When you ask US$351 Million for an exclusive property, keeping it that way kind of comes with the territory.

Last time the comms press spoke about how effective the cage soccer, or horizontal football billboards that Nike had rolled out had been in terms of hijacking the event. It was great content, sure, but the numbers didn’t mean it seriously competed with the event and its title sponsor. Even a chink in the armour was seen as a success.

But as I said, that was last time. This time things seem very different. A local survey by media buying agency MEC indicated that Nike had 17 percent recall as a sponsor of the event, Adidas, who shelled out the money, came in at only 15 percent. Leveraging sponsorships outside of the games, their physical locations and the licensed broadcast content is where the real benefits reside from a brand perspective. Both brands have invested in their online presences, but Nike is the clear winner in more than just brand recall when you look at what they’ve actually put up.

First, the Quest, from Adidas.

Now, Write the Future, from Adidas.

I think the big difference here is that Adidas has created advertising, the product shots seem almost gratuitous, especially on the third time through, It seems more about the brand that any emotion. Anticipation of something coming maybe, but not something I’m going to talk breathlessly about around the watercooler.

The Nike spot in comparison could have been written by a PR company. It is the beautiful game at its most noteworthy. The slowmo isn’t there to amplify the swoosh, its there to make you ache for the strike that’s coming next. It has stars from a wide range of nations. The real genius is of course the fat Rooney in the caravan cooking beans and painting the third division lines on a grim park somewhere in England. This unbelievable moment, with a little bit of internet meme in the form of Ronaldo on the Simpsons takes it over the top. No wonder then, that it has garnered 16,000,000 views to Adidas’s 200,000.

Building Content that Earns Attention.

The approach that has been used to develop the Nike content above is one many brands could learn from. I think we all agree that the days of telling the public a message that you decide are fast fading. Channel Proliferation and online clutter means that you story has to tick four very important boxes.

1. Be Noteworthy.  You have to include an element of note if you expect people to pay attention. If it’s something brand new, great. The fact you’re now selling a pink one probably doesn’t cut it. Surprise people if you can, even better if you can make them laugh or feel something inside their heart. Show something that hasn’t been seen before. The world probably does not need another flashmob.
2. Know you audience and build stories for them. Understand that the success of what you are doing depends on the audience liking the story enough to retell it or pass it along their networks. In jokes are great.
3. Be shareable. Build content and stories on platforms that make sharing as easy as possible. One more retelling is of value to you as a brand, why would you create a barrier to this happening?
4. Be relevant. There has to be a strong connection between your brand, the sponsorship and what you’ve created.

Now, Adidas did realise they needed a “cooler” piece of film to compete in the transmedia space and earn them some coverage. Here’s what they came out with:

It’s almost like a few people got together and said “Star Wars is popular online, so is Snoop and we’ve got Becks, some Mancs, Daft Punk and that other guy. Let’s put all that together.” It’s kind of funny, but I don’t think it really ticks those four boxes. Maybe if Snoop had his arms chopped off, Becks was shot and the end had Jabba on the sideline at the World Cup. maybe.

I ran into this over at http://www.planningfromtheoutside.com/

I think it’s a great way to communicate the sheer weight of involvement and communications the social web has attracted. Sometimes when we’re planning a new campaign, it feels like the game is changing in front of our eyes. Here’s the proof it really is.

Change really is the only constant.

The first step in developing a campaign for a client in the world of social media has been the identification of a platform of choice, usually based on knowledge about the segmentation of different users, their preferences as a group for a platform or the desired campaign behavior being native to one.

With the ever increasing number of changes to facebook, the API, the page layout and the rules around using the platform to communicate with real life people are starting top wake agencies up to the issues around committing a campaign to a single social platform. What used to be a choice made for manageability might now be a big risk to success.

Social contests, competitions, content production, interaction and crowdsourcing seem as though they’ve become staples of the marcomms landscape with larger players moving money away from traditional ATL into the social web. The social web as newsmaker also seems to be growing in importance, with message integration needing to be as current and as relevant to get the “viral” multiplier effect that we’re chasing as both brands and agencies.

Which brings me to the inspiration for this post. When G-Star and their agency got together to talk about fashion week they chose a very different direction when the got to the platform of choice conversation. They decided to build a platform of choice for the targets of their campaign.

The concept is to find four citizen journalists to cover fashion week in NYC (here’s the link, if you’re keen)

Where the departure from tradition happens is that they’ve asked people to self idenity the channel that best fits them.

If you’re a facebook queen, you need to connect your profile and upload a photo of yourself that shows your love of denim (create personalised, engaging content your friends will comment on.)

If a tweet seems more your style you’ll need a big audience that listens to at least some of what you say and you’ll need to craft 140 characters that get the team at G-Star interested (prove your ability to write platform specific, engaged copy.)

Flip camera owners will need to connect to their YouTube account and share some quality documentary footage that already exists, or some new stuff especially for the content. (Be able to cover the event in a way that really brings it to life.)

If images that are still seem more your style, share your best fashion shot from flickr. (Stylishly capture fashion.)

This to me has real potential, tagging or submitting your photo on facebook should give them the opportunity create an engaged group ready to disseminate content when Fashion Week hits. Cheery picking a twitterer should allow for furious coverage when folks are looking for the lowdown, leading to a bigger share of voice in traditional media. Tie these two amplification strategies to two quality producers of moving and still imagery, house it all on a microsite with inbound and outbound links from the platforms they’ve engaged and you might have a property that leads Google ratings for the year to come.

The real nugget of value is if you’re making a decision about platforms of choice. Try making it about your audience not your administrative overhead.

Toyota Australia has taken an unusual move in developing a social media approach for the market here, briefing five agencies and challenging them to make something work for a mere A$15,000

The first few campaigns have broken, and pickings are slim.

• One Green Bean have put an American Werewolf in a Yaris, enabling all the twitterverse to get a cheap ride around Sydney, should the stars align and this one cab wolf be able to oblige. Passengers are snapped with Wolfy and uploaded, as well as be encouraged to live tweet the lift to their network.
• Hothouse have lifted one of the old internet meme standby’s, making a lego film about a prison break, with a real life yaris being driven by some massively out of scale lego men. They’re asking for comments on why yaris is so clever on the YouTube host platform and giving away a car at the end of it.
• The Population are playing on the car’s role as the ultimate city car and leveraging Sydney Melbourne rivalries to drive a facebook page war between the two cities, asking existing fans to recruit new ones, add comments and building a (maybe) useful permission asset along the way.
• Saatchi & Saatchi have made no real effort at all, asking users to create an ad, offering up 7k as a first prize. Perhaps spending some of the cash on the design of the page would have made this more appealing and they might have an amazing strategy to leverage the content that they’ll get (or maybe create in-house)
• Iris seem to be waiting, perhaps to take advantage of the noise around these campaigns.

The social media echo box is awash with negative comments and admonishments for Toyota for perpetrating such an injustice on the public of Australia, Laurel Papworth has a lengthy post covering a lots of the errors but I think she goes too far with the comment “social media is NOT an experiment”

Back when we were still living in a world where TV always delivered sales, this type of open pitch would have been impossible. Production of TVC’s completely preclude it. It also would have been visible to a very high percentage of the market, making confusion and ridicule very likely.

The digital environment turns that logic on it’s head. Cost per action advertising has led to a situation where multi variate testing is not just common, it’s necessary. Starting with a broad, somewhat unfocused approach and then increasing investment once a channel or message has proved engaging is very much a best practice approach.

I’m not naive enough to believe that social media campaigns are the same as web based ad serving, but the cost of building for these platforms is much lower than for TV and apart from a few highly interested and talkative “new media” experts, I’d suggest that badly thought out, usury ideas don’t offend, they simply don’t cut through and die out, unnoticed and ignored.

Using a ready, fire, aim approach can be very successful in learning about the social media environment and how consumers see your brand, it’s voice and it’s place in their live’s. The real danger in adopting this type of approach doesn’t lie in the quality of the ideas but in not backing what works.

Mumbrella has an excellent post, with links to all the campaigns if you want to go see.

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