Hill+Knowlton Strategies

Just how do you follow Burger King’s legendary viral ‘Subservient Chicken’? Well, the wags at Crispin Porter + Bogusky keep trying with various degrees of success.

The latest chicken-themed campaign is Huckin Chicken, involving a man on a motorcycle in a chicken suit performing a series of increasingly dangerous stunts. The viral is a clever extension of the related Burger King ads using behind the scenes footage. As the number of visitors grows, they show additional clips, leading to a ‘world record’ chicken jump after 1m visitors.

At the time of writing, I’m not aware of whether the Guinness Book of Records has added the record to their books. Perhaps they are waiting for other flying chickens to come forward first?

Given its relation to the ads, it is heavier branded than previous virals, with brand mentions in the ad, on the back of the bike and the final ads themselves on display.

It’s well executed and another creative piece of work, but maybe it’s time to move on now, guys. We’ve all seen enough viral chickens for one lifetime.

P.S. One disturbing note was a throwaway comment saying that the pit was specially dug to film the footage as ‘originally this was all giant redwoods’. I sincerely hope not, as I know which I’d prefer to see.

If things have been a little quiet on here lately, there’s a
good(ish) reason. No, I haven’t fallen out of love with the blogosphere
- quite the reverse. It’s all down to Chocolate, you see.

For some weeks now my affections have been elsewhere as one of the Chocolate bloggers, a blog our Netcoms team set up to amplify a blogger relations programme we are running for the LG Chocolate phone.

While it can be considered poor form to post about client work (I
think this is my first), I have been itching to share some observations
into the programme so far. Observations which probably don’t have a
natural place on the Chocolate blog. So, here we are. Sorry.

My colleague Niall has already blogged about some of the more mainstream insights he has gained, so let me just make a few personal observations:

1. Bloggers don’t bite, as long as you ask nicely and do your homework.
2. It helps if you have an interesting product to talk about. A lot.
3. Prepare to learn something. Despite mugging up on the phone for a good
   week, almost every review has taught me something new.
4. Bloggers
   don’t follow the classic ‘press review’ formula. Reviews are personal,
   passionate and go in unexpected directions. Little things matter.
5. Take a deep breath. This kind of activity makes people nervous.
6. Be yourself and try to have fun. It shows.
7. The higher profile an activity, the weirder emails you get.

In the interests of full disclosure in case I haven’t made it clear, LG is a client of ours

Thanks to a particularly savage set of keys, my right hand pocket is officially out of action today. This leads to a storage issue for all of the gadgets I have been accumulating in recent weeks, now that it is jackets-off for the summer.

And it appears I am not alone in experiencing this increasingly common problem in modern society.

My poor overworked left pocket now has to cope with wallet, keys, MP3 player and phone, leaving it surely at breaking point. Just as well I’m not carrying a BlackBerry or digital camera. Fortunately, my independent-minded pedometer is at home on a belt.

Given the growing convergence of devices the solution may be to have one of the combined MP3 players and phone. The problem is that no single, affordable device acts as a panacea.

My digital camera takes better pictures than my mobile phone. My MP3 player is more intuitive and has better storage than my mobile phone. Those devices are out there, but will have to go through the early adopter pricing phase before they are viable for my pocket (in all senses of the word).

With the steady growth of m-commerce, mobile transactions will become more trusted and prevalent, allowing me to reduce wallet space, although again it will face the issues of trust and technology that e-commerce went through.

Indeed, even my pedometer’s days could be numbered through the likes of GPS. But not anytime soon.

Until then it’s time to get out the needle and thread and fix that pocket.

Never one to miss a trick (or a little publicity), Jamie Oliver A.K.A. ‘The Naked Chef’ is adding his voice to the Podcasting phenomenon.

In between running his restaurants, selling his books and doing his charitable works, the ever energetic Oliver will be answering ‘the very best and funniest’ questions from his loyal fans. Questions are sent in by leaving a 30-second message on the ‘Podcast’ hotline and Oliver will answer them via the Podcast in a ‘cross-media’ phone-in show.

Quite whether this is the right medium for him is another question. Given the myriad specific challenges facing the amateur chef, a Q&A style session may well be better handled via the messageboard format that he already has on the site. Also it would prove somewhat impractical to be scribbling down any recipes while listening to the Podcasts themselves.

This smacks more of a ‘bit of fun’ and the chance for those that like the sound of his voice to enjoy his unique cockney charm than the new pillar of the Oliver empire.

I’d be surprised if this one goes the distance.

Sometimes Google is just too clever for its own good. I’ve blogged before about Google’s predictive search and the sometimes strange assumptions that it makes about your searching intentions.

I received an unusual email today from someone calling me a ‘dingle‘, which I believe is a reference to my footballing allegiances. Keen to see if I was being insulted or not, I did a quick Google for a ‘dingle’. Ever the clever clogs, the predictive search result came back ‘See results for house of fraser‘. Eh?

More digging quickly unearthed that the House of Fraser had acquired Dingles back in the 70s. Now this could be an obscure reference to my fashion sense, but footballing insults are rarely that sophisticated.

Another scan down the results brought up Emmerdale’s Dingle family (bad eggs in a UK countryside soap opera). Bingo! Southampton is not a major metropolis (it’s a city though), therefore I am a (London-based) country boy.

Back to the drawing board, Google. Unless of course Dingles do shop at the House of Fraser after all.

No, not a misty-eyed post about Badly Drawn Boy’s songwriting genius, but instead the launch of a new blogging portal, 2TalkAbout.

Its first incarnation is a Honda-sponsored site where customers and in theory Honda engineers get to mix and talk about Honda. Consumers can sign up and post their thoughts into the portal for others to comment on and respond to.

At the time of writing, there is an interesting mix of branding, praise and criticism. Branding through the Honda logo and an ad for the Honda Civic; praise on the likes of fuel efficiency; criticism on topics such as the blog itself and of car defects like the Civic ES fuel flap (no sign of the engineers just yet though).

All in all a promising start for a community conversation and there is certainly an active community of Honda advocates online to tap into. The question remains the level to which Honda themselves will actively participate in the conversation and act upon requests made by their customers. It’s good to listen, but also important for customers to feel that they are being heard.

In the interests of transparency, I am an active follower of Honda’s moves in the digital world, having worked on the Honda account for a number of years at my previous digital agency. I was interested to read the thoughts of my old client John Goodbody on the portal: “We like people talking about our cars. And now there’s a blog site where you can discuss your Honda experiences with others or get a useful insight into Honda ownership. We encourage our customers to interact, and this is a great medium for doing just that.” It certainly is, John.

Today saw the release of the final episode of Ricky Gervais’ all-conquering series of 12 Podcasts.

As Ricky Gervais will tell you (and often, if you’ll let him), he is a comedy phenomenon with record sales of his DVDs, live gigs and books. It was inevitable that he would prove the tipping point for Podcasting when it was announced that the Guardian would be hosting it, stacking up a world record 3 million and counting downloads along the way.

While I have experimented with various forms of Podcasting, from the Telegraph’s daily Podcast, to various BBC programmes, to the weird and wonderful world of amateur Podcasting, it has been more in a professional capacity to learn about the medium than as a staple of my media consumption. The Gervais Podcast, however, has become the essential accessory to my Monday evening commute and his informal chat is ideally suited to the MP3 player.

The strange sight of a commuter chuckling away to himself still provokes looks of bemusement from commuters clearly upset that someone is enjoying the daily scramble to make it home, in the same way that we still haven’t quite got used to those people with hands-free mobiles talking into space. It certainly helps to keep the seat next to me free.

Gervais’ ‘charity’ in providing free Podcasts, or ‘putting something back’ as he calls it, is also at a temporary end in another significant move for the medium. Gervais said in receiving his Guinness record: “Steve and Karl wanted to charge for the podcast. Just a pound they said. I said no. We’ve had nearly 3 million downloads so far. It’s difficult doing a show with two people who won’t talk to me now”.

Steve and Karl look to have got their way as both a new set of episodes and the full archive will be available for paid download shortly on Audible.com and iTunes Music Store and a currently advertised price of $6.95 or £3.75 for ‘at least’ 4 more episodes.

The real test will be whether people are willing to pay for the content. The Podcasts already attract advertising from the likes of Channel 4 and this form of informal chat is more commonly found on commercial radio, funded by advertising. As a representative of their target audience, I have to say I’m tempted to subscribe, although am reluctant to as the success of the series so far should be able to attract sufficient advertisers to keep it free and subscriber numbers ever higher.

The success of the Podcasts really do show once again that while innovation will always attract the curious, content is king in any medium.

The issue of blogger allegiances is still very much a live one, as Spanish start-up FON has discovered. Does stating that you’re an advisory board member amount to a full disclosure of interest? The tech sector feeds a (once again) growing number of entrepreneur-commentators whose networks of relationships (rewarded and un-rewarded) are often less transparent than those of MSM journalists. As the WSJ notes, “the possible conflicts associated with bloggers may be more nuanced than outright pay-for-commentary scandals.”

An apparently simple idea, and as Steve Rubel said at the time, an interesting one.

Lending sample products to talkative gadget enthusiasts that regularly review new models in their blogs was nothing new. The key innovation was giving them a blogging space packed with member-only resources which would help to amplify the reach of their blogs and facilitate the development of comment and citation networks both between them and with the wider blogging community. As well as getting access to new gear, the bloggers are clearly benefitting from the information and interaction fostered by the blogger relations blog. (Not to mention the increased traffic.)

However, Oliver Starr makes the point that all would-be copycats should note: “When sending something like these phones to hard core geeks, you’d better be awfully confident that your product is exceptional.” Nokia certainly appear to have been very open, making no restrictions on the blogger reviews that have arisen from this initiative. They also made sure that the campaign has been managed by a communications consultant with a technology background and his own blog – and with the time and enthusiasm to comment on each review generated by the 50 or so bloggers originally recruited to the scheme.

Gadgets like camera phones (whose output is itself media) lend themselves especially well to well-considered promotion through the blogosphere and other social media. And it’s clear from reading the blogger reviews that they are able to give the kind of hands-on perspective of how the devices fit within personal lifestyles that most mainstream journalists wouldn’t trouble themselves to reproduce:

“I took a 344MB AVI file of Pirates of the Caribbean and the PC Suite software churned out an 81MB .3gp file that plays like a champ on the Nokia N90. While viewing isn’t as great as it is on my PSP, it is nice to know I can do this on the device and save having to take multiple devices on trips.”

Still, there have to be one or two less transparent aspects to this campaign. How, for example, has Nokia managed to keep the flow of reviews so steady over the past three months? And in my review of all the posts I’m sure I spotted at least one blogger who had posted multiple reviews without making the sequence of posts entirely clear.

• Substance (including parts, structure and quantity)
• Form (including pattern, order and quality)

An article in Nature this week suggests that we make up our minds about websites within 50 milliseconds of viewing them. These brief glimpses can have a lasting impact known as the “halo effect” whereby minor faults are thereafter overlooked. As we tend to enjoy being right, it’s natural that we persevere with a website that delivered a positive first impression.

This research evidence complements that of Jane Raymond, a consumer psychologist at the University of Wales in Bangor. According to the New Scientist her team used a camera embedded in a pair of specs to record people’s gaze as they glanced at adverts while shopping or commuting. They found that hardly any ads made an impression at all: only around 1 per cent could be recalled without prompting. We may be exposed to brand messages all day long, but most of the time we’re just not taking them in.

Rayond blames this on the “attentional blink” whereby our awareness tends to plummet as we focus our attention on one thing in particular: So if something catches your attention, your brain is blind to anything else for a short period afterwards. Researchers have also found that if people are distracted by an image or brand when performing an intellectually demanding task, they tend to instantly dislike it, regardless of its emotional value. (Bad news for banners!)

The conclusion Raymond has reached is that in these times of attention overload, brand messages should be presented in a more absorbable way.

There’s a handy guide to consumer-generated media in this months’ CorpComms magazine, sponsored by us.

It’s a non-threatening introduction to the world of blogs, podcasts and community media, written specifically for the corporate communicator. We hope it get more companies in the UK interested in the opportunities that it raises.

If you can’t wait for your copy, here’s a PDF to download (833Kb).