A nice presentation on immersive branding

I found this website called Under The Influence through Christiaen Verschaeren's Twitter updates (subscribe to the man!). It's a series of presentations in pubs by incredibly interesting people.

The have all been recorded and you can watch them on the website or download them onto your ipod or iphone. I watched a really nice presentation by Paul Kemp-Robertson on what he calls "immersive branding", or how advertising stops looking like advertising. Basically, his story - cramped with fascinating examples boils down to four pilars:

1. Brands as entertainment – Example: the Cadburry's gorilla commercial and the subsequent immersive website "a glass and a half full productions", which is a great example of transmedia storytelling, on which we blogged about before. Another example: the Nike football campaign: Wayne Rooney drawing a circle on a camera lens and then break it with a free kick, followed by a question: what can you do?
2. Brands as service – a simple example Wrangler Laundromats at festivals. Springwise/Trendwatching.com would call this tryvertising.
3. Connected products – the product leads to an online experience. Nikeplus is the most obvious example. There’s also an organic banana brand that lead you to a website where you can see where it comes from and what the community is like. You can even network around the community where you’re getting your fruit from. Kitkat in Japan: the barcode on the packaging leads to the website in which you get a fortune wish that you can share with friends or on your blog.

 Link: http://www.irisnation.com/undertheinfluence