Introducing the Beyond The Promise-Sessions

Last week we kickstarted the campaign for an upcoming series of seminars called Beyond the Promise-sessions with the release of our CEO's first (and according to him, probably also his last) book. The book is called "Beyond the Promise" and makes a statement against the deluge of marketing books nowadays that promise one-stop-big-visions to branding.

Pieter Goiris' book to the contrary is apart from 3 pages empty, hinting the reader that the real content about "Beyond the Promise" is about vivid examples and real proof that our way of working ... works. First reactions to the book were overwhelming, a high profile magazine editor replied "Pieter, your new book is a real pageturner. I finished it in 3 minutes".

To learn more about our approach you can skip the book and head straight to the Beyond The Promise-sessions on May 26, 27 and 28th. 

Seats are extremely limited as we prefer quality over quantity, so you'll have to hurry. More info via the campaignsite or follow us on twitter via @btpsessions

When is Baby K arriving???

Apparently the baby-elephant @ the Antwerp Zoo wants to stay in his mummy's tummy...
A lot of people are wondering why it's taking so long so we've launched some new stuff on baby-olifant.be:

• A short movie in which the elephant caretaker Bruno explains why Baby K isn't here yet
• An avatar application that allows you to generate an "I'm waiting for Baby K" avatar with trunk on your photo
• An online ticketshop so you can already buy your tickets to visit Baby K and avoid long waiting-lines
• Nothing to do with the waiting but now you can also easily share the baby-elephant site on delicious, twitter, facebook, myspace, and so on.

Belgium is doing great on Facebook

According to a blogpost on O'reilly, Belgium is on place 5 in Europe, with around 2 200 000 (almost 20% of the Belgian population) active Facebook users. There are a few reasons why Belgium as a small country is ranking so high. I'm thinking of a few :

• As Belgians we don't mind our site being in English. I know currently you can get FB in Dutch, but a lot of Belgians started using FB in English.
• We, Belgians, are internationally focused.
• We didn't really had a locally focused social network, which was targetted towards an elder crowd (18+). We do have Netlog, which still is (and will probably remain) really popular, but it is focused more towards a younger crowd. 
• We have a relatively good penetration of broadband connections, which makes it easy to share and browse photos/movies/ ...
• Facebook came to Belgium just when a lot of Belgian internet users were discovering that the internet was more than the basic usage like email, surfing, google, e-banking, ... 
• Facebook became very popular as a social network for students and has grown exponentially from that audience.

Others reasons? (feel free to add some in the comments)

Boondoggle & Volvo launch a CO2 neutral internet campaign

To promote the Volvo DRIVe models, we launched a CO₂ neutral internet campaign. The CO₂  emmissions of the campaign will be neutralised via certified CO₂ compensations. Volvo will not only compensate the CO₂ emmissions of the website, but also the Google searches and banner impressions.

Discover the campaign and the amount of produced CO₂ on www.volvoconditions.be.

Axion Bannerconcerts on Forbes.com

Well this is great. Our campaign for Axion made it into the Forbes list of the year’s top digital campaigns. Really cool stuff, especially if you look at the other brands that made it into the list:

1. Axion
2. Fiat (eco:Drive)
3. Nokia (N96 Bruce Lee edition)
4. Sony Playstation (“The Last Guy” videogame)
5. Orange (Animal-themed pay-as-you-go cellphone packages)

Cyber Lions Awards Belgium – 5 out of 7 awards!

Boondoggle in pre-selection for Cannes Lions Awards

The Belgium Cyber Lions Awards, which rewards creativity in interactive marketing, issues 7 awards in the categories Interactive Campaign, Online Advertising and Viral Advertising. Five out of seven awards have the name  Boondoggle written all over it now. The winning campaigns will be submitted to the International Cyber Lions Awards in Cannes.

The “Banner Concerts” campaign for Axion, a Belgium bank for youngsters, is solid as a rock for two times Gold, in the categories Interactive Campaign and Online Advertising. Through Axion banners on www.axion.be band members from roughly twenty upcoming bands performed in a banner concert. The audience could vote for the band they liked the best. The band having received the highest number of votes won a  live concert in the famous Belgium pop venue The Ancienne Belgique, a streaming of this concert and a recording at the AB sound-studio.
Previously, the campaign has won a Pencil at the prestigious One Shows Pencils Awards in New York, and is selected by Forbes.com as one of the 10 ‘most outstanding digital campaigns of the previous year’.

Bronze is for the Volvo campaign “Personalized Website”. Volvo stands for  comfort en communicates this by organizing the Volvo Comfort Days. To promote the Comfort Days in September 2008 the choice was to  gekozen make a detour from the regular concept of a campaign website, in which design and content are predefined. Through banners the public was being led/directed to a portal upon which they could choose the most comfortable format to check out the conditions of the Volvo Comfort Days: Excel, Word, YouTube, Facebook, Volvo microsite, Flickr, Wordpress blog and PowerPoint.

Boondoggle won another two Bronze Awards, one in the category Interactive Campaign for the road safety campaign “The Will” for the Flemish government and with “Out Of Focus Reply” for Berlitz in the category Viral Marketing.