Have you heard about Shazam? If you own a smartphone you probably have. And you probably know exactly what Shazam does, right? One more question. Have you ever seen an ad for Shazam? I haven’t, and I’m guessing a lot of people haven’t seen one neither. Shazam is a service so simple it doesn’t need advertising
Since it’s birth the advertising industry has specialized itself in selling bad products through advertising, where today they actually should be specialized advising companies how build products that advertise their selves.
If we want ad agencies to be relevant in the future we need to convince brands to help with the R&D of their new products. Instead of hiring agencies to invent a brandpromise and advertise across media old and new, hire agencies to help building a product or a service that doesn’t need a promise, nor a USP.
“Sometimes strategic and creative time is best spent thinking of new product or service innovations for clients. Ad agencies have developed amazing innovations for clients, and I think the best example of this is the Happy Meal for McDonalds. Just this week I heard CP+B is testing a new product for Kraft Mac and Cheese for the Grill.”
Mel proposes some steps we can take to move more upstream in a client’s business starting at an execution level, moving up to strategy (where most of the agencies stand today), further up to R&D ending up in Venture Capital, where agencies are no longer hired, but an actual partner in developping the business.
But do we belong as far upstream as Mel suggests? We do. In this videoDavid Pogue, tech columnist at NY Times, points out where brands fail to build products or services that fail. Not because they lack innovation, but because they are built from a technological point of view.
Modern brands that really get what lives with people today already know they should be authentic if they expect consumers to engage. Modern brands know they should go beyond the promise and proof what they stand for.
But consumers are smart. Just as much as people were wary of brands (s)talking through old skool mass media, people are still on their guard when brands act. Brand behavior is not about getting your act together, but it's much more about defining what you stand for and making sure it fits your brand character. People aren't stupid, they know when you are greenwashing. They know when you are trying to gather personal information to spam their facebookpages.
This presentation contains a very insightful quote: "Remember, consumers don't judge authenticity based on actual behavior but, rather, the intention behind it."
Yesterday InBev announced that their takeover of the American brewer Anheuser-Busch was complete. The new company would continue to operate as Anhauser-Busch InBev, the largest brewer in the world and one of the five largest consumer product groups in the world.
When it was announced, this takeover wasverycontroversial in the US. Budweiser, A-B's flagship product, is widely recognised as a real American product, and popular sentiment had it that this pearl to the crown would be lost when the company ended up in foreign hands. No more "Watching the game, having a Bud". True.
Popular sentiment is a headstrong horse, and riding it can be very tricky. A-B decided not to try and change opinions with a large-scale advertising campaign, but chose to confront it head to head. It launched Budweiser American Ale, a beer that couldn't be more distant from InBev's Stella-Artois lager, and stressed it's American qualities :
"Brewed with caramel-malted barley from America's Heartland for a rich, amber color, and sweet malt character, and dry-hopped with Cascade hops from the Pacific Northwest for a noticeable citrus aroma, it's more than a new taste... it's a whole new tradition".
A-B continued to support this by advertising in Americana magazines and media, and by supporting media that also ranked high on the real-American scale, such as WBEZ-Chicago's popular radio show, This American Life, with presenter Ira Glass. Initial reactions werepredominantlypositive.
It's a great example of turning the tides, and launching a new product in the process.
Conversations between consumers build brands, but can also break brands. Up until now however, we had no tool to monitor these conversations, to measure their impact and to pull vital strategic insights out of them. Boondoggle and Insites Consulting partnered to build such a tool.
Starting point was the Conversation Mapping Research, in which we tracked both offline and online conversations for the media, gaming, soda, telecom, cars, small multimedia equipment category, during two weeks with 1000 consumers. In terms of methodology, an online diary method was used.
The press release will give you ample details about the results of the Conversation Mapping Research , but here is already a small grasp :
every week, there are about 25 million conversations on brands
people talk about every brand, and everybody talks about brands
these conversations are not without impact : about 1 out of three conversations brings about a change of opinion on a brand
conversations about the brand and the product or service tend to have much more impact than conversations about the advertising
the impact of a conversation is much higher if the conversation was triggered by a question
superinfluencers exist, but anybody con contribute to this word-of-mouth. Brands telling a engaging story and providing the right tools, are able to engage influencers, spreaders and receivers. Volkswagen succeeded with its UK campaign for Golf in creating a new aspirational territory for Golf, and an engaging experience for influencers, spreaders and receivers. Cadbury handed with its gorilla commercial to everyone a story of highly entertaining value, creating massive views and a significant increase in marketshare.
conversations can be categorized into 4 productcategories : bashing, barking, serenade and bonding.
brands out of the same product category tend to be in the same conversation category.
brands can design conversations and even more important design the answers
The result of the Conversation Mapping Research is a research tool which brands can use to track and gain insight into the conversations happening on their brand. Read more about all this in the press release. And get a chance to win one of our five Conversation Mapping Workshops for your brand on conversationmapping.eu
Hummers have long been the archetype of the self-centred, gas-guzzling compensations for all kinds of neuroses or frustrations that are SUV's. Even with all the talk about global warming and the like, some blockheads will still drive around in their little tanks, showing off their bling.
Enter the ninja, or rather artist and activist Ji Lee, who, together with Andrew Wilcox and Nelly Ma, created Tag A Dummer, a grassroots kit for showing your disapproval.
The m.o. is pretty straightforward :
Download template
Cut out letters
Find Hummer
Modify logo
Upload photo
The result : "207 Dummers tagged". But with a website design that mimics Hummer's, "Like nothing else" may be stretching it a little...
As you might have noticed through our blog, flickr and twitter-feeds, we were with quite a lot at the Cannes Lions festival last week. Vinne -as a member of the cyber jury- already gave his favourites last week, so now I guess it's my turn to give my overview of last week overload of creativity.
For starters, last year a high rank media executive told the memorable worlds : "2007 will become known as the year where digital has finally left the computer". This quote really struck a chord with me as it echoes the vision we had when we launched Boondoggle. Without giving the whole story away, 2008 confirmed the trend : most of the interesting work at this year's Cannes festival was digital, whether it was online or not.
Our co-creative director Vinne who was a member of the Cannes Lions Cyber-jury gave his favourites in a previous post. Yesterday night then, the Cyberlions 2008 were announced, click here for an overview with links and all.
I must say I was really impressed by the giant leap interactive communication has taken (again) this year. However, interactivity seems to be an indispensable element in all the categories. More about that later. For now, enjoy this case that won the Grand Prix in the "Viral"-category. What started as a promotion for Nine Inch Nails' new album turned out to become an immersive alternate reality game that redefined not only viral marketing (bye bye funny youtube video) but music experience as well.
Yesterday Simon and Amaia, managing partners at Attentio.com treated the Boondoggle strategic team with a workshop on conversation tracking and on how to extract intelligence from online conversations.
This movie was recorded by our embedded journalist Vincent Depoortere with his mobile phone and uploaded on YouTube the same day. Today -6 days later- the view stats have hit the 120,000 mark along with a heated discussion on "wasting food" in 70 comments.
