Wednesday
November 19
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 was very controversial 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 were predominantly positive.
It's a great example of turning the tides, and launching a new product in the process.
Monday
November 3
Apparently vintage rockers AC/DC know their demographic : for their new single, Rock'n' Roll Train, they launched a new video full of guitar rock cliches. Sadly, however, most of their fans have grown up, have jobs and spend their days at desks, staring at computer screens that quite often are behind extensive firewalls. Not to worry, Australia's loudest come to the rescue with a special version of the video, rendered completely in Microsoft Excel. Talk about surfing the information highway to hell !
Monday
October 6
This is how you could put the challenge that Droga5 was facing in order to help Barack Obama win the US Presidential election.
Key swing states like Florida make the difference between winning and losing. A significant part of Florida's population consists of retired Jews, who contrary to their liberal grandchildren, tend to vote Republican. In order to win them over to the Democratic side, Droga5 came up with a rather smart strategy that could serve as inspiration for traditional political marketing : to ask liberal Jewish grandchildren to convince their less liberal Jewish grandparents to vote for Obama.
The campaign-platform's main feature is an hilariously effective 4 minute commercial feauring Jewish comedian Sarah Silverman that's been viewed 1.4 million times in only 2 weeks. The ultimate objective is to get as much people to fly over to their grandparents on Columbus Day Weekend in Florida. To do that the campaign site has some nifty social features like a printable PDF discussion guide, pre-written emails and a facebook group that already gathered more than 15.000 members.
Friday
June 27
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.
... [ Read on ]
Tuesday
June 12
(picture by Bill Bertram)
Earlier this year we told you how Jourik's Commodore 64 brought out the geek out of everybody at Boondoggle (well erm i-merge at that time). In a sudden burst of Commodore-mania I bought a copy of "On the Edge - The spectacular rise and fall of Commodore" which I I just finished reading yesterday. It turned out to be a fascinating read, because it discusses all the "serious" business, technology and political issues that weren't on my radar when I was a gameplaying teenager in 1985. For example :
- the perpetual war between marketing and engineering. Despite the fact that Commodore was mainly engineering driven, the success of the Commodore 64 (17 million sold, during its 12 year lifespan) was the result of a joint effort of a couple of visionary engineers and one of the most powerful advertising campaigns of the 80s.
- founder of Commodore Jack Tramiel's sleek sense of business, famous for his cut-throat business deals. Negotiating a one-off licence for Microsoft Basic 2.0 which came along all 17 million Commodore's 64, meaning Microsoft never made one dollar off the success of the C=64.
- how Commodore almost incidentally created a market for homecomputing following Tramiel's rallying cry "Computers for the masses, not the classes" with the VIC-20 and the C=64. Then due to greed, company politics and mismanagement failed to make a success out of the technologically superior Amiga in the second part of the 80s.
If you want to have a quick read through Commodore's history, this Wikipedia-article is pretty good.
The spectacular rise and fall of Commodore is most of all a homage that wants to set the record straight about what really happened at the start of the homecomputer-revolution. For that matter, the inside flap resumes the author's pitch quite welll :
Between 1975 and 1994, Commodore had astounding success in the nascent personal computer business. Amid the the chaos and infighting, Commodore was able to achieve some remarkable industry firsts. They were the first to show a personal computer, even before Apple and Radio Shack. They sold a million computers before anyone else. No single computer has sold more than the Commodore 64. The first true multimedia computer, the Amiga, came from Commodore. Yet with all these milestones, Commodore receives almost no credit as a pioneer.
A large part of Commodore's unstable success and it sudden fall can be attributed to their almost exclusive focus on cost-effectiveness and distribution (Commodore was the first to sell its computers via K-Mart & Sears in the US). Commodore however never really had a vision on marketing & advertising. Apple in contrast was exactly the opposite. Throughout much of the 80s their underpowered and overpriced computers were outsold by Commodore 10:1. But they constantly touted spectacular (but exaggerated) sales figures, while Steve Jobs established the visionary image of Apple. A fact that remains unmentioned in "The spectacular rise & fall of Commodore" about Apple is that Apple had somebody like Guy Kawasaki on board who successfully introduced the concept of evangelism to the computer business.
If Commodore thought about advertising, they followed the text book with hefty TV budgets and single minded product claims. One can only dream about how Commodore would have fared with somebody like Guy Kawasaki on board to evangelise the Amiga, which in 1985 was 1 or 2 generations ahead of the black and white 128k Macintosh.
Click below to watch some of the milestones from the short advertising reel of Commodore.
... [ Read on ]
Sunday
February 4
The problem with advertising for movies is that most box-office hits don't really need it. The fact that a movie theater invests in showing the movie is most of the time more than enough to get the PR- and Word-of-mouth machine rolling. Throwing in some extra advertising just might add a few extra percentages, but distributors often don't consider it worth the effort.
That's why I love this campaign for Tim Burtons latest movie Corpse Bride. It featured two campaign sites. The first one is bonymail.com, in which you can compose a bony mail (as shown on the picture) and send it to a friend. The second one is Ask The Dead, in which you can ask a question to the dead or let the dead compose a message for your friends. Both campaigns stimulated people to share the Corpse Bride brand experience with their friends. I think that's a very clever use of interactive advertising in a category that thrives mainly on PR and Word-of-mouth.
Thursday
January 18
I found this brilliant interactive campaign on MIT Advertising Blog. A great example of how the internet can bring immersive experiences in the real world:
MIT Advertising Lab: "Last year, I wrote about how all the pieces were already in place to create Minority Report style billboards that address shoppers by name. Today, fiction has become reality in a test run by MINI: "The idea is simple, first give MINI USA some irreverent information about yourself (nothing too personal). MINI USA then sends out a special keyfob (4-6 weeks after sign-up) that identifies you to each of the Motorboards you pass. When the boards detect that you are about the drive by, they deliver a personal message based on the information you originally gave."
-- Motoring File via Digital Signage News
http://adverlab.blogspot.com/2007/01/mini-tests-personalized-billboards.html
Friday
December 15
Read in NYT: " The ThermaCare products intended to treat women with menstrual pain
are behind the elaborate new campaign, known as “Men With Cramps.” The
effort, with a budget estimated at $1 million, includes two special Web
sites, a fake documentary and video clips, all purportedly the work of
an imaginary institute that is studying the imaginary problem of
“cyclical nonuterine dysmenorrhea” — i.e., men with cramps. (There are
traditional ads for the other types of ThermaCare products, with
spending last year of about $35 million.
MenWithCramps.com.
Saturday
November 11
The 1st moment of truth is the place where you first "meet" the product. The shop - off or online. You can screw it up already there. Online ... the 1 st confrontation with your brand is of course the site. eMarketer.com - Online Retailers Face Four-Second Barrier published this nice list of hurdles.
Friday
October 27
Marketers at Procter & Gamble are testing a revolutionary marketing tool that, through the power of computer-generation, is saving them years of traditional research. The reactions, behaviour and experiences of consumers are being played out for them to see thanks to "the Cave" – a walk-in three dimensional room that projects the visitor into a virtual world.
Given P&G’s clients comprise A-list supermarkets like Tesco, J.Sainsbury Asda and Boots, the cave is able to recreate, in every detail, the interior of these high street stores, The FT reported.
Cave visitors can walk through and explore the aisles, ‘picking’ products that catch their eye, or turning them round to read labels or sell by dates before they proceed to checkout to ‘buy.’
As consumers explore their familiar shopping worlds, albeit virtual, watchful marketers at P&G are tweaking the store layouts, displays, product design and overall packaging.
Interesting as that sounds, P&G is once again giving it's own interpretation on the theme that has been proven to be succesful for other web services. Just like the launch of Tremor, their own word of mouth network, The Cave is very similar to what is now going on in Second Life. It's the idea that counts, but rather than following the other brands into the Second Life saga and creating the experience on location, P&G fights swims against the stream and chooses to create it's own virtual world, of which they'll have full control.
“In three months we have done work that would previously have taken us two years,” Gianni Ciserani, P&G’s general manager for UK& Ireland said in an interview with The Financial Times.
He added that before the virtual cave, the company would need to persuade one of their retail clients to overturn one of their stores for a pilot – an experiment that means time and money for both parties. (read more via CustomerWorld)
That said, the industry in Second Life is booming as never before. Three months prior to the targeted date, Second Life welcomed it's 1.000.000th visitor. With all these new people streaming in to share the experience, it still requires quite some pc-savvyness to move around and explore what Second Life has to offer.
Very often, newbies find themselves lost in a place with no directions and they don't know where to go to participate in social events or gatherings. That's why an online travel agency sees its business booming by offering guided tours to new citizens of the virtual life.
Synthravels is based in Milan, Italy. The concept of Synthravels is by Mario Gerosa and by Matteo Esposito of Imille. Mario Gerosa is a journalist who has a long experience in travel. He has worked for many years as senior editor of Condé Nast Traveller Italy and for the most renowned travel magazines. He is a member of the GIST, the association of the Italian Travel Journalists, and of the OMNSH, a French association of video games researchers, and he has been organizing in-world meetings with famous Second Life residents for a project of the Indiana University. In July 2006 he launched the project for the preservation of Virtual Architectural Heritage.
After a quick registration procedure, you're invited to list the parts of Second Life you wish to explore and one or two dates/time settings that best suit your schedule. Synthravels then promises to contact you and arrange the guided tour of your choice.
Apart from travelers, the organisation is also looking for guides, so if any of you know some nice spots and cares to make some money touring around newbies, sign up at Synthravels. Your digital red umbrella is waiting for you. So are the tourists.
If you think the story ends here, no, we're not even getting started.
... [ Read on ]
