Branded services

The appstore opens a whole new world for branding. Easy to use, easy accessible and highly relevant connections with the consumer. The apps create a space for engaging the consumers on their terms and a new race has opened. The race for developing the most inviting, intriguing, innovative and involving app. So I will kickstart the race here and ask everybody to send comments with branded apps they have seen or heard about. Also ideas for cool apps that could have had a perfect sponsor or sender on it. Please participate. This could be quite fun and interesting .

Brand tags by Noah

This is really so cool. When we say the internet is focus groups on steroids this is a cool brand image exercise.

Look at Noah Brier – brand tags here. This is Adidas…

Created in tag clouds, by people to people. I could get lost a whole day looking at this real life perception of brands.

 

 

Top 27 under 27:advertising young minds: blogroll

I just made the list of top 27 blogs of people under 27! Proud to be number 26 on this list, although I actually am 27, but will enjoy it till they find out.

Here’s how it’s calculated and the official listing.

How to be a better planner

As planners we always observe others. We look at the herds, the individuals and complex relations between media, brands and people. But my favorite exercise, which continues to shock me is spending time looking at my own behavior. Watching my choices and actions with a curios”why the hell did I choose this toothpaste???” or just after finishing my daily newspaper (that will in a contemporary meaning be translated to the newspaper I claim to read, because it makes me feel like part of an weel-educated herd, but in real life reads once every fortnight on a saturday morning when I finally have the time for it, but end up reading the design and lifestyle section and then rushes out of the house throwing away the remaining 257 pages) asking my self “now I count as a READER how many ads do I remember?” Hmmm .. I remember one thing  – a fashion section featuring a new store in the Latin Quarter – I’m going to check that one out.

So to do this exercise is a constant reflexion on why did I do that. How do this ad affect me? What do I feel in different situations? How do I use the internet on work and does it differ from my use back home?

Another interesting approach would be taking a look at yesterday. How did that day turn out. Which touchpoint do I remember? Did I get affected by advertising? Did I buy anything? And most importantly why?

Lets see at my yesterday: I got up early, just doing my daily morning routine. Snooze, snooze, snooze, snooze – damn I have to get up now…. DAMN IT! Turning on the radio so I can wake up with music. I LOVE music.  Shower; wash my hair with the cheap shampoo from MATAS which I love the smell of. Most of all I use it because it okay and it goes into my non-branded dispenser from MUJI because it looks nice in my very minimalistic bathroom. Then I apply the super expensive conditioner from ORIGINS which I hate the smell of, but makes my hair behave very well.  I like the look of the product, so even though I have all intentions of pouring it into on of my MUJI dispensers somehow I haven’t done it yet… All the way through I’m listening to P3 the danish public service radio station on my TIVOLI Audio. I hate radio commercials in my morning bath. They are loud, aggressive and I feel my ears hurt! So P3 it is.

Then I put on a various collection of skincare. I spend a fortune on it eventhough all test say the cheap ones are just as good, nobody sees it and nobody nows it. My boyfriend makes so much fun about it, so it doesn’t make sense at all. BUT I LOVE IT! It just makes me feel so prepared for the day!

Then I walk to work getting exposed to all kinds of outdoor. I like outdoor when it’s made well. I spend last autumn eating a tomato and mascarpone soup because of the product looked so tasting on the adshells and it just fitted into my busy days.

This all happens in half an hour. Try to do this on a whole day – including your trip to the supermarket. It’s exiting and you learn a lot.

When you get tiring of this try to do the same exercise with a close close friend you expect to be honest. Keep asking into motives and situations.

I think this can inspire us everyday and be a personal perspective on the contrast to focusgroups, surveys and external consumer insights.

Nimby planning

The word Nimby seems to accelerate its meanings these days, so I will hereby join the choir and extent its reach to the planning sphere. So I’ll introduce the concept of Nimby planning. Everybody working with advertising know the  situations in which  co-workers or clients agree fully on the strategy. They nood at the insights on the need for a digital strategy or a creative media plan. You feel that the meeting was beneficial and that we all moved a step further into a bright future. You sleep well that night.

Next morning the “nimpy” feel steps in. You get a call; “Ohh we just talked about the strategy for next year and about blogging we don’t think we have the ressources. And by the way the creative outdoor campaign; It’s really great, but can we get the same reach as TV gave us last year?, and the thing about activation the social networks; our chief of sales says trade won’t accept it”

Ten days later you take last years strategy and copy paste it to 2008. That’s really a nimpy feel. We all know what’s right; but not in my backyard (or with my marketing budget) . Nobody ever get fired for recommending TV. (But they will in the future!)

So this is Nimpy planning. Here is wikipedias explanation of NIMBY:

NIMBY (an acronym of Not In My Back Yard) describes the phenomenon in which

residents designate a development as inappropriate or unwanted for their local area, even if the development is clearly a benefit for many.

NIMBY and its derivative terms NIMBYism, NIMBYs, and NIMBYists, refer implicitly to debates of development generally or a specific case, and as such their use is inherently contentious. Also, it is a relatively recent term, the first printed usage of which the Oxford English Dictionary identifies as being in 1980 in the Christian Science Monitor, and the nuances of which are still disputed. The term is usually applied to opponents by advocates of a development, implying that those opposing the debated development, or at least their viewpoint in such regards, is narrow, selfish, myopic, hypocritical or otherwise limited.

Social networks challenging IM?

A while ago I was going crazy cause some of my friends really got into the myspace thing, which in it self isn’t a bad thing. I’m there too – but mostly to figure out what is happening there. But they started sending messages to me on my comment-board. Which is ok as long as it is just comments, pictures or fun. But the comments started taking form as appointments and so. – and for a while I missed all the fun because I still rely on my cell as the place to contact me if going out for drinks or coffee. So I was going mad, cause I had no intention of starting to check my myspace once a day (or more). I’m more the visitor of the month there.

So I started thinking a bit more about this tendency. Could the social network challenge the cell texting or the Instant Messenging? Many of the networks are different cause it isn’t real time interaction, but with the major networks applying services as “online status”, IM-functions and so in to their sphere will this be the new way to have direct interaction with your friends in the future? Myspace has its myspaceIM and facebook just launched an application to integrate twitter into their service.

Three days ago imediaconnection published an article about this phenomenon taking off. John Gray VP of interactive marketing at Enlighten started the discussion. No conclusions, cause it doesn’t seem to affect the IM numbers – not yet. But he raised this issue as a trend to watch. Read his view here.

And it is an importante discussion, cause in reaching the teens IM has become an important player. John says here:

According to Pew Internet & American Life Project, 75 percent of all online teens use IM to communicate, making it a popular choice for media planners and buyers eager to target this influential consumer group. Marketers know platforms like AOL’s AIM have some of the highest conversion rates in the business. Consequently, they have made IM placements an integral part of their youth-centric campaigns.

So I’ll try to watch this trend and post some conclusions as soon as they appear.

How to create a YouTube succes

This video reached the magical number one on Youtube on the 22th of june. The secret is once again timing, and shows how important it is in the web 2.0 world to be able to react and do it fast. This is how to create outstanding social media campaigns. I’m not impressed by this production and a lot of creative things could be discussed, but they managed to tap in to the public agenda on just the right time and with the right speed. The video is on the 250.00th view in this moment.

Gaining clients versus keeping clients; Quote of an early morning

Had a bad start of the day. It’s 6 am and I can’t sleep, so my mac is always a good date. So here you go – an early quote, which will get the day of mine kickstarted in the best possible way..

“It is the thrill of the chase” – “Landing new customers is sexy, like cavemen slaying a gazelle on the grasslands. Keeping current customers, like gathering nuts and berries or growing a garden, is hard work”

It’s from Huba and McConnells fantastic Creating Customer Evangelists, talking about how much it cost to gain a new client compared to nursing the existing. But the marketers seems to focus mainly on gaining clints. And I must add, the advertising and media industry is not so much different; the industry keeps focusing on pitches and new bizz… It’s more fun to go hunting! But could we see this in another perspective…? I see the problem as this; it is not the customers being illoyal today – it’s the marketers being illoyal to their exiting customers. And thats is a bigger problem than the other!

Why is social media on web 2.0 different?

As Daria Rasmussen (my lovely co-worker) and me stressed several times under a conference on social media we hosted in march this year, social media is in its basic nature not so much different than 20 years ago. We now use last/Pandora or ilike to express our identity through public playlists, we make profiles on social networks as we  spend ours fillig out friendship-books and passing them  through our social networks 20 years ago (Personally I always had a problem filling out the “My future”- box, because my outer self wanted to be a hip journalist writing about politics and media, but deep inside I still had a little girl really wanting to be an indian princess – but I ever wrote that, in case some of the boys from the 6th grade would see the book)

The things going on in the media users heads and in their social interaction is not so much different. But the huge gap is in the speed in which these things go on. The adaptation rate is sky rocketting and I get dizzy just by thinking about the reach of our messages.

So there’s nothing new on social media – the news is in the broadband acces…

This is a good recent example copied with pride from Dan Calladine (love your newsletter, Dan!)

iLike popularity jumps due to Facebook widget?
“In true Internet fashion, iLike has gone through a year’s worth of
growth in a little over a week. As I wrote here last week, the company
went from having just 1,200 users to having more than 400,000 in a
little over a day — which taxed its resources to the point where it
doubled the number of servers it was running five times and still didn’t
have enough capacity. Eventually, the company had to plead with its
Silicon Valley friends and neighbours to provide extra servers for it to
use. And where is it now? It has quintupled in size again, and has more
than 2.2 million users.”

Read the whole article on Ingram 2.0 here

Misunderstanding creativity

Sometimes it seems as a lot of the people around me lacks a basic understanding of creativity. Especially after we started pushing the concept of media creativity, and takes creativity a step further from the print ads and TV commercials formerly know as “THE creative work” and stressing it’s meaning to apply it to a process. I get that my mom doesn’t understand, but I totally freaks me out that it seems as so many people in this business don’t even understand.

To stress my point, this is a case where creativity is interpreted in worst case possible. This is a direct mail campaign send to one of my friends – Andreas at Busto – I left Andreas’ own comments below the picture…

“Dear Andreas. With an ad in Market Magazine, your salespeople better start polishing their shoes” Taped to the poster is a tube of shoe-polish…
This is the lamest direct mail campaign I’ve ever seen. They hired some two year old to tape the shoe-polish to the poster. It came in an envolope, making the poster really creased….and don’t even get me started on the concept and copywriting…I think they teamed up with the two year old who did the taping, and some 90 cabaret entertainer last seen on a stage right before the end of WW2…This actually convinced me never to take put an ad in the magazine…Do they really think I get out the check-book as soon as I see my name on a poster…If this is new media…I don’t want it..

Does anybody have something to say about this?