Sometimes you can't imagine the possibilities...

I'm catching up on the useful not urgent pile from last week. 

I just found this piece of Lightspeeed Research quoted by e-marketer which was headlined "Americans want brands that inform...[..] but don't get too friendly".

Personally, I think that's a bit like that infamous story (I paraphrase) of when asking people what they wanted in terms of new features out of a new VHS player, consumers asked for a 2 speed rewind rather than imagining the possibilities of the DVD format. Sometimes consumers just can't imagine, recognise or define what they want / might want until they've experienced it.

We all have a range of friends and acquaintances, some are close, some are not so close, and those relationships are all useful for different purposes and at different times.

I don't see why having a relationship / friendship with a brand is any different. There are times when it will be important to me and times when it will be less so, but on whatever terms, the whole point that many brands miss so frequently is that relationships are 2 way. There has to be give and take. I always liked the Stephen Covey notion of emotional bank accounts. Some people contribute / add credit and some people debit.   If a relationship becomes too one sided/debit lead it becomes an effort and you'll place less value on it or just discard it.

I'm very happy to be Alexsandr Orlov or Ted's friend on Facebook / on Twitter. They add something to my life. Whilst they continue to do so I'm happy to interact with them.

Is your brand being constrained by VHS-feature-enhancement thinking? Or have you grasped how by behaving more like you are in a relationship with them you can add value to your consumers lives by being relevant and accessible at the right times? 

X-factor may be everywhere but "talent" is subjective

It's X-Factor season in the UK (although personally I'm more of a Strictly Come Dancing fan, despite the shocking costume design this season).  There are X Factor stories in the papers everyday. Simon Cowell and his fellow judges getting to appraise and be brutally honest about the finalists talents, and then the public voting for who they want to keep in the competition.

Love it or hate it it's hard to ignore it. 6 year olds today just want to be famous, such is the cult of celebrity. I'm all for encouraging aspiration but at the same time when you see the truly dreadful being propelled forward in the competition because of the value of ridicule it saddens me.

However, you do have to applaud these shows for creating endless amounts of hilarious, entertaining and enduring content & conversation (remember SuBo? 77m views of this video alone). Having just written a post about a music talent competition in Malaysia with a catchy song, I shall expand on the theme and offer you a Boy Band example someone just sent me from Russia from 2007. This blog does like to flag the delights and the disasters from across the web after all. It's another cheesy pop song, but those boys do look like they could do with a little bit of make-over help from the X-Factor team.

Make up your own mind :-)

Catchy Tunes & Bands in Banners from Malaysia

Apparently I'm a bit behind the page and the notion of Banner Concerts was pioneered last year via a Belgian Bank called Axion.

They built sets that were scale models of traditional ad formats, streamed live music performances into banners in situ and then  encouraged X-Factor style interaction and voting for favourite acts.

Nice. Who said financial services always had to be dull?  Here's a short video that brings the initiative to life:

As my friend Faris says, Talent Imitates, Genius Steals. So applause and compliments to the originators of this Malaysian mash up of Banner Concerts.  The winner will be announced on November 21st 2009.

Meanwhile this cheesey but incredibly catchy pop song has been playing every time I've opened Firefox for the last week.  But if you can't be bothered to go over to the campaign page, here's the video on YouTube.

I love the notion of content and digital display working hard together to deliver engagement. Smart.

Twitter Advertising in Malaysia

Whilst I was hanging out with my ASEAN buddies last week someone told me that you could advertise on Twitter in Malaysia.  Curiosity aroused, I dug a bit deeper to find that Churp Churp  have basically taken an existing blog seeding model and applied it to Twitter.

Interesting stuff and well worth clicking on that link above if only for the nice graphics of how WOM works.  I wonder how long it will be before we see this rolling out in the UK / elsewhere.

Talking horses and breakfast cereal

Nod of hat to my buddy Mr J Willshire of Feedingthepuppy for tipping me off about a new ad / video from breakfast cereal Weetabix.  Ok, it stretches the boundaries of credibility a bit but it's an engaging piece of story telling and it doesn't hammer you over the head with branding / product  messaging upfront.  It doesn't need to, everyone in the UK knows what Weetabix is, and the agency / brand team have clearly grasped this, so I have no hesitation in applauding.

 

There's a time and a place for product benefit messages and there's a time and a place for brand activity that engenders conversation and positive sentiment.  Lots of brands are having a hard time getting their heads around this as it goes against years of TV-lead brand building advertising, known GRP's and ad decay curves.

Moving forward in the conversation space is not about throwing the brand baby out with the bathwater nor abandoning brand building altogether, it's about understanding how to balance brand equity activity that delivers recall, awareness, goodwill and conversation currency with activity that delivers sales.

Keeping conversation going the VW way

Volkswagen released a couple of pieces of interesting content a while back using the notion that fun can change behaviour for the better and harnessing that notion to build brand goodwill and conversation.

They asked me to sign up to thefuntheory.com (which I did on the 9th October) and promised me more fun things soon. Well, they delivered the goods.

Last week I got an email announcing that the site was live (it previously just had a holding page / sign up option) and inviting me to visit and incentivising participation with a prize / competition. Admittedly, they could have put a bit more effort into the copy writing (back to my dating analogy, first impressions count!), but it did what it needed to do:

It made me keen to engage with the brand again, they'd added more content, and hosted some of it on YouTube to make the most of opportunities to engage with people actively coming to their site or those just surfing looking for content on YouTube. Boxes ticked!



There's also some interesting other suggestions up there already, so I'd recommend a visit.

First online flash mob or not, the conversation went so slack I almost forgot...

Back at the end of September I wrote about an intriguing initiative featuring digital space hoppers that turned out to be by Sony Ericsson. At that point I was rather thinking it was all quite good.  And then I heard not a squeak in a whole month.  10 points deducted for not continuing the conversation.

I'm going to keep using my dating analogy.  That's like asking someone if they'd like to go out for a drink and then not bothering to call for over a month to fix a time and a place!?  Why would you do that?  In the meantime they might start a relationship with someone else.

 However, at least they did follow up eventually with this email last week announcing the time of the first online flash mob event, 24 hours after the email was sent.

The small print in the email also told me that I'd only be able to see what my hopper was up to from the computer I created it on which was no use at all as I was in Thailand with my work laptop and I'd created it on a laptop at home in London. 

Time difference, distance and technology therefore conspired against me but you can relive the hopper invasion here.

However, we'll allow a degree of points redemption for providing downloadable games and other means of ongoing interaction with the experience / idea via the Sony Ericsson Hopper Invasion website.

Overall as end of term reports go I'll award a "C++  & could do better" for the initiative overall and "A-" for effort because at least as brand they are experimenting and learning. There's no rule book and the only way brands will learn is by trying so dive in. 

If you don't ask for that date in the first place, even if it takes a month to follow up, you won't stand a chance!