Viral
The Samsung Smart TV stare battle with Keenan Cahill
Samsung is challenging people in the Netherlands to a staring contest with YouTube lip-synching sensation Keenan Cahill on their YouTube channel to promote their new series of Smart TV’s. You game uses eye-tracking to watch your eyelid movements through your webcam and your score is based on how long you can go without blinking. They then use the time you are staring at the screen for Cahill to use and promote the TV’s features like Skype and YouTube. It is a fun use of technology and an internet personality to use an old media channel is a new way.
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Twerrible Towel for #SteelersNation
I was born and raised in Pittsburgh so I pretty much had no choice but to become a die hard Pittsburgh Steelers fan. As a result when it comes to the Steelers my better judgement goes out the window and I do things like wear my Steelers jacket into the NYC Subway the week before they played the Jets so I could get flipped off and cursed at by homeless Jets fans among others. It gets worse with other facts like my dog was named the Steelers fan of the week a few years ago (seriously). I am fully aware of how out of character and ridiculous all of this is but here I am writing about it and making it worse so you get a sense of just how bad it is.
So with that in mind, what do you get when you combine a microcontroller, a repurposed fan motor, Twiiter, a hash tag and a Terrible Towel? The Twerrible Towel which is microsite housing a live stream of a repurposed mechanical contraption that will twirl a Terrible Towel every time someone tweets #SteelersNation. It was the brainchild of the agency McKinney who did the recent Sherwin Williams Color Chip campaign that I think was one of the most visually beautiful campaigns done last year. So far it is up to 16,000 twirls and counting so who knows where it will be come game day.
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Creativity can even save a cold call
I get calls, email, letters, posters, boxes and everything else you can think of sent to my office on a weekly basis from agencies who are try to get my attention and so I will give them some work. 99.8% of these attempts end up in my delete folder or garbage can because this type of shotgun attention getting just isn’t how I look for new agencies to work with. A few weeks ago my cell phone rang about 7:30 p.m. with a number a didn’t know and I did what I always do with those calls – I sent it to my voicemail. I picked up my phone a few hours later to see that the unknown caller left me a voice mail so I punched play and listened to this message. When you get this message as a cold call you have to listen to it more than once to be sure you understand what just happened but the creativity, writing and improv comedy style delivery got my attention. As you heard in the message it was created by Hammerhead Advertising from Hoboken, NJ. There are several other version of the voicemail campaign you can listen to here with security guard and dreamy as the other two standouts in the campaign.
So it was a really great success story because the campaign and the voicemail technique worked because they got my attention which tons of other agencies hadn’t been able to do. I was truly impressed with their creativity and originality. If only there was a happy ending waiting at the conclusion of this story where we went on to create a long list of brilliant campaigns together. But sadly all that positive energy and interest came crashing down when I hung up the phone from their voicemail, picked up my laptop and found a site that was painfully out of date with a collection of work that didn’t seem to demonstrate a fraction of the creativity I just experienced.
So whether you’re doing your own PR or working for a client please think about the ENTIRE experience the customer is going to have. If one part of your campaign is brilliant then you have created the expectation is that the rest of the experience is going to maintain that same level of quality. If it doesn’t then the customer will have a strong negative reaction to it and you’ll see them dropping off in huge numbers and wasting all that great thinking (see Domino’s latest campaign for another good example).
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Virgin Mobile wants you to please SHUT UP
Virgin Mobile’s recently launched a pretty funny new microsite to helps to rid the world of annoying cell phone talkers and formed the Center of Phone Etiquette that can be found at PleaseShutUp.com. The site brings the problem to life through airplane safety card style infographics and the list of unspoken rules, hidden videos, the mobile eti-kit and the ability to report your own incident. I could use a lot of these tools on my morning MetroNorth commute into NYC when the over caffeinated stock broker in the row behind me won’t shut up when all I want to do it read in peace.
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Vodafone puts 28,800 Facebook members in 1 car
Vodafone has rolled out an interesting use of Facebook in the Netherlands called Facebook vs Hamilton where they are challenging F1 champion Lewis Hamilton to a race on September 13th against 28.800 Facebook users who are competing against him in a virtual car. It is a timed race to see which is faster – downloading the profile photos 28,800 facebook members or Hamilton driving around a 2.7km track in his Mercedes F1 race car.
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Cloudy with a chance of music videos
Singer/song-writer Lissie has release a new music video on her web site that is controlled by the current weather conditions in your location. When you get to her site it will determine your current position or you can choose yourself and the background of the video will change according to the current weather outside. If you select a new location while the video is playing a TV weatherman will provide a new forecast as an intermission while the video transitions to the new location’s weather. I think creating this type of unique digital experience is a smart investment for artists trying to break into the main stream media consciousness and you only have to look at OK GO’s YouTube sensation ‘Here It Goes Again’ to see the possibilities.
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I am Iron Man with markerless AR
Marvel & Paramount releases a new augmented reality site / application today powered by Total Immersion technology that lets you see what you’d look like wearing the Iron Man / War Machine helmets or go inside the helmet to see the internal Heads Up Display. I’ve written before about Total Immersion AR for the work they did with Tops Baseball Cards and this new Iron Man AR experience is just as interesting as that was one. The big difference between the two is that this new Iron Man experience doesn’t require you to have a baseball card or print out a marker for it to work. You would think that would a huge step forward but it comes with a different set of problems. First is that you have to go through the dreaded plug-in download which is only around 5MB but we all know how prohibitive that simple step can be for people. Next is that I found the plug-in initialization took a really long time. I launched the site, clicked to start the experience and it took me over 5 minutes on my insanely fast FIOS connection to have the plug-in initialize and download the content. During that time I was treated to only a spastic loading bar which felt like a missed opportunity to sell tickets, market a promotional partner or pretty much anything but making me look at that load bar. The plug-in finally came online, I picked my webcam and a few second later the video came up with an open Iron Man helmet popping over my face. After a second or two the helmet snaps shut to give you the full effect of the helmet. The helmet is able to track with your head pretty well and would only consistently lose position if you the turned part 45 degrees right or left. After trying it a few times I found it struggled with how big to make the helmet and it would either make it too small so I had red hair sticking out the top or too big so it would make me look like a bobble head. You can record all of this which is a great idea to make the content viral but yet again I found it crushed by technical problems. I hit the record button, played around with the helmet and when it was done I hit OK hoping to be able to post in this article. The first times I wait 30 minutes and got nada. Tried a third time and waited and hour and you got it – nada. The ‘Processing Video’ message was the only thing I was treated so sorry but you get the generic YouTube video instead.
So while you can see how augmented reality technology is advancing in this site the technical problems are just too much overcome. If they can find a way to create this experience more in line with the older embedded web site technology and lose the install and initiation time then I think it will be moving into an area where we can start creating some seriously interesting experiences.
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Why did Belgian ad agencies go on strike this week?
Nineteen advertising agencies including JWT, Ogilvy, BBDO and Saatchi in Belgium launched a virtual strike this week to try and change the number of agencies asked to pitch any piece of new business. This has been an increasing problem worldwide and it was most publicly exposed in the Zappos pitch last year that ballooned to over 100 agencies. For that pitch the agency Ignited used Google Analytics to calculated that Zappos viewed only five pages of its 25-page submission with an average page-view time of 14 seconds. This type of behavior should never happen and in the 1990′s the UAB and ACC developed a charter to define the rules for agency pitches and it was signed by all the big agencies. The virtual strike is being done to try and draw attention back to that document and get it back to being the rules of the road. The strike is being executed as a letter that is broken up into 19 pieces and displayed across the websites of the 19 different agencies. You can see the whole thing by starting here. I love seeing the industry come together to make a statement like this and I hope it has an effect.
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IKEA turns Facebook into their own showroom
IKEA has come up with an innovative digital campaign that turned one of Facebook’s basic functions into a promotional tool that they used to promote the opening of their newest store in Malmo, Sweden. The campaign started with a profile of the store’s manager, Gordon Gustavsson who then uploaded pictures of the store’s showrooms to his photo album and any “friends” who tagged the products with their names then won those items. The word quickly spread through Facebook and users started embedding links and images in their profiles and news feeds. So with nothing more than some photos and a great idea they got thousands of consumers to willingly promote IKEA and its new store.
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Orange smartly uses social media to create Friend-o-Meter
The U.K. mobile provider Orange has created one of the most interesting uses of Facebook and Twitter connect that I have seen recently. To promote the launch of the social media focused Motorola DEXT mobile phone they have created a site that quizzes you on ten questions to see how well you know your friends on Facebook and Twitter. The way they use the data is really smart as the questions aren’t the obvious ones you would expect and use things like friends upcoming events events, like and dislikes to create challenging questions that will really test how well you know people (I only got a 45%). You leave the experience thinking that maybe you need to be better connected to those sites and that information which us exactly the point of the experience. Since Facebook seems to be unable or unwilling to give advertisers the tools to be able to create meaningful experiences on their site then this direction may be able to save them from themselves.
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