What kills good innovative marketing campaigns before they even have a chance to go live? Often it’s misguided ideas about control and the place a brand really has in consumers’ lives.

We need to ask ourselves, each and every time we come up with another brilliant concept for social/viral/user-generated content/engagement campaigns — “what’s in it for them?”

“Them” are the consumers, the people who you hope to captivate. And unless your brand is truly an essential part of peoples’ lifestyles (think Apple Computers or Harley Davidson) the hard truth is that consumers really aren’t interested in devoting chunks of their own time to talking about your products, bragging about what they bought from you, playing a flash game centered on your brand, decorating their desktops with your logo, or participating in any other brand-centered activity … unless we provide them with a compelling reason to do so.

Don’t think you can fool consumers with social networking plans that pretend to be meeting places but are really intended to get people talking only about the glories of your product, blogs filled with nothing but company news (and carefully monitored comment systems), or widgets that enable people to interact only with a brand rather than with each other. It’s not going to work and if you build it they will not come.
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A friend – and senior executive at a globally recognized department store – contacted me recently for advice.  In the competitive world of retail, how should we organize and manage our people who market and sell across channels, to develop ideas in concert, to be more creatively effective and cost-efficient?

That conversation came back to me this weekend while I was reading a study from Accenture called “Transformation: Changing Ahead of the Curve.”  In it, I recognized the advice I gave my friend. …Read More…

A campaign for Scarlet leads viewers astray

by Sonia Reyes, July 2008 issue

Hire a high-profile Hollywood film director for your TV creative. Cast a Catherine Zeta-Jones look-alike starlet as a spy-superhero-action-star leading lady. Then bombard the Internet and TV with all manner of viral marketing ploys to stir up anticipation for a new TV series called Scarlet. Invite 500 celebrities to screen the series at a red carpet event in Hollywood on April 28. And what do you get? What you get is a tsunami of headlines from a lot of folks disappointed over being misled. Why?   …Read More…

If Firefox is your browser of choice, click here right now and download Ubiquity, a Mozilla Labs experiment that attempts to find a new way to do common Web tasks more quickly and easily. Try it a couple of times and you’ll be hooked.

Essentially Ubiquity is a way to work with the command line within Firefox, but the result is that you can use natural language commands to do all sorts of things on the web superfast. Just hit “Control/Space” and type whatever you want to do into the command line. Ubiquity comes pre-loaded with a slew of commands, but you can create your own commands to mashup your daily tasks too.

But how could typing commands make your life on the web easier? Here’s just one example — let’s say you want to send someone an email with directions to your office. Rather than going to a map app page, typing in your address, copying the link, going back to your email program and pasting in the map you can simply type your address in the email, select it, enter the command “map”, click on the preview, and then insert the map. You don’t have to fully type all the commands either, there’s a handy autofill feature.

Check the list of commands here, and look at the tutorial here and you’ll start to see the potentials.

“Big companies talk the talk when it comes to adapting to the digital age. But do they walk the talk? It’s difficult to reconcile their desire to be nimbler – and more responsive to their customers – with the fact that at big companies budgets are generally scheduled a year in advance.

What’s more, when consumers are increasingly driving the dialogue online about products and services it may be problematic for big companies to be part of the conversation when they deploy a top-down strategy. Arthur Ceria, founder and chief creative officer of CreativeFeed Network, says these sorts of business practices are fast becoming antiquated and may be deterring large enterprises from capitalizing on digital technologies.

Ceria has blogged about the need for big companies to think small if they want success in the digital world. He stresses that, for many large companies, process has started to infringe on creativity.

Big companies grappling with the Internet need to embrace a “sense of discovery,” said Ceria, who has worked with Cisco, Intel and Yahoo, among other major brands. A sense of mission and a sense of awareness are also crucial if big companies want to take advantage of the Web. I recently spoke with Ceria about why bigger is not better in the digital age – and how large enterprises need to change if they want to stay in the game.

I also chatted with Ceria about trends in Web design. Ceria, who has an MFA from Yale University with a focus on graphic design, says far too many companies still treat their Web sites like a “brochure,” rather than a living, breathing “organism” that is part of the company’s DNA.

Enjoy.”

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Saw a blurb in Device.com and Core77.com that the Nike mobile truck had arrived.

Nike's Truck

Reminds us a lot of the Sonim truck we developed last year to roll the streets of Sweden and Germany promoting the Sonim XP1.  Retailers and customers loved it when our Sonim ambassadors drove up in this super-rugged looking truck, complete with video monitors, collateral and “torture test” events Sonim Launch Event Compilation - Sweden

Sonim's Rugged Launch Vehicle in Sweden

Here’s an awesome Pop-up book by Marion Bataille I ran across recently. It’s simple, inventive and just plain cool. It’s also surprisingly cheap. Buy it today!

BUY AT AMAZON.COM

In a recent article Ogilvy’s China digital guru Kaiser Kuo said that said Beijing 2008 is the world’s first web 2.0 Olympics. And he went on to write:

There’s ample irony, and for some perhaps a certain poetic justice, in this — that the capital city of a country so infamous for censoring the Internet should be the first to host the Games in the age of Internet video sharing, citizen journalism, social networking, of microblogging, and the myriad online services and tools that have empowered ordinary people. Significantly, Beijing 2008 will also be the first Olympics in which a sizeable percentage, if not an absolute majority, of those in the audience will have in their pockets or purses a device capable of sending text, pictures, and often even video around the world almost instantaneously.

Another irony is that all of those devices in peoples’ pockets are provoking huge headaches for mainstream media here in the US. …Read More…

We are finally settled into our new office here in NYC! Everyone is staying very, very busy and looking forward to all the new and exciting projects that are coming up in the next few months. Here is a shot of the new office:

Also, Arthur was interviewed yesterday by Matthew at Scribe Media. They will be launching a podcast early next week on http://www.scribemedia.org/, I will be sure to post the link when I receive it next week.

Over at the Master New Media blog Robin Good has an interesting article about how brands can leverage the credibility of online personalities in a fair and open way.

Good says that The Brand Ambassador should be a “respected followed authority, a blogger or small publisher targeting a specific audience niche” and points out that having an ambassador can be a much more effective vehicle for marketing communication that the most expensive advertising campaign.

Snipped from Good’s article:

We do not trust brands anymore. We trust individuals: friendly, familiar authority figures with who we feel great affinity. These are the people we trust and those from which we would always welcome honest suggestions and tips, and when they are spontaneous or clearly disclosed even those of commercial nature.

When you get paid to be a sponsor, you are a passive vehicle sending off a message to an audience that has no way to respond, comment or talk back to you publicly. There are no checks and balances in place to verify your claims and credibility. You just get more popular and visible by selling yourself as a testimonial while you lose little or none of your credibility as everybody knows that it is all fake, staged, unreal.

The piece is well worth a read and — bonus! — Good has included some great photos too.

-Arthur