Social media one-pager

Geek vs Nerd: The ultimate test

Everybody loves a good infographic – none more so than the geeks and nerds of the world.

So imagine the joy circulating around the interwebz this afternoon, when this bad boy surfaced:

Courtesy of (presumably) the geeks AND nerds behind the Masters in IT website for that Friday giggle. And a rather cute marketing ploy for their cause – I mean, who is a likely target audience…?

 

Catvertising: why more ad agencies need to learn to laugh at themselves

Catvertising is the latest YouTube sensation to ‘go viral’, with creators, Canadian advertising agency John St., undoubtedly now reaping the rewards of global awareness.

How did this little 150 second clip gain nearly 1 million views? And what other agency can claim that from what is essentially a promotional video?

Quite simply because there is something for everyone: People love the cats, brand-side marketers enjoy the mockery of typical agency showreel videos and every other marketing consultancy around the world is wishing they thought of the idea themselves.

In terms of a strategy for new business, this ticks every box:

1. At the centre of their pipeline ‘bulls eye’ will be the brands – potential clients – to whom they need to prove their creativity and ability to deliver against a brief.
2. In order to attract the best people to work in their team, they need to make sure everyone in the industry knows who they are so that if you don’t currently work there you kind of wish you did – or at least that your team was more like them.
3. And finally non-industry folk - who, directly, are of little benefit to John St. in terms of revenue, but they will be the ones their clients look to reach, so proving they can market themselves to this audience is a pretty convincing way to show they can market their clients with the same creative success. Not everyone will get the knowing references to AdLand’s bullsh*t bingo, but that doesn’t matter, because what everyone does know is that cat videos rock.

Having worked in a marketing consultancy for five years (and loved it), creative and innovative though it was, the trappings of the agency showreel are fairly universal. Catvertising is full of these and I love John St. for being so openly willing to poke fun, laughing at themselves and their industry nuances in the process.  As cutting-edge as they may be, too many agencies can take themselves so seriously, that by blinding prospective clients with zingy quotes, mind-boggling stats and mind map flowcharts, they alienate more than they do attract.

What John St. seem to be saying is ‘we know our stuff, but we’re not afraid to have fun. We don’t need whizz-bang strategy documents, Venn diagrams uncovering the ‘sweet spot’ or graphical displays of consumer behaviour to get our message across. We create content that sticks, and by doing so attract the very audience we set out to reach. We entertain, and we deliver. And we love cats.’

Who wouldn’t hire them?

Making the most of spare time

Tom Hodgkinson in today’s Style magazine in the Sunday Times raises some interesting challenges to the way we spend our spare time in the modern world. Are we making the most of it? Or are we squandering what little time we do have to ourselves, falling into the trappings of convenience?

His opening lines below and, as they did for me, may ring scarily true:

“What do you do in your spare time? Maybe you indulge your precious moments of leisure with a £5 bottle of Chilean Sauvignon blanc and a DVD box set of Mad Men or The Wire. Or do you find yourself in front of a Champions League game, or the Brits, or the latest episode of Glee, with your phone locked to Twitter in one hand, the remote control in the other? Or are you on Facebook status-updating, or discussing house prices and schools over a “kitchen supper”, or getting competitive over YouTube — who has the funniest clips? (I always feel a bit disappointed when other people don’t seem to find the clips I like as funny as I do. But anyway.) Perhaps you might go for a little eBay surfing or browsing on Net-a-porter. Later, you’ll nod off with your new Stieg Larsson book.

Yes, well, it’s the modern world, and I suppose we have to live with it. But couldn’t we be doing something more satisfying in our spare time?”

Ringing any bells? Tom offers a plethora of more worthwhile, simple pursuits that might offer more fruitful development of the mind and body, without huge expense or dramatic lifestyle change – such as learning to sing or sew, getting into the garden, learning a language or how to play an instrument, or simply drinking good wine.

I’m also reading Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows at the moment – a fascinating and worthwhile read about how the universal expansion of the internet into every facet of our daily lives is essentially re-shaping the way our brains work. We have smaller attention spans; we find it harder to get lost in lengthy pieces of text; we jump from one communication to another and depend on a constant feed of information to keep us occupied.

Perhaps we could do with putting down the mobile, switching off the TV and shutting down the inbox every now and then. Sometimes it’s tiny changes that can dramatically change our quality of life. Food for thought.

Another reason to love a good Royal wedding

…for the email/calendar invite many of us are about to receive, may the Royals make us truly grateful:

Amen.

The Ralph Lauren Gang set out to charm American Moms

For the past two years, my office pod wall has been adorned with a quotation from Ralph Lauren, torn from a magazine advertisement for fashion website Brand Alley:

“I don’t design clothes, I design dreams”

Ever since I first came across it, this kernel of an idea has formulated my interest and belief in the power of brand communications. Marketing that goes beyond the product, that can trigger and play on emotion and aspiration – now that is powerful.

So it was with interest that I came across the latest development in Ralph Lauren’s marketing of their children’s wear. ‘The RL Gang’ has been created as a group of fictional child ambassadors for the label’s kids range, living for the most part online on a dedicated micro site. Visitors watch the video story unfold of Hudson, Willow and friends having fun and getting up to mischief in the schoolroom.

And all the while looking sensationally adorable, kitted out head-to-toe in the latest Ralph Lauren Kids back-to-school fall season range.

There’s no denying it, the film feature is beautifully produced. Traditional children’s book illustrations in fine-line ink and watercolour are interlaced with live action from the exceptionally cute child models as they run around their animated school yard. Added kudos is given by narration from Hollywood’s Harry Connick Jr.

The impression is a warm glow of child-like imagination and adventure, strongly conveying the sense (illusory or otherwise) that Ralph Lauren loves your kids as much as you do. The idea, of course, being that Mom logs on, watches how delightful Willow looks in her Cotton-Cashmere Sampler Jacket and thinks how cute her own offspring would look similarly attired.

Naturally, the route to purchase is instantaneous. Via links embedded throughout the film, Mom can hover over each of Willow’s garments and ‘shop W’s look’, taking her straight to the online store for purchase.

If a particular role model strikes a chord, Mom can even peek inside the little one’s ‘closet’ to skip through their personal style and view their particular collection – be it Oliver’s country-gentleman-in-the-making or Zoe’s more rock chick vibe. Mothers of wannabe Suri Cruise‘s can shop the Mae look.

But that’s not all. As a nice addition, RL has produced a kids storybook (yes, a real old-fashioned traditional paper page-turner) to go alongside the digital campaign that captures the story in an offline platform. In ten different languages no less. And a percentage of the proceeds from each $18.95 book sale go straight to charity. It’s a cute idea, and whilst the marketer in me thinks the book reads like a slightly more engaging version of the kidswear fall catalogue, essentially it’s a well-presented children’s story book that just so happens to dress all its characters in Ralph Lauren.

Because the production values are so strong, the video is highly watchable and I should imagine any Moms logging on do watch it in its entirety and that the click-through rate to the online store is high. It beautifully captures the brand values and presents them in a way that Moms can relate to – a visual representation of child-like imagination.

So to return to Ralph’s principle, The RL Gang sees the brand staying true to its guiding light. If it were just about the clothes, the brand could simply post a digital catalogue online. Ultimately, Moms hope for and dream of the very best for their kids, and The RL Gang has brought this to life perfectly.

What is your Digital IQ? Find out and pay it forward

‘Digital IS the future’. I’ve lost count of the amount of times that I’ve heard these words spoken in the last few years. So much so that it’s almost become a meaningless comment on something that is self-evident. Largely because we can conclude digital is the future, if only inasmuch as digital is also the present.

Clearly, there is an enormous amount of knowledge to be had out there about working in the digital space, and harnessing the power of digital assets to work better in other more traditional avenues. No longer can we sweep a generalising brush-stroke to divide between Murdoch’s ‘digital natives’ and ‘digital immigrants’. It is everyone’s responsibility to get digitally savvy. Fast.

But when digital courses, seminars and qualifications are ten-a-penny for businesses who can afford to train their people in the relevant disciplines, it becomes easy to overlook those for whom acquiring those skills is remarkably more difficult. It may be because the base level of knowledge is not enough to reach the next level. Or the funding isn’t available to implement the training. Or they just don’t know what skill development is required to take their business further.

Enter Media Trust. The UK’s leading communications charity (one of our charity partners on The Marketing Academy as one of the Donate28 programme) is launching a national campaign to encourage more media professionals with digital skills to volunteer and share their expertise with the charities, communities and young people who need them.

Great plan. And to get people engaged, they’ve developed a funky little Facebook application to gauge your ‘Digital IQ’. I tried it out earlier, and lo, the results:

My Digital IQ results (not quite as impressive as I'd hoped)

A techie with a creative flair. Fair enough.

So try it out, and if you feel that the world would be a better place if we could share our digital knowledge then get involved and find out how to volunteer.

Socialnomics – putting an ROI on successful social media campaigns

After my great digital comms/social media training run by the eConsultancy‘s James Matthewson earlier this week, I was prompted to go out and find some concrete stats about the success of brand involvement in social media campaigns. Just came across this fab little Socialnomics video, from the author of the Socialnomics book, Eric Qualman, and however much you think you already know about brands marketing in this space, it really is worth a watch.

Time and time again we find clients hesitant to relinquish control over their brand in the interests of entering the social media space, yet there are countless examples – as the video will show you – of big and small brands who have made the leap (or even tiny step in some cases) and for whom it has paid huge dividends.

However, of course it is far from fool-proof and companies should not throw all caution to the wind, implementing social media marketing strategies with abandon. In fact, social’s greatest strength is potentially its greatest danger – that of instant amplification. Whilst it means that campaigns done well can reap huge rewards in a very short space of time, it also means that those done badly can rapidly spiral out of control in the worst way, with irreparable damage caused to the brand (see the online legend of Kryptonite bike locks, the shining example of one man’s blog causing an estimate loss of $10m).

(A good number of examples of crisis communications in the YouTube era can be found here.)

But there are still a lot of brands out there who have a lot to learn, and they could do a lot worse than start with some Socialnomics.

A Brand Personality Test

A cute branding discovery this morning: Digital marketing consultancy Mate‘s online brand personality test (brought to my attention my @GWoffer). Amazingly, by your selection of 5 brands from the presentation of 5 pairs of brands (Adidas/Nike; Apple/Google; Coca-Cola/Pepsi; Burger King/McDonald’s; American Express/Visa), Mate can find out a little bit about you.

Mate is the digital outfit of Dutchman Ruud Verdellen (the genius who has garnered ‘absolutelegend’ as his personalized Facebook URL), and while both him and Mate were new names to me until this morning, this little device has already enticed me to their services. The kooky functionality of the simple website makes it high impact (but presumably low cost) with cute little features like a random facts and random questions generator on the homepage, presenting the appearance of a consultant(cy) genuinely interested in questioning the world around them. Essentially implying that Mate is more than just another digital consultancy. And proof you don’t need a whizz-bang website to say so.

Anyhoo, my results came out pretty accurately. Fair enough I’m not dating Johnny Depp, and most people will have been seen with a Mojito in their hand at some stage, but the personality bit, the favoured car, and the fact I am heading off to Cape Town in 3 weeks might be more than just coincidence.

Take the test yourself and see how you fare.

Luxury fashion brands embrace social media

As if it weren’t enough that, according to Times headlines this morning, bloggers are snatching the LFW front row seats right from under the noses of their traditional print counterparts, it seems that the high-end luxury brand marketeers are no longer directing us in store – or even merely online. But to our iPhone apps.

Flicking through the March Vogue, I started to see brand after brand including a call to action within its glossy DPS advertising that promoted online videos, behind-the-scenes exclusive web content and invariably how to download the brand’s iPhone app in order to access all these goodies.

Ralph Lauren:

The luxe oceanic ruffles of Ralph Lauren flow from one page to the next but check out the call to action nestling in the bottom right...

'View the Runway Show and behind-the-scenes video with the Ralph Lauren application on your iPhone or visit RalphLauren.com'

Donna Karan:

Ethereal brush-stroke imagery makes the message in the bottom left barely visible...

But it's there: 'View the System of Dressing on the Donna Karan iPhone application and at DonnaKaran.com'

Fashion advertising is traditionally a work of art. Hours and hours of painstaking designing, casting, styling, photography shoots and post-production go into every double page spread. For said art teams and designers to soil their canvas with a one-line advertisement for the iPhone, it must really mean business. Literally.

Finally it seems, high fashion has accepted that whilst all of their devotees do still subscribe to the monthly fashion Bible, they probably flick through its glossy pages whilst simultaneously checking their emails on their bejewelled iPhone and surfing the internet all at the same time.

I’m both glad and saddened to see luxury branding rapidly becoming fully integrated in this way. It’s both a positive and necessary adaption to the current market and a shame that the artistry I pour over every month has to relinquish its perfection for the sake of sales. But to every budding fashionista out there who is remotely technically savvy, you can bet these guys will now be coming after you from every possible angle.