An absolute pillow fight
It is a strange stretch between the scenes in this ad and the product. But nevertheless, it is the absolute pillow fight, love it!
10 principles for consumer generated ad campaigns
Pete Blackshaw and Max Kalehoff have put together a list of 10 principles for ad campaigns leveraging consumer generated content, which are, in short:
1. Connect The Program To Larger Business Goals
2. Keep It Authentic
3. Be Transparent
4. Encourage Advocacy
5. Empower Syndication
6. Tap The Long Tail
7. Capture The Moment
8. Be Consistent
9. Embrace Criticism And Deprecation
10. Move From Campaign To Platform
You can find details to each point either here or here.
I particularly liked the points about making sure that whatever you do fits into a wholistic strategy, as well as making sure that you take the possible long term effects into consideration. With all the hype around this topic, I sometimes fear this tends to be neglected…
Joost testing new ad formats
Joost is apparently testing new ad formats:
In addition to in-stream 15- and 30-second spots, the company is serving ads in „bug“ format. Bugs are brands that appear as floaters in the corner of the viewing screen. These typically appear shortly after an ad for the floating brand has just aired.
Clicking on the bug opens a new browser window that takes viewers to the product.
Interactive television with the corresponding interactive advertising is already in use by some stations (for example Sky in the UK). You press a button whenever a red dot appears in a corner and then you get further information. But in the case Joost, you can send them deep into the web, onto landing pages, rich media experiences, contact forms, etc. This will clearly change the way TV advertising is perceived and produced!
And there is even an additional benefit:
Ads will largely be targeted to viewers based on personal and demographic data that users entered when they first registered with Joost.
Somehow I don’t think they’ll stick with only personal and demographic data. How about behavioural targetting? Measure and track what they watch and what they have clicked on in the past (and hope that it is still the same person sitting in front of the screen).
Is Skype Spam a reality?
To a greater or lesser extent most of us have gotten used to email spam. There are ways to filter it out, and the rest you can usually identify very easily and delete quickly.
But just today I have had a curious incident with Skype. Already a few days ago I had 2-3 people I have never heard of trying to get in contact with me, with spam-like messages.
Today, I was invited to a group chat with I don’t know how many other „victims“ I suppose. Most of them had left the group chat once I saw the open window, and all that was left were a few spam-like messages chatted by the initiator of the chat.
Does this mean IM is also subject to chat? Have they managed to invade the one digital communications channel that was – sofar – spam free?
And how about voice chat via skype? Will we have to face audio-spam ads during our telephone conversations?
I’m not sure whether or not I really saw spam, or just some unlucky coincidences. Did anyone encounter similar phenomena? According to Google, it does indeed exist…
The unexpected power of TV advertising
Even though the discussion about the life after the 30 Sec. Spot continues, there are still some amazing examples of how TV advertising produces visible results.
There is a TV spot for German Telekom currently running in Germany, that is quite nicely done, a few nice special effects, absorbing visuals and surprising scene-cuts. But really nothing special.
Yet, the spot draws you in, fascinates you (well, at least me). And that’s mainly because of the song they’ve chosen. It’s „Paint it Black“ by the Rolling Stones and a search on Technorati for this song shows that many people talk about it.
Indeed, if you look at Yahoo! Clever (Yahoo! Answers) in Germany, there are many people looking for the song in the Telekom Ad.
And, furthermore: this song, even though a few decades old, made it all the way to Nr. 2 of the German iTunes charts! Listed before Maroon 5 and P!nk, for example!
The product of German Telekom launches on the 4th of June, so we don’t know yet, how successful this will be.
But we certainly know already, that the TV spot has helped the Rolling Stones catapult one of their classics all the way up the charts. I find this rather amazing.
Links & News, 30.05.07
- Joseph Jaffe on an Ad Age feature of the Coca Cola Second Life promotion
- Werbeblogger links to a „Spam Radio„. Where you can have an automatic Computer Voice read out your spam to you. Nice idea filed under „new and useless“.
- German Themenblog features a nice (and rather long) post about the current status quo of the German Blogosphere.
- CBS has acquired last.fm for $280 million. I hope that last.fm will stay as cool as it is, I really enjoy it. (Check the last.fm widget at the bottom of the right sidebar.)
- A cgm post about the fine line of letting go and not letting go too much whil staying authentic in FMCG CGM. (Like those acronyms, anyone?)
Wo ich sonst so bin...