Name: ian
Email:
Bio: Ian Fenwick: management educator, entrepreneur, and digital marketing consultant. Dr Ian co-authored DigiMarketing: The Essential Guide to New Media and Digital Marketing, published by Wiley & Son (native language editions also available in Japan, PRC, Taiwan, Thailand, and Vietnam). In its first few months, Norman Pearlstine (former Editor-in-Chief of Time, Inc. and Managing Editor, the Wall Street Journal) hailed it as “the definitive guide to marketing in the digital age”. Microsoft Corporation invited Ian to address their key distributors on DigiMarketing at their annual World Partner Conference in Houston, Texas. Ian’s previous experience includes working as Senior Branding and Marketing Consultant at The Business Generation Group Inc.; Senior Consultant to Market Facts of Canada Ltd.; and serving as expert witness on market research and branding in Canadian provincial and federal courts. Most recently Ian is a Founding Partner of digiAindra, a one-stop (actually a non-stop) digital marketing turnkey solutions provider.
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Consistent names in digital media (Part 1)
August 31st, 2012Last post I wrote about consistency in branding. Consistency of product/service and consistency of physical brand. You can’t brand successfully without consistency.
The most obvious part of the physical brand is usual the name. It’s remarkable how many companies that impose absolute consistency on brand naming in traditional marketing, let things lapse in the digital arena.
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| Enough with names already by James Cridland |
It can be tricky
Now it’s true digital is a bit more interesting than traditional media…
Many brands embarked on digital as a sideshow. They didn’t really pay much attention, or move very quickly. So some started off with careless naming, or started slowly and found their real world names had been stolen. There are recovery procedures, and they are getting more streamlined. We’ll look at recovery in a later piece, for now let’s focus on prevention rather than cure.
Things are made even more interesting by the different (arbitrary) constraints that various digital platforms impose.
Look first at web, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube as the four major digital platforms where you want at least the potential of a presence, and so should reserve appropriate names. You may which to add other channels: Slideshare, FourSquare, Flickr etc.
Finding a domain name
Website names, domain names, are pretty flexible. Except no punctuation: Toys"R"Us becomes plain www.toysrus.com. There is a limit of 255 characters, although most are much, much shorter than that to ensure memorability and easy of typing.
In practice, easy of typing is becoming less of a constraint. As the command bar (where you type the URL) morphs into a search bar, it’s rarely necessary to type the entire URL (search engines will guess pretty accurately what you want). Life becomes forgiving of typos! So the only remaining constraint is memorability.
Short domains are definitely nicer (especially if you want to set up your own brand URL shortener). I usually start by using Domain Hole. This looks at expired domain names. I’m a pessimistic believer in human error.
I always think "if it’s good it’s gone…but maybe someone forgot to renew it"! So I go to Domain Hole first where you can search by length of time since the name expired, domain name length, and keywords 123Finder offers very similar functionality over all domains, not just recently expired. I found the domain I use for custom URL shortening: www.digi8.us, from one of these services, forget which.
Another interesting tool is domai.nr. Their specialty is suggesting neat ways to get the name of your dreams via less well know top-level domains (TLDs) and clever use of subdomains. The top-level domain is the .com, .org, .net…but there’s actually hundreds of them, covering all the countries of the world; with a whole raft more soon to be added. A subdomain is basically a folder that you create within your main domain.
domai.nr’s own domain name is really domai registered in the top-level domain of nr which is the country domain of Nauru. For digimarketing, one option domia.nr suggested was registering the name digimarket in the Indian top-level domain .in and creating the subdomain /g: giving digimarket.in/g.
Confusingly, domai.nr will also suggest names that are impossible to register. Like digimark.et/ing. .et is the country top-level domain for Ethiopia, but its seems that it can only be used with a second level domain name, e.g. .com.et. Looks like you can’t get just .et. But the domai.nr algorithm doesn’t seem to know that.
Some of those strange country level domains can be pricey too.
Phrases can work well
As short domain names associated with your brand may already be taken, I always advise to consider longer phrases. A phrase is memorable (particularly if it’s always written with capitalization) and as above the search engine takes care of guessing what you want to type so most often you won’t have to type it all. Of course if you want to do customer URL shortening, you’ll need another shorter URL just for that.
When I went looking for a domain for my own email back in January 2008, my surname, Fenwick.com, was already taken. It’s Silicone Valley lawyers! So I took IanFenwick.com,
Check for potential confusion
Having selected potential domain names, I usually run them through PyschicWhoIs (another phrase base name, plenty memorable, but you have to be psychic to be able to spell it, This is a great tool that as you type, will show you taken and available domains. So you can see exactly which characters you need to add to make your domain unique, and just how close is the nearest similar domain. It seems happier running in Firefox than in Chrome.
When Kent Wertime and I wrote the book ‘>DigiMarketing: The Essential Guide to New Media and Digital Marketing, we used PyschicWhoIs to find that DigiMarketingNow was the nearest available, memorable name.
Then check across social media
This is where it gets really tricky. Ideally you’d like to get the exact same name in all the digital channels that you use. But that’s all but impossible.
Twitter for example allows only 15 characters in your name. As your name, probably plus a # or an @ or a D, comes out of the 140 character limit for replies and retweets, you probably want to get the shortest twitter handle that you can. But you still want to be as close to your brand as you can get.
Facebook allows you to set a custom vanity name for your page once you have about 25 fans. This limit occasionally seems to be waived, whether by mistake or design I’m not sure.
Although many say you can’t ever change that vanity URL, at the time of writing (August 29, 2012) you can, by following these instructions change this vanity URL once. I tried it on the digiAindra page. I didn’t actually change the page URL (it’s right already), but it looked set to do it. I didn’t actually see any mention that it was once only.
But it’s important to take a look across social media, if at all possible before settling on your brand names. AND decide a strategy for adapting your names to the different social media so as to minimize the number of variations.
More on that in Part 2.
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Dogs, bells, saliva and brands
August 27th, 2012
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Just been thinking what a debt brand builders owe to this gentleman: |
and quite possibly this one too: |
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Ива́н Петро́вич Па́влов |
One of the dogs of Ива́н Петро́вич Па́влов |
Branding…all about saliva catching
Well actually, branding’s all about learning…and learning’s all about teaching.
Branding teaches your customers to associate some symbols (your physical brand) with the problem solution provided by your product or service. Eventually, when the brand is built, the mere sight of those brand symbols is sufficient to elicit the comforting expectation of problem solution. A fleeting glimpse of your logo, pack, or even a color or sound, is conveys the feelings that I will have after using your brand.
It’s just like the guy who rang the bell and fed the dog. Over time, the dog learned to associate the bell with the imminence of food. When the bell rang the dog salivated. That’s learning. That’s branding. (And I know you said: Pavlov, at the start of the story. That’s learning too. I say feed the dog, ring the bell: you say Pavlov).
And yes, if your Russian’s rusty the top picture’s Ivan Petrovich Pavlov…and the bottom one is one of his dogs, apparently, preserved at The Pavlov Museum, Ryazan, Russia. Notice the surgically implanted saliva catcher.
Learning…all about being consistent
For building a brand, consistency of product/service comes first.
If the consumer experience isn’t always the same, it’s pretty well impossible to build a brand. The classic example is movies. The MGM logo and lion’s roar (what i call the physical brand), are universally (pun alert) familiar. Yet I have never heard of someone choosing a movie because it was made by MGM. The MGM brand is not a benefit driver for the consumer: it doesn’t drive their movie choice. Movie choice might be based on stars, director, reviews, storyline, whatever.
I think that has happened because there has been no consistency to MGM movies. Other movie brands, (think Disney, Pixar), have developed a consistency of product and so have been able to build a brand that is a benefit driver. A brand that means something to consumers. For Disney-Pixar, stars are less important…and as a result tend to get paid less. There’s a value to owning a benefit driving brand.
Physical brand…consistent too
What I call the physical brand are the brand identifiers that consumers see, hear, feel, or experience in any way.
If we’re going to teach, those physical symbols have to be consistent. The brand always has the same name, spelled the same way, in the same color, in the same font. If there’s a sound (the lion’s roar), or a pack (the coke bottle), it’s always the same…or one of a small number readily seen as similar.
If I change my physical brand radically, I risk losing whatever I have taught the market. Think of Datsun. What’s a Datsun? A name that hasn’t been used since 1986, yet still has awareness and brand meanings for many people, that have not been successfully transitioned to its successor, Nissan. According to the LA Times the Datsun physical brand may be making a come back.
Every time I use Heinz ketchup, I experience the satisfyingly difficult task of extricating the sauce from its container. I see the label on the container (almost unchanged in a century). I see the brand name. And every time the product is the same. The look, the texture, the taste: all the same. For Heinz Ketchup, thickness is all. It is consistency is consistent!
Get it right from the start
Consistency of physical brands is something we need to get right, right from the start.
Make sure you have clear, consistent brand names…even down to the spellings and fonts. Think ahead to when you have more brands, does your naming leave room for them?
Watch out for adjectives in your brand names. Will they become albatrosses around your neck? Here in Thailand we have the supermarket chain Big C. It has blossomed into Big C Extra, Big C Jumbo, and most bizarrely Mini Big C .
Next time I’ll look at easy ways to check whether your brand names are available on crucial digital platforms, before you choose them.
Finding, and correctly attributing, images
November 9th, 2011Although this may not seem to be directly about digital marketing, indirectly it is. As more and more people start DIY digital marketing, finding neat, free, images…and displaying them with the required attribution becomes important. Digital is all about sharing. Never have there been so many images available for you, at no cost. But they deserve the respect of attribution.
Finding free images
I haven’t had much success in searching for “royalty free images”. My experience is that all you find are the bait of paid image websites. A frustrating trek through bait and switch goodies aimed at getting you to pay for something. Of course, I may be doing it wrong. Your mileage may vary.
The 50 Ways Wikispaces site has some good ideas for finding good, free, royalty-free, images. As does Skelliwag.
FriedBeef recommends FlickrStorm, personally I find the thumbnails it produces a little small, and the search process very hit-and-miss.
What I usually do is search on the Attribution Licensed page in Flickr Creative Commons page. Enter whatever keywords you want.
As I’m in Bangkok with flood waters destined, slowly, to arrive; I searched for “Thailand floods”. Then, here’s the trick, on the Sort line click the button for “interesting”. This will show images that have been used, commented on, saved…and they do tend to be “interesting”. Like this one:
![Thailand HAST [Image 4 of 11] by DVIDSHUB, on Flickr](http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6114/6284174644_2becc60523.jpg "Thailand HAST [Image 4 of 11] by DVIDSHUB, on Flickr")
The attribution data with this image is worth quoting:
U.S. Marines comprising the humanitarian assistance survey team, III Marine Expeditionary Force, not shown, conduct an aerial assessment of the flooded areas in and around Bangkok, Thailand, Oct. 24, 2011. Kristie Kenney, U.S. Ambassador to Thailand, flew with the HAST during the assessment. The HAST is providing information as to any support for humanitarian aid and/or disaster relief III MEF may be able to provide. (U.S. Marine Corps photo by Cpl. Robert J. Maurer) III Marine Expeditionary Force Combat Camera Date Taken:10.24.2011 Location:BANGKOK, TH Related Photos: dvidshub.net/r/fn4lrj
But if I didn’t want to list all that, I could grab the required attribution data using the method below (that’s how I got that little link under the image…which is probably worth more to the image creator than the words in the attribution…and is usually actually required).
Other than Flickr
The US National Parks Service has photos, videos and podcasts. The photos are arranged in useful albums by themes/locations…but the copyright position is not completely clear to me. I had thought that all .gov content was free to use, but this page suggests that might not be true.
Then of course there’s Wikimedia Commons of images, sounds and videos. This categorizes images by quality. Valued images are a good place to start. A valued image is “considered to be the most valued illustration of its kind by the Commons community” . Each file comes with a box of HTML attribution code, making it easy to get things like on a blog or a wiki.
Getting the attribution right
One excellent tool for this is ImageCodr. Given the URL of a Flickr image, ImageCodr will generate the code for the image and the necessary attribution. That’s how I got the code for the image and attribution below:
I just flicked myself (in WordPress) into HTML and stuck in the code. I find it helps to put in a line with <nbsp> (a non-breaking space) at the start AND end of the ImageCodr code. Then when you flip back to Visual (my HTML isn’t up to much), it’s easy to restart typing. If you don’t have that <nbsp>, WordPress in visual isn’t always happy
Paste the URL
ImageCodr lets you paste in the Flickr image’s URL here. Or (what I prefer to do) you can drag a link into your toolbar, and when you find an image you want to use, simply click the toolbar link. ImageCodr launches and generates the necessary HTML for you. Just be careful to copy it all: triple click or whatever in the HTML box, and scroll the box up and down to check you grabbed all the code.
Other image attribution solutions
I’ve seen reference to a similar tool, PhotoDropper, which works as a WordPress plugin, but I haven’t tried that yet.
Attribution for saved images
What I would really like to find, is a way to save attribution data with images.
I prefer to scour for images when I’m too tired to do anything else. Then save the images for later use. Often the images make me thing of how I want to use them.
Then I use them in presentations more often than in HTML. Unfortunately by the time I use them, I rarely have the URL where I found them. For a while, I tried keeping the exact filename as on Flickr, then adding some descriptive info, thinking I could search for the filename on Flickr and recover the attribution data when I used the image. Sadly, this yielded very long filename and made everything a bit unmanageable. The closest solution I’ve found is the MIRFLICKR image collection. This claims to have downloadable images with attribution data…can’t check as it’s still downloading, If anyone knows how to download Flickr images AND the attribution data…perhaps two files with the same name: one an image one text, I’d really like to hear it.
Interesting digimarketing for automobiles from VW
October 31st, 2011I seem to be seeing more and more interesting digital marketing for autos. Maybe it’s just become more salient to me since a did a Digital Marketing Seminar for Chinese auto-marketers in Beijing. Sponsored by Tencent and organized by CEIBS, it was a very interesting group.
One of the requests they made was that I present some of what I considered to by leading, marketing-cutting-edge (which is often NOT technical cutting-edge), digital marketing. So I started clipping things as I see them. Please jump in and add more.
VW Tiguan Cross-country
One simple, effective, on-brand, and with a twist, TVC that has great viral video potential, I saw courtesy of Creativity OnLine, was a piece by DDB Sydney for VW. Take a look yourself:
VW LinkedIn
Then I came across another VW while doing some research on marketing with LinkedIn. One of the first brands to get linked up (sorry) with the LinkedIn API.
This ran in the Netherlands, April (2011) I think. It’s called “LinkedUit” which is LinkedOut in Dutch. The way it works, you can challenge another LinkedIn user to see who has the “strongest” profile. The overall winner gets the VW Passat.
The DigitalBuzz Blog, has the branding angle as that, like LinkedIn profiles, the VW Passat is fully loaded with standard features. Mashable claims the campaign “supports the tagline, ‘Nogal vol van zichzelf,’ which translates to ‘Quite full of himself.’”
Social Times believes they’re ‘comparing the various powerful features of business moguls—lots of connections, great recommendations and more—to all the powerful features of the Passat’. Which is sort of what DigitalBuzz Blog thinks too.
Whatever, so the brand link is a little bit of a stretch. But think of all the potential customer info that pours out of those LinkedIn accounts.
What’s more, as Simple Zesty point out, there’s also an end for LinkedIn. It actually encourages people to fill out more details in their LinkedIn profiles!
Volkswagen Linkeduit from Fethi Uluak on Vimeo.
It’s by t Achtung in Amsterdam
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Klout, TweetLevel…what are they worth?
October 28th, 2011How not to explain Klout
Take a look at this video, (came to me via Mashable)
This video is a great example of using Xtranormal, an incredibly easy to use service that lets you make cartoon videos from your own scripts. I’ve experimented with the free version a while back, and kept meaning to go back to it, seeing this video reminds me to look into it again.
Kout moved down this week
The trigger for this video seems to have been the drop in many Klout scores this week as “they” refined their algorithm. My personal score seemed pretty unaffected so I can take a disinterested view. My score’s here. As I write this I’m at 47: 47.15, 485, 18, 19 to give my full vital statistics.
But I recall a few months back, an earlier algorithm change dumped me, and I felt quite down.
Measures that define themselves
Klout is one of those ideal businesses. They’re measuring something which is important to many people: how important they are in social media. But which is not easily to cross-check. Its measured in a way which they make little attempt to explain in detail. It’s like a modern day AC Nielsen rating or market share stat. Hard to live without, and hard to check. It’s a bit as though the beauty pageant judges also took all the vital statistics (do people still use those words? apparently they do: Google shows up 6m plus results; with 200 plus in News), in a way that no-one could check.
I preferred the old-style Klout of a few months back. That showed in more detail the people they claimed influenced me. I have no idea at all how they measured this. But it gave a useful repertoire of new people to follow. I simply drilled down in Klout to find the people that influenced the people they claimed influenced me. They tended to be journalists or broadcasters, mainly in UK, who had higher Klout scores than me. And mostly they followed me back.
This resource is much depleted now. Klout now focuses on people I influence, with tags suggesting I invite them to Klout. I have a nagging feeling that if I did my Klout score would go up.
Klout Perks
Then they’ve added Klout Perks. These are offers, most of which carry the small print “Sorry you’re not eligible” and a “How to be eligible” roll over. For me eligibility mainly requires that I tweet about different topics, and move to the US, or a specific part thereof.
These perks are an outgrowth of earlier celebrated marketing use of Klout scores. A couple that I recall: last June (2010), Virgin America offered free flights to high Klout scores to launch its new route out of Toronto. Then Las Vegas Palms Hotel and Casino set up a special Klout Klub last September (2010): jacket not required, but Klout score essential. The Virgin application seems more appropriate as if high Klout scores are really influentials, and if the flight service is good, it should get a deal of social media buzz.
Basically I think Klout Perks are hoping to bring Klout promotions within the reach of smaller, local, businesses. Buzz word of the year: localization. Easy do-it-yourself promotions that get lots of views, and a few actions: with the actions only available to the influential, defined within a locality.
Who guards the guards?
It makes me feel a little uneasy that the fox is assessing the solidity of the henhouse. Should the people whose magic gives you the score, also be making money from it? So those beauty pageant judges, decide the contest, measure the contestants, sign the sponsorship deals, AND take the sponsorship funds.
Competition
Now there is a Klout competitor: TweetLevel from Edelman. Now they provide a lot of (apparent) information on how their scores are derived. And one of those laughable formulas that looks as if it came from the mad scientist’s blackboard in a horror movie.
One of my thesis supervisors long, long ago, at London Business School, the late Professor Andrew Ehrenberg, coined the word “sonking” for this sort of thing. Stands for the Scientification of Non-Knowledge.
He would often say “I SONK therefore I am”. Needless to say he greatly discouraged us PhD students from doing it. It is a very bad habit.
I’m amazed to find that I can even find a hyperlink for SONKING. That source aptly describes Professor Andrew Ehrenberg as iconoclastic. That he was, and a brilliant man, and magnificent teacher.
My TweetLevel score right now is 67.8: my complete vital stats? 63.3, 51.7, 43.3. I see my lowest score is for “trust”. This is cross-referenced to Edelmans’ Trust Barometer.
The blurb says that its basically the rate at I which my tweets are re-tweeted. Not sure that’s what I would mean by “trust”. More like it’s interest. newsworthiness, or the intriguingness of the headline.
Refinement
But these are the days of alchemy in digital marketing. Different recipes are bandied about and hailed as elixirs. Over time the least trustworthy (omg, according to TweetLevel, that’s me!) will be officially designated as snake-oil. And there will emerge reputable measures that marketers find really do measure influence and reputation.
It will be a while before we get there. And Hey! if my scores go down, I’ll say it’s because they didn’t like this piece…
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Interactive TV via YouTube
October 27th, 2011A Taste of What’s to Come..and what’s not quite there yet
Mashable tell me that Coldplay will stream a live concert “today at 4 p.m. ET” on YouTune, as part of the American Express Unstaged performance series.
Viewers will be able to watch a live performance (from Madrid), and be able switch between different camera view, and take part in a global live chat. We’ll actually be our own directors.
What Time is it Mr Wolf?
Now for me, the challenge is to decode the exact timing. The Mashables piece reveals–fleetingly–that it’s dated October 26. After a moment, the date changes to “11 hours ago”. So you have to be alert to know that “today” is October 26.
As I’m in Indochina time, I need to go find a world time zones site. Grabbed TimeandDate.com, World Time Converter page.. Entered October 26 16:00…decided that “ET” is Eastern Standard Time …and found the concert happened at about 3:00 a.m. this morning. Missed it already.
Anyway, you can still check out the trailer for the concert (it’s v short):
And you can take your chances with the website for the event. Pretty much a dog’s breakfast site to my way of thinking. My humble internet connection is still trying to load the video; while the flash on the righthand side slowly drives one insane. Maybe you’ll have better luck. For me it’s a “flash flood” (sorry).
Swatch Internet Time
Maybe there’s an easier way to do these global times. Certainly, I think we should be away with ‘today’ and ‘tomorrow’ on global blogs. Too bad that Swatch’s internet time never really took off . A quick google leads me to the Internet Time on the Official Swatch Website. It tells me about the concept but not what time it is!
If I click on What Beat is It?, the URL promises an iTime Converter (did Apple let that slip past?). Unfortunately the page wants my mobile phone number and email address and offers a newsletter…not the time.
Seems Swatch Internet Time may be stopped. The beat is gone?
World time
Is there an app, or a plugin, that would translate times into users’ local time zones? Or allow such a conversion to be seen on mouse-over perhaps?
There should be. Anyway this kept my mind off the approaching, fabled, Bangkok floods, which have not yet (14:15 Indochina Time) reached where I live.
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Interactive media creep over more surfaces
October 23rd, 2011Starbuck’s Windows
From Digital Buzz Blog, I see that Starbuck’s in Toronto and Vancouver are installing some interactive windows to promote the new loyalty program. It looks like it’s strictly one way interaction.
I always think interactions with digital media should be #1 on-brand: teaching the consumer more about the brand. I guess this qualifies on those grounds as it does inform interested (effectively opted-in customers about the brand).
AND #2 meaningful: teach the brand something about the customer. Looks like this one doesn’t go that far. Doesn’t seem that your membership of, and status in, the loyalty program gets read or used at all. Maybe that’s phase two?
Then there’s #3: the viral component. What is there about the interaction that compels me to recommend it to my friends? There certainly could be something like that here. If they solved #2 and had consumers login by NFC card. Then maybe interested consumers could generate Twitter/FB content to friends and earn points?
Lot’s of potential: let’s hope it gets realized.
Starbucks Interactive Storefront from The Media Merchants on Vimeo.
Floods in Thailand
I write this, sitting in downtown Bangkok, waiting to see if the floods will get here. I guess interactive store fronts will not be here for a while!
My local 7-Eleven just built themselves a metre high concrete wall across their store front…even across the door, which is now furnished with sandbag steps to allow you to get in the door!
Have to feel for all those people already flooded out. Some moved from one evacuation center to another. Probably they won’t be home for a month or so. Good background piece on how we got into this sorry mess by the Guardian here. Will anyone really take responsibilty?
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Merging digital and real worlds
October 21st, 2011I seem to be seeing more and more examples of aspects of the digital world entering the real world. As digital becomes commonplace, looks like it’s becoming cool to do digital things in the real world.
Really Angry Birds
Some examples are just plain silly. Like this Mattel plastic version of the game. Hard to believe this will the cool toy of the year!
A mere $17 (about 8 time the cost of the app)
3D Angry Birds
If you’re in Changsha, Hunan province, at the WIndow of the World theme park, the you can fire real plush Angry Birds at a wooden structure, in “The 3D Angry Birds Game“, an unlicensed knock-off of the game.
Rovio Entertainment Ltd, the makers of Angry Birds, are in talks to regularize the licensing arrangement. They view their status as the third most copied brand in China as a compliment. Imitation is indeed the sincerest form of flattery.
They’ve also just announced they will set up their first overseas operation in Shanghai, hoping to be operational by the end of 2011. There are already almost 40 million downloas of Angry Birds in China, with deals now in place to make the app playable on feature phones (86% of China’s reported billion mobiles are feature phones).
Theme park creates real-life Angry Birds game by Zoomin_UK
Meanwhile, in Barcelona…
At least this version uses a smartphone as the trigger:
Then there’s Chelsea
Using football skills to repulse Space Invaders:
Honda’s Interactive Ads
More directly related to digital marketing, is Honda’s Interactive Dream Wall. This was the talk of the Australian International Motor Show in Sydney late last year.
One of the first large-scale advertising installations to incorporate facial recognition software, using 6 cameras to look for smiling visitors, with each smile triggering part of an animated story on the display. This seems a promising way to anchor digital in the real world.
Facebook friends in lights
And lets not forget the brilliant installation art piece by Obscura Digital. As you’ll see in the video below, they created an augmented reality experience (“Connections”) at the F8, Facebook’s developer’s conference last September. Users swiped-in with their RFID event badge.
Multiple overhead projectors tracked people on the floor, and projected ”radial visualizations”, representing the social graph of each person. Colored lines extend to join the visalizations of friends.
Just watch the video it’s easier! I can imagine one day soon this will project onto my eye as I walk along, and I’ll never (unintentionally) cut a Facebook friend again.
Connections for Facebook from Obscura Digital on Vimeo.
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The China Difference
October 14th, 2011Preparing to give an executive education seminar in Beijing, I’ve been brushing up on my digital marketing a la Chine.
It’s interesting to see how global brands tweak their execution around the world. For a while now I’ve been showing seminars how Lever’s Lynx/Axe brand has rather cleverly replicated their “Even Angels Will Fall” TVC in the real world, using augmented reality.
Just in case you haven’t seen the TVC (and because it is rather good), you can see it below:
The first “live” performance (if AR can be said to be “live”), seems to have been in London, England’s Victoria Station, March 5, 2011. Thanks to a large digital screen, the perfect illusion of angels falling:
Not sure just how many markets Lever has taken this to, but one of my students pointed me to the event at Paragon last June (a major shopping mall in Bangkok). Looks very similar to the UK version, although the video is not quite as good.
Mobile App
In Thailand there’s also a popular (and even more sexist) mobile app version. This let’s you catch angels in your mobile, where they simper gentle to you.
You can even choose which ones to catch.
China…no angels
Lynx/Axe seems to have just entered the PRC market (with the Lynx name), in June 2011.
The positioning seems about the same. But sans angels. Perhaps this is based on religious differences: are those females who sweep through Kung Fu movies and kill people angels?
Or perhaps based on other cultural aspects.
In any event the AR aspect is certainly there. Here’s the Shanghai version as performed September 2011. They’re wearing a bit more, and not visibly angels. But otherwise, very much the same.
…and in private more explicit
Then there’s the Chinese AR app. Again they aren’t visibly angels.
And, perhaps in cultural respect, Razorfish Shanghai designed the app for use in private. But the “un-angels” do dance in your hands…and, hey, what’s the significance of that tissue at the end?
(many thanks to kindtyrant for providing these on YouTube…so much easier for non-Chinese readers to navigate than Tudou where these are also available).
Sequel
And if you still want more angels. The sequel to “Even Angels Will Fall” is here now. It seems a lot less sexist to me…basically illustrating some of the occupational hazards of living with an angel.
Reportedly this is the first time Lever have had a global sequel campaign like this.
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The power of connected networks…and visually attractive sharing
October 4th, 2011Last Friday, September 30, 2011, my good friend K Siwat Chawareewong (Managing Director, mInteraction Co., Ltd.) came to along to my Digimarketing MBA course at Sasin as a guest speaker. He gave an interesting and entertaining talk on 20 Questions about Digital Marketing in Thailand. It was especially entertaining as we all knew he had about 90 minutes to speak, and at minute 85 he was only on question 12… Fortunately he had a trick up his sleeve: there were really only 13 questions!
Dog-A-Like
One of the many apps K Siwat demonstrated was Dog-A-Like. This is simple but addictive app from Australia, funded by Pedigree, is aimed at helping Australians adopt dogs from dog pounds (in Oz they seem to be called ‘shelters’).
You take your own picture. The app analyzes it and compares it to pictures of dogs from shelters across Australia. It then presents you with your “Dog-A-Like”. A dog that looks like you! You can adopt the dog, or donate funds. You can also share the results on Twitter and Facebook.
When I saw his materials immediately before the class, I knew this would be a hit. But what a hit.
Within three days, this Australian app was the #1 free iPhone app and the #3 iPad app in Thailand. Meanwhile, I guess, the folks in Australia were wondering why so many Thais were downloading this dog adoption app (perhaps they thought “are they going to eat them?” 
).
What are the lessons?
First, digital marketing is global by definition. Attractive apps will escape from their country of origin.
One of my FB friends asked "Is this a dating app?"
Second, getting take-off is not that hard. You need an application which can be shared in a visually attractive way, which makes people say “that’s cool, I want to try that”. And, you get it into the hands of users with large connected networks: like Sasin students. Thir, maybe we could get an animal rescue group interested in launching a similar app in Thailand!
Makes me also think that one day, classes will become promotional vehicles…maybe I could get brands to sponsor the examples I give in class (or even better, to pay not to be mentioned).
By the way here’s a video about the app (and looks like Pedigree donate a bowl of dog food for every view).
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