Creating value for Sports Sponsorship in the digital age

Here is a thought leadership piece I wrote for publication and a conference by the Leaders in Sport. It is about how to create value from Sports Sponsorship in the digital age. There are some big strategic ideas and some practical tips to get going. It was greatly well received at the conference and has had much positive feedback so please feel free to add your thoughts.

Whitepaper How To Use Digital To Maximise Sports Sponsorship V2[1] from Andrew Gregoris

The power of being there...

Getting People to Talk: An Ethnography & Interviewing Primer from Gabe & Kristy on Vimeo.

If you are like me you are always searching for new ways and techniques to provide greater insight into you consumers and over the years I have come to appreciate that nothing provides better understanding than getting down and dirty, face to face and in-situ to drive out compelling insights.

Here at SapientNitro ethnographic research is at the heart of our strategy practice and this video provides an interesting insight into the philosophy and practicality of ethnographic research and how you can learn from this philosophical area of research.

What do you think? Is ethnography something you are using to plan your strategies?

Cool interactive installation from Heineken

Heineken have been producing some pretty innovative digital work recently, a few days ago we were looking at the “Heineken Star Player” app and today we’re talking light art. Minivegas recently created this interactive mirror in Milan for Heineken that allowed users to create light art on site with their body. It looks pretty cool and is a great way to get people to interact with your brand in a place where they’ll be purchasing/consuming your product.
If you’re interested in the techy side of how this works then here’s some info on the graphics framework Atlantis, described on the Minivegas site as “a set of user interface components suitable for the rapid assembly of artist tools, which together with a persistent data and parameter system allows artist and programmer to work together on shaping the project’s look without needing to hard-code everything.” Thanks to Creativity for this find.
Heineken really seem to be placing emphasis on their digital creativity which is great to see. What will they be doing next?

Value of marketing bookmarklet?

The Digital Buzz blog posted today a new campaign by M&M called M&M’s Internet Invasion Game. The game was “developed” by BBDO Denmark, and there are tons of learnings we could get out of this.
1. The M&M’s Space Heroes is actually a straight up copy of the Kick Ass bookmarklet by Erik Andersson, also covered by Wired among other respectable publications. BBDO’s code acknowledges it was inspired by it, though it’s just a copy with new graphics. This is a smart move by BBDO, taking into account they probably did not spend more than a day on development of the microsite and new graphic assets, and charged M&M a substantial margin for coming up with the idea. The code was open source has an Apache 2 license, granting anyone full rights to copy, modify, and distribute for any commercial use, thus BBDO didn’t do anything illegal, it was actually smart — not creative, but smart.
2. Deployment strategy: the code was not optimized, minified, or even deployed to a CDN. I would have expected an agency dealing with Mars food to be a little more thoughtful of brand performance.
3. Tracking. Perhaps the most important point I’d like to make. Due to the fact that bookmarklets are simply plain JavaScript code that runs on a browser, it makes it a little less trivial to track, but far from impossible. Technically speaking, they could have modified the code to add pixel images, a JavaScript timer to update it every few seconds, and could have gathered full analytics tracking total games, unique games, geo-location of players, time spent on site, top referrers, etc.
You should always use a simple rule of thumb: if you can’t measure it, don’t do it.
It is not hard to predict that Mars will ask BBDO how many people played this game? How much time they’ve spent? What’s the most popular site where it was played? How many people shared it? How many people talked about it? … and most likely they won’t get any answers.
So what’s the moral of the story?
It’s hard to come up with purely innovative ideas and you should always welcome creative mash-ups and different uses of existing experiences (full copycat perhaps not so much).
No matter what you do, always try to improve based on previous cycles, add value, enhance the experience, bring something unique to the table.
Always, but always, track and measure results.

Unreal Time-lapse of the Aurora Borealis

Landscape photographer Terje Sorgjerd spent four years looking to create a timelapse of the aurora borealis — also known as the northern lights –, then finally flew to north Norway and spent a week capturing one of the biggest displays in recent years. The final result is absolutely amazing!

The stills were shot with a Canon 5D Mark II along with the Canon 24mm 1.4, Canon 16-35mm 2.8, and Sigma 12-24mm lenses.

The Aurora from Terje Sorgjerd on Vimeo.

Discovering your why?

A great TED talk about the golden circle and helping you and your business to define its purpose.

There are times in any person’s or organization’s life that everything just goes right. Whether by design or by accident, these times are when the Golden Circle – the combination of WHY, HOW and WHAT – is in balance. The process to learn your WHY is about going back and examining these times to find out what the patterns were so that they can be repeated. This is the reason learning WHY is always a process of discovery, not invention. It comes from within an organization or from its founder. It comes from looking back and finding the natural patterns of behavior when things were effortless and running at their best. It comes from the times when passion runs high, energy is readily available and success is guaranteed

Decentralise or die...making social media work

Douglas Rushkoff likens social media to the peer-to-peer market places of the middle ages that forced the powerful to invent 'businesses' and 'brands' to stop the disipation of power and wealth.

But rather than try and do the same centralising trick in the social media space (because people are now too smart and too empowered), he argues that social media will only really work for businesses when they (truly and not just in social media platitudes) let go and let people take over...



Enjoy...

Losing the fear of co-promotion...writing the future of marketing

On Monday night, after the England Mexico game, I saw the full Nike advert ‘Write the future.’ It was the first major example, that I can recall, of a brand co-promoting competitive brands by tapping into the passion of the audience. The advert starts with Drogba in his orange Ivory Coast kit (Puma), before cutting to Wayne Rooney in his white England kit (Umbro) before moving to Brazil (Nike). Interestingly involving competitors did not dilute Nike’s positioning but rather positioned it as the leader of the pack.

Visit Britain...go on you know you want to...

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Well perhaps you don't, but I guarantee that now the new site for VB has gone live you will genuinely feel inspired about wanting to travel around Britain.

A personal success story for me this. Having led the initial pitch team over a year ago, developed a truly innovative strategy for how to re-market the UK overseas and in the UK itself. Based on the powerful insight of "Bragging rights" and specifically using the web /social to help potential visitors to discover the unique and individual stories of others across their travel through Britain as a way of helping people achieving their own "Bragging rights" when talking to their friends about where they go on holiday, and ultimately aid them in the expression of the kind of person they are.

The site itself takes a beautiful simple design approach and using technology to the max to make a rich experinece. From long scrolling pages, video/photo widgets (see above)to bringing to life holidaying experiences and the use of behavior recommendations in the search functionality to help people plan from inspiration through to the travel experinece itself.

And all just in time for the Olympics....

Should make a whole lot of Chinese tourist very happy indeed.

Fingers crossed

Small steps, big potential...

Today was a very exciting day for us all, Finally released a nifty tool that can help people take simple small steps, but with potentially big consequences. Produced for the Energy Saving Trust (EST), the water saving calculator suggests ways that users can save water and energy, as well as cutting their carbon footprint. The Trust says CO2 from energy used to heat water in UK homes accounts for 5% of the nation's total carbon emissions. Yet, it adds, water use is the "forgotten energy saving opportunity" by homes, businesses and policymakers.

We produced this tool for EST as an interactive, "easy to understand" tool for people to make the link between water efficiency and energy efficiency. Energy used in the UK water sector accounts for about 6% of the nation's total CO2 emissions, 89% of which is a result of homes and businesses heating the water. Figures from the Trust estimate that heating water accounts for about 30% of the average household's energy bills. The calculator provides each user with a personalised report that tells them how much water their household uses, the related carbon emissions and the cost of the water and energy used.

The report also offers a series of tips that can help reduce the amount of water and energy consumed. "For example, it will say that if you took a minute off the time you spend in the shower then you could save 'x' amount.

Not only has the tool had great feedback from consumers and in initial user testing, but the BBC were so impressed with the tool the have decided to a news piece on it. Hopeful this will drive even more people to use this simple tool to make a real difference.

Facinating....Robert McKee's Story Seminar - Story Design

Beware if you use the micro-blogging service Twitter as you might just be hunted down by Jack the Twitter

A really exciting new idea from the strangle, but brilliant Marcus Brown!

He has created another character called Jack The Twitter. Jack is currently stalking twitter users in London who foolishly publish their whereabouts as tweets. I'm very excited by this project. Jack happens on a load of places:

Worryingly, he is following me on Twitter, and as I work in East London, I am hoping to find him!!!

• Jack's blog
• Jack's google map (the darkest alleyways of twitter)
• Jack's fan page
• Jack youtube channel (which will launch over the next couple of weeks)
• Jack's friendfeed

As of ta few weeks ago Jack's story has been available as little booklets (he is going to try and publish one every week or so). I've just published Volume I today which contains his encounters to date as well as a dreamy run in with wicked mother. The booklets or "volumes" will contain little bits of the story that can't be found elsewhere on the Internet. You can order them as printed booklets or download an ebook.



Good luck London....

Or..... Social Shopping Comes to Levi's

Facebook is going to take over the world...........

Roll the dice and see it's California or bust!

SapientNitro has launched the official California board game.

It took a lot of effort to convince California Travel and Tourism that an online board game would be an effective way to sell California -and it took even more effort to bring our vision to life. We had to sell CTTC on the power of online games. Then sell them on our ability to build a game and promote it. Then, once we had CTTC on board, we had to help them sell the idea to an advertising partner to share the costs. Southwest Airlines agreed to co-promote this campaign, and SapientNitro integrated SWA and their “bags fly free” message into the game and the prizes.

The beauty of the board game is that it delivers on so many levels. Here are some of the strategic benefits that we wanted to deliver:
1. Get more people to interact with the brand.
2. Increase each person’s interaction with the brand (5 minutes or more).
3. Provide a great experience that educates people about everything California offers.
4. Provide a promotional platform that California could sell to their partner Southwest Airlines
5. Provide a promotional platform that California could use over and over with different advertising
partners, and different markets (international).

But that was just the beginning. It also took hard work to ensure that we delivered a great user experience. In the face of pressure of multiple agendas, our group kept focused on creating an experience that was fun, challenging, and played like a board game. We knew it was critical for the game to be good in order to achieve the all-important word-of-mouth effect, and ultimately get big results. In addition to the game, the team had to create, sell and coordinate an integrated campaign with another ad agency and two PR firms – not to mention 2 clients.

Thankfully, all this effort is paying off. A week in, the game is a huge success. We are getting tons of visitors. People are really enjoying the game. And we are generating tons of leads. Here are some of the eye-popping numbers: 75% of all players finish the game. 50% submit their score to CTTC. And over 20,000 people have requested a copy of the California visitors guide mailed to them – so many that California will run out by the end of the week!

The integrated campaign for California – The Game includes OWNED, EARNED and BOUGHT MEDIA. Advertising and PR will work together to launch and sustain interest on social networks, blogs, and entertainment websites. But please help us spread the word! Post the game and share it.

The power of story telling...

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This is an interesting preso on the art of story telling and how today it is even more important for brands to get this right.
My favourite quote is.... "A great brand is a story that is never quite told"

The future is real-time culture shifts, experience, and expectations with streaming, commerce, collaboration, customer support, and more …

Real-Time Everything - the Era of Communication Ubiquity

View more presentations from Rob Gonda.

Here is a presentation my colleague Rob gave about the realtime interweb.The abstract / summary described the the presentation as: A focus universe research strategy; imagine using the entire internet as your focus group. Analyze every conversation, visualize trends, compare brands, learn insights, envisage it over time, and get real factual answers, not just amplified assumptions based on focus and control groups. Now add IPv6 to the picture, digital invasion, UGC/MGC user and machine generated content; we’re not that from the day fridges tweet about food needs, tvs’ about programs, subways and highways about traffic, clubs about nightlife, … So now imagine adding that to the picture, a digital blueprint of society.

It covers real-time culture shifts, experience, and expectations with streaming, commerce, collaboration, customer support, and more … tons of very interesting data points.

Is TED on the verge of imploding?

I love this video and the "joke" analysis that has gone into it. But I cant help thinking that maybe now that TED has reached this point of self-referentiality that the whole thing is set to implode. There has been something slightly ironic and a little bit too self-conscious about the more recent TED talks (Take Jamie Oliver) and this talk takes it even further. It would be a shame but then it would also be natural if that is the way things develop. There has to be an analysis of great cultures or movements somewhere which deals with this.

Festival app for engaing cool kids...Why haven't I got one?

We have launched this exciting mobile phone festival guide for the Reading and Leeds music event.

It’s ensuring festival-goers don’t miss the action thanks to its app, which works across most handsets, and is free. It features general festival information including stage schedules, maps of both sites and a Rock Up & Play section providing full details of what festival-goers can enjoy at Nokia’s Rock Up & Play tent.

They can also personalise it, adding the bands they want to see to their own personal schedule.

Rock-up and play, go on, you know you want to...

Sorry, for this blatant plugging of my old work but I thought it would be great to capture this on my blog as I am still proud of both the campaign and the supporting app.

Here is the background. Nokia had witnessed a losing market share and loss of brand affinity with the all-important youth demographic. The mobile giant

also wanted to raise its profile in the highly-competitive, but very lucrative, mobile music player market, as well as boost its brand in general.

Research shows technology adoption is driven by young, leading-edge consumers – exactly where Nokia was performing weakest.

The Challenges

Music-immersed 16-24 year olds were identified as a key audience. Any campaign would need to reach them in large numbers and demonstrate a direct and emotional brand engagement.

But the challenge of winning over this cynical and sought-after audience was vast.
Luckily, while the challenge was great, so was the potential reward – once you’ve cracked them there’s a good chance they will stay with you for life.

Music is by far the most effective way of reaching this market. The problem is most campaigns fail because their methods are perceived as being corporate and cynical rather than credible.

Not only can a poorly devise

d campaign mean money wasted, it can actually damage the brand. Clearly, for an experiential campaign to be effective it needed to be unique and relevant.

Strategy

Haygarth’s solution was an interactive on and offline brand experience where people could showcase, share and connect in their passion for music. Nokia Rock Up & Play celebrated musical talent by giving bands, individuals and air guitarists the opportunity to simply turn up and perform on stage at pubs, music venues or at the summer’s top festivals.

Haygarth director Damian Charles said, “We wanted to create an interactive and ‘emotional’ brand experience that brought the best out of the brand essence of ‘Connecting People’ and tapped into the target audience’s hearts and minds.”

Solution

Rock Up & Play put festival goers in the spotlight, promoting the excitement of

the live experience with raw emotion and pure energy at its heart.

Haygarth’s Charles continued, “We acknowledged that the target audience needed to feel involved, and be part of something, rather than just ‘being there’. Unlike the numerous brands doing talent searches, we wanted to develop a really interactive and spontaneous concept where consumers formed the experience.”

Rock Up & Play provided a platform for new music talent and a place that new music fans could visit to find, review and promote new artists.

Publicity

Word of mouth was key to the credibility and ‘realness’ of the concept both prior to, and during, the festivals. The campaign was supported, both pre and post festival, through press, radio, third party banners and ticketing flyers.

A large proportion of the media spend was online due to the time spent by the target audience browsing sites such as Youtube, Facebook and MySpace.

Social networking & youth lifestyle sites such as Xtaster & MySpace were used to seed content and discussion threads across youth platforms.

Virtual Festivals were the key festival media partner and NME provided both reach and relevancy through on and offline editorial support, competitions and co-branded activity.

Digital

Haygarth developed an online platform that successfully captured the physical energy of the festival experience with various stages, continuous music performances and ways to share a feeling of inclusiveness including artist Q&A sessions and Air Guitar Championships.

Haygarth’s Charles said: “The look and feel of the site focused on communicating the unique energy of the live music experience– whether playing on stage or being in the crowd. The main emphasis was to create something non-corporate.”

The target audience was encouraged to upload performances online, put questions to artists pre-festival, win tickets to perform or just view other talent. Online advertising included expandable banners streaming Rock up & Play video clips from the festival to promote ticket competitions. As well as a data capture form; users were encouraged to upload a clip of themselves performing for the chance to play live at the festival.

Other activity

The activity was also integrated into Nokia products, including the ability to load edited highlights of artist question-and-answer sessions onto N95 handsets, and participate in guitar tutorials with artists, which were compressed onto an N95, then fed onto a TV screen.

Festival goers were then invited to pick up a guitar and go through the tutorial while hearing what they were playing on a headset. There was also a free photo printing service available in the Rock Up & Play tent where festival goers could send photos via Bluetooth and collect prints in a branded festival photo wallet as a memento.
A free downloadable mobile festival guide was created for all to ensure festival goers could make the most of their experience with up to date line-ups and news, as well as Nokia competitions.

Other activity included special chill-out areas, mobile phone demonstrations and a trailer where people could recharge their phones free, which helped drive traffic to the main Rock Up & Play tent.

Results
In all, more than one million people directly interacted with Nokia Rock Up & Play through on and offline means.
Awareness was 28% amongst 16 to 24-year-olds, and 56% among the music-immersed in this group. This was certainly an impressive reach, but were the key messages put across effectively?

“Definitely,” said Charles. “The campaign specifically made those 16 to 24-year-olds aware of Rock Up & Play feel more highly disposed to the Nokia brand, while driving its association with music and demonstrating that the brand understands them and knows how to communicate with them.”

What’s more, at festivals the campaign was considered “fun, cool, innovative, unique and relevant”. It also delivered against key brand metrics, for example 87% of those surveyed agreed that “Nokia has products that allow me to listen to music”, 80% agreed “Nokia is a leader in mobile technology”.

The campaign also had a positive impact on product purchase consideration, with 77% of non-Nokia users saying they would consider buying a Nokia next time they purchased a mobile phone – a 7% increase from the 2006 campaign.
“This is a great example of a grassroots youth marketing initiative that really helped Nokia to connect with a disengaged audience in a truly engaging and credible way,” summed up Charles.

“We reached 56% awareness of the concept among our target audience, and over 1,000,000 people directly interacted with Nokia Rock Up & Play through on and offline means."

Part of the revolution (piad for that is)...

After a gruelling few months our team at News International have helped to successfully launch the successor to the Culture Plus site. The new site, Times+ is a subscription based service which allows its members exclusive access to travel and culture news, events and offers. The project was delivered on time and budget. Within the first 3 days the site is already looking like it will break 10,000 paid subscribers. Take a look for yourself at

http://www.timesplus.co.uk/

This project does not simply deliver a web site. It is in fact the first milestone in Rupert Murdoch and News Corporations strategy to drive the industry to a paid for model for content. This is the first site to be built on its custom IAM (Identity and Access Management) platform. This platform will eventually be rolled out across all products in the portfolio and deliver the digital strategy.

Let's see if this really is the 1st step in a new reality for the web!

(I kinda hope it isn't, but don't tell Rupert!!)

AutoTrader Iphone app goes live...

We have just launched our new iPhone app for motoring website Auto Trader yesterday, which contains car listings and reviews, as well as a number plate recognition tool.

It's potentially a very useful app, so I've been seeing how user-friendly it is...

Car search tools

Users of the app can search by make and model, while a postcode is also required. This can be typed in, or the app will detect your location and use that as the starting point for a search.

To select a make and model, users need to scroll down and select these from the drop-down menu, which can be a bit annoying, especially if you want to search for VW or Volvo.

With 100+ car manufacturers in the list, this could be made easier, by allowing users to key in the first letter and jump to the relevant point in the list.

Users can specify other parameters in their search, such as distance from the postcode entered, or price. Price and mileage can be adjusted by using a slider tool, which looks good.

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For more specific searches, there are advanced options, allowing users to specify mileage, transmission, fuel type and more, as well as adding a keyword to the search, which is a useful addition if you have a particular model in mind.

Search results

The results are clear, and give key details on price, model, mileage etc, as well as a small photo of the car. Results can also be sorted by price, proximity, mileage, age etc.

Car details

Depending on the level of detail and the number of photos added by the seller, the listings can be very useful.

Technical specifications, such as performance and economy are included for each car, which could very useful when checking out cars on a dealer's forecourt:

A detailed review is provided of each car, examining different aspects of performance, safety, reliability, and providing an overall score:

Larger version of photos can be viewed by turning the phone horizontally or clicking on the pictures, though it is unclear how to get back to the car details page after viewing pictures:

Number plate recognition

The USP of the Auto Trader app is the number plate recognition tool, which allows you to take a photo of a number plate, then returns results for that make and model.

This removes the need to spend time searching, and allows you to quickly look up details of a car they have just spotted on the roadside and find similar cars for sale nearby.

It also allows for easy price comparison, so if you are looking at a second hand car on a dealer's forecourt, you can easily check other dealers in the area to see if you are getting a good deal.

Crucially, it works well, as long as you take a clear photo in the first place. One you have the photo, simply pinch and zoom the photo so it fits in the rectangle on the screen, and then submit the photo:

Within a few seconds, you will see details of the make and model, with reviews and technical specs, as well as the option to search listings for similar cars.

The Auto Trader app is one of the first apps to do used car searches!

With an excellent review score on the App Store so far (No.1) , hopefully it should become a very popular app...

What does it take to make a successful iPhone application?

Before answering what does it take to make a successful iPhone application we have to define what makes an application successful. Sapient always asks why are we building something, what are we trying to achieve, and how are we going to measure it; so starting from top down, what are the business objectives, the key performance indicators, and all metrics. iPhone applications usually serve one of two purposes: drive brand or drive revenue.

Objective: Drive brand
Applications that drive brand most likely are free since they have to target a broad reach. Objective is usually increase awareness, brand recall, or word of mouth, and is traditionally measured based on simple downloads, usage, and extended with how many share with friends, stickiness, and engagement levels. A good way to take it one step further is tie in social media monitoring and analyze share and velocity of voice, general sentiment, and overall impact of the application within social conversations.

Now that we understand how to measure it, what will the application do? Nowadays brands cannot push messages to the consumers, they have to provide value and we generally call it brand as an enabler. Applications that drive brand usually fall under one of two categories: be entertaining or be useful. Entertaining applications usually have a wider adoption, more downloads, but less engagement as users open it just a few times before they get bored. Useful applications have a smaller reach but higher engagement; less users will download the application, but they will use it much more than simple entertainment applications. However the key for both types is simplicity.

Objective: Drive Revenue
Revenue can be driven directly by the application, or indirectly but multi-channel tie-in with retail and stores. Indirect revenue usually aims to drive users to store fronts, partners, or provide reasons for the user to purchase products or services. Whereas direct revenue is generated by the application. Measurement towards these objectives are always dollars.

Direct revenue can be generated from advertising or downloads, and both have different strategies. Revenue from advertising is similar to brand-driven applications: it aims to reach as many users as possible by providing free entertaining or utilities, and collect revenue through 3rd party advertising. However, download revenue can be a little more complex as it involves pricing strategy.

The secret to maximize download revenue is pricing. The most popular paid applications are priced between $0.99 and $3.99, with predominant 99 cent applications. These applications are what we call the big-fast-sales. Most users download them and use them once or twice; they’re predominantly entertainment and provide small value to the consumer, but the mass download provides great initial revenue and then stops. The most grossing applications are actually priced between $4.99 and $9.99 at 44% and account for 44% of revenue. These applications are downloaded less, but used much more often as usually they do provide value.


Conclusion
So what does it take to make a successful iPhone application? You need a strategy, know what you want, how to get there, and how to measure. Keep it simple, make it engaging, and provide means to share and pass-along

Social media keynote presentations

Our planning team has recently been working on some keynote presentation for the Figaro Social Media Conference and the Social Media World Forum, both in London

Social Media 2012 focuses on new innovations in social media that are just starting to appear in production or experimental forms and that I believe will be future trends to watch as marketers. Regardless of your knowledge level with social media you will find content in here that you have not heard or seen before and I hope you find it as inspiring to listen to as I found it to research and develop for this presentation.

Social Media 2012 Master

View more webinars from Freddie Laker.

Facebook Connect + Sprite = an interesting mix

Coca-Cola Europe launched an interesting project for Sprite earlier this month that I think is worth noting. “Green Eyed World” is a video series revolving around a 23-year old singer from London as she looks to fulfill her dream of becoming a star. The audience is able to influence her choices as she journey’s through the music world by commenting and voting on the site.

The audience can follow and interact with this 23-year old singer from London as she creates new opportunities for herself by following her dream. By joining her journey online, the audience can influence her choices through commenting and voting directly in the GREEN EYED WORLD videos using their own Facebook profile.

The interesting twist is that the highly customized YouTube channel doesn’t include the familiar comments that we’re used to using, but only allows users to comment by logging in with their Facebook credentials via Facebook Connect. This function makes each comment act as a seeding element for the campaign across your friend’s list as well as allows you to easily see what your other friend’s have said about the episode.

This use of Facebook Connect stood out to me because it was completely replacing a very familiar commenting system, but I think it works for this branded entertainment campaign. The quality of the video looks solid. The videos views aren’t particularly high yet, but I think this could be very interesting to see how it plays out as it’s too early to see how successful it’s going to be.

The “Episode Zero” show will be immediately followed by several viral extras on YouTube and Facebook updates from Katie leading up to premiere “Episode One” of “Season One” on May 1st. Viewers can also download a free application for their iPod/iPhone in time for the beginning of the season.

Burn Alter Ego

The application we developed for Coca-Cola’s brand Burn just recently crossed 150,000 installs with over 85,000 users active on a monthly basis.

This app allowed users to create a customizable virtual avatar, and then “go out”- either with existing friends, or new ones. The next day, users could check their avatar’s blog to see what went down the night before, and view images that showed both avatars hanging out. The end result was that, just like actually going to a club, users received a story and a shared experience with a friend the next morning. Brought to them by the makers of the night-extending Burn energy drink.

Burn Alter Ego

We used technology in an innovative manor as an additional method to make the application stand-out in a sea of competitors. I’m proud to say the application is a finalist in both the MIXX and OMMA awards. Please wish us luck!

If you’d like to see a demo of the application without installing it in Facebook click the link below.

Top trends in social media for 2011??

It’s easy to get caught up in today’s trends or even focus on the next six months. Some of 2009’s biggest trends included an increased emphasis on real-time search and information distribution, while distribution of marketing content in widgets and other pieces of portable content that worked across devices and social spaces also saw its stake rise. Plus, there were great improvements in social-media monitoring and analytics. And most notably, marketers finally acknowledged that social media was more than just a fad, with almost complete adoption by all major marketers.

Here are the top 11 predictions for what social media will look like in 2012 (based on a full presentation which is available on my blog). Some of these items exist today in their early stages, but this list is about what I believe will become the norm in 2012. Ultimately, share of voice, point of view and community influence will be more important than brand ownership — and marketers will need to get over it if they want to stay relevant in 2012.

1. Privacy expectations will (have to) change
There will be a cultural shift, whereby people will begin to find it increasingly more acceptable to expose more and more of their personal details on different forms of social media. Sharing your likes, dislikes, opinions, photos, videos and other forms of personal information will be the norm and people will become more accepting of personalized experiences, both corporate and personal, that are reacting to this dearth of personal information.

2. Complete decentralization of social networks
The concept of a friend network will be a portable experience. You’ll find most digital experiences will be able to leverage the power of your social networks in a way that leverages your readily available personal information and the relationships you’ve established. We’re already seeing the beginnings of this with Facebook Connect and Google’s FriendConnect.

3. Our interaction with search engines will be different
Real-time information in Google search, e.g. from Twitter, blog results and user reviews, will be more prominent. Google’s Social Search will change the way we interact with search engines by pushing relevant content from our personal networks to the front of search results, making them more personalized. The importance of digital-influencer marketing will increase significantly.

4. Rise of the content aggregators
The amount of content online is growing at an exponential rate, and most online users have at least three online profiles from social networks to micro-blogging to social news sites. Our ability to manage this influx is challenging, and content aggregators will be the new demi-gods, bringing method to madness (and make a killing). Filtering and managing content will be big business for those who can get it right and provide easy-to-use services.

5. Social media augmented reality
Openly accessible information from the social-media space will be used to enhance everyday experiences. For example: the contacts book in your phone links to Facebook and Twitter to show real-time updates on what the contact is doing before you put in the call, real-time reviews from friends and associates will appear in GPS-based mapping services as a standard feature, and socially enabled CRM will change the way companies manage business relationships forever.

6. Influencer marketing will be redefined
As social media continues to permeate more and more aspects of not only the way we interact with digital media but also other channels such as digital outdoor, commerce or online TV, we will see the significance of influencer marketing grow dramatically. As a basic example, the inclusion of Twitter in Google search results or Google’s soon-to-be-released Social Search will permeate search results with content that will not be managed by Google’s infamous PageRank but by social influence and relevance to your social network. Discovering people that can help you to reach your desired consumer will become exponentially more effective and important.

7. Ratings everywhere
In today’s world, having a commerce site that doesn’t have user ratings could actually prove to be a detriment to sales. In the near future, brands and businesses will more frequently place user ratings and accept open feedback on their actual websites. User ratings will become so common that marketers should expect to find them woven into most digital experiences.

8. Social media agents
Managing the customer experience offline and online is already a key concern for marketers and customer-experience advocates. As businesses continue to support customers by monitoring and engaging in the social media space, tools to optimize this experience will become more important. Expect to see a certain percentage of responses handled by natural language engines that can respond to basic commentary such as “my service is down” or “I never received my package.”

9. Riding the (Google) wave
It’s still early days as Google Wave is still primarily limited to developers but it has the potential to revolutionize collaboration and engagement. Wave offers marketers a unique way, at minimal cost, to allow consumers to engage with each other in way that is miles beyond anything we’re currently using. Savvy marketers will develop extensions for Wave that evolve its unique communication toolset into a rich brand experience that is immersive but allows for new levels of interaction from crowdsourced storytelling to crowdsourced product design.

10. Thinking beyond “nowness”
In 2009 we became very focused on the real-time nature of social media. The implications behind consumer feedback and interaction around brands using tools like Twitter or Facebook’s news stream caused marketers to re-evaluate the power of social media tools in parallel to “traditional” digital-media channels such as search. Looking into the future we’ll need to try and evaluate what’s next and the likely answer is based on the next evolution of the web as we know it: the semantic web. In a semantic web world, search engines, for example, will anticipate the best search results we’re looking for based on what they know about us (such as all our public social networking profiles). There will be an opportunity for marketers who push the limits of their imagination to anticipate what marketing will look like in this next stage of the web and creating new and compelling experiences that we’re only touching the surface of now.

11. Social media everything and the return of digital media
Social functions will become so commonplace in digital experiences that the thought of not having socially-enhanced experiences will seem illogical. Digital media by its very nature is inherently social. I hope we’re not talking about social media in 2012, and we just refer to everything as digital media again.

SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING - Overview and Case Studies

Check out another interesting presentation on social media, giving lots of examples to bring social media to life, although it feels a little light on measurement and the long term impact on the brands presented.

SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING - Overview and Case Studies

View more presentations from James F. Robinson.

There’s a war on - pull the ads!

A study published by two academics from Oregon State University and Eastern Washington University (via Science Daily) found that when people watch ‘graphic’ and ‘intense’ war news on TV, they are less likely to remember the ads that follow.

Keven Malkewitz and Damon Aiken showed 396 students five minutes of war news from Iraq followed by two 30 second ad spots. The cycle was then repeated again for the students’ viewing pleasure - more war footage and then more ads. The ads had all been aired during US nightly news broadcasts and featured large brand names.

If the news items featured ’strong intensity’ the students were less likely to remember the ads. The definition of intensity meant words such as ’suicide’ and ‘explosive’ being used, along with shock images of bodies and amputees.

A previous study confirms much the same - at the end of 2008 Experian found that news programmes, magazines or websites were becoming less effective in terms of getting brand or ad messages across, with consumers simply not being in the ‘buy’ frame of mind when there’s a constant drum beat of doom being thrown at them.

Though in Experian’s study, news media scored highly on ’social interaction’ (you talk about what you see), it didn’t provide all important ‘time out’ factor. As a result, 28% of consumers were influenced by ad messages they saw in the news media, compared to 40% for other media. In other words, if there’s a war or global recession on, put those remaining marketing pounds or dollars into entertainment or lifestyle media!

There is a twist to the study done by Keven Malkewitz and Damon Aiken though: When viewers were shown war news defined as ‘less intense’ (just a bit of shooting here and there?), people who were war supporters often did remember the ads, with anti war viewers still not remembering them.

Guess for some brands, those ad buys on Fox News really is money well spent after all.

A company’s Facebook page is its flagship store

If your company has a Facebook page, be advised that your Facebook page is your No. 1 flagship store. It is your brand completely laid open to the world, with at least 300 million Facebook members invited to share your space with their personal appreciations, advice, comments and perspectives. It isn’t a physical space, of course, like a usual retail flagship. It’s a flagship of your brand character, brand values and brand behavior, in an ongoing dialogue with all your Facebook “fans.”

When did we start trusting strangers?

Really interesting document from Mcann and the Wave 3 report on technology

When did we start trusting strangers - Universal Mac Cann

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: internet international)

Building brands in the age of digital - The power of "brand utility " in action

This is a really interesting video and article about Nike + and how it represents the power of digital to really change the ways marketers approach communications. It's no longer about building brands through comms alone, now a brand services is equally important in delivering a brand's promise as the digital revolution has meant that alomost any brand can connect and deliver a service to consumers - this is brand utility in action!

Nike+ was born as a multi-channel, multi-sensory marriage of Apple and Nike technologies. See the video case study of the Nike+ campaign. The campaign was created by agency R/GA from New York and won a Grand Prix Cyber Lion at Cannes 2007.

The concept is smart, simple, creative and innovative. It makes Nike running shoes speak to Apple iPod nanos, which sync with iTunes in turn sending your personal workout data to the Web.

Nike+ integrated an online community inside it’s website but also launched the Official Nike Running Blog- Run Faster, with integrated forums. That’s engaging target groups and smart community marketing.

Nike also integrated widgets and below viral commercial to spread the word about Nike+.

I think that CMO’s can learn this from the innovative Nike approach: don’t always listen to your media agency. Since most most media agencies tend to kill great creativity and big ideas by shopping for the cheapest production company. Do all media agencies know how to value engagement? Or are they just preaching for cheap reach? And, does cheap reach drive consumer engagement, loyalty and eCRM?

Women : the dominant force in social networks

Online reputation company Rapleaf recently published a study on gender and age in social network users.

The study was made using the public available data gathered from the social web on hundreds of millions of people

Interestingly, one point highlighted by the study is that women outnumber men on most social networks (with the notable exception of LinkedIn and Flickr).

Sex ratio is significantly biases toward young women (14-24) on most social networks.

If a point is above the dashed line at 1.0 it means that there are more women than men, and vice versa.

It is clear that social networks can be divided into 3 categories:

1. the vast majority of social networks exhibit the same pattern than myspace or facebook

2. bebo or myyearbook shows a sex ratio bias whatever the age of the users. Those social networks seem to be mainly populated by women (myyearbook could even be seen as a female only network)

3. linkedin and perfspot can be viewed as two “outliers” in this study, showing a sex ratio bias toward male whatever the age - except for teenagers on linkedin. At least linkedin is more business focused.

We can see also that there is a small sex ratio bias toward men for 30-40 year old demographic

However, this tendency is reversed just after 40 years old.

It is interesting and also funny to note that this pattern is generally the same in dating networks, where there are more men looking for women for 30-40 year old demographic and vice versa after 40 years.

Finally, note also the significant enrichment of men for 60-80 year old demographic.

Interesting hey, there really is a digital gender divide!

The collaborative "we"

Now, on this blog we talk a lot about collaboration and the collective power of the community, and how the true power of digital is in harnessing consumers collective thoughts / might to empower them to do greater things.

Indeed, the "democratisation of communication" runs through a number of campaigns we are executing for our clients currently (hope to bring more on this shortly).

So just to help explain the concept of "we" here is a great presentation I happened upon from Marieke Schoenmaker. The slides below are a great introduction to the subject, and the case studies at the end of the deck (including Nike+ and Zopa) are world-leading examples of the power of we.

The We Experience

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: sport media)

The power of digital is in engaging consumers: how interaction drives greater brand favourability and ultimately purchase intent!

This is a story about how one little moment flipped my life upside down.....oh no only joking it's about a campaign we ran for P&G for their Gillette brand, which attempted to change existing Mach 3 user’s behaviour and get them to trade up to the new Fusion razor.

The strategy had been to try and ‘engage’ this uninspired audience by going to where they hang out online and deliver an relevant and exciting ‘experience’ which demonstrated the benefit of the new improved technology. All nice and simple, the client loved the creative execution right form the off (indeed please feel free to have a go yourself and let me know your thoughts).

The problem arose when the media agency started to get involved. Driven by their ever present fascination with reach and frequency they started to kick-up a fuss – “how can we buy these rich media formats” “we were going to buy standard formats on network buy” went their screams and cries.

All valid points if awareness if your objective, but here we were talking about changing the behaviour of a disaffected group of individuals. As the digital agency, we knew that interaction (i.e. playing a game) would help the consumer become more involved, and therefore start to feel more favourably towards the brand (which we believed would ultimately result in purchase intent; not the use of a mass awareness tactic).

The theoretical arguments went bounding across the ‘table’ with no side refusing to back down. Just as the client was starting to lose confidence in the resulting battle the result of the concept testing started to roll in. And there it was, plain as day, indeed the added functionality of being able to be involved, did indeed result in much higher levels of favourability towards the brand, much higher levels of the key product messaging and more significantly much higher levels of purchase intent.

So the moral of the story? Well firstly, always back yourself when you believe in your ideas (waiting for the result was one of the nervous times of my career and the most exhilarating). More significantly for us all is that a little bit of interaction really can help a brand engage with their audience to the point of changing behaviour; and to a degree which is vastly superior to any awareness driven approach as so often dictated and espoused by media agencies.

With a lot more involvement, (you can get) a lot more love (Brand), that's the real power of using digital!

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Fancy getting a little closer to Kylie....

A bit of a shameless plug for my agencies work, but here at Haygarth we have been developing a fascinating integrated campaign harnessing digital, sponsorship, sales promotion, experiential and trade activity to help Nokia bring their European consumers “closer to Kylie”.

In a bid to underline Nokia’s association with music the campaign includes the development of 12 websites across Europe and special Kylie box sleeves, in-box collateral and point of sale. Nokia aims to demonstrate the audio quality of the Nokia 5310 and 5610 XpressMusic handsets, which are also being offered as exclusive Nokia Kylie handsets featuring pre-loaded, exclusive video and music content.

Consumers will be able to download the full album and additional content from the new website and will have the opportunity to win ‘meet and greet’ tickets to one of the dates on the KYLIEX2008 tour.

Not bad, even if I do say so myself….

http://www.nokiakylie.com/