Friday, January 25, 2013

New video ad format from Rockabox

Very nice new expanding video format from Rockabox, with space to put additional content.  Click on the 'Exclusive Content' text to expand

The first ad on Twitter Vine

Vine, an app bought by Twitter last year, has just been launched as a stand-alone app for the iPhone.

It lets people make video clips of up to 6 seconds.

This is the first clip posted, by Twitter's Dick Costolo.

& I think this is the first ad, very suitably by Red Vines Licorice.

Update - this is good by Topshop
& Jaffa Cakes
& Dove
& Cadbury - Unboxing


Also, The Wall has a selection here, with some good ones from GAP, GE and more


I think Vine is going to be so hot for the next few weeks!

See the latest Vines by searching for vine.co on Twitter

Tuesday, January 22, 2013

Smart Cars to be sold on Sina Weibo


Mercedes Benz is selling a limited edition of 666 'Snake' Smart cars in Sina Weibo this Friday, to mark the Year of the Snake.

The cars will sell for approximately $20,000, and it's the first time cars have been sold on the platform.  However Mercedes have experimented with sales like this before, for example in 2010 they sold 205 of them on Taobao.  I expect these will be sold even more quickly.

More here.

Friday, January 18, 2013

The problem with scheduling your Tweets

You never know when events are going to give a new meaning to your wording.


Source

Wednesday, January 16, 2013

Friday, January 11, 2013

Lionel Messi's Ballon d'Or

Our client adidas has commissioned artist Richard Swarbrick to make this film to celebrate Lionel Messi's historic fourth FIFA Ballon d'Or.



Also - Team Messi is now on Twitter  It's not him personally, but it's an official Messi account

Earlier - Richard Swarbrick's film of Gareth Bale

Thursday, January 10, 2013

RFID Bracelets


Are RFID bracelets going to be the next new thing?  Two interesting stories this week suggest they might be.

Disney World have released plans to introduce bracelets for payment for rides and more; visitors input their payment details and can then pay for things by tapping the bracelets.

"Disney in the coming months plans to begin introducing a vacation management system called MyMagic+ that will drastically change the way Disney World visitors - some 30 million people a year - do just about everything.
The initiative is part of a broader effort, estimated by analysts to cost between $800 million and $1 billion, to make visiting Disney parks less daunting and more amenable to modern consumer behavior. Disney is betting that happier guests will spend more money.
“If we can enhance the experience, more people will spend more of their leisure time with us,” said Thomas O. Staggs, chairman of Disney Parks and Resorts."

(In fact rumours of this circulated in 2011)

Meanwhile music streaming service Deezer are using RFID bracelets at the Eurosonic Noorderslag music festival in the Netherlands at the moment.  Called 'Where Was I Last Night?' the app can track people as they move around the festival, and tell people what bands and artists they have seen based on where they were, when.

"Just this morning, Deezer shared details of a total tracking concept involving major festivals.  Through the use of RFID chips, Deezer will know every single spot you stood at a festival, what you were listening to and when, and play it all back to you the next day.  And, share that information with festival organizers, labels, and others interested in tracking these details.
It's called 'Where was I last night?' and it's being piloted at Eurosonic Noorderslag, a pop-focused festival happening right now in the Netherlands.  Intellix is powering the RFID strap-on, and in correspondence with Digital Music News, Deezer outlined some of the exciting possibilities.  "RFID has never been used in this way at a festival before," an executive at the company relayed.  "The personalized email update will contain content and contact details for every artist the attendee saw the night before."
Which means, you can actually remember what you checked out (even if you were otherwise checked out).  And of course, so can others, including advertisers and festival organizers.  "If successful as an A&R tool, the technology has the potential the revolutionize the festival experience for music fans," Deezer continued."

With Disney the benefit to consumers is more obvious (simpler payment); with Deezer it's less clear, and you can see that there would be more of a backlash, especially as clamped-on bracelets or wristbands are pretty much obligatory at Festivals, to stop you transferring your ticket.

However both fit into my trend of workarounds.  Disney could have had a n app to do the same thing, but that would have relied on people having NFC enabled smartphones, while this is simpler for consumers, and you also get a nice collectable object.

Update - Samsung & EE did one at a Robbie Williams gig - writstband let people download content and enter a competition

Wednesday, January 09, 2013

Monopoly - Save Your Token


How do you generate buzz for a brand that's been (relatively) unchanged since the 1930s?

Monopoly has previously done it through special editions (Star Wars, Simpsons, university campuses), but has now unveiled a new campaign following the 'eviction' idea.

One of the eight tokens (car, thimble, boot, dog, battleship, hat, iron, wheelbarrow) is going to be taken away, to be replaced by a new one (robot, diamond ring, cat, helicopter, guitar).  You can vote on both here on the Facebook app, and also see the leaderboard.  I'd remove the battleship, and add the robot.

It's a nice stunt, and it'll be interesting to see how fired up people really get about it.

(It's been done before, but Revels/Mars (and probably a few more))

Monday, January 07, 2013

Marketing on Snapchat & Facebook Poke



Regular readers of this blog know that I'm a bit of a sucker for people marketing on new platforms - for example these two early examples of marketing on Foursquare, and this on Instagram.

This is the first bit of marketing I've come across on Snapchat, currently a bit of a flavour of the month.

Snapchat is a photo app that deletes the photo a few seconds after it has been seen by the recipient.  Inevitably some scare stories are already out there, as it could be used to send pictures that you don't want to be saved, for example of body parts.

So - how would brands use this?

One idea that yoghurt chain 16 Handles has had is to use it to deliver coupons, since the coupons will disappear after they are used.


People have to take a picture of friends in a 16 Handles store with some of the yoghurt and then send it to the company within Snapchat.  They then send a coupon back, which the person must open while the server it watching.  The coupon will be for a mystery amount - anything up to 100% off - which is a nice touch.

I think this is clever, but it's a bit fiddly, and not particularly scaleable, since the server has to be trained to recognise the process the coupon on the spot.  Foursquare have suffered from this.

It'll be interesting to see how this one develops.

Update - As Armando Alves has pointed out in the comments, this has also been done with Facebook Poke (effectively a Snapchat copy) by Delta Lingerie, using a video message:


Shop the Celebrity Big Brother House


This year the online & catalogue retailer Very is a sponsor of Celebrity Big Brother in the UK. 

As part of the deal they've kitted out the house (& maybe clothed the celebrities - although I'm not sure).





On the Very.co.uk site you can buy things you see in the house, arranged by area.  For example the suitcases only cost £62.



Ads for Very are on the Channel 5 website, but as far as I know they're not allowed to use the association on TV.  Dreams beds are also a sponsor, but they don't seem to be capitalising on it online.

I think this is very smart by Very, and sure to become a pretty standard part of TV economics.  As far as I know this is the first time it's been done in the UK.
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