Coca Cola - Open Happiness

Interesting to see Coca Cola extending the 'Happiness' idea beyond the Happiness Machines.

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

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

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))

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.

Christmas Hangouts

A good ad for Google+ Hangouts with Wallace & Gromit.



Google seem to be promoting Hangouts as the main feature of Google+; I hope we get to see some stats on the number of people who do this over Christmas!

Trends for 2012 - The Audit

I thought it would be useful to look back at my trends deck from last year (12 Trends for 2012) to see how I did.  What I got right, & what I got wrong.

Mobile Commerce - 
Yes - lots of us are spending more through mobile.  For example eBay and Paypal reported record levels of sales through mobile in the run up to Christmas this year, mobile accounts for 18% of Domino's online pizza sales in the UK, and 20% of Orbitz hotel bookings...  & there are lots more stats like this (assuming that mobile includes tablets)

Mobile Payments - 
Yes & No.  Mobile is a both a huge influencer on retail sales in store, and retailers like Starbucks are seeing lots of mobile payments (over 2 million a week currently).  But...  While more handsets have NFC (over a million Android devices per week) and nine of the ten top handset manufacturers make at least one handset with NFC, crucially Apple doesn't yet.  There are different standards of payment, and lots of other things holding NFC back.  What's interesting is that Square, which is very anti-NFC now has over 1 million merchants using its technology in the US and is processing over ten billion dollars a year has achieved this without any NFC capability.  Oh - and Square didn't launch anywhere outside the US this year.

Mobile + TV - 
Yes - Mobile & TV are interacting very well, especially when it's Twitter on the mobile.  This chart shows the Tweets per minute during the last episode of The X-Factor in the UK, and SecondSync now produces a leaderboard of the most Tweeted about TV shows in the UK.  In the US half of all mobile owners use their phones when they're watching TV, while Shazam was used by nearly half of the advertisers at this year's Super Bowl, and is releasing lots of data on the effectiveness of ads that use its technology

Connected TV - 
Yes & No.  As with mobile payments the issue is getting hardware into circulation.  However there are lots of interesting things happening, for example The TV App Agency is making lots of TV apps for brands.  TV is also becoming a connected device through other devices, for example in the US Xbox households spend an average of 84 hours a month with online services, and one fast-growing company in China, Transmension puts mobile and online games onto TV.  It was the partial failure of these trends that led me to put 'Work-arounds' into the 2013 trends - lots of work-arounds are emerging to allow people to do connected things on their TVs before they have a fully connected set.

Mobile in China, India & Africa - 
Yes.  For example in China the mobile messaging service Weixin (WeChat) now has more than 200 million users, 3G subscriber levels grew over 800% in India, an Indian company has developed at $40 tablet to revolutionise internet access, in Nigeria over 80% of Facebook users access over mobile, and mobile banking is becoming essential.

Mobile's Threat to Other Services - 
Yes.  Mobile has continued to kill off or damage other services.  For example texting is now in decline in the US while WhatsApp is delivering 10 billion messages a day.

Ecosystems & Walled Gardens - 
Yes.  The recent changes that make it harder to see Instagram pics in Twitter, the removal of Google Maps from the iPhone (& it's reinstatement) are just two examples of this.

Real Time Bidding & Automation -
Yes.  DSPs are growing, and now that Facebook has launched its own exchange the available impressions have increased as much as fourfold.

Education Enabled - 
Yes.  Coursera now has 1.6 million enrolled students, other companies are getting into education (for example the publisher Pearson has launched a degree course), and the retailer Target is helping kids get education in the US.

Hijacks & Guerrilla Marketing
Yes.  Lots.  From the inevitable Olympics ones that managed to dance around legal restrictions to the very recent hijacking of Starbucks' #SpreadTheCheer, to brands hijacking their own customers sarcastic comments...

'eBay' for Services - 
Yes.  Zaarly have gone from strength to strength, adding a Zaarly button to other sites so that you can find someone to cook a recipe for you, for example, Pepsi used TaskRabbit in a campaign, letting their customers win an extra hour by finding someone to do tasks for them, Roamler has launched in the UK and is using people for several tasks, and other competitors are launching.

Simplicity -
Yes - Clearly its not everywhere, but examples include the Dollar Shave Club, campaigns like Bacon Barter (can you travel across the country paying only with bacon?), VW's Beetle-shaped shark cage for Shark Week,  and there's now even a Brand Simplicity Index.

So that's ten and two halves out of 12, which I think is very good.  Yes, you can argue that I pick quite easy targets, but I think I did well in highlighting some themes that would be important.

See the full deck here.

& now see this year's trends here.

How far would you go for Delites..?

This is a follow up to this vending machine stunt that I featured back in July.  Back then people were just asked to do silly things; now Delites has upped the ante and put a great big hamster wheel in a mall.



I guess you'd have some problems doing this in the UK (& especially in the US) but it looks like fun until they start to go too fast!

Very clever 3D ads

Here are two ads which use 3D technology, and the way that you see different things out of different eyes to achieve the 3D effect.

First, for Women's Aid, an ad that raises issues about domestic violence.  The full film can't be seen yet, but this gives you an idea.  It's going to be shown in cinemas in the UK before 3D screenings of The Hobbit - so people will all have 3D glasses:



Second, Axe (Lynx in the UK) have this ad that uses a more primitive red and green 3D technology.  Close your left or right eye to see a different scenario play out:

Rewind 2012 - YouTube Style

Wow.

It really shows how YouTube now has a really deep relationship with the people who make the videos!

Behind the scenes:



Also, this very handy interactive timeline (UK only) which shows the top videos by month


Plus - The Year in Review (location-specific)

The Year in Review - Global

10 Trends for 2013

My new presentation is now on Slideshare.  (It's one of the reasons I haven't been posting here in the past few days).  I'm planning on doing a review of last year's trends, and also a post about each of the trends, explaining my thinking a bit more.

10 Trends for 2013 from Dan Calladine

You can also read my trends from previous years:

2012

2011

2010

2009