Caspar01

[boingboing]

Portraits of children’s faces as they watch TV

[caspar01]

[caspar01]

[caspar01]

[caspar01]

Honda's 'The Other Side' - digital storytelling done right

Is this the best bit of digital storytelling of 2014? I've not seen much better. Honda UK have created 'The Other Side',  an amazing 'double-sided' film - think two distinct stories with the same protagonist, matched shot-for-shot - to demonstrate the two sides of the Type R ('suburban family runabout' and 'sinister crime machine', in case you were wondering).

It's powerful, witty and brilliant. And because you have to play a part (Press 'R' at any point), it becomes much more than just a bit of content to watch: you become an active participant and creator of your own, personal experience.

Unleash your inner Scorcese here.

[caspar01]

Brand Experience: the new battleground

Ladies and gentlemen, a new battleground in the supermarket wars has emerged: brand experience.  The 2008 crash has had a long-tail effect on British shoppers. Discount chains, such as Germany's Lidl, have seen their fortunes rise dramatically. Just a few years ago, shopping there was an embarrassing secret. Now it's a badge of honour for frugal consumers. And the dominant supermarket chains are worried. So Morrisons, the 4th biggest chain in the UK, tried to play them at their own game by announcing they'd price match Lidl. And Lidl have responded…in a very interesting way. Rather than slashing prices further, they've taken out full page press ads, detailing a point-by-point takedown of the crappy user experience sitting beneath Morrisons' offer.

It used to be that a great ad could plaster over a rubbish experience - British Telecom did just that in the 80s with some brilliant ads and some terrible customer service. But now, we have comms being used to point out the flaws in the customer experience. We've said it before: brands are verbs. They're the sum total of your experience of them, every touchpoint: from ads and PR to customer service and in-store experience. Put another way, Comms are what you say, brand experience is what you do. And if your comms make a promise your experience can't deliver on…you're going to get found out

[caspar01]

[bashford]

The 20th Gartner Hype Cycle graph

[harrattanparhar]

Visit Original Link

[lacienegasmiled]

Demo of Beat It composed using only Michael Jackson’s voice

As Jackson couldn’t fluently play any instruments, he would sing and beatbox out how he wanted his songs to sound by himself on tape, layering the vocals, harmonies and rhythm before having instrumentalists come in to complete the songs.

One of his engineers Robmix on how Jackson worked: “One morning MJ came in with a new song he had written overnight. We called in a guitar player, and Michael sang every note of every chord to him. “here’s the first chord first note, second note, third note. Here’s the second chord first note, second note, third note”, etc., etc. We then witnessed him giving the most heartfelt and profound vocal performance, live in the control room through an SM57. He would sing us an entire string arrangement, every part. Steve Porcaro once told me he witnessed MJ doing that with the string section in the room. Had it all in his head, harmony and everything. Not just little eight bar loop ideas. he would actually sing the entire arrangement into a micro-cassette recorder complete with stops and fills.”

Reasons why I laugh when people say he wasn’t a real musician.

[caspar01]

Prankvertising: it's basically Candid Camera with a packshot at the end, isn't it? But - done right - it's endlessly entertaining. And it's not (just) schadenfreude. It's because we never get tired of seeing genuine reactions and emotions. Real people, in real places, experiencing real things.

With that in mind, here's 'Fins-bury Shark' - a brilliantly simple activation to promote Discovery Channel's #SharkWeekUK.

[caspar01]

[caspar01]

The right message, to the right person, at the right time: it's the ultimate goal of marketing and comms. And Cancerfonden (the Swedish Cancer Society) have hit the nail firmly on the head with this clever activation.  Melanoma cases have doubled since 2000, which they think is due to Swedes remembering to cover up on holiday but forgetting to do so at home. So they created a shaded area for people.

But there's more: it's also a football pitch...and the field of play is marked out by lines of sunlight that are only visible between 11am and 3pm. To put it another way: the moment the message is relevant, the activation comes to life. And by creating a place to play, they've given people a compelling reason to step out of the sun - an experiential pull, not an above-the-line push. 'The medium is the message', as Malcolm McLuhan would say.

[strategygroupposts]

Host: David Wilding from PHD Media

Strategist: Andy Nairn from Lucky Generals

Live Twitter debate (#IPAStrategy) at 13:00 today with Grey’s Leo Rayman and Mother’s Katie Mackay.

Watch the video:

Last week I was lucky enough to chat with Andy Nairn, founding partner at...

[caspar01]

Beautifully simple participative comms campaign.

[caspar01]

Do you remember when HD, arial footage of a city would require (hundreds of) thousands of pounds/dollars of camera and a hired helicopter? Ha. Downtown Los Angeles (by drone)

[adteachings-deactivated20220125]

(H/T to Paul Ruta!)

[caspar01]

IKEA - stamping out brand fandom wherever they find it.

I’m all for innovation in marketing, but IKEA might be taking it a bit far: they seem to be running the world’s first customer disloyalty campaign. They’ve threatened legal action against their most active brand fans and customer champions, in the form of IKEAHackers.net and IKEAFANS.com, in large part for using the IKEA name and marque (in the course of celebrating and praising the brand).

It’s not like those sites have only just come to light. In fact, IKEA and IKEAFANS have been working together since 2007. In return for advance product info and exclusive access/interviews, IKEAFANS provided customer feedback and data. Oh, and created and managed a massive community of IKEA fans out of sheer passion and enthusiasm. IKEAHackers, in case you don’t know, is a wonderful, crowd-sourced compendium of ingenious hacks for IKEA furniture, giving entirely new uses and personality to the BILLYs, EXPEDITs and RIBBAs of this world.

Taking legal action against one of your biggest and most popular fan sites is an error. Going after two? That points to a deeper problem. And it’s that, as we’ve said before, IKEA need to learn that you can’t have complete control over how people act online. IKEA launched Share Space in 2011, which takes the walled garden approach: use our products to be creative, in the way that we want you to, in the manner we decide. And that’s not how the online world is. Which probably explains why, in June 2014, (according to Alexa) Share Space was getting 2,200 daily visits, compared to 44,000 for IKEAFANS and 110,000 for IKEAHackers. Of course, all of those are dwarfed by IKEA.com's staggering 5.2m visits per day, which makes you wonder why they're bothering. Not least because the traffic on the two fan sites represents the most ardent, vocal, connected fans they have…so the backlash was inevitable and the subsequent backtrack over IKEAHackers was not a big shock. What this really shows is something we’ve said for a while now: your brand is what you do, not what you say. You can make as many lovely, emotional stories about customers using your products as you like, you can give away all the free pencils in existence…but it gets cancelled out when you attack your biggest fans for short-term gain. If your words, actions and touch-points aren’t aligned, you’re in trouble.  So the less-than-radical takeout from this episode is this: if someone is celebrating your brand, if they’re building your community, encouraging participation and enabling new ways of using your products…maybe don’t try to stop them. You heard it here first.

[caspar01]

What do you get when you strap a GoPro to a DJI Phantom 2 quadcopter and fly it into a fireworks display? Something pretty amazing, that's what. There's tech for tech's sake...and then there's combining it with a little bit of ingenuity to make something truly special*.

*which may or may not be illegal. Do not try this at home.