Three Minds On Digital Marketing @ Organic

Need some entertainment for the New Year?  Here are a couple of interesting social networking/ social media sites. 

Wallop is another invitation-only challenger to MySpace - very interesting visual representations of the relationships between you, your friends, and your common interests.

www.wallop.com

Imeem is a well-designed social media site that adds Digg functionality to blogs, music, video, playlists,  and social styles (thanks Kelley).   

www.imeem.com

They are both a little hard to get your head around.  Let me know your thoughts.

Misha Cornes

Beautiful new site from Volvo to support an unusual campaign for the Internet age.  Love the C30 or hate it? - You decide.   Read more from AdAge.

Misha Cornes

There's a great story in today's New York Times about the booming market for air fresheners among teens and young adults.  Proctor and Gamble's Febreze, for example, offers a $27.99 "scent player" that resembles a CD boombox.  It runs interchangeable  "discs" ($5.99) that radiate smells rather than sound. 

What really struck me was a quote tucked in at the end from Christina White, senior marketing vice president at Anne Taintor, a quirky women's line that mocks the traditional vision of the 50's housewife:

Scenting your dorm room feels like the natural extension of personalization online (custom IM icons, MySpace) and the physical display one's personal space (the iPod sound cocoon, the Bluetooth earpiece).  College students are literally marking their territory with scent.

Read the full article here.

Misha Cornes

I wasn’t one of the many who had to stand on a 3-hour line to get a Nintendo Wii this holiday season.  Instead I drove over 100 miles to the parking lot of a Pennsylvania shopping mall to surreptitiously rendezvous with someone who saw one of the consoles fall off of the back of a Toys’R’Us truck.  I’m not a gamer, trust me, it was a gift for my partner.  And I’ve never been swayed by past announcements that a PS2, Gameboy, GameCube or Nintendo DS had been added to our media room.  As far as I was concerned video games were time wasters - just another gadget to be dusted and forgotten in a few months time when something better was viciously marketed.

Not so the Wii.  It won me over.  Rather than continue being the couch-potato I am, I have actually rearranged my living room furniture (including my couch) to make way for uncoordinated boxing jabs, golf strokes and tennis volleys.  I’ve actually broken a sweat playing video games.  In fact, the most fun I have had with my Wii was making the Wii version on me, an avatar that is too-cutely called a Mii.  Making sure my Mii head was the right shape, that my Mii’s nearsightedness was similar to mine and that my Mii goatee was represented accurately took me nearly 30 minutes. That’s 28 minutes more than it should have taken.  It was that much fun.

Then I stumbled across Mii Plaza, where the Wii community meet to share Mii’s,  search Mii’s and meet to mingle with other Miis. The creative outputs of fellow Wii lovers blew Mii away. They’ve conjured up Mii’s for Harry Potter and Dr. Phil, Jesus Christ and Satan, George Bushes (multiple versions) and Bin Laden (surprisingly solo).  The Dylan and Morrissey Mii’s are scarily realistic, as is the Mii version of Cap’n Kangaroo and the Soprano’s Paulie Walnuts.  Mii versions of John, Paul, George, Ringo look cartoonish.  But ‘cartoonish’ fits my favorites, the Ramones. Gabba Gabba Mii!

Could Mii’s someday overtake MySpace? What’s your favorite?

Wayne Mitchell

The Edge Foundation's lofty mission is to "promote inquiry into and discussion of intellectual, philosophical, artistic, and literary issues, as well as to work for the intellectual and social achievement of society".  For the New Year, The Edge Foundation asked 160 world class scientists and thinkers to answer a single question:

What are you optimisitic about, and why?

See the answers at http://edge.org/

Bill Camp
 

The popular corporate social networking site LinkedIn has recently launched a new service called “Answers”. It's not much different than what Yahoo! offers, but instead of covering a wide range of topics, LinkedIn: Answers covers a smaller range of niche topics from Business Administration to Hiring and Human Resources.

Also, you can limit who can answer your questions, from the entire LinkedIn network to just people you are connected to. Since LinkedIn is in direct competition with other networking sites, this could become a very hot feature for them.

http://www.linkedin.com/answers

Jason Law

Here's a great piece from Kodak highlighting how it's corporate culture has evolved as it finally embraces the digital photography boom - it's tongue-in-cheek and hi-energy.

Read more about the genesis of the project in Ad Age.

David Feldt

It's been widely reported that MySpace is heading towards middle age - over half their visitors are 35 or older.  But with all the hand-wringing about the aging of this lucrative franchise, it's easy to forget that time marches on for everyone, even teens and college students. 

The latest sign -  interest groups targeting brides-to-be.  Condé Nast's Brides.com has launched a MySpace page:

www.myspace.com/bridesdotcom

This is a really smart, forward-thinking execution from a site that was only launched in April, out ahead of industry leaders The Knot and Wedding Channel.   Read more in AdWeek.

Misha Cornes

Yahoo! has mobilized its offerings (including flickr and maps) into a mobile app and service called yahoo! go.  It's currently in beta  but you can sign up for an alert once they expand the beta pool.

Check it out:

http://mobile.yahoo.com/go

Chad Stoller

Here's a lovely way to communicate a 3D space in a 2D way. 

The destruction of so much infrastructure around the World Trade Center has created opportunities to redesign the public transit system in lower Manhattan.  This walkthrough from the New York Times highlights an innovative way to bring light below ground.  A simple but elegant solution to the problem, nicely illustrated.

Adam Turinas

It’s a tough time to be in the magazine business. Time magazine is in the midst of a big turnaround, including a redesigned Time.com. This is a centerpiece of their strategy and they relaunched the site today. This site is designed to be a strong standalone media property rather than its predecessor which was designed to sell subscriptions.

They have done a good job of web 2.0’ing the site. There are well-designed blogs by top correspondents, the content is easily shareable and blogable. Photography is beautifully displayed and there are tons of multimedia slideshows. They have done a great job of preserving Time’s uniquely accessible editorial point-of-view. There is a great diversity of content and editorial types right off the home page.

The only downers are that it would be nice if there were a bit of video and they stop short of incorporating comments in the main articles.

Adam Turinas

Last week David Card of Jupiter Research posted his predictions for 2007 (most were built on Jupiter's overall predictions) and they are well worth a quick read. Smart.  Funny.  And probably pretty accurate.  Check back in a year.  Our predictions are fairly congruent (mine were posted on ClickZ) although we differ on the development of niche social networks (he's not a big believer and I am).  Here are some highlights (my interpretation):

• "All media should be multi-media. One brand, one audience, multiple channels, multiple receivers. Optimize programming for each, fine-tune revenue models likewise, but drive traffic across all. Cross-promote. This is The Law. Repeat every year."
• Social media will remain fragmented.  There will be no more blockbusters like MySpace. Niche social networks won't be "big bidness."
• 2007 will show what kind of video works on the small screen.  Content won't be subscription based or ppv but will likely be ad supported.  As such, he believes the opportunity is probably more in infrastructure than creating a destination or programming.
• No really big dollars in mobile media marketing in 2007 but real traction.
• The great search build out will happen.  Next areas to conquer:  branding and off-line.

If you are in the mood, give Sean Carton's piece in ClickZ a read. Its the anti-prediction prediction focused on the localization of the web.

Mark 

All of us who weren’t watching the streaming vid of Jobs today found out via the Times or WOM office chatter that Apple’s done it again, maybe... The Mac folks launched a portable gizmo that’s an internet device, cell phone, iPod and camera all wrapped into one (largish) package. I’ve been waiting for years and years to buy a smart phone that isn’t powered by Microsoft, whose software I find to be over complicated, user nasty, and prone to breakdowns, and now perhaps this is the big one.

What’s most unique about the device are these points (as far as I can tell):

The screen takes up the entire device, all buttons are “soft”
It uses Flash memory and can go up to 8 gigs
It utilizes classic Apple vertical integration: proprietary software and hardware combo

Of course, Google has also been working on a phone OS platform with Orange in England, so we’ll see who breaks out first to claim the masses yearning for internet-in-pocket ease. Personally, I prefer Google and I’m dying for a phone that can integrate Google mail/ calendar/ docs/ spreadsheets/ maps, and leave music and photography for other devices, but so far I’m still waiting…

Image courtesy of Wired.

Zachary Thacher

In case you missed it, Time named you Person of the Year.  Ok, they named "You" Person of the Year, citing YouTube, Wikipedia, MySpace et. al as clear evidence that consumers now control the information age.

Now Ad Age is on the act too, naming "The Consumer" Agency of the Year.

What's an ad professional to do?

Last month, we talked explicitly about two complementary trends: the growing number of campaigns where the consumer is the star, and the push to have consumers create their own commercials.  [Update: Unilever's Dove is also jumping on the make-us-a-commerical bandwagon through a partnership with AOL]

But after an interesting discussion with David Schatsky, President of JupiterKagan, I'm feeling compelled to rethink my own arguments.

David reminded me that giving consumers control is not always the free lunch that it appears to be.  Of the seven programs mentioned in the Ad Age review:

• Two have not yet launched (Doritos Superbowl Ad, Bud.tv)
• Two didn't produce any results worth sharing (Mastercard's Priceless, BMW/ Nintendo)
• Two were total failures (Chevy Tahoe, Walmart's Social Network)
• One lifted sales, by accident (Diet Coke/Mentos)

These are obviously selective examples, but this is not a track record that would keep me in a job.  Whew.  Thanks for the vote of confidence, David. 

Misha Cornes

Check Old Spice's latest online campaign (by Wieden & Kennedy).  It's a cheeky and irreverent way to breathe new life into the Old Spice and appeal to a younger man's market.

The campaign carefully balances the concept of "experience" (as in "if your Grandfather hadn't worn Old Spice, you wouldn't be here") and a call to action to an "inexperienced" crowd of bumbling, cologne tossing young men.

The New York Times provides some interesting context: Proctor & Gamble is determined to punch up this stodgy brand after watching category rival Axe (Unilever) steal market share among younger men with a series of risqué campaigns.

Experience it at http://experienceoldspice.com

Virginia Alber-Glanstaetten

English footballer David Beckham is leaving Real Madrid to join the Los Angeles Galaxy of the MLS.  At an estimated $250 million in salary and endorsements over five years, it's being promoted as the largest deal in sporting history. 

To give a sense of scale, the league's highest paid player last year was Juan Francisco Palencia, a former Mexican national team forward who made $1.36 million playing for Chivas USA, another Los Angeles team that shares a stadium with the Galaxy.

MLS is betting big that the world's most reconizable footballer can finally bring soccer into the big time in the United States.  Grant Wahl of CNNSI thinks it will work, and that Beckham's signing will open the doors for other superstars to sign with US teams.  Brazil's Ronaldo, for example, has long been rumored to be joining the New York Red Bulls.

But the real subtext, in my opinion, is the battle between Adidas and Nike for sports marketing dominance in the United States, a battle that Nike has been winning for some time.  Of the 25 richest athletes in 2006 (according to Forbes), 12 have relationships with Nike, including names like Tiger Woods, Lebron James, Derek Jeter, and Lance Armstrong.  Beckham, a long-time Adidas client, is another piece in Adidas' arsenal.  In 2004, Adidas placed a big long-term bet on MLS's success with a 10-year partnership deal worth $150 million.   This is a league that has lost more than $350 million in the past decade.

Personally, I wish the MLS was thinking a little smaller.  Why not sign some stars from Latin America to appeal to Latinos, still the most loyal audience for soccer in this country?

Misha Cornes

I know we all get kind of hot and bothered over User Generated Content when it’s done right, but boy is Dove getting it wrong. The process for creating your own Dove Cream Oil body wash ad is overly complex and appears to require some pre-existing video editing skills. Furthermore, the explanation is 7th-period-chemistry boring, and it looks like even after all that work, you still get a pretty cookie-cutter result. Plus, you don’t even get money if you win!

I really like the idea of users creating and submitting their own video for a campaign, but this seems like a great way to bore customers while simultaneously squelching their creative instincts. Anyone have examples of ways to do it better?

On an unrelated note, the name “Dove Cream Oil” makes me gag – it’s certainly not something I’d want to slather on my body every morning.

Anna Hecker

As some of you know, the expansion to World of Warcraft, known as the Burning Crusade, is being released next Tuesday.  Blizzard has put together a pretty cool little mini Flash site to tell you about the new changes in the game.  A very cool and immersive experience.  The site even gives you little mini-game “quests” to do as you visit each section by clicking on the exclamation marks (just like the game), and when you do them all, you get access to some hidden content.  Very cool idea.  The Music in the site is a great example of how sound can enhance an experience, especially since it’s the same sound used in the game.  Awesome stuff!

It may also interest you to know that World of Warcraft just recently surpassed the 8 million mark in subscribers, and there’s no end in sight.  Simply amazing.

http://media.worldofwarcraft.com/bc-minisite/index.htm

Daryl Brewer

Is this your vision of Seniors online? It’s certainly the prevailing mindset in the interactive industry.  We are so focused on the youth market, and so averse to marketing to anyone over 55, you’d think we were all Army recruiters.

Several recent client engagements reminded me that Seniors are a vital and underserved Internet audience.  A little research showed me that the Seniors segment (defined as those 65 and older) is growing faster than other audience online - including children and teens.  I got so excited that I wrote an article about reaching Seniors online, which you can read at Adotas. 

[Photo credit: Rachel Pennington]

Misha Cornes

There's a nice short piece in Monday's New York Times about media saturation in the New York market and elsewhere, particularly out-of-home.

"Marketers used to try their hardest to reach people at home, when they were watching TV or reading newspapers or magazines. But consumers’ viewing and reading habits are so scattershot now that many advertisers say the best way to reach time-pressed consumers is to try to catch their eye at literally every turn."

Eggs, airplane seatback trays, turnstiles, even outpatient treatment rooms have been fair game.  It's hard to say how far this trend can go before consumers  revolt.  In San Francisco, a series of complaints led to the removal of 'Got Milk' billboards that emited the odor of chocolate chip cookies at bus stops.

Read the full article here.

Misha Cornes

Six weeks ago, a Philadelphia man decided to see what types of physical gains he can make by playing Wii sports for 30 minutes a day. Today he published his results and pictures. He was able to drop 9lbs, 2% body fat, and 3.5” in his waistline.  Does Nintendo have the next Jared?

Frank Ribitch

If 4 hours of Jack Bauer wasn't enough for you this weekend, check out this branded entertainment effort by Degree: "Rookie: CTU"

Its a series of side stories based on the 24/ CTU universe featuring "Jason Blaine," a rookie analyst/field agent. Chapter 1 launched last night and it seems we will have to wait a bit longer (about 19 more days) to see the continuation of the story. However, the stories will connect to cliff hanger commercials and be the basis for other Degree/24 promotions. More about the program can be found here.

This isn't the first time that 24 has ventured into branded partnerships, spin-offs or a combination of the two. "24: The Conspiracy," was a mobile video spinoff developed for exclusive distribution on select mobile carriers and Toyota recently sponsored the Season 6 prequel which was bundled into the Season 5 DVD set.

In other 24 news, Fox released a retail DVD of the first 4 hours of Season 6  for fans who may have missed this week's airings (this DVD may have been the source of this month's episode 1 leak on BitTorrent). This action follows the announcement by NBC and Netflix for an exclusive "season in review" DVD for its hit show, "Heroes." Both efforts represent a convenient on-ramp to lure late viewers into the programs.

While digital distribution offers new-media friendly fans the opportunity to catch up, will mid-season DVD releases appeal to traditional viewers who want content on a conventional home video format? 

And while we're on the subject, couldn't someone have bought Jack a cup of coffee after he came off that plane?

Chad Stoller

I came across this well thought out, on-line diagramming tool (UML, flowcharts, networking, floorplans, etc.).

Diagrams are saved online in your free account and the finished result can be published to the web, printed, or output in SVG, JPEG or PNG formats.

And all done in Flash 7.  Nice work!

http://www.gliffy.com

Jim Bachalo

About a week ago, I renewed my ski pass online for Keystone Colorado, a Vail Associates resort. The process was simple and reliable.  OK so that was the expected bit.  The thing that impressed me was what happened today.  I received a short and enticing email, welcoming me and linking me to a Resort Explorer.  This nicely designed flash site shows off all the cool aspects of the Vail Associates resorts.  Basically, it’s designed to get me excited about the vacation I have just invested in.

It does a good job.  It’s easy to navigate and the content is pretty good.  A few minutes on the site I am even more excited about this vacation.  The only call to action is to send a postcard to other people who will be going with me or to download a “Snowmate” desktop app that lets me know about snow conditions and events at my resort.  Usually I don’t use these but this one is truly useful to me and as it gets closer to my vacation I will be looking at it daily to figure how deep the base is at Keystone and what’s happening that week.

What impressed me most about this is what they didn’t do.  Normally when I get these post-booking emails, it is to offer me money off on something I don’t want yet.  It might be something I will be interested the week before I go but right now it would just be an annoyance.  Typically when I get these, the sender goes into my sub-conscious spam filter so that whenever I seen an email from them I automatically delete or ignore to delete later.  They have blown it with me from the outset.

In this case, the experience was so good that I will be looking out for offers or events in Keystone as it gets closer to my vacation.

My lesson from this is that by being patient early on in a customer relationship and investing in giving something valuable without expecting anything back from, they have bought my trust - even a bit of love. They will never be in my subconscious spam filter and I will most likely spend more with them as a result.

This seems so bloody obvious but how few companies actually do this.

I compare this with a cruise vacation I was investigating.  The company will remain nameless but I had to give them my email before I could get anything useful out of their site.  I was then bombarded by emails from one of their representatives offering me big discounts on vacations I had never shown any interest in.  It turned me off the whole category of vacations.

Adam Turinas

I was part of the walking dead after CES, but I had to go to MacWorld and check out the iPhone first hand. I was skeptical at first but after after watching Apple's demo, I believe that everyone will want one. The power of the Apple brand, mixed with social currency, iPod envy and "device newness" will prevail and people will get over their "perceived flaws" and even accept that a new iPhone is probably around the corner, and rush to the Apple Stores on Day 1 in order to be the first on their block to get an iPhone.

Sure I think it has its differences. I personally think it needs a physical keyboard, but that's because I'm accustomed to BlackBerrys, Treos, and old school Motorola Skywriter 2000s, but the iPhone isn't only for you and me, its for everyone - and not everyone has or has had a smartphone experience. A majority of smartphone users use them for documents, web access, phone calls and email, but what makes the iPhone so unique, is that its really "iLife in your pocket." If you love iLife, this phone is for you..and it browses the web and gets email too.

What would we get if Virgin Airlines was granted permission to fly local routes within the U.S.?

Click for the YouTube video of Fred Reid, CEO of Virgin America.
(Courtesy of aurum3.)

Why can’t all airlines offer this?

Virgin has started an online petition at www.letvafly.com to counter the DOT rejection.

Sign it if you have a chance.  Let the airlines compete for your business.

Jason Law and Chad Stoller

Change the speed, the direction, scrub the narrative in either direction, no chugging.

Never have I seen a site with this kind of control over video playback.

Plus the audio design and special effects are cool to boot!

http://www.julianred.com/

Ian McGonigle

Today the NY Times has a shout out to the Home to the Future exhibition at Time Warner’ (totally risk- and aesthetic-free glass) corporate building (that could be in any business center in the world).  According to the Times, the show is “a 45,000-cubic-foot exhibition on home-related technologies…”

Anyway, I don’t mean to sound jaded, but as a New Yorker I’m struggling with the fact that Time Warner squanders their architectural (and corporate-identity) opportunity at the south-west corner of Central Park – a globally visible location – with two run-of-the-mill glass towers hovering over a mall. Why couldn’t they do something with classy and modern masonry like the Conde Nast building in Times Square?  How about a super-green approach like the new Bank of America tower on 42nd street?  The actual Home to the Future seems cool, and there’s a website for it:

http://www.hometothefuture.com

Here’s where the 3 Minds critique kicks in. This is a very boring Flash demo – perhaps to match the architecture around it.  There’s a long introduction that adds no value to the experience. Then there is a tiny, tiny video box you can pop up.  Hello TW! Ever hear of YouTube? Oh right, they’re your new Google-sponsored competition.  The vid has yet another very slow introduction – after five looong seconds it’s click-away time.

The content itself is so templatized and lean as to be non-existent.  There is no photography of the exhibit, no in-depth experiences for people who aren’t physically at the exhibit, and no sense of why I should schlep all the way to a super rich persons mall stuffed with Miami-Vice inspired Bang & Olufsen products to look at a corporate-sponsored pavilion.

Forbes highlights the current state of US phone number inventory. According to the article, there are 1.3 billion telephone numbers available in the United States, and 582 million of them are in use.  Of the total numbers, 59.1% are assigned to mobile carriers - this number includes the 30 million landline numbers that have been moved to wireless carriers since 2003, when number portability was put into effect. (Thanks to Fiercewireless)

Chad Stoller

One of my classmates, Alexis Lloyd, is conducting her thesis on the language of advertising and, as one part of her work, has created the Ad Generator.  By dissecting popular ad slogans and semantic structures of advertising language she has reassembled the meaning and messages into new slogans attached to Flickr images tagged with words from the newly generated messages. The results range from insightful to comical to poignant. Copywriters be warned.

www.theadgenerator.org

Shaun Rance

My cousin's wife started a family tree on Geni beginning with our grandparents.  She sent me an invitation, from the site, to complete my section of the tree.  The basic updates were quick and painless.  From my section, I could also add family up the tree on my Mother or Wife's side of the family.  You can only view people within your own tree.  I can browse back through her family.  I don't think there is a way to link trees that have not been populated by you or by someone added to your tree via an invite.  We could be related and never know it.  :~/

http://www.geni.com/tree/start

Richard Liechty

Diesel, the Italian purveyor of $200 jeans and other fashion-forward clothing, has taken the concept of the viral video one step further than most - the entire site homepage has been "taken over" by the Heidies, two attractive young women who appear to be holding an equally attractive young man captive, and recording the whole event by webcam.

The cam site itself has a live, uncensored chat room that lets viewers comment on the proceedings.  Be warned, this is definitely mature content.  As Adam Kahn writes, "It’s not something I want to share, forward, or perpetuate, but can’t help but feel like there was once a good idea in there somewhere?"

http://www.diesel.com/

What's fascinating about the execution is that the Heidies really have taken over- you have to wade through the marketing campaign in order to get a look at the clothing.  Even without a homepage campaign, the Diesel site is heavy on experience on light on merchandising, but this is exceptional in its aggressiveness.  Judging from all the comments, their customers seem to like it.

Misha Cornes

When I saw that the blogging site LiveJournal was rolling out Sponsored Communities, I thought “there goes the neighborhood.”  Unlike other blogging sites, Livejournal is intensely community-oriented.  The feature that really sets it apart as a social networking/blogging hybrid is the multi-user special-interest Communities, which range from topics as general as “New Yorkers” to those as specific as “Polyamorous Pagan Vegans.”

I was pleasantly surprised to see that the current sponsored community, for the movie “Blood and Chocolate,” is doing several things right.  First and foremost, it’s not LonelyGirl15: they come right out and ask you to think of the site as a Livejournal-based roleplaying game where users can interact with someone writing in the voice of the main character.

Secondly, they make the best use of the medium with daily journal entries, and got a good writer: she really sounds like a young girl struggling with a secret.  But even better than her entries are her responses to the comments left in her journal, and the way she references them in subsequent entries – exactly the way a real Livejournaller would.

The site’s writers also have fun with it, bringing in other characters from the movie and having the main character question their validity.  (At one point she writes: “Someone has to be messing with me… that guy wouldn’t even know how to turn on a computer!”) Aside from that, they don’t seem to have generated any fake comments, which is tempting when you’re trying to solicit user interaction.  I clicked on the journals of some of the responders because I’m suspicious like that, and they seem to be real people. 

Finally, they chose the right site to promote their movie. “Blood and Chocolate” promises to be a Goth-y flick about a teen girl werewolf… and Livejournal is full of teen Goths. With 422 members who have joined the community, another 574 watching, and about 30 regularly leaving comments, “Blood and Chocolate” has found a captive audience. The question, of course, is whether those numbers will translate into increased box office sales – but in terms of creating an engaging experience within a distrustful market, I think the creators of this community have done a great job.

Go to http://community.livejournal.com/mydarkestsecret/ to see if you agree or disagree.

Anna Hecker

If you like having RSS-enabled news and blog articles read to you (somewhat slowly) by a computer-generated news anchor, then News at Seven is for
you.

It's the brainchild of  Northwestern University's Intelligent Information Laboratory. The content is automatically generated and spoken through a series of characters from Half-Life 2 in settings that range from a virtual studio to man-on-the-virtual-street locations.

Is this the future of newscasting? Will news from war zones be conducted via armored camera-toting machines designed by iRobot and read by celebrity avatars in Second Life?

They report. You decide.

www.newsatseven.com

Daniel Modell

Adweek has named the Jeep Uncharted campaign “Best Use of Web 2.0 in 2006”.  It’s a great honor for Organic, particularly since it's a complicated integrated campaign that defies easy categorization.   

Starting in late 2005, we began planning an interactive campaign to coincide with The Jeep Compass Music Tour, a multi-city concert tour of new and emerging artists headlined by G. Love & Special Sauce. We built promotion pages on MySpace and Friendster that served as a hub for MP3 downloads, musician bios, and tour information.  The idea was to reach a new kind of Jeep buyer – young urbanites, particularly women – through the power of social networking.  Once the tour started, flyers drove the concert attendees back to the web for additional tour dates and concert videos.  The profiles ultimately linked back to Jeep.com.  To date, more than 12,000 people have become Jeep’s friends, and there were more than 224,000 music plays. On Facebook, 10,000 people joined, creating more than 67 discussion topics. And the MySpace site is among the top natural search results for Jeep Compass, and friends continue to comment in the forums six months after the tour ended.  As Sam Cannon quips, "It's nice to have friends instead of entries in a database."

Looking back, this innovative automotive campaign grew out of some our entertainment work, where collaboration with social networks is a standard way to reach a teen and young adult audience.  In our work for X-Men 3, for example, we were the first to build new functionality into MySpace as part of an advertising campaign.  We knew from our research that for our target demographic, their Top 8 was a constantly shifting measure of their friend’s social worth.  In return for “friending” the X-Men, users were given a “superpower” that allowed them to have 16 Top Friends.  The X-Men now have nearly three million friends, and the promotion was such a success that MySpace removed the cap on the Top Friends feature.

It comes down to great clients like Daimler Chrysler and 20th Century Fox who are brave enough to trust their customers with their brand.  To me, that’s the essence of Web 2.0.

Misha Cornes 

Awards are nice, but the big guys in Hollywood are always keeping an eye on the bottom line.

While everyone is busy with their analysis of the Golden Globes and recent Oscar nominations, Kagan Researach, a media research company in California has published their 2006 Kagan Profitability Index which ranks movie releases based on studio ROI (the simple math of dividiing total revenue by the studio's total production and marketing expenses). According to the study, the biggest hit (in regards to profitability) was Ice Age: The Meltdown with over $1,053 million in total revenue. Considering the $256.4 million it required to make and market the film, the animated hit posted a 4.11 KPI which topped the 3.93 KPI of Pirates of the Carribean: Dead Man's Chest.

More on the report can be found here.

Chad Stoller

A few days ago, a tech-savvy friend introduced me to Twitter—a mobile network where friends just say what they’re doing during the day.  (It sounds weird, but stay with me.) You can post updates via the Twitter website, via your IM, or your mobile phone.   I’ve been getting a steady stream of fun, informative, and hysterical emails.  As of this morning, one friend is troubleshooting a furnace pilot light and another friend is apartment hunting while scavenging for a burrito.

Random, fun, and totally addictive. Mobile social networking at it’s finest.

www.twitter.com

Amanda Van Nuys

DepicT! (www.depict.org) is a short film competition for amateur / budding filmmakers to tell a story in 90 seconds.  The brief was “to uncover distinctive voices - originality, imagination, and the ability to engage the audience with a compelling idea told in a mere 90 seconds.”

The 2006 shortlist are here: http://tinyurl.com/2q5ds6 – the contest has been held each year since 1999 – check out the site to see all of the winners over the years.

This is an inspiration for all of us who tell stories for a living.

David Feldt

GoArmy.com is an innovative site that is constantly adapting to meet the expectations of its core audience: young adults age 18-24.  As a major recruiting portal for the U.S. Army, the site has to strike a careful balance between entertaining and providing a realistic portrait of Army life.  TV commercials and print all point to the site as a one-stop location for comprehensive information about joining.   With a diverse workforce of more than 650,000 people, that's a lot of material for any potential employer to cover.

Sgt.  Star is a virtual search agent designed to meet this challenge in a compelling way.  Ask the Sargeant, and he'll tell you: "STAR which stands for Strong, Trained And Ready. I'm an artificial intelligence agent created for the U.S. Army to provide you with information about Army life." Like Ikea's Anna, Sgt. Star can parse natural language and suggest areas of the site to explore.  As an avatar designed to match wits with teenage boys, he's fairly difficult to stump.

The application pops up as daughter window to the side of your browser, and what's even more compelling is that Sgt. Star will update the main GoArmy window as you browse.  Ask him about payscales, for example, and the browser points to the Benefits area.  There's also an integrated live chat function that he will call on for backup.  The application was developed by Next IT.   You can read their case study here.

Misha Cornes

Awesome takes many forms. Here are two. The first looks like it cost a lot. The second looks like it did not.

The first is a German-market TV spot for a product that was widely panned as a failure, selling only 2,200 units in the US, for big money all. This is a car that prompted British auto journalist extraordinaire Jeremy Clarkson to quip, "To what question is the answer a £68,000 Volkswagen?" The commercial is as awesome as the car, but represents a similar type of conspicuous excess.

The second spot is for a pet store near Richmond, California (East Bay, stand up!) I rap along when it comes on in the third quarter of Golden State Warriors games.  It is so low-budget and homely, one could ask (a la Clarkson) to what question is the answer "rapping about a pet store"? But the reach on this humble little spot represents a lot of bang for the buck, as everyone who lives in the EB can attest. These, my friends, are also 30 seconds that you will remember.

Obviously, selling VW Phaetons requires a different approach than selling "rabbits and scorpeeonns," but still. The floor is open for thoughts on king content, cost-to-reach ratio and whether or not the world really is changing. To wit, to what extent are lo-fi solutions appropriate for large-brand advertising, particularly online?

Daniel Turman

With the approach of the SuperBowl, Madison Avenue's showcase of conspicuous consumption, there's almost as much anticipation for the advertising as about the game itself.  The size of the Superbowl audience has remained flat, but prices continue to edge up, to a record $2.6 million for a 30-second spot. 

Is it too much to argue that the Internet saved the blockbuster SuperBowl ad?  Now a Superbowl buy can be integrated into a wider, multi-channel campaign, either as the big pay-off at the end (e.g. for a user-generated content contest), or as the big bang kickoff for a campaign that will extend onto websites, cellphones, and of course YouTube.  By my reckoning, this is the first year when every single campaign will have a web tie-in. 

Here's a quick run-down of some of the more anticipated SuperBowl commercials and their use of the interactive channel.  I'll keep adding to the list as we get closer to the date.

Web-based Create-Your-Own Ad

• Chevrolet: Chevy College Ad
• Doritos: Crash The Superbowl
• Snickers:  Snickers Satisfies
• Alka Seltzer: Battle of the Bands
• NFL: SuperAd

Web Sneak Peeks

• Nationwide: KFed YouTube Profile
• Budweiser: Bud Bowl Preview (mobile campaign)
• Garmin: garmin.blogs.com
• CareerBuilder: Sneek Peek + ageomatic.com, a viral teaser
• Sales Genie: Sneak Peek
• GoDaddy: Rejected Ads timeline
• All the user-generated competitions offer sneak peeks as well

Register Online, Watch and Win

• Pepsi: Pepsi Super Can

Misha Cornes

The competition around here to scoop new music applications is pretty stiff, so I feel extremely honored to be the first to post this link.

www.musicovery.com

I’m having fun listening to 70s soul this morning… and I like the bold, colorful design. I like that it gets a little more specific than Pandora, but the jury’s still out on whether they’ll actually have enough tunes within the genres I like the keep me amused.

What are your thoughts?

Anna Hecker

Maybe I've had my head in the sand but just read about Joost in the most recent Wired.

Is Joost an essential missing piece in the puzzle of TV/internet convergence? Or will it be forgotten as another software startup that missed the mark. I'm betting on the former.  For one, the founders are also the guys behind P2P based Kazaa and Skype.

What is Joost? It's essentially a java based P2P streaming application on the front end coupled with a network infrastructure that helps overcome some of P2P's shortcomings on the backend.
In a departure from YouTube and the many YouTube clones, viewers won't be able to upload their own content.

And it seems advertisers are getting on board big time, according to both Engadget and Business Week.

Jim Bachalo

The New York Times reports today on yesterday's Microsoft Vista launch. According to Steve Ballmer, it's “the biggest product launch in Microsoft’s history” and the rollout will be backed by a first-year marketing budget of hundreds of millions of dollars.  Microsoft has 500,000 industry partners worldwide who have a vested interest and are obviously betting (praying?) that the Vista launch will be a success. “I hope your forecasts are right,” said Todd Bradley, executive vice president for personal computers at Hewlett-Packard. “We’d all be thrilled.”

A Microsoft funded study by the IDC predicts that “this ecosystem should sell about $70 billion in products and services revolving around Windows Vista” in 2007. 

So, will the world upgrade to this latest version of the MS operating system?  More than 90% of the world PC market already use the previous generations of software from Microsoft.  The key question is: "Why upgrade?".  According to Bill Gates, Vista is "easier to use".  Will this be enough of a reason?

If one looks at the launch photo above, one senses a surprising (and significant) lack of enthusiasm about this launch - look at the body language and facial expressions. Do you notice any smiles? Any enthusiasm? Any sparkle?  It may be the biggest product launch in Microsoft's history, but they don't seem too excited about it.

We shall see.

David Feldt

Is the world ready for another viral video web site? The folks at Turner Broadcasting sure hope so. They just launched Super Deluxe, a hybrid between Comedy Central and YouTube that features original videos and cartoons from professionals, aspiring professionals and aspiring aspiring professionals. There seems to be little restriction on raunchiness, aside from a required lie-about-your-age verification feature (think beer sites) but it helps to weed out the NSFW content. But it begs the question: why are you watching it at the office, anyway?

www.superdeluxe.com

Daniel Modell

The future of TV advertising could be 1950’s soap opera-style sponsorships, plus a website.   

Windows Vista just kicked off a campaign on Comedy Central on 1/14 by sponsoring a Demitri Martin special.  Each commercial break was “free of clutter” meaning that there were no :15 or :30 spots.  Instead, there were informative 2 minute segments about the Institute for Advanced Personhood. 

The segments were modified versions of earlier Webisodes, which we discussed on ThreeMinds in October, which featured Martin as the person in need of treatment from the IAP.  If these make no sense to you – that was the point. 

The segments provided just enough information to make you curious and also had cut footage from the Demitri Martin special.  It was the first time I have watched an hour of TV without channel surfing in years.  If you watched the entire show it was impossible to resist checking out the websites, and once you are on the site it is hard not to watch all the webisodes.

A couple of things are great about this campaign:

• Very engaging - not only on the website but the throwback TV sponsorship as well
• Very targeted
• Seamlessly integrated branded entertainment
• Web-led advertising – webisodes drove content of TV sponsorship
• Communicated one key message -  Windows Vista can help remove clutter from your life

Well done.

Russ Hopkinson

In the past, I've used this space to complain that too much online content is aimed at young men.  While microsites like Mitchum and Axe focus on babes, Burger King and Borat go after the Jackass demographic.

But lately women are getting their chance to objectify the opposite sex.  Last week Diesel ran a four-day campaign where two women kidnapped a male model and tied him to their bed.  And the videos for Xtra Pine's Cleaning Hunk could be the opening scenes from an adult film.    According to Business Week, the idea for the site came from an insight that Mexican housewives often pass pictures of hunks around by email.

Reversa, an anti-aging skincare brand Reversa owned by Montreal-based Dermtek Pharmaceuticals, takes more of the Kim Cattrall approach to sexuality- less skin and more "Oh you naughty boy".

www.SeeMoreSideEffects.ca

Four female fantasy "helping hands" come to the door to do things around the house.  Each fantasy has three scenarios and is aligned to a Reversa product: a chef (the bread-making scenario is the best, according to a survey of female colleagues), a fireman, a gardener, a plumber.

It's a great viral execution that turns the stereotype on its head.  (Thanks Chelsea)

Misha Cornes

Low cost insurer Geico has created an apartment (or is it a persona room?) for their popular TV spokesperson as he readies himself for a party.

Besides all of the the amazing details, humor and slick transitions, the fact that the whole site reads like a story really makes this site actualized.

http://www.cavemanscrib.com/

Jason Levine