As with all articles containing the words “x success criteria…” use this with caution. However, the report, while not earth shattering should help you with your next argumentation.
Via DavaiDavai
This is by far, one of the most impressive and amazing videos I have seen in a long time. Not only for what is shown, but for its concept: one guy, walks across America, from New York to San Francisco wearing blue jeans (Levi’s obviously) and I guess the t-shirts were also from the same brand.
Where is the “amazing” part? Well, the whole video is made in stop-motion.
That’s right; the video consists of 2770 pictures and is 1:53 minutes long. If we do the math, that’s 113 seconds, which makes 24.5 photos per second. Just as any given animation. The procedure and technical aspects are explained in the behind the scenes video and the complexity of the project is much more of what one may have thought, since it is not clay or computer animated.
Another aspect of the commercial is that there are almost no references to the brand and at least I was able to find only three. One is made at the end with a close up to the jeans where the Levi’s tag appears (next to a “to walk” list), which is the more obvious one. The other two (or maybe more) are “hidden” along the video, which make them much more difficult to find since there are 24 pictures every second.
The team of Conscious Minds was in charge of the production of the video and they used a Canon EOS-5D Mark II for all the shots. Anyway, it is a great video. Enjoy!
Levi's sign hidden along the video around min. 1:49
In a recent post on Retail Customer Experience.com, Jeff Weidauer speaks about how mobile couponing is heading in the wrong direction. He references the fact that marketers trying to replicate a coupon bar code on mobile devices can be compared to Henry Ford’s famous comment that if he had asked the public what he should build they would have told him - “A faster horse.”
While I agree with his well-thought-out points on the dire situation of mobile coupon display technology, I think the revolution is almost here - where the mobile channel becomes a serious contender in the value chain. And it all comes down to customer behavior (just like it always does).
Couponing has never been ideal for marketers or the public - with most coupons distributed willy-nilly in broadcast print media, and the vast majority of them never used. And people hate having to remember to clip and carry - not even willing in most cases to print at home with the slew of online coupon outfits.
Marketers also have to do a careful dance with couponing - realizing that they will unwillingly subsidize a portion of purchases that their loyal consumers would have already planned to make. And the higher the value, the more possible that they will shift the ideal price point in the consumer’s head for the product or service.
But when couponing is thought of differently, and more personally, we can get to a place where it starts making sense for everyone. For marketers the only realistic position is personalization - if they can’t customize the coupon value for the individual, then they don’t have any way to assist in developing any real relationship with the person. Once you are committed to personalization, the mobile channel starts to look more and more like the right place to be, and if you maintain focus on ease of use for the user, you’ll avoid the replication of real-world ‘Faster Horse’ mentality that the article takes issue with. For retailers, they will continue to push for solutions like Kroger has, that tie manufacturer value-off deals to their existing loyalty cards - creating frictionless experiences for the big chain shoppers.
Ever dreamed with being the Mayor of your own city? Ok, the video game SimCity has already done that before but what about a game with REAL problems or as IBM says: a real world game with real world impact.
The game “City One” was presented on May 4th but as it is going to be delivered in the latter half of this year, the buzz around the game is increasing.
Forget about the simple options like building enough houses or bigger streets, the mission of this game is not only build your city, but also make it smarter, revolutionize the industry, solve real-world business problems, deal with pollution issues, water supply, energy efficiency, banking and retail innovation, all of this using IBM solutions of course.
As a fan of this kind of games I can’t wait to try it I only hope they don’t took the “fun” out of it.
By the way, the trailer is really good and you can find more and subscribe for updates at the game site.
… they use a social networking phenomenon to say that aliens are contacting us.
Granted, Mail online isn’t exactly known for Pulitzer material, but still:
While any ‘lost in space’ messages wouldn’t exactly be restricted to 140 characters, as on the website, a study suggests ET is more likely to send out short, directed messages than continuous signals beamed in all directions.
The reason?
Because alien civilisations are likely to strive to limit waste and make their signalling technology efficient.
Thank god for Twitter. We have finally found a medium for aliens!
Recently, I’ve come across some articles about the ad industry having a sort of midlife-crisis. This is an interesting notion, as this would premise that advertising as such has a natural life that has to come to an end at some point. And after so many people already having screamed “Advertising is dead,” I am now confused it isn’t. It’s just a mid-life crisis? Folks, get our vital signs right! Also, to follow the metaphor, what exactly is the proverbial “Porsche” in Advertising’s “mid-life crisis”?
Joking aside, just 2 weeks ago Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung painted a critical picture of the industry and mentioned that ad professionals have hard time reinventing themselves and their business model.
Just like a balding 45 year old in a track-suit with disposable income looking for a souped-up convertible to feel better about himself, advertising lacks purpose.
Today, I read Warren Berger’s take on the Bogusky situation “Maybe the Midlife Crisis Isn’t Bogusky’s?“. Being American and a bit less cynical that his German counterpart, and using the crisis as an opportunity, Warren states that agency professionals (just like Bogusky, but without the massive payout) have been looking for deeper social meaning and context for their work ever since digital technologies have put public opinion (and advertising itself) in the hands of the people. But more interestingly, Berger also makes some nice observations that in fact remind us what the real story is:
The second part of the story suggests to me that some client companies are perhaps still a bit thin-skinned when it comes to having any kind of candid discussion about serious issues. Which in turn suggests that these companies are living in the past — in a pre-social networking era when they could actually still control the public debate.
Ok. To anyone working in an ad agency, this is a pretty shared (even though somewhat of a subjective) sentiment; still, thanks for saying it on Adweek, Warren! And, by the way, this answers my previous question of what the “Porsche” is in the “advertising mid-life crisis”: Affording yourself the irresponsible, ineffective and inefficient luxury of lolly-gagging around when it comes to changing your business model, dragging your heels on changing your creative product and pretending you still live in a brand era. However, I would say this is still true for clients and agencies alike. Dependency on short-term quarterly planning, lack of deeply thought-out foresight and interupted implementation of long-term vision apparently makes it hard to think about a more efficient, unsexy hybrid car when you can still afford the 911. You won’t be able to afford the gas in a couple of years, but hey, »Après nous le déluge«.
Hence, Warren continues to point out that the ad agency’s deliverables should change: product design, launching community initiatives, revising corporate policies, etc.
Or, as we would tell our clients: We want to help you doing things, instead of just saying things. Things that create value exchange, not messaging.
For that to happen though, the role and creative product of agencies have to change. And right now, it’s a a bit of a chicken or egg problem: a) Agency leaders have to really put their money where their mouth is, and enable their shops to actually deliver a creative product that does things with people and instead of milking a defunct business model of creating messages, while b) clients have to become more confident in matters of understanding true human behavior and consequently need to start paying their agency partners for creating purpose-driven initiatives that create a qualitative difference in people’s lives. Result of this catch-22: if agencies don’t offer it, clients can’t buy it. If clients don’t buy it, agencies can’t build those competencies.
So instead of wondering what’s first, chicken or egg, all parties should focus on the chick everyone has been talking about hatching: people-driven brands that have a human purpose, not a promise. Experiences that are authentic, not tagged-on target-audience sentiments that muddy a brand’s expression more than enable a true value exchange. If both clients and agencies came together on this simple observation, Warren’s finishing paragraph would actually not be that utopian:
It might even allow the ad agency to claim some of the moral high ground as it plays a greater role in guiding companies to do the right thing — not just for themselves, but also for the world at large. Is that an overly ambitious and idealistic vision of the future of ad agencies? Maybe. But hey, when you’re having a midlife crisis, you’re allowed to dream big.
Damn right you are. It’s what you signed up for.
In fact, there are enough examples of behavior-based and purpose-driven brands out there that show it’s not utopian to steer clear of a type of cookie-cutter advertising that is either crass exhibitionsm or bland commercialism or teary-eyed sentimentalism, but rather enable human behavior in a way that works for brands and people alike.
I’m loving the video responses from the Old Spice guy. You can take a look at the commercials here but the one below is actually a response to a tweeted request - a guy asked the brand icon to help him propose to his girlfriend.
The Old Spice Guy answers tweets to the Brand’s Twitter account with custom videos - a nice use of engaging media for entertaining and extending your brand. And it helps that media outlets are LOVING this campaign.
Check out all his custom videos here.
Via Mashable
Our popular quarterly release of TechCheck is out again.
For the latest in marketing technology and applications, download it here.
Within the pursuit of being students of human behavior, Leo Burnett researcher Carol Foley is developing a typology of human behavior, called Behavioral Archetypes (SM).
The Tool allows the classification of human behavior and the brands response behavior.
Our starting point for all explorations of behavior must be to identify and understand what people are doing right now with regard to our brand or product.
The psychological literature is full of references to specific types of behavior.
Yet no one has sorted out all of these various types of behavior, nor created a schema of their relationships to one another.
Were we to be able to do this, we could begin with the behavior itself, rather than with a psychological perspective, and then allow the relevant perspectives to inform that behavior further.
Through over 10,000 interviews in multiple studies, we’ve been able to quantitatively map all of the major types of behavior into a paradigm.
What is important about Behavioral Archetypes(SM), and what substantially validates it, is the degree to which it mirrors models of human motives and values. The model allows for spotting adjacent behaviors (e.g. the freedom behavior’s neighbours are self-interest and change) as well as opposite behaviors (e.g. the the change behavior’s opposite is preservation) as well as 40-50 sub-behaviors per behavior category. See below.
Further investigation into human behavior with this model also leads to insights (behavior tensions) regarding
The tool lends itself to a more structured approach to behavior investigation, spotting behavioral tensions within the people that are most important to a brand and to formulate a brand behavior response.
If you are interested in more information, please feel free to contact us.
