Leo Burnett - Cultural Fuel

…doooooooooooh:-) not new but kinda cool!
some smart guys say smart stuff about it here

have fun.

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South Korean car giant Hyundai launched an interactive microsite through San Francisco-based Goodby, Silverstein & Partners to promote the new-look Genesis Coupe.

Pro racing driver Rhys Millen hurls the car around a test track and the users can experience a white knuckle test-drive by switching between multiple camera angles, taking screenshots to store in an online gallery. An editing facility enables users to drag and drop clips into sequence to make a personalised film.

Hyundai also introduced its Assurance purchase promise: ‘Buy any new Hyundai and if in the next year, you lose your income, we’ll let you return it’.

See in www.edityourown.com

in: Contagious Magazine, nº18

It’s a really cool user-experience

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Google launched their SearchWiki last week, and caused quite a stir in the blogging community.  It’s not really a wiki (as comments left are not editable), but it allows for unprecedented user control over search results.

Users can leave comments on websites returned as search results (and therefore on the Brands themselves) and move search results up or down in the list as they wish.  As initially launched the results and functions were only available to signed-in users.

Watch Google’s description here.

It was discontinued a few days later, but the implications are very interesting from a marketer’s perspective.

In the short time it was active, spammers added links to their websites to other, more popular addresses, the posted comments could not be edited (again, not very wiki-like) and users found that they could not  opt-out of viewing the searchwiki results along with the content that they requested.  (Several of these behaviors were not called out in the Google description of the function.)

The points for marketers are clear.  Perhaps this experiment did not succeed, but a form of it is likely to make a return.  Users will (and some say must) continue to gain control over their digital experience, and create their own experiences.  Given this cultural fuel, how will marketers participate?  Search engine optimization must evolve to include real reasons for users to include an organically presented result. Sponsored search links may radically decrease in terms of effectiveness.  Those that do not take an active stance on managing their own reputations online will continue to be at the mercy of (possibly) vocal minorities, and their silence can equal guilt in the mind of the digital shopper/surfer.  Below is an example of a possible future entry (from www.readwriteweb.com):

I don’t think this is the last we’ll hear about this kind of user empowerment.  And marketers will have to stop thinking about search results as ads and start making them Acts.

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Who needs a smartphone that does everything if you can have a digital assistant that does all the heavy-lifting for you?

Enter Dial2Do - the service that gives you a handsfree productivity tool that is only a phone call away.

Using it you can:

• Send email
• Send text messages
• Record reminders
• Send updates to Twitter or Jaiku stream
• Play internet audio content

I love this kind of service!  Why isn’t it offered from a company who needs to “own” productivity?  Or memory?  Or Safety?

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With tough financial situations everywhere, and things not looking to improve anytime soon, more and more marketers will be tightening spending and looking for ways to stretch marketing Euros.

A recent post on Ad Age (http://adage.com/mediamavens/peterson.html) showed that Procter & Gamble Co.’s Randy Peterson has focused on research that shows a surprising level of search activity around package-goods categories and branding impact for search ads, even if clicks are relatively sparse.

Mr. Peterson says he’s found a way P&G can enjoy a scale advantage in search — by treating it as one of the few truly global media for a company with two dozen billion-dollar global brands.

“Usually, in media, we look at it on a country basis,” Mr. Peterson says. “If you buy a TV ad in one country, you don’t really want it spilling over into [another] and paying for that. [But] with search, you can have one system that works globally … doing keyword analysis in country A and with little or no effort reapply that in countries B through Z.”

…

“Seventy-one percent of consumers expect us to be there in the search-results page,” he says. “If you’re not there, it’s like not being on the shelf at the store. They think if you’re not there, you’re not a leading brand.”

Another big advantage for P&G in search is feedback that can create continuous improvement in marketing pitches, sometimes dispelling preconceived notions about what words have meaning for a brand. “You can see what keywords are driving the most results,” Mr. Peterson says, “and you should be trying to win against those words.”

How much time and attention do we place on making sure that the search experience for our consumers is supporting and encouraging the user?

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Ad Age reports that New York and Chicago are planning to refit hundreds of buses as rolling video billboards. The project is the latest work of Titan Worldwide, the outdoor advertising company that has focused aggressively on new digital formats that are transforming that business sector. The 12-foot-wide bus-mounted video screens are networked to a central computer and can be programming with a constantly changing schedule of commercials.

The schedule of images to be shown is controlled centrally, allowing for up-to-the-second content, such as number of seats left, happy hour/lunch hour/breakfast messaging, and other flexibility in terms of content.  The busses will be GPS enabled - increasing the contextual possibilities based upon which part of town it is in -  for example, changing languages based upon neighborhood.

Cynical note: It’s also likely to be noticed the most in the first few months, and rapidly ignored afterwards as just another invasion of our senses!

Source: http://adage.com/video/article?article_id=132095

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