Brands are becoming increasingly creative in their marketing for the World Cup – and Nike is without question on the cutting edge of this trend.
Following the success of its Write The Future campaign (32 million views digitally since its launch less than a month ago), they’ve now launched the "Write The Headline" campaign – an interactive digital communications experience which basically involves a giant LED sign on the Southern Life Center building in Johannesburg.
The ambitious interactive installation allows fans to submit personal messages to inspire their favorite players, and then see their headline transformed into a huge player animation that will tower over the city of Johannesburg (through a giant LED sign on the Southern Life Center building).
Fans can submit a 57 character personal message (in 12 languages) through Facebook.com/nikefootball, Twitter, Facebook, Mxit (South Africa) and QQ (China) to over 50 of Nike’s athletes from around the world. Up to 100 headlines are then selected each night and transformed into digital player animations that are projected across Johannesburg. When a fan’s message is used they receive a personalized notification showing them a picture of the headline and the animation created from it.
It'll generate buzz for sure. I can quite literally see this being an actual movie or better yet an MTV reality show/series that generates viewership.
It'll boil down to whether they will deliver quality content that will match up to people's expectations and whether they can ensure that the phone doesn't get Completely sidelined (no obvious plugs either).
I was planning a post about the colossal waste that is the "Save our Tigers" campaign, when I came across this.
Now I'm not surprised that someone else has taken it up already - there are tons of smart people out there. What I was surprised about however is how comprehensive his critique is. He's hit the nail right on it's head and I concur 100%.
So without taking up any more real estate, over to Tantanoo:
‘Save’ is perhaps the noblest of all four letter words that I’ve come across. It doesn’t have the hidden desperation that other four letter words have. ‘Save me’ sounds much better than ‘Love me’, much more earnest in its desperation.
When I first saw the ‘Save our tigers’ ad on teewhee, I rubbished it, you know, like we rubbish everything from Save Haiti to Save Hockey. That way. But having 400 friends on Facebook does have its disadvantages especially when sending invites to stupid clubs is the favourite pastime of some of them. But when some of the ‘sane’ friends also sent me invites to join ‘Stripey the club’, I was sure something was amiss.
It happens so that ‘Stripey’ is an innocent tiger cub whose mom ventures out in the forest and doesn’t return. You know, like women venture out in Goa(or Delhi or Bombay or <insert Indian city>) and don’t return. But let’s not digress. So Stripey’s mom has been killed by some poachers or so the commercial says and it then punches a figure of ‘only 1411 tigers left’ in your face. Very poetic. Figures always move people. You know, when anchors were screaming the number of Swine flu victims on news channels, people were scared shitless. Similarly this 1411 figure brings a sudden horror. Add to it a cute tiger cub and you have a win social initiative. Good job Aircel. Not.
Save the Tiger – www.saveourtigers.com , in my honest and unwanted opinion, is a very poorly executed social initiative. I am not sure if this has brought any mileage to Aircel but apart from creating some buzz, the initiative hardly does anything worthwhile. It lacks the soul and resolve that a social initiative requires. It applies armchair activism to an issue where its effect is debatable, and the extent of change that can be brought is extremely limited. Let’s do a quick post-mortem of the initiative.
More than 67% of global Internet users arrive at web sites through Direct Domain Navigation, making domain names an awesome medium for advertisers to reach their target market. (Domain Advertising’s nailed this concept here).
Here’s a great example that demonstrates the effectiveness of direct domain name advertising, specifically advertising on parked pages (domain names that have no websites for the uninitiated). It’s well targeted, it’s a creative approach (even for direct domain navigation advertising), it’s cheap(er) (more so in this case because they’re all .co.il domains) and, while I’d like to see actual stats in terms of number of site visits, coupon redemptions, etc., it’s apparently worked well.
Lager has long been known to augment reality, normally lending sex appeal to nearby members of the opposite gender (or the same gender, depending on the amount of lager). But Stella has gone better with an iPhone application that paints the company's logo onto the outside of buildings where the brew can be found.
This is definitely the best bar/liquor related iPhone app - much better than the ones for Budweiser or Heineken.
What's more, it's a concept that can be replicated successfully by others - imagine being able to find the closest McDonalds/Subway, ATM, Hospital/Chemist, Supermarket, Gas station... the list is endless.
And this is also why Google Goggles is going to be HUGE!
P.S. Have always loved The Register for adding zing to whatever they write
We’ve (Directi) sponsored tons of events (industry gatherings, sales expos, recruitment focused conferences, etc.) in the past and have had a booth in most of them. Over the years, we’ve used several carrots to bring people to our booth – whether it’s the classic “Drop in your Visiting Card for a Surprise Gift” or simply having a big bowl of awesome candy (hey, it Works) or giving away freebies like Pen Drives and T-Shirts (surprisingly popular still) to organizing Casino Nights (passes to be collected at the booth), coding contents and Treasure Hunts.
Now I’m not saying that these don’t work. Au contraire, we’ve had looong queues for our T-shirts on multiple occasions (with people coming back and asking for multiple T-shirts), we almost always run out of candy and have even had plenty of buzz for the Casino Night. But it’s really time to think out of the box – and this is really something that can work.
Why? Because Augmented Reality (a combination of live video and interactive graphics) is still something few people have been exposed to. It quite literally takes pretty much the same ideas (freebies, treasure hunts, etc.) and changes the delivery/execution – which makes all the difference.
And it does works. The Nike 6.0 case study proves it. Add to that this which someone posted to everyone in office, and everyone in office Had to try it at least once.
All you need is:
A creative concept to use Augmented Reality: You could do something elaborate like virtual clues or map for a treasure hunt or something as simple as Nike’s virtual slot machine works.
The Augmented Reality itself: Nike used Total Immersion and I assume there’s a growing number of companies that do this.
Basic infrastructure: A few webcams and large screen displays and distributable print outs of the basic images to enable to video experience.
Check out the pictures of how Nike set it up. You’ll need to find a way to get the initial few people to your booth. Post that, word of mouth will ensure that more people will follow.
Given that we have a whole bunch of events coming up in 2010, I’m really hoping to test this out first-hand.
I simply Love the new Incredible India ad campaign and I’m talking specifically of the latest TV ad (uploaded to YouTube by the guy in the ad it seems) viz.:
Having said this, I need to admit that I’ve had a problem with previous ads, an example being:
My problem is that the ads are just not real - there I said it.
They’re Way too glossy for their own good. The hyper-glossed, over-exposed, super-contracted pictures take away the reality of the places they depict. Now I’m not naïve. Off course ads are glossy. Not even Dove (which claims to always go au naturale) can pull off completely un-glossed ads. But there’s a line that advertisers should not cross because the damage can be irrecoverable. Consumers aren’t stupid. They can tell when an ad is misrepresenting the product and that can seriously damage the credibility of the company (the country of India in this case). But that’s not the worst that could happen.
Imagine when the hordes of tourists (who believed what they saw in the ads) come down expecting to take a boat ride on the Yamuna river by the Taj, only to discover the stinking polluted river water (if there is any), corroded boats and a million irritating street children hounding them for money. Or that they want to go north to the Himalayas and try authentic Indian food and maybe even try some Yoga in the mountains, only to encounter the thug like taxi drivers practically mauling the tourists, the dog meat being served as chicken, the con-artists posing as holy men and off course, lest I forget, the million irritating street children hounding them for money.
Ok, so am I exaggerating? Yes (Thankfully). But it’s important to note that when these harrowed tourists, who spent their hard earned $s in a bad economy, suffered a long air trip, experience something even slightly close to the above mentioned horrors – the likes of which they’ve Never seen in the western hemisphere – they will remember it in the exaggerated form and probably never return. What’s worse is they’ll go back and ensure that their friends know the real story behind this Incredible India. And guess what, now with tools like Facebook and Twitter – doing this is easier than ever and it comes free with the ability to take anything viral.
To a certain degree, this is also true of the current ad (the first one above), but I submit that it’s at a very acceptable level. In fact, there are clips that I’d say are completely normal/natural – not sure if that was intentional though. The tourism department should make it an important guideline and try and display a more holistic picture. It’s a calculated risk that’ll pay for itself. Apart from the fact that it’ll avoid the above mentioned problems, I believe the even the Real India has plenty of appeal for tourists. And funnily enough, this appeal also comes from the chaos, its mass of humanity and its poverty. Don’t believe me, just ask the by now bus loads of foreign tourists visiting Dharavi (home of the Slum dogs) and the plane loads visiting the Kumbh Mela.
So I know that the people of Dharavi benefitting from brand new tourist influx into their neighborhood (especially the local charities and small retail shops) would agree when I say, “Keep it Real, Tourism Board of India. You’ll be glad for it in the future.”
I sign off with some Incredible images from the Incredible India campaign, more specifically from the Incredible Taj campaign. They’re touched up images - often juxtaposing two different regions.
Going for Days 3 and 4. Have an imp meeting on Day 4 so that one I'm not 100% sure of, but will try my best to wiggle out of it. Looking forward to it. Let's hope it's good.
HatTip: Prachi (my sister) who went for Day 1 and loved it - especially the session with Ross Lovegrove
There are recruitment campaigns and there are recruitment campaigns. And then there's the Best Job in the World campaign, which can be described best as the most effective recruitment campaign in a very long time – making for a killer case study.
In fact, I shouldn't even call it a recruitment campaign - this was a lot bigger than that. It transcended mere recruitment to cover brand building, tourism promotion, social media marketing and even reality TV - garnering tremendous exposure for Australia's Great Barrier Reef islands – nothing the ads that the tourism industry normally comes up with could ever achieve.
I won’t even be surprised if I hear that the Australians never really needed an island caretaker and this was all an elaborate way to bringing the focus of the world’s media to the Barrier Reef islands. Money well spent I say, especially when you’re getting:
Applicants:
34,683 from 201 countries
User generated content:
610 hours
Website visits:
8 Million (54 million page views)
Estimated media coverage:
over US$ 150 million
with a CNN live cross & BBC documentary
Campaign budget:
US$ 1.2 million
This case study is a great example of a couple of things that we’ve been talking about for a while now, viz.:
-Marketing is consistently becoming less advertising and more PR and this is a great example of this. Ads are becoming blind spots and you need to create genuine content around something with a unique angle/concept/hook to stand out from the clutter.
-Further, this is yet another example of how Social Media Marketing can propel campaigns to becoming viral movements. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube were all perfectly suited to this campaign as the infrastructure needed to help content go viral.
It’s no surprise that this won 3 lions at Cannes this year.
It’s also interesting that there was another campaign, with a similar concept that wasn’t submitted for consideration for the awards, but achieved great results nonetheless. It was the Professional Fan Job – Case Study below:
On a separate note, while the Australian Tourism Board must have surely received hundreds of great applications from several qualified candidates, here's one that I stumbled upon that I think was awesome:
And in case you're wondering who won, it's this guy:
