This video of Danny MacAskill doing bike stunts in Edinburgh is utterly jaw-dropping. Had it been a cinema ad for a sports brand, or an energy drink, it would have been a worldwide smash.
But of course, it is anyway. And we all made it so. It’s freshness and audacity screams out to be shared.
Big brands have lost the advantage they once had on finding, sanitising and packaging youth culture for us. A big budget and well-researched ad concept is no match for authenticity and peer recommendation.
I imagine there will be much cooing over this new Honda ad.
Reminds me a bit of this marvellous piece of lo-fi fun from a few years ago:
I wonder whether the jailing of the Pirate Bay founders will actually have the unintended effect of increasing file sharing?
Suppressing things there is a huge market for rarely works and the publicity around this verdict will likely produce copycat services and spread the awareness of bittorrent technologies further into the mainstream.
I heard a great line attributed to Cory Doctorow “P2P is a demand signal from the market”.
More power to forward-thinking business models such as Spotify, gaming tie-ups and ad-funded services.
Spotted on 37 Signals
So Coke have bought c. 20% of Innocent drinks. There’s a feisty bit of feedback on the Innocent blog with many comments being negative, eg.
This is going to be an ongoing PR management issue for Innocent, but hats off for blogging it in the first place and keeping open the comments thread. This way the debate happens on their site and allows them to put their side of the story.
Indeed, so far the objectors have not gained much traction on other new protest platforms such as Facebook, and my bet is that this will die down. There’ll always be some people who object to corporate buy-ins (eg, McDonald’s and Pret. Btw, now no longer), but most people don’t care that much.
So long as Innocent remain open and engaged, they should be able to contain the dissent and continue with their plans.
Nicholas Carr has an excellent article on how the internet, rather than removing middlemen, has spawned a mega-middleman in the form of Google.
For much of the first decade of the Web’s existence, we were told that the Web, by efficiently connecting buyer and seller, or provider and user, would destroy middlemen. Middlemen were friction, and the Web was a friction-removing machine. We were misinformed. The Web didn’t kill mediators. It made them stronger.
We know Google is a big hairy 800lb gorilla. What’s remarkable is how loved a gorilla they are. Often when companies are perceived as too successful, pressure groups form to turn on them: witness the scale of dissent around McDonald’s, Tesco, Wal-Mart, Starbucks et al.
Staying likeable when you’re massive is not easy.
So how does Google do it? There are many reasons, but I think the big three are:
This all adds up to a feeling that Google is on our side. Who cares if industries get shaken out or that a corporation knows our intimate secrets? It’s more than a fair bargain, thanks.
Can they sustain this? Sure for the next year or two, but people move on (or retire rich) and cultures change. Can the next wave of Googlers continue to woo us? Will a future CFO be tempted to put ads on the home page? Will shareholders demand ‘new ways of monetisation’?
Will we still love them tomorrow?
What do you do when you’ve got great brand heritage but the times are changing?
Re-imagine, re-introduce or remix your product.
Trainer companies have long found new ways to benefit from nostalgia – see Reebok Classics or Converse all-stars – and long-defunct video games are making a comeback on new platforms.
I wonder how long it will be before mobile phone manufacturers do something with classic handsets?
Up to now phones have been getting smaller, techier and more serious. Maybe there’s opportunity in doing something different – I can imagine Shoreditch fashionistas slipping their SIM card into a second, old-skool phone before a night out.
As a brand opportunity, heritage in mobiles is one thing Nokia and Motorola have over Apple.
In the early 2000s I was on a conference panel in Cambridge. A discussion began about the growing threat of spam with the the prevailing argument being “At this rate, email will be unusable in five years time“.
Sitting here in 2009, spam volumes have never been higher, but my gmail account gets maybe one false positive a month. Email remains quite usable.
This is what I call the horse-shit fallacy.
This is not simply a pejorative term, but is based on (possibly apocryphal) tales of London in the late 19th century. Apparently, the volume of, um, little horse presents on the streets was a growing concern and doom-mongerers voiced that “at the current rate” in 20 years time we’ll be three feet deep in the stuff.
Of course this didn’t happen, and it never would. The reason being simply (and what I argued at that spam panel) that we’d never let it. Life is not linear, and successful marketing is predicated on solving problems. Although I had no idea how spam would be dealt with, I trusted that someone would fix it. In this case, it was Google.
Extrapolating the past to create a projection of the future is endemic in our culture and only serves to immobilise innovation and limit thinking.
Don’t believe the hype. Listen out for that phrase “at this rate…” and give it a dollop of what it deserves.
Photo by Pleple2000
If you’re a regular reader of RSS feeds, you’ll know they’re the easiest way to enjoy a sumptuous spread of blogs. And though I rarely visit my favourite websites, I never miss an article.
I use Google Reader and it’s the first (and often only) page I check on the web. There are good offline readers (eg, Vienna for the mac) but Reader is web-based and thus syncs across all your home/work computers. There are also a growing number of iPhone apps (Byline being the best to date) which let you continue reading on the move or when offline (eg, on the tube).
It takes a while to find the right feeds for you, but I’ve put together a selection of my favourites in the tech/marketing/thinky space. Right-click here and save this file. You can then easily import this ‘opml’ file into Reader (settings>import>).
Do let me know your suggestions for great sites/feeds I’m missing. Thanks.
I’ve mentioned before how Nine Inch Nails are heading the pack for bands (and brands) in turning forces usually seen as disruptive to their advantage.
Well, they’re at it again. As reported by the splendid (and often outlandish) B3ta newsletter:
we have to salute former Nine Inch Nails drummer Josh Freese. You can download his album for $7, but the more money you pay the more additional goodies he’ll throw in. For $50 he’ll call you up and thank you personally. For $1000 the extras include him coming round your house and doing your laundry.
The full list is here. Whether this is a genuine offer or just some guff to get people talking, it works and it’s marvellous.
Google’s amazing Street View coming to the UK is impressive enough, but you gotta love the little touches to make it even more talkable – as the BBC report:
hidden among the images is the popular children’s book character Wally – of striped-jumper Where’s Wally? fame – in one UK location.
I was doodling around this morning looking at slo-mo camera geekery when I stumbled upon this extraordinary bit of film, shot at 5,000+ frames per second:
Having seen this on a tech site, I didn’t know I was watching an ad. So when the boy appeared I instinctively had a “What?!? No……” reaction.
Had I seen it in a regular ad break, I think it would have been less surprising/impactful. Does marketing work better or worse when people aren’t expecting it?
And is that a good thing?
Publicity for the Watchmen movie is in full swing. I enjoyed the spoof news wrap around Metro this morning, but even more the free sheet of blood-splattered smiley stickers I was handed at Charing X.
Simple, iconic and highly viral.
Businesses are all getting to grips with the sensitive and tricky task of dealing with the wonderful world of bloggers. Most companies are extremely careful to be respectful of this emerging news channel.
Which is what makes Ryanair’s position on dealing with bloggers, given to Travolution and reported in the Guardian, so extraordinary
“Ryanair can confirm that a Ryanair staff member did engage in a blog discussion. It is Ryanair policy not to waste time and energy corresponding with idiot bloggers and Ryanair can confirm that it won’t be happening again.
“Lunatic bloggers can have the blog sphere all to themselves as our people are far too busy driving down the cost of air travel.”
While this will doubtless cause much shocked Twittering, you have to admire Ryanair’s clear, if blunt, stance. It’s absolutely in line with their no-frills, low-cost positioning.
As Twitter is invaded by the masses and loses its cool, experienced users are parading their know-how by littering tweets with increasingly arcane codes: RT for re-tweet of course, L: for location and # for hash-tagging a post with a topical or popular word – #iphone or #lost for example.
Some of this is the simple fun of working within short sentences – the Twitter equivalent of OMG! txt spk – but I think hashtags mean something more.
Hashtags allow people to join a virtual club easily and temporarily. And to leave it just as quickly. People can just dive into a conversation, make a pithy observation about the #brits and dive right out again. No need to subscribe to an email list, no forms to fill in, no facebook group to join. It can be a no-complications, one-tweet stand.
They are perfectly suited for an world where attention is ever-more scarce and people are wary of sharing personal data. But they’re also wonderful fun – the ideas flitting in and out of existence in perfect harmony with their true value and popularity.
They’re hashmemes if you like.
Right now #oscars is in vogue but once the red carpet is rolled back up, it’ll disappear as a living idea until the next time enough of us shine a torch on it.
Hashtags.org allows anyone to see what’s hot at any moment, and even includes graphs describing most hashmemes’ beautifully short lifespans.
Marketers have to work pretty hard to jump on such fast-moving bandwagons. Indeed the only way to do it is to keep running. Only if you’re already up to speed with the conversation can you expect your brand to contribute something useful and credible.