Well this is audacious. Their explanation says it all
This video was created as an official response to the Newsweek article calling Grand Rapids a “dying city.” We disagreed strongly, and wanted to create a video that encompasses the passion and energy we all feel is growing exponentially, in this great city.
People don’t like ads interrupting their viewing, and adverts that aren’t relevant to particular viewers (or skipped) don’t work.
Step forward MirriAd – a neat way of allowing product placement to be inserted post production. Its effectiveness will all be down to execution, but it’s a very neat idea. Imagine being able to place ads into programmes tactically at a minute’s notice, or show ads for products a particular viewer has been researching online.
Check out the video demo.
Miso is kinda like Foursquare for TV – you check-in to programmes you’re watching.
It might be easy to dismiss Miso as derivative, but I think it’s got a good chance of catching on (I’ve talked about Real-time watercooler moments and social tv before).
Whereas “Bob just checked in to North Acton station” is so what, “Bob just watched Madmen episode 4×10 can elicit real interest for a conversation – “Ooh what did you think of the bit where…?”
I suspect we’ll see a slew of other non-location check ins – sports games? fashions? video games? books? I can imagine “Dave just checked into The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest” being a basis for a conversation.
One of my favourite NPD tricks is Break One Rule – take a successful formula and change one thing. I think Miso does this well.
…but they need to avoid news feed pollution. It was already pretty grating seeing too many Foursquare check-ins. Now that’s going to step up another order of magnitude.
This extraordinary ad/short film from Diageo makes for compelling viewing. Aside from the green screen magic (presumably?) and great choice of actor in Robert Carlyle, it is notable for two other reasons:
thanks to the excellent Word magazine for the spot
I’ve just uploaded these two collections of The Guardian‘s TV ads that cover the 80s and 90s. The first set pre-dated my time as Brand Manager, but I was responsible for the second reel.
The ‘points of view’ (skinhead) ad from the mid 1980s remains the most famous ad from any newspaper and often appears in those lists of top 100 ads. However, viewed as a collection, I think they show the evolution of the brand, becoming notably more sophisticated, entertaining and inventive.
It was a critical task to modernise the paper, shake off the beardy, worthy image and fight the price-cutting Times and the newly-launched Independent. Good marketing, editorial vision, investigative journalism and investment in the product itself combined to strengthen a much-loved media brand and give it a strong platform to compete in the digital era.
Next time you’re in the queue at Starbucks or Tesco, watch people.
If it doesn’t look like they’ll get served in the next few seconds, chances are they’ll start prodding at their phone. Which will be in their hand. Ready. There’s even a phrase “Blackberry jam” that has been coined to describe being stuck at tube station exits behind office workers slowing to a halt as they breathe in that fresh phone signal.
Increasingly, people don’t do downtime. And this includes me. I’m not proud to admit it, but I find myself digitally snacking in the those oh-so-boring seconds in-between lift floors. Or waiting for the train to pull to a stop. Or while your colleague grabs a drink before a meeting. A watched kettle might never boil, but it’s definitely enough time to read the BBC headlines. I wager that checking facebook has replaced reading a tabloid as the nation’s favourite on the loo pastime (or is that a boy thing?)
I don’t say this is a good thing. It might even be a dreadful malaise, but it’s definitely real. And it’s getting worse/faster. Multi-tasking on iPhone 4.0 means – God forbid – that no longer do we need to stand by idly whilst the Spotify app hogs the foreground. Nope – we can start a track playing and check Twitter. Why has no-one updated anything in the last five minutes?
So what does this mean for marketers?
Please note. This piece also appeared as a guest post on the Reform Digital blog
If Carlsberg are behind this, then full respect for speed and creativity.
If they didn’t, then credit is still due to them as a testamant to the power of their campaign idea
The iPad is a gorgeous media consumption device. It’s desirable, it’s selling like hotcakes and buying apps is easy. Print media owners shackled by declining sales can be forgiven for willing it to their saviour.
It won’t be.
As the paltry sales of GQ’s iPad app indicate, simply having an app isn’t enough. The dirty truth is that no-one ever wanted a magazine. Just as Coke sells happiness rather than fizzy drinks, what people actually get from mags are:
Magazines have delivered on these benefits very well for decades. The challenge is that digital does all of these better, or changes them:
That all said, magazines will not die. Print has winning attributes of portability, ever-lasting battery life and brings a simple, tactile pleasure. However, it will of course change. There will be fewer titles and producing them will become a leaner, tougher, much less pleasant game. Print dollars really will be replaced by digital cents. Get over it.
My counsel is:
The 90s brought Appointment TV – the hyping of TV schedules to create must-watch TV moments such as Friends, 9pm on Channel 4. The ensuing conversations in offices the morning after became known as watercooler moments.
These “did you see…” conversations seemed set for the cultural junkyard in the noughties, thanks to greater choice of viewing, the explosion of excellent TV DVD box sets and Sky+ powered time-shifting. We were all watching different stuff.
I think that’s changed again. I wrote 9 months ago about real-time watercooler moments: the emerging behaviour of using social media services such as as facebook and Twitter while watching an ‘event’ programme such as X-Factor.
Up until now, this has been pretty disjointed and not something most media owners had properly considered. However, the advent of ITV Live, conceived and led by friend and former colleague Dominic Cameron is changing all that. It’s the first serious attempt to create a joined-up TV/social experience. It recognises that people like to talk with friends and fellow fans about the experience they’re sharing – and provides the tools and content to do just that.
It’s a fledgling service, and has its clunky moments, but the ITV team should be praised for leading the way in this field globally.
They’ve even been audacious enough to run the service around matches they don’t have the TV rights to – so people can watch a game on the BBC and discuss it on ITV Live. Neat.
If each year of the noughties were never quite the year of mobile, it’s surely a safe bet that the tens/teens will be the decade of mobile.
Serious analysts like Mary Meeker are forecasting that the mobile internet will overtake the fixed by 2013*
To this end, I wanted to share an excellent plugin called WPtouch I’ve found for WordPress that optimises any blog for iPhone viewing. The difference is remarkable:
Before
After
* that’s fully two years before Back to the Future forecasts flying cars and hoverboards 😉
When it’s easy even for non-techies like me to add social plug-ins to websites, we better get ready for an explosion of ‘Like’ buttons, activity streams and friend recommendations all over the web.
Google must be thinking very hard tonight.
This is a great insider’s-view article on how Microsoft lost its creative and innovative spark.
Internal competition is common at great companies. It can be wisely encouraged to force ideas to compete. The problem comes when the competition becomes uncontrolled and destructive. At Microsoft, it has created a dysfunctional corporate culture in which the big established groups are allowed to prey upon emerging teams, belittle their efforts, compete unfairly against them for resources, and over time hector them out of existence. It’s not an accident that almost all the executives in charge of Microsoft’s music, e-books, phone, online, search and tablet efforts over the past decade have left.
Reported on Gadling, this is the very essence of talkable, likeable. Beds in economy. Oh yes.
As Kathryn Gregory, director of marketing for the Americas region recently said, “We like to look at what the other airlines are doing in their marketing and then… don’t do that.”
Awesome.
Thanks to @jackschofield for the heads up