Now That’s What I Call Digital Advertising
I thought I’d start this week with a few examples where companies got their digital advertising right. When you’re exposed, like I am, to a lot of web campaigns, it’s easy to become a bit blase and not see the forest for the trees. But these, for differing reasons, stood out.
First up, Toyota have partnered with EA and produced a virtual version of the Prius for Sims 3. While this kind of integration has been happening in the movies for time immemorial, it’s less common in the world of video games. The Sims is the perfect starting point as, as well as being the most successful PC game ever, 50% of its audience is female, very unusual in a market dominated by young males. A simple, clever idea, hitting the Prius’s demographic right on the head.
Another thing we often work on are online competitions, and the mantra we repeat when doing so is keep it simple, make it interesting, make it easy and make the prize memorable. The World’s Cutest Dog Competition ticks every box – simple, easy mechanic, everyone dog owner thinks theirs is the cutest, a million dollars worth of prizes. Tick, tick, tick – and the result is a huge number of entries and unbelievable exposure for the sponsor. And on a completely different tip, but great for the same reason, is Canadian beer Okanagan Spring’s Sponsor Me Spring. Visitors to sponsormespring.ca could appeal, through video, to Okanagan Spring to sponsor their small-scale or backyard social gatherings. This saw the sponsor of events as salubrious as Hanging Around After Ed’s Soccer Game. It generated some some really funny content – definitely a site worth browsing for a while. The promotion obviously really speaks to the beer’s target market.
But if you’re not going to go with simple, make it memorable. Wrigley’s France have launched this fantastic augmented reality competition to promote 5gum, where you mix a track and create a visual, upload it. A few similar things have popped up lately, including one to promote Eminem’s “The Release”‘s UK launch, but I haven’t seen it done this well. The site around it is nicely done as well.
Four clever ideas, well executed – great stuff.
Privacy in the Public Space
A couple of privacy-related stories popped up this week. Firstly, once again, a lawsuit against Facebook for privacy breaches was dismissed as being groundless, and a report was released in the US that found 45% of employers screen potential employees via social media. It still amazes me how people still have the “Invisible in my car” mentality when using social media. Even though cars you’re perfectly visible to the outside world in their car, they behave as if they are in public – picking noses, singing, putting on make up. And it’s the same on with social media – as private as it feels, it’s not. Sites’ number one concern is UBs, not making sure no one sees that photo of you drunk at Schoolie’s Week in 2001.
Interestingly, the reality of lives being increasingly led in public are the subject of a new documentary We Live In Public, which won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance this year. The film, directed by Ondi Timoner (who also directed the cult classic Dig!) looks at the life and work of Josh Harris. Harris was a pioneer in the first dot com boom, launching pseudo.com, the first internet television network. He used his fortune on an event he called Quiet!We Live In Public. Part art installation and part social experiment, he gathered 100 artists in a Japanese pod hotel style building for 100 days, all of it on web cam. Basically, he was commenting on how, as the internet made greater levels of connection possible, people would be increasingly willing to sacrifice, or rather redefine, their notions of privacy. It’s an observation which has proved to be very prescient.
What this probably all means is that we’re at the end of the anything goes era of social media. As a social media presence becomes an accepted part of everyone’s life, we’ll be forced to meet the same standards there as in the “real world”. Which also means there is potentially a commercial opportunity for someone who works out a way of keeping social media private, whether through paid subscriptions or comprehensive history kills.
Twitter in Pictures
Finally, a nice little infographic showing what the Twitter community would look like if it was 100 people – although I wonder what criteria they were using when they categorized other people’s tweets as “inane”, and how big the sample group was.
Are you a digital producer? If so, 
