DEXTER – Pop-Up Marketing

These Pop-Up news stands were installed in high-traffic areas for 2 days in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia and San Fransisco.

It was created by the advertising firm Pop2life. It’s tough to miss what they are trying to promote.

Oasis NYC Street Performer Promotion

To promote their new album “Dig Out Your Soul”, Oasis taught New York City street musicians unreleased tracks off the album, seeding it across the city.

I like this idea for several reasons:

1) It creates a win-win between the performers who get attention and income and the band that gets people excited about their new music.

2) It taps into something that no “free-download” promotion can do: people love live music, and people love when other musicians interpret music giving it their own feel and spin. It adds an appealing dimension to the story.

3) It has transparency. If Oasis had chosen to hide the fact that they were behind it and the musicians lied and said they did this on their own love of the new album – fans and consumers would have felt duped and upset about it. Instead – there is a clear intention which keeps the story honest.

4) It has great viral capabilities. The video we posted documents the process, but if you go to youtube, there are lots of videos of full performances of individual songs start to finish. This increases the rate at which this spreads awareness and interest.

Nintendo Wii Promotion Partnership with YouTube – Awsome

Play this clip by clicking on the image – very cool marketing partnership.

Bands and Brands – The Kruger Agency

For those who aspire to have such powerful brands that people can’t help but sing their praise in pop-music, there may be a short-cut. Since 2006, The Kluger Agency has been coordinating “brand-dropping” in music and other forms of pop entertainment.

“Led by Industry Specialists in Research, Branding, Entertainment Marketing, Label Relations, and PR, The Kluger Agency specializes in getting brand names and products in front of large targeted markets by means of relevant yet discreet placement in Chart Topping Songs, Music Videos, and Industry events.”

Would you use this service for your brand? Could it work for any brand?

Retail Marketing – Video Game Experiment

Click on this link to a informal yet insightful piece of retail marketing analytics.

The author posed as the uncle of a 15 year old and quizzed 100 video game retailers on their recommended gaming system for that age group and the pros and cons of each of the 3 major systems (xbox 360, PS3 and Nintendo Wii).

For me, the results are only half the story. The important take away for companies like these video-game console makers that sell through retail channels is the the influence and importance of the employees’ opinion and knowledge. Now this same insight may not carry forward for CPG’s where the purchaser is often the consumer (eg. moms) – but there are many products where this isn’t the case and thus there is a lot of responsibility on the employee to fill the knowledge gap. As a manufacturer – do you step in and train your distribution partner’s staff? As a retailer – do you volunteer to increase the quality of workers by more pay or other incentives? It is a tricky problem that more retailers are having to face as the demand for service goes up.

Historical Advertising Database

For anyone that wants to take a look at some historic ads from the US & Canada – Duke University has a free, online image database of over 7,000 print ads from 1911-1955. It is interesting to see how far we’ve come – and how some things never change.

Chose Your Own Adventure on You Tube with Samsung

This is really cool. While You Tube has become a clearinghouse for the world’s video clips for some time…it still registers low on interactivity. I think this idea of chose your own adventure tied in with a strong brand message is only the very preliminary stages of where you tube, video games and moves are all converging. It will only work if I give you the link to the URL – but you will quickly get the idea:

http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=HoOCiaxIZF4

It looks like this was done by some of the good folks at Cossette Communications in Toronto. Nice Job!

Reaction while watching “ShamWow” Spot

My thought process watching “Shamwow” mini-infomercial for the first time:

5 seconds in…  “Are you serious?”

10 seconds in…”Are you serious?”

15 seconds in… “You ARE serious”

25 seconds in…”woah woah…what did he say about Germans?”

30 seconds in… “How do I currently dry my sweaters? Maybe I am not doing it the right way”

45 seconds in…”Real Time? Shamy power in real time?”

1:45 in… “Does a sponge only last a week?”

1:44 in… “10 year warranty? Vince – I am not planning to leave this thing for my kids.”

What I hate to admit is that this breaks through the clutter. I leave watching this spot with not just one, but several things to take-away and it is such a easy-to remember name. The brand and category are tied together. I don’t have a positive reaction, but I remember it. I don’t want this to be effective – but I think it does what any marketer would hope for in a brash and unforgiving way: communicate a clear solution to a consumer.

BMW’s Never Stand Still

To promote the release of the new 7 Series of cars in Europe, BMW decided to go big by building a 12m high hourglass in Moscow Square. Well, not only did they build the hour glass, but the engineered it to unveil the new car model encased in the hour behind the silver balls that dropped into the bottom part of the glass. Over a period of days, bit by bit, the car was revealed.

Talk about an effective and unique way to build attention and anticipation.

The Campaign is called Never Stand Still.

Brandtags.net: Wiki+Brands = Insight

http://www.brandtags.net/

This was sent to me by one of our “field” officers. It is really cool wiki that gets users to input one word responses to “flashcards” of various logos. It then produces a tagmap of all the responses, with the popularity/repetition indicated by the size of the font.

For example: Here are the top 10 words pulled from over 1.1M entries for the brand Pizza Hut -

Pizza

Greasy

Fat

Gross

Grease

Cheap

Cheese

Crap

Food

Yummy

—

As a way to provide quick insight into a brand – I think this site hits the nail on the head. It is not only relevant it what is shows, but also what is left out or the order in which it is shown. For example – I looked up the list for Greenpeace. Do you think they would be happy to hear that “Annoying” is higher rated than “Peace” ?

There are many explanations about why something may or may not be present in this list which aren’t simple to answer, but the experiment/site certainly provides a short cut for marketers looking for the right questions to ask.