That is what has now happened; due to a tightening of belts, my services are no longer required. Very little of my time was against clients, a lot of what I did was education and internal stuff and they could basically no longer support that. I’m not surprised, I’d been looking for more work internally for a while and not getting much luck. The result is I no longer have a job and am looking, most probably back in the UK as the visa I have won’t work at another company. Unless somewhere else takes my fancy (I’ve always liked Sydney ).

Next steps..a short period of misery (I’m allowed, this is the first time it’s happened to me), a take stock and then a push to get a new job (whilst moving countries again!) Meanwhile, enjoy the rest of my time here, enjoy the company of the many new friends I’ve made in the city

• an agency appointing a ‘digital czar’ is not enough, you need to have the people to implement the plans
• you can’t just drop a bunch of digital people in the middle of a traditional agency as they’ll all just wonder what they are doing. Digital needs to be more than an extension of the ad campaign.
• to understand digital you need to live it, otherwise you will never get it as a creative medium. it’s not something you can just read about

The points rang very true, it’s difficult in an agency where many live TV but few seem to live digital.

Here’s a job description.

Background: living and /or working in London who is immersed in the web 2.0, technology sector, startup, social media communities. Good candidates in the past have been bloggers, writers, and marketers.

Duties: This is for part-time work, on a contract basis. Scouts could either have a day job in the area, or be a full time freelancer. Typical assignments are short reports in Word doc or PPT with text and images.

Fees and rates depend on length of project and experience.

CScout is a global trend consultancy with 12 full time employees in offices in New York, Munich, Tokyo, and Beijing. In addition, 25+ scouts placed globally are activated depending upon the needs of our clients.

They also have opening in Sydney and/or Melbourne. Contact Raymond for further details if interested: r a y . c h a at g m a i l ( d o t ) c o m , (you know the drill with munged addresses)

The site taps into the blondes vs brunettes war (you don’t think it’s a war – take a look a the MySpace groups!). Not sure how many of the target audience read this, but if you are, you can do the following:

• watch videos – the TV spots, behind the scenes, jokes (send your friend a joke video)
• see results of our ‘secret experiments’, currently it’s who eats healthiest, but we have a few more to come.
• read all about the product and see how it works (look out for the easter egg)
• answer polls, get stuff for you website, download wallpaper and AIM icons and (soon) play games

Throughout the site, you earn points for your side, so go and take a look and click around the brunette side, more points for us

The campaign is not just the website, that is just the first stage and there is a lot more to come. The TV breaks tonight.

*The number of times I have to retype that ‘correct’ the right spelling is getting annoying.

One of the projects I’ve been working on, at least from a metrics and tracking perspective, is a US campaign for Domino’s Pizza: Anything Goes, any large pizza, any topping any crust for $9.99. Supported by a heavy TV promotion, in-store, email, SMS, online advertising, all the usual stuff, it also had an unusual contest and teaser video component.

The concept behind the online promotion is that anything goes for $9.99. So for 5 weeks, starting 1 Jan, Dominos have been auctioning items on eBay for $9.99. From ipods to video cameras to home entertainment systems everything was the one price. It was set up as an Buy it Now auction; to find the items, a clue was posted everyday on the microsite that when solved gave the keywords associated with the auction page and you were told within what time period the items would be posted. There was a lot of commetary about it within the eBay community as well, as this was a new thing for the service to participate in.

There were also 4 big prizes. With each of these, there is an associated set of videos that tell a story that leads up to why the item is being sold. The first one went up 15 Jan, 2 weeks before the campaign was launched, in 3 video channels (YT, metacafe, AOL Uncut). So, meet Mackenzie.

Mackenzie is a sweet (!) 16 year whose father bought her the wrong colour car for her birthday. Looking at her videos, you eventually find out that she gets the car that she wants and she puts her Saab convertible up on ebay to sell it. And it went pretty quickly – see the winner here. A second series set up the sale of a big screen TV and there are 2 more that went up this week, one for a Harley Davidson and one for one last big surprise. (the big surprise was a Lotus car)

So that’s the campaign, let’s take a look a little closer at Mackenzie. Her behaviour drove a lot of comments, most people condemning her at various levels of politeness (it definitely brought out the worst online attitude in some people). And the views that the series for, especially the first one, were OK but not spectacular. That was until it was ‘borrowed’ – downloaded from one of the services and reposted. If any of the initial re-posters credited their source, I could not find it, which again indicates an interesting attitude. We found it first on YouTube, then Break, then 4 other sites and saw the views really stack up. Break has by far got the most views that we can count. It may be in many other places that we’ve not found yet.

The pinnacle has been appearing on the front page of AOL, on their video blog,(where it is the most commented at the moment) making their top viral video and being picked as video of the day. If only we could get the viewing numbers!

Interestingly, AOL got the video from iFilm. Now, none of these reposts are branded, although the connection is normally made in the comments. But the company is still getting the benefit, being able to talk about the success in press and on TV.

Some lessons from this:

• Don’t be surprised how long it takes for something to take off. Most views on the videos have taken place after the auctions are complete, items can have a slow burn
• Be prepared for the comments. Once it’s out on the web, people can say anything. However, comments were closed on the video with the winner in it – there’s a difference between a character and a prize winner.
• Don’t expect success with everything, even if the creative team is the same. Mackenzie did well, Rich man not so much. It’ll be a few weeks before we now the results of the last 2 sets.
• Don’t be surprised when things are taken and not credited to you. Work out how to make that a success as well

After that, I’m back to recording video views.

Prep Work

Originally uploaded by RachelC.

On Monday I got the chance to spend a little time in the studio where some of the content for a site I’m working on is being filmed. There was no actual business reason to be there – I just wanted to see what a filming set looked like! The bigest surprise to me was just the large numbers of people required to do the shoot…as opposed to the one person video blogging stuff that mainly appears on the sites I visit.