Last night I went along to the New York launch party for Sunsilk shampoo (one of the brands I’m working on). It’s a well known brand for me but is just being launched in the US..and the Unilever are pulling out all the stops. The voice of the brand on all the comercials is Mario Cantone, who was the star guest at the party. There were a lot of other ‘celebrities’ but I’m obviously not up to speed on the New York social life as there was no one I recognised. Even when i was told their name. However, I’m pretty sure photos will appear, as there were plenty of press and cameras there.

The party also launched the Hairapy Guys onto the world. They’ve been pretty busy on the PR circuit and will be doing htings like appearing on the VH1 Best Week Ever tonight.

The team here have been working hard on the web stuff and the main site launches next week. In the meantime, check out Micah’s Hairapy blog, Micah being one of the HG’s. The writing gives you a good indication of what he’s like in real life..great fun.

Going one better than GM’s Fastlane Blog, Ford this week launch BoldMoves.com, tying in with their new campaign in the US. This is a reality video blog, documenting the trials and tribulations of the company as they try and find a new direction. Ford is allowing cameras into business meetings throughout the comonay and also using the site to comment on the state of the US motor industry. Launched 2 days ago, it’s already garnering plenty of comments.

Ford appear to have embraced conversation, syndication and sharing. You can embed the video in you own blog or subscribe to feeds for the videos or the blog. They are offering opposing arguments and letting disagreemtn show in the comments. But the proof in the pudding is if we see reaction to the comment and conversation that they are encouraging. All in all, a bold starting position from the company.

Nice to see Guinness win a coveted award at the weekend for the Noitulove commercial. This ad cost over 1million GBP to make, full of CGI and expensive filming. To see it you can go to YouTube, although a better quality version (although with an age and country check) is available on the official site. You have to go in as being from England though, as it is not available on the other versions of the site. Good to see that Carlton’s Big Ad is also up there – a firm favourite. The third one in the running for the main prize was the Sony Bravia Balls.

All three are very good ads and 2 of them have shown definitely demonstrate a wider impact than the TV commercial they are aimed at. the Big Ad demonstrated the power of great content going viral with the story of the link to the website being sent out to

Cannes Advertising Festival is taking place this week, so it’s a perfect opportunity for the various execs to pipe up about how their business is adjusting to the new world. Sir Martin Sorrell, chief executive of WPP, talked on Monday in the Financial Times .

The head of the UK advertising group also acknowledged the difficulty of competing against websites that destroyed business models. “How do you deal with socialistic anarchists?” he asked, referring to Craigslist, the popular, free classified advertising site that has been threatening revenues at US city newspapers. “The internet is the most socialistic force you’ve ever seen,” he added, noting that the response from some media groups had been to offer their content for free in traditional and digital form.

Not necessarily the best thing to call one of the most successful websites. Especially as he goes on to state that successful companies need to good people and changewho have been used to the quick reactions of the web. As most of these are probably extremely at home with Craigslist, far more so than the ads produced by most of WPP’s group of agencies. He thinks that agencies need to set up a separate group to manage through the changes.

Meanwhile Craig Davies, worldwide creative director of the JWT recognsies the change..”The redefinition of advertising is not being led by ad agencies. It is a consumer-driven phenomenon. There are just so many ways to say no to advertising.” (also FT, but firewalled). So he thinks that “The challenge to us is to stop interrupting what people are interested in and be what people are interested in.”

So in an attempt to do just that, JWT took over all the advertising on the Huffington post for a week. Let people watch full ads when they want, is the idea. Unfortunately part of the campaign slightly backfired..the ‘buzz marketing’ part. MaxPower has a good breakdown of what appears to be astroturfing

There a lots of companies that provide this service, sending out information and tips to blogs, message boards and other community sites. I’m not against it, as long as done openly. If the ad/game/video etc is good, it will usually be picked up, but doing it in an underhand way is old school marketing, doing it openly is closer to to the concept of markets of conversations – sending on stuff to people you know..and being honest about why you are doing it. In this case, it looked like whoever was behind the emails was not that clear..leading pretty quickly to a bad taste in the mouth of a few of the bloggers on the receiving end.

And in the spirit of disclosure, I’m currently doing some work for JWT…but nowhere near the stuff mentioned above 😉

Updated…now I’ve put the password here! And the URL for the site is www.goodcleanfeeling.com

There’s a US campaign for Orbit Gum that involves a spokeswoman* suggesting that various characters clean up their mouths and language by using the gum. The latest version involves Snoop Dogg, beng sent to hell for using foul language in front of a bunch of schoolchildren.

A site you can happily spend a few moments on, looking at the videos (especially if a Snoop fan, with some of the behind the scenes stuff). There’s also a nice little tool – enter your (or any) number and either Snoop or one of the other characters will phone you and leave a message. In this way you can get a password to see a ‘hidden’ video with more background stuff. And the password is ‘fabulous’….but if you can take the phone call it’s fun 😉

Looking at the screen below, for all intents and purposes you are giving them your number only to make this call back to you as a one time event. They are not after your name or other identifying info. So imagine my surprise to hear at the end of the call the fact I need to press some buttons to go onto their Do Not Call list. I didn’t even know I was on the call list, there’s no indication that my number would be retained, I have not opted into anything that I could see…so why make me press 2 buttons on the phone to opt out? And do I opt out of everything – I may have wanted to be called by wrigley on another matter. This is very confusing. Looking at the privacy policy I think it was driven by the statement: “Such responses will include information on how to opt out from receiving further information or services” but it definitely needs more warning and more explanation as to why they are doing something to remove me from a list I did not believe I was being added to.

I was also surprised that there was a lack of product information…or even a link to the main product page. Instead, there’s just a flashy series of product images.

*Sometimes characters just cry out to be put into little advergames…I’d pay money to get this very annoying woman in a nice flash game I could shoot out all her nice shiny teeth and then whack her to the ground.

Folgers Coffee (something I;ve never heard of before this) have a bright and breezy ad that does make you smile first thing in the morning. Completely wacky, reminiscent of 70’s style musicals.

The associated campaign site has some nice little toys, including a Boss tracker, which requires a bunch of you from one office to download and then collaborate about where the boss is in the office, to give all advance warnings. They also have email templates with great excuses about why you are late and a wake up tool – enter your details and they will give you a wake up call in the morning – choose your sexy voice and set of compliments.

I’m guessing the campaign site has been done by a different agency to the main site…there is a severe lack of compatibility between the two, with no visual or design similarity that makes switching between them jarring. I would have at least thought that the coffee jar image could have been the same on both pages.

Absolut do it again. They continuously update their home page to new and fresh things. Their latest is a bottle hunt…finding bottle shapes on a complex graphic in a short time frame. The fastest way to find the bottles is just to random click (very quickly) all over the site and not to actually look for the bottle shapes. This way I got 58 out of the 82 instead of the measley 30 that I found by actually searching. Of course, doing this you don’t get a chance to look at the great artwork.

Over on Alphamale (a blog normally dedicated to health issues by the look of it) is a story of how Kitkat increased their sales in Japan. A definite longview approach, building up a story of a brand over 4 years, from a small start to something that is regarded as a good luck charm.

Meanwhile, in the UK, where it is already the number one brand, there’s less subtlety in the brand offering Golden Tickets. 100 lucky (or is that unlucky) winners will have the chance to become ‘famous’ by entering the Big Brother House. Of course, as long as they pass “thorough background checks”. Catch 22 always comes to mind though – anyone who wants to go on Big Brother and have their whole life under scrutiny probably shouldn’t be stuck in one place being televised for a month. BTW, Wikipedia has a quite fascinating page showing lots of different Kitkat varieties

I consistently find Three Minds@Organic a great pointer towards cool marketing stuff on the web. This time they have linked to a great spoof of the Sony Bravia “balls bouncing downhill”, but this time with fruit. See if you can guess the brand before the tag line. And make sure you take a look round the site to see the ‘damage’ the filming caused. The ‘send to a friend’ component sends a great message asking you to sign a petition against nasty advertisement makers who traumatise innocent streets and don’t clear up after themselves.

Another good copy/spoof/parody (call it what you will) is by 118, again redoing some of W&K’s Honda ads. This time they took on the Choir Ad . The original can be found here (again on YouTube, as you can’t link direct to the ad on the Honda Civic site but have to go through Flash flashiness first).

Via Mit Advertsing lab, In what I assume is a tie in with the US version of The Apprentice, Chevrolet have opened a competition to make your own advertisement. In a very nice website, it allows you to combine video shots and music and text however you wish. I can’t work out the way to get to the ads online, but you obviously can…so some have been grabbed for your viewing pleasure.

Whilst many will be complimentary, funny or just plain bad, the competition has also opened the doors to those who do not agreee with big cars. There’s a series over on YouTube (for the while at least) and some more here on Eco-Geek..

These things were inevitable – they would have (at least I hoped they were) covered in all of the preparation for the campaign. The acid test will be what do Chevy do next. Leave the negative ads out there, not go chasing to have them taken down, whilst. hopefully, listen to what they are saying and learn something? Or prove that they are still, really, a command and control marketer, don’t want to listen to their customers and not really interested. I guess we’ll see next week – assuming the lawyers aren’t working the weekend 😉

I’ve been following the back and forth between Amazon’s CTO Werner Vogels, Robert Scoble and Shel Israel. An interesting challenge – provide hard numbers about the benefits of blogging. It’s far easier with websites to understand traffic, how many people have seen it, than any of the other methods of indirect marketing (ie those that are not experiential when you actually count people), but understanding monetary value of an any marketing can be a challenge, especially when it is one part in many. Teasing out the effect of one part of marketing from another, when you are trying to change people’s perceptions, is a difficult art. So providing hard numbers for blogging, especially when it is part of the marketing and communication effort, may not be possible. Or needs to be taken with a pinch of salt. I’ve developed pretty comprehensible, logical, spreadsheet based calculations for the RoI on consumer-facing, product based websites (had to follow the process, don’t you know). But I know that the accuracy was suspect – but I had numbers and a great RoI!

You may not be able to get detailed numbers, and in a lot of cases I think it is too soon to tell, but there is a definite need for some more rigorous case studies to to supplement the change stories (which is to me the greatest benefit of opening up companies) (Update: Shel’s posted more here)

PS – see Hugh’s cartoon for one take on it.

Marketing Map

Originally uploaded by miss_rogue.

Tara posted this earlier, folloing up on here posts about Pinko Marketing. Love it!

As an advertising campaign, Mastercard’s Priceless appears to strike chords and I’ve seen it replicated many times, such as the one that was circulated after London got the 2012 Olympics. Finally, Mastercard have cottoned on to this and are running a competition to get us to write the copy for the ad. Adrants have an interesting twist on it….”We have to wonder, though, how many industry creatives will anonymously go after this and then gleefully add the ad to their portfolio once it airs.”

Talking about Microsoft (well, sort of) they had a particularly lame attempt yesterday at marketing the new Office Suite in Waterloo Station. The station has been decked out in banners and posters and great big floor stickers with the Dinosaur campaign all over it. (It’s big in the papers as well) And to bring this home, some experiential ad agency decided that having people with big dino masks wandering round the station handing out cards full of stickers. Yes, little stickers of people with dino heads on and the various slogans. All I need the the picture book with scenes in that you just stick the stickers into.

Of course, the campaign is working in one way – I’m talking about it. But I’m thinking about why, if it is as good a product as they are trying to say, isn’t the marketing better? And I won’t get to try the features either – won’t work on the set up we have here.