A campaign for Shreddies in Canada introduces the new diamond variant to consumers in real focus groups held in Toronto.
It's pretty funny - especially if you've ever done any qualitative research - and is another example of what J Vulkan dubbed User Involved Content while we were going through the Clio entries.
There has been a groundswell of real people captured on camera in ads - reality advertising if you like - abandoning high production values for the gritty authenticity of gonzo film making.
The Whopper Freakout works on a similar principle - hidden cameras capturing genuine people being deprived of their Whopper - as does the new Pizza Hut ad, where restaurant patrons are served Pizza Hut pasta.They claim to like it even more once they are told it was deliverd by Pizza Hut.
And, in the film above, one of the subjects expresses a taste preference for the diamond shape Shreddies.
Silly - it's the same!
Except: what if it's not?
I've been reading Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely. It illustrates the fact, that we intuitively know but that classical economics refuses to accept, that we aren't rational beings. We make decisions that are seemingly irrational, in the same way over and over again, because of how our brains are hardwired: anchors and priming, emotions and social context all interact to change how we choose.
One of the things he highlights is the power of expectation to alter experience. He describes a replication of the famous Coke/Pepsi taste tests, done with the subjects in an MRI to record how their brain is processing the experience of tasting the drinks.
We all know how it works - in blind taste tests, Pepsi usually wins, but when the brands are revealed, people prefer The Real Thing [TM].
And, according the experiment, it's because that the experience of consuming branded sugar water is different - the Coke brand activates different associations in the memory and emotional parts of the brain, which contribute to the consumption experience.
Which means that, when you drink a Coke, a part of what you are tasting is the brand.
[Not quite as much as the Littlest Hobo but I felt I had to use the theme tune because no one in New York seems to remember this seminal, landmark show of my youth]
I'm heading down to the Clio Awards in Miami tomorrow - I'm helping to explain our decisions in the Content and Contact category on Saturday morning.
Noah has just created Brand Tags - a site that allows you to tag brands with whatever words you associate with the brand and then converts the brand into a weighted tag cloud of associations.
Campaign Magazine asked Richard, Scamp, Ben, Neil, and I to have a big blog up to blog about blogging.
They wanted to know why we do it, among other things.
Here's what I said:
O blogging how do I love thee - let me count the ways.
I blog because it makes me think. The blog needs constant feeding, so I need to keep thinking and reading and making things up.
I'm
constantly looking to make connections between disparate things, to
package them up into posts. Finding patterns. Or creating them.
It's
a place where I can think unfettered and get feedback on what comes
out, from people who I know are interested in the same sorts of things,
otherwise they wouldn't bother.
It's writing but it's not solitary.
It's a place where I can do whatever I want with words.
A couple of days back I met up with the lovely people behind Behance.
Behance are designing products and services that "empower the creative world to make ideas happen" because of the observation that most ideas vanish, stillborn, into the ether.
This creative waste is a shame for everyone, so Behance want to help ideas get actualised.
One of the tools they use is what they call the action method - an insistence that every creative session leads to action items - and to help bring them to life they created action books - notebooks that are designed to craft notes into actions - as shown above.
You can buy the well made note books and other action items via a website - but the point of them is not to make money, but to market Behance, it's creative networks and consultancy services by spreading the philosophy behind it in a useful way.
My mate Rob works for Nooka - a design brand started by Matthew Waldman, looking to invent products that challenge the paradigm they operate in. The first product is a a line of cool watches that re-invent how to display the time.
As all brands that have a unique view of the world should, they have a blog where they update the faithful on Nooka news and celebrity sightings.
They've just announced a collaboration with Toyota - Nooka designs, inspired by participants of the Toyota 5th Door program, to celebrate the new Toyota Matrix. The watches are limited editions and being sold for $300 a [time] piece.
I've been thinking about marketing people will pay for for a while now. It started with BK Games - I think perhaps the most interesting thing about these globally lauded Burger King XboX games is the fact that people paid $3.99 for a piece of advertising.
3.2 Million people, according to the case study.
It's difficult to fault marketing that actually makes money, in and of itself.
Staples turned their Easy Button into a product and sold millions of them, donating a proportion of proceeds to charity, but this was more of a happy accident, one assumes.
Whereas, things like the IDEO Method Deck are more strategic. The cards detail 51 methods that IDEO use to help inspire great design. So - they are a product. But they are also a powerful piece of marketing - positioning IDEO as the people to call when you need some design help.
IDEO have just launced their Field Guides for the Curious - travel guides that shun the obvious for the unknown, which positions them as experts on urban design as well.
Creating marketing products, as opposed to services, is a way to engage people and establish values around your core business with things of value, that people are willing to part with some cash for. The line between marketing and product is blurring, and this no doubt confuses matters even further
[Look, up in the sky! It's marketing! No it's a product!]
but when people are willing to pay for your marketing, even if it's only a nominal amount, it follows that the marketing has value and is desirable.
And that seems like a good thing.
[A line of TIGS branded merchandise will be available shortly.]
The Free Rice website blends two excellent things: using advertising money to donate rice via the UN World Food Program - which is a GOOD THING - and a word definition game.
As it says, for each word you get right, they donate 20 grains. They could just say "endlessly refresh the page" as each click could donate, but they make it interesting, rewarding and cumulative, which is far more effective at driving endless clicking.
Build your vocabulary and harnass the awesome power of intertising to make rice appear from nowhere now.
Facebook just launched instant messaging, which quickly reminded me how addictive IM can be, and got me thinking about different modes of communication.
[There was also another thought about the inevitable rise of web based applications, and something to do with Facebook being an operating system, but I'll leave that for now.]
Instinctively, I believed that I used different kinds of communication for different, well, different kinds of communication. Modality and messaging dictated what you use.
Somethings are better asynchronous [SMS, email], some better synchronous [face to face, phone call, IM], some are better audio, some better textual, some better as pictures [Flickr, postcards] some are better online [links] some off, some private, some public [Facebook Wall] some one to one, some one to many, some broadcast [like this].
But I'm not entirely sure that's the only way it works. I've noticed that some people only use certain channels. I text my dad, email my mum. Younger friends [say below 25] never really seem to email, they just use Facebook.
[In fact I've seen various pieces of research that say that 'the kids' like SMS best, then email. So they love asynchronous communication. Probably helps them multitask and distribute their attention and that.]
And, when I stopped using MSN Messenger a while back, there were a few friends who I just stopped being in touch with, until I logged back on, because that's how we used to communicate.
Thing is, all these channels, loosely, enable the same thing - communication, admittedly in different ways.
But some people are much more comfortable with some than others, even though all will reach me.
Which, perhaps, is something that applies to our brands that are acting like people.
Brands can reach an audience in innumerable ways. But perhaps some of them are more comfortable for the audience in question than others.
And maybe some brands just wouldn't use Facebook to get in touch, because it's not who they are and never will be.
Noah said some good stuff on stage at PSFK that we've been talking about for a while [that he kindly, falsely attributes to me]: that brands need to act like people, especially in a digital context.
We naturally anthropomorphize everything. We can't help it - we're incredibly solipsistic. But it's also because most of our big ol' brains evolved to help us understand other people. It's really very complex. I have to model how you might respond to what I might say, and how it might influence them and so on.
So we see faces in everything and think computers are out to get us when they crash with that deck unsaved.
Stephen King picked up on this. Hence the idea of brand personality was born and agencies began to attempt to link specific personality attributes to products.
But they didn't act like people.
Now, if brands want to play in our social media spaces, if they want to come to our party, they have to act like people. By being nice. And charming. And polite. By asking our names, or getting us a drink. By being interesting. Or useful. Or flirtatious.
Not just shouting about how great they are the whole time.
I like how flickr have taken clip culture and pulled it into their own territory: photography.
Matt has a good post about introducing a function that automatically loops the long photos, turning a micro narrative into a recursive system, which makes complete sense to me - as soon as I took the long photo I instinctively wanted to loop it - repeating patterns endlessly repeating appeals.
Coincidentally, he also links to this burgeoning collection of 11 second shots.
Red Brick Road's new website defines the agency in contradistinction to the rest of the industry, which is fairly standard for new model agencies - the agency is called Red Brick Road because it's the path that Dorothy didn't take, the path less travelled so to speak.
But their Yellow Brick Road satirical site sends up the industry and made me laugh on a sweaty Friday afternoon.
I like the typologies of agency folk above but, to clarify, I don't DJ anymore, especially not at the Fudge Club.
Defining yourself by what you are not can be a defensive positioning, especially for a challenger brand so clearly linked to the establishment it's poking fun at, but this is pretty charming on the whole.
My mate Nancy is involved with an ecard start up called someecards:
for when you care enough to hit send.
They have a panoply of wonderfully offensive electronic missive material for your delectation.
I chose this one because it references an interesting media behaviour that I keep noticing.
There's too much media. Too much content constantly crying out for attention. So we develop tools to manage the flow, allowing us to timeshift and placesshift how we consume content. But there are only so many hours in the day.
Content keeps building up, in the PVR, the RSS reader, the inboxes, the media streams.
And if you leave the stream for a couple days, there's this huge backlog of content that needs to be cleared.
I've got to go home tonight - I've got loads of stuff on Sky Plus I need to get through.
PVR pressure. Email overload. RSS distress.
I just delete everything in my inbox / feedreader.
Too much of a good thing and it becomes a chore. The signal to noise ratio gets confused, because, when there is too much signal, it becomes noise.
Which leads me to wonder. About brands and that.
Brands have grown up using content to communicate.
But do we really need more content? Or are we tense enough as it is?
Perhaps there are other things brands could do, rather than adding to the ever-expanding infinity, to be entertaining or useful. To earn some attention.
Someone has to help alleviate all this tension.
Could the future of brands be in collation, curation, aggregation, dissemination, navigation, catalysation (insert other words that end in -ation of your choice here) - rather than traditional creation?
I couldn't find out much about the strategy behind it but it seems like a great way to demonstrate the brand's commitment to creativity in a way that delivers value to the community - a permanent brand space.
This week I've been mostly judging the Content and Contact category for the Clios, which has been awesome.
Amelia and I are going to try something: opening up the judging process and offering up some of the thoughts of the group on some of the entries - but we can't do that until after the awards are announced.
Doug from LVHRD was one of the lovely people on the Culture Panel at PSFK and he throws parties that get people to do stuff.
The PHTHRD event invited three artists to tell a story using Polaroid photos taken at the event itself - above is Jonathan Harris' entry: a fractal polaroid, make of polaroids, showing people in various stages of undress [sounds like a fun party] exploring the blurring of identities that comes about in liminal spaces.
The image has a fantastic zoom interface thing that allows you to control the size and magnification.
Both the event and the pieces themselves feel like elegies to the Polaroid, doing something that can only be done with instant photographs.
I've signed up to write a chapter of the second Age of Conversation blogbook - contentiously entitled Why Don't People Get It?
I'm not sure who these people are, or what exactly they don't get about conversations - Jason suggested that it refers to the marketing status quo - nor am I sure that I totally get it, whatever IT is, but that's not going to stop me writing something, possibly inspired by Gary Coleman.
[Sidebar:
[Sidebar to Sidebar: Do I actually need to say Sidebar. I guess not. It's obvious. I'll knock that on its head. I think it started because over here in New York people say "Sidebar" when they want to head off on a conversational tangent. It's interesting when conversation picks up self-conscious literary tropes - except for the bunny ears quotation marks fingers thing, as they're never used to designate quotations, which is just annoying. I wonder if I should start saying (parenthesis) in conversation. Probably not.]
Remember when the Segway Personal Transporter was referred to as IT, or Ginger, and people suggested it was going to change the world, and speculation about it got so intense the inventor had to release a statement to people saying it wasn't really all that? The curiousity gap in effect. That's what's so inspired about JJ Abrams Mystery Box idea - revealing what's in the box will always be a disappointment. Especially when it's a gyroscopic scooter.]
Once again the proceeds of the book will be going to Variety - so this is officially a GOOD THING - and this time around 275 very nice smart marketing adverblogger people have offered words - so there's guaranteed to be some great stuff in there, despite my contribution.
I'm coming up to Toronto on Thursday this week [April 3rd] to speak to the friends of the Broadcast Research Council about the FUTURE of media and brands and communication and that.
It's at the Spoke Club - if you fancy coming you can get tickets by emailing Taylor.
My mate Allan found his way into the vault, got hold of the footage from Trucks and has begun the Truckmix, with this topical reference to Heathrow Terminal 5's baggage issues.
The sequel to Cadbury's Gorilla spot launched today. Trucks is another slice of surreal madness, with a truly awesome soundtrack choice, that's delightful [although it could use a better denouement] and will trigger innumerable arguments as to whether it's as good as the original.
[Sidebar - can a sequel ever be better than the original? Most film geeks would say no, with a couple of contentiousexceptions, but in the context of FallonJuan's advertisements the originals set up the conceit, establish a new new thing, so can the follow up ever be as impactful? If this came before Gorilla, would it have been as discussed and popular? Is there anyway to parse this without reference to that which came before?]
The lovely people at digital shop HyperHappen have incorporated a bunch of features that capitalise on many of things TIGS is obsessed with.
The interface is an intuitive 3D chocolate factory that hosts the Gorilla; the studio it was filmed in; some of the top Gorilla remixes; a teaser of a build-your-own truck application; an ARG-lite that opens up a password protected vault that holds downloadable clips of Trucks for easy recombinance; and a few films that show the provence of Dairy Milk and its fairly traded supply chain.
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