Old Spice Muscle Music Interactive

Just in case you haven’t been sent this today, here’s the latest Old Spice campaign featuring Terry Crews’ body rigged up as a one man music mixer! Teaming up with Vimeo for perhaps the first interactive video I’ve seen on their platform, which allows you to record you’re own version in real time, and then post it straight onto your own Vimeo channel, or let it form part of the gallery.

Stunning paintings with real Humans

This is not a post related to my blog, but worth a watch!

This is a stunning piece of Art created by Alexa Meade, a 25 year-old artist who has developed an approach to portraiture that involves painting directly on top of her human subjects in a style that perceptually compresses 3D space into a 2D plane. The project is a fusion of painting, photography, performance, and installation.

Mortal Kombat vs Street Fighter In Real Life - Ultimate Fan Fights Ep. 2

It’s an epic battle in which you get to choose the winner.

A new YouTube video pits Mortal Kombat’s Scorpion against Street Fighter’s Ryu in a no-holds-barred fight. Since being posted on Tuesday, it has gained almost 20,000 views.

Created by Start, an entertainment channel for gamers, the interactive video begins with martial artist Ryu practicing punches on a tree, when he is approached by Scorpion.

What is Brand Activation?

It's about engaging consumers at an emotional level and driving them to take action.

Brand Activation a relatively new "term" in the industry, there is much debate around the exact definition of Brand Activation. It's pretty simple really; it's all about bringing the spirit of brands to life. The objective of Brand Activation is to make brands active in their markets, building their reputations along with results. Most fundamentally, brand activation contributes in creating trust between the customer, the society and the brand (i.e. company). And trust is one of the key factors to create loyalty between consumers and brands.

"Brand Activation a natural step in the evolution of the Brands"

Brand Activation, is the Marketing/Brand activity that enables the consumers to live the life in the Brand Way.

Every brand has a core identity and extended identity, the brand also stands for proposition. You take the brand identity and the proposition and blending those two you develop a brand activity/program in which the consumers get to live their life in the way the brand promises life to be.

Lets have an example to clarify brand activation.

Example can be the LUX beauty contest. Lux is a beauty soap. its proposition is to increase your beauty and the brand personality is the young sucessful beautiful women. the brand idnetifies itself with beautiful celebrities, i.e. film stars like Aishwaria Rai of India. combining all these brand elements you develop and implement Lux beauty contest. you select the most beautiful girl of the nation and she gets her crown from Ash. She wins loads of prizes from LUX, gets her cosmetics and other beauty products courtsey of LUX and lastly she gets selected for the new-face of next upoming film of Yash Chopra as the new debutant. If she really can prove herself then the tinsel-world is all hers and she becomes a STAR.

So you are taking an ordinary girl and making her a star courtesy of LUX, this is LUX Brand Activation. Making one girl live the life in the LUX way while stimulating the aspirations of million other girls, who dreams to be the star. they start to think "if she can be star why not me". Well not every girl who uses LUX becomes star but they strive to be.

At the end of the day, all this is done to increase brand sales, awareness and loyalty.

Tug of War Between ATL & BTL

There was a time when Sales as a concept and practice got being considered ineffective and insufficient. The concept with longer relationship with customer gained the importance. Thus, got the  Marketing concept its being. Slowly, this became the integral and most important part of the strategy and the prime tool while devising a plan for revenue generation. The increase in competition, the globalization, economic growth and recession all has played its role and made the process richer and complexer each day. Among the multiple facets that form the wings of this approach, brand promotion is one that too has grown in the ways of implementation and has seen fortuned innovations. 

With the advent of the present century, the existing tug of war between  advertising and sales promotion took a new shape and came the concepts Above - The- Line and Below - The- Line activities (ATL and BTL) widening both scope and intensity of this war.

The ATL or above-the-line propagated traditional marketing channels that strived to reach a mass audience with messages that reinforce a brand communicate general product information or inspire an emotional response.



i.e. ATL focuses on

- Mass Reach

- It creates Brand Awareness

- And has no direct consumer involvement.



It thus has the vehicles like: Print Advertising, Hoardings, Electronic Channels and the Radios.

While the “Below-the-line” initiatives, by comparison, acted like traditional direct marketing efforts – they aspired to establish targeted relationships between marketers and individual consumers, and offer comparable ease in measurability.



i.e. BTL

- is consumer defined . 

- It generates Trial.

- and has direct consumer involvement.



It thus has vehicles like Events, Road Shows, Dealer level activities, Consumer contacts, Mobiles etc. Sometimes the same vehicles can act as both BTL and ATL activity complementing each other e.g. Dealer Board.

The concept of BTL was however; fresh and resulted though smaller in size was more decipherable. It thus, started making its way in the brand promotion strategies. It started eating the budgets of the ATL activities. From negligible, to size-able. Until the mid of 2008 where in the economy of the world was upbeat, and growth triumphant, this new arena was being welcomed as a forward integration of the concept. With increased fragmentations and demographics along with the growing pressure to promote effectiveness of marketing communication BTL activities was giving the apt answers and so it started prospering. A separate budget started being devoted to it. The world (especially the growing economy started seeing a growth in the BTL along with the ATL budgets. It started complementing the ATL. More recently, agencies and clients had switched to an 'Integrated Communication Approach.' BTL was a common technique used for "touch and feel" products (consumer items where the customer would rely on immediate information rather than previously researched items). BTL techniques ensured recall of the brand while at the same time highlighting the features of the product.

But then came the period of recession. Companies - trying to cut on the expenditure. Amongst the many heads of budget that came into strict revision the promotion, too started being looked as the expenditure rather than the investment. And then came the real tug of war between the two. Should the age old ATL be retained under these tough conditions or the newer approach BTL be considered as the new lease of life. Obviously, the ATL that encompasses a higher budget got a pause for the time being. The BTL with lower per event cost kept the promotional plan rolling in those hours. And the century kept seeing a steady growth in the BTL expenditures over the year. The worry among the media people thus was.... for how long? 

No situation stays forever. So was the case with recession. BTL, which had been constant throughout, kept seeing a steady growth in expenditures. With its unique ability to personalize and customize communication this form of communication started penetrating metros to cities and to rurals. The ATL, which had seen a cut in the past few months, got a lease of life. The BTL that had slowly started replacing the mass media advertising again started seeing it back among the masses. 

 Such recent trends of future has a common term being used by savvy media sales persons i.e. Through The Line approach, which according to some Brand Activation consultants, has been around forever but under a new named coined for media men is called the TTL approach. The TTL approach is where a mix of the two (ATL+BTL) are used to integrate a marketers efforts and optimize returns from these separate investments.

 More recently however the TTL approach had shifted its attention with more weight shifting to the BTL side of the fulcrum. The idea remained to optimize the ROI on marketing budget spent, by focusing ones energy on winning smaller yet more crucial BTL battles than ATL wars which were being raged by Sponsorship and logo positioning crazy big spenders.

 In a nutshell, while Above-the-Line promotions are tailored for a mass audience, BTL promotions are targeted at individuals according to their needs or preferences. While Above-the-Line promotions can establish brand identity, BTL can actually lead to a sale. Above-the-line promotions are also somewhat impossible to measure well, while BTL promotions are highly measurable, giving marketers valuable insights into their return-on-investment.



Now when in near future, the market is expected to still behave better, we expect the budgets being re-vitalized. Especially with a certain soothing of the Political conditions in the country. The study reflects that BTL now gaining its importance would surely form an integral part of the plans but integrated and well coupled with extensive ATL plans. A proper mix i.e. TTL and apt utilization of both the vehicles are expected to form the successful means of promotion in the coming years. But, this would also mean a constant innovation and newness in the approach and extensive brainstorming in store for all.

Brand Activation Process

It is becoming a difficult issue to be evasive about branding. We live, eat and drink brands. Some one has said that brands constitute the organizing mechanism that helps us navigate through each day. We are all branded even though we may not want to agree with that. Brand perceptions are result of mixed stimuli of interactions that an individual has with a given brand. This fact accounts for why brand managers as well as activators must work hard to ensure that the perceptions of various stimuli are resonating with brand’s character, behavior among others. 

Brand activation demands that brand managers intensely ignite the passion of a big idea that customer will appreciate in all the processes. Effort must be made to connect the brand emotionally with the clients who eventually ‘owned’ the brand. Brand managers need to create strong believe in the offering through all the stages of brand activation. Brand experiences by the consumers must also create a deep relationship through education, interaction, motivation as well as communication that builds closer rapport. 
Brand activation process must evolve and be able to change with time or remain in the present tense as a friend once asserted. Brand activation that will work must listen to and study the client’s preferences per time, the influencing factors in their decision making process. 

A great brand activation effort must support, encourages customer awareness of the brand, good knowledge of the brand, promote liking, conviction and eventual purchase and re-purchase. I am also convinced that brand activation process must begin with what the brand stands for and proper identification of who the audience is. Brand activation process must show vividly the step by step guide on what to do at any point in time. It should guide the brand’s communication channels, designs, creativity among many other vital indices. Brand activation is an expression of how a brand will approach brand management activities from within the organization. Be sure that as brand manager, one is looking deeper behind every possibility in the brand and find out vital assets that have relevant consequences for the entire organization or brand. Brand position must be clearly elucidated. Brand activation that is wholly controlled by external consultants is bound to fail because the employees are major actors in making brand activation process successful. 

Great brand activation meets with customers demand and challenges. Let me conclude today by saying that when brand activation is done right, the followings can be an advantage. 

1. It enhances effectiveness of brand communication 
2. It serves as a rational and impactful means to advertising campaign process, design 
3. It helps to build strong emotional tie with clients 
4. It aids brand’s repurchase.

The Rise of Engagement Marketing

I've been reading a lot lately about the “death” of traditional advertising and the rise of engagement marketing. In this post I want to discuss engagement marketing, also known as engagement design, tryvertising, experiential marketing, and guerrilla marketing. 

Undeniably, the importance of traditional advertising has diminished as we have gained greater access to what our friends think, via social media. People naturally place more weight on their experiences and their friends’ experience with brands and products than on ads. At the same time, our ability to block advertising is on the rise as well. 

So what is a marketer to do to catch the attention of prospects and create a positive ROI on their marketing investments? First, we have to understand why people behave the way they do when it comes to decision making. In Advertising on the Brain it states, people “have an emotional and a physical reaction, before we engage in rational thought.” In other words, we feel first, react second, and think last (sound like anyone you know?). Emotions are the connection between our feelings and our actions. In the same article it says, “It would really come in handy to have a yellow highlighter pen in your brain that says ‘This is important, remember it.’ That’s what emotions are; a yellow highlighter pen in your brain. We can’t make decisions without them because emotions are our brain’s way of signaling importance biochemically.” Bottom line, marketers have to affect people’s emotions in order to get them to act. 

Most advertising fails to elicit positive emotions, which proceeds action. Any negative emotion felt, intentional or not, is carried over as a negative towards the brand/product. As example, I often see in my neighborhood an ad on bus benches that states “All work and no play makes Jack a great realtor!” Every time I see it I want to pick up the phone and tell Jack that his ad stinks and he should hire a real marketer instead of trying to do it himself! The problem here is that we all know the phrase from childhood “all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” When I read Jack’s ad, I am reminded that he is a “dull boy,” and quite honestly I would never hire anyone who is “all work and no play.” He must be burned out by now, and certainly is not one I’d entrust the purchase or sale of a home to. Maybe he’d fall asleep in the middle of a transaction. This was unintentional eliciting of a negative emotion.

The rise of engagement advertising is simply this – marketers have to be mindful of the emotional reactions that they create, be authentic in creating positive emotional reactions, and make it easy for people to try their brand/product, thus (hopefully!) solidifying the positive emotion that makes them talk about their experience with others. 

In Charting A Shift from Communications to Engagements it says, “The new marketing is about creating 360⁰ brand experiences, not messaging. Consumers should buy into to your brand’s ideas, not just your product. Instead of defining ‘Reasons To Believe’, you need to define ‘Reasons To Be.’ “ Brands no longer are “contained in any communication or campaign, but rather is understood through its many touch-points.” Create enough positive touch-points, and you create positive ROI. Of course, creating multiple positive touch-points requires a creative mind. You have to be willing to risk failure, and ideally allow a minimum of three months to test any marketing/advertising ideas to see what works. It takes using your intuition, something women seem to utilize a little better than men, which explains to me why so many more women are in the marketing field than men. No judgment here, just observing the facts. However, as stated in Reinventing the MBA: 4 Reasons to Mix Business With Design Thinking, “An over-reliance on intuition is every bit as limited as management by the numbers.” Really it takes both intuition and analytical thinking to create excellent engagement marketing experiences. 

In addition, also stated in the same article, it takes humility and team-building skills as well as a willingness to be “always ready to praise…colleagues and friends.” One of the ways we can utilize the principles of engagement marketing is through the use of “tryvertising.” From Trendwatching, tryvertising is defined as “[incorporating]…’obvious’ activities like handing out product samples, and more subtle, integrated product placements that are part of an experience or solution. It’s everything from new-style sachets containing single servings of liquid products, to hotels partnering with luxury car makers to offer high end model test drives to guests during their stay…The challenge here has always been a certain lack of relevance: there’s no guarantee samples are tried out at the right time, in the right spot, and by the right target audience. 

So what about more targeted, more relevant new-style tryvertising? Product placements that become part of the landscape, part of the real world where consumers hang out and certainly don’t mind trying something as long as it makes sense to them?” Read the rest of Trendwatching’s introduction to tryvertising, to know how Mercedes-Benz, Porsche, Mini Cooper, IKEA, Nike, Starbucks, HP and other brands are using it. Experiential marketing is another way of saying engagement marketing. As an aside, you may want to join the Experiential Forum, as I did, to join in the conversation about the latest-and-greatest in experiential marketing. In The Last Campaign: How Experiences Are Becoming the New Advertising it states, “65% of U.S. consumers report a digital experience changing their perception about a brand (either positively or negatively) and 97% of that group report that the same experience ultimately influenced whether or not they went on to purchase a product from that brand. In a nutshell, experience matters. 

A lot. Of course, brands that were ‘born digital’ intuitively know this. Google and Amazon are pioneering experiential brands. That’s why Amazon continues to pour money into improving its customer service rather than run traditional advertising or marketing campaigns. As Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has said, ‘We are not great advertisers. So we start with customers, figure out what they want, and figure out how to get it to them. Zappos…built its brand the same way, as has Facebook.” Experience matters. A lot. 

If you have an amazing engagement campaign, but your retail staff aren’t plentiful enough, don’t know where anything is, or how to help you resolve your problem, it matters. A lot. If your customer service reps don’t know how to handle the frustrated customer and act snotty, it matters. A lot. If your website makes it difficult to find what the person wants and see the price before they put the item in a digital basket, it matters. A lot. As marketers, we often have to step back, look at the entire process and be critical of how it works through the eyes of the customer. It matters. A lot. 

Lastly, I want to talk about guerrilla marketing, which is also a form of experiential or engagement marketing. The term guerrilla marketing has become a catch-all phrase for non-traditional marketing, but it really is its own form of disruptive marketing and we have opportunity as marketers to bring it into the world of digital media that we are now in. As stated in Guerrilla Marketing Goes Tweet, “People are focused on social media; they’re walking around with their smartphones and updating their statuses and tweeting. The more we give people opportunities to do that, the more exciting it is, such as creating art at an event where people can save it to their profiles…The more we can incorporate social technology into real-life events, the more people get excited about it.” Marketers should be on the prowl to incorporate promotion of art into their work. After all, art creates positive emotion, which begets action. Not to mention, it helps those who are less business and more creative-minded earn a living. To read more about guerrilla marketing tactics that companies are now using, I recommend the blogs Guerrilla Gorilla and Guerrilla Communication Blog. Google “guerrilla marketing” and you are sure to find much more. I hope this post helped your thinking about creating positive emotional and experiential marketing tactics, resulting in the positive ROI you are looking for.

Volkswagen Up: A Scream Powered Olympic Car

For Dutch people wanting to score tickets to the London Olympics to cheer their country, here’s your best chance yet with “Up! Holland Up!”. Volkswagen have created a sound/scream powered car and are giving you the chance to post your fastest 100m sprint time for the chance to win tickets.

Volkswagen have removed the all the foot pedals and re-configured the engine CPU to translate sound decibels into RPM’s to power the car, so that every cheer, scream, chant or noise helps to increase the power and ultimately speed of the car over a 100m race to give groups of Dutch Olympic supporters the chance to post ther very fastest time in their area and score Olympic tickets.

Google Fiber: The Next Chapter of the Internet

So you've probably heard that Google is launching its own Fibre network in Kansas City, well here it is, with Google starting to ramp up information around the massive project, starting with this video, Introducing Google Fiber: The Next Chapter of the Internet, upping Internet speeds by upto 100x.

The installation is of course real, in typical Google style, a hand crafted set complete with electromagnetic powered cars, and brilliantly shot for the video. If you’re in Kansas City, you can check this out in person at the Fiber Space building. So my only question on the Google Fibre network is, if they already know so much about users through data collection, what’s going to happen when get become the ISP themselves? How dangerous could this be?!

Listerine: Smelly Flipbook

Great idea to make people awar that a bad breath is no good. Not for you, not for the others. JWT, Hong Kong created a flipbook showing an attractive woman who appeared to be speaking as you flip the pages. What no one knew was that the agency inserted a bad onion smell in the flipbook. On the end of the flipbook, people got a coupon for Listerine.

The Nike+ House of Innovation Experience

It’s summer. The London Olympics are on and Selfridges are hosting Nike’s House of Innovation. What’s the Nike House of Innovation? Well, it’s a very cool brand experience that is made up of a handful of challenges, exhibitions and environments that converge the physical and digital retail space for “everyday athletes” as they compete against each other and interact with the environment filled with some of Nike’s most innovative products and technologies. Seriously cool…

The World’s First Programmable LED T-Shirt

A T-Shirt OS… Oh yeah, this one is for all you nerds out there. Introducing the world’s first programmable LED T-Shirt, and it’s no set and forget LED, it’s a live, real-time connected object that is powered by a big brain (aka your iPhone) and a smaller brain built into the T-Shirt to process just about anything you want visualise and send to the in-built LED’s…

Tweets, Photos, Animation, Text… You name it, you’ll be able to sync it live with just about anything and have it processed and displayed in real-time onto your new T-Shirt. Want one? I sure do…

KRAFT Macaroni & Cheese: Make iPad Art

Here’s the latest innovative piece of work from KRAFT Macaroni & Cheese, an iPad app that stops the wastage (at the hands of Kids) of tonnes of pasta pieces the world over, and creates a new, super cool way for those same kids to create all the best Macaroni Art they can possibly imagine.

Created by the guys at CP+B, the ‘Dinner Not Art‘ app will also donate 10 noodles to Feeding America for every virtual noodle saved into a piece of Macaroni Art, capped at 110 million noodles… which I’m not sure what it adds up to, but it seems like a hell of a lot! I can see thousands of kids going crazy for this app… A parents dream!

Google: Introducing Agile Creativity

Google is famous for its Agile process and now they are attempting to bring that world of experience to creative agencies to help them find an edge and create a more fluid creative/innovation process to keep up with the digital age. In a new site curated by Think With Google, you’ll find a range of Agile Creativity tips and tricks from the world’s best agencies to digest… What do you think?

Red Cross Blood Trade

Company: Red Cross
Agency: Timetobreakdance
Country: Unknown

Ever gave blood to the local blood bank? We usually don't! So how do you encourage the masses to get up and donate? Your video game :) Red Cross is teaming up with all major video games. Donate blood at your local blood bank and get a promotional code, you can use this promotional code whenever you lose a level! One Word: Brilliant!

Bounty: Let the spills begin

Company: Bounty
Agency: Publicis
Country: USA

We see a lot of Olympic themed ads passing the last few days and this is definitely one of the best. Get your inspiration from this one young athletes!

Gillette: Water Projection Mapping

Company: Gillette (P&G)
Agency: Unknow
Country: USA

Gillette combined a series of various projections onto buildings, walls and ultimately on water, to wish TEAM USA luck at the Olympics, just as the world finished watching the Opening Ceremony.

It’s My City: Using Army in Outdoor

Company: Its my city
Agency: Red Pepper, Yekaterinaburg
Country: Russia 


In Russia the streets aren’t always that safe, people often have to fight to go where they want to go. The local magazine It’s My City thought of a way to make people aware of this problem. They took over the media spaces on the street when the Russian Army was rehearsing their Victory Day Parade. The banners that were set up got a lot of media attention, and apparently the percentage of fights dropped by 75% afterwards. 

New York Pizza! Damn F****ING Shameless, you call this qulaity?

Company: New York Pizza
Agency: Selmore
County: The Netherlands

I found this Advert quiet amusing. I'm posting this not because I admire the agencies work but because I disagree with the message. The two adverts released focus on quality of Tomato and Flour! For a brand of Pizza they could have done much better!

ALS Foundation: I have already died

Company: ALS Foundation
Agency: Publicis, Amsterdam
Country: The Netherlands 

Powerful & Brilliant! Publicis amsterdam took advertising for a non-profit organization to the next level. This campaign is definitely unique in its kind and will surely create a lot of buzz. The voice of people with the deadly muscle disease ALS is represented in a series of commercials, print, billboard and bannering campaigns. The special thing about this campaign is that it won’t be released until the person in the ad has deceased. A very powerful approach which will definitely turn some heads.

Jordan: Rivalry

Company: Jordan
Agency: Wieden + Kennedy, Portland
Country: USA

Somewhere, someone is working on their game. This is how the new commercial of Jordan, the shoe brand starts. Watch this global rivalry unfold for two players determined to rise above the competition.

Hanes ComfortBlend: Softer than a kitten

Company: Hanes Comfortblend

Agency: The Martin Agency

Country: USA

Kittens and Michael Jordan combined into one commercial. This is definitely something weird but something you will surely remember when you see it. Enjoy.

Windlesham Golf Club - A Short Drive Campaign

Client: Windlesham Golf Club
Agency: ...Gasp!
www.gaspfour.com
Film: Ross Fairgrieve
Golf Drive: Scott Patience, PGA

Gasp an agency based in England recently teamed up with WIndlesham Golf Club to attract Golfers around the area! They are located on the M3 in London, so how did they go about attracting the target audience?