Frontiering Talk

Firefox has announced the winners of it’s Firefox flicks competition which I previously blogged about.

The winning entry from Pete Macomber is called Daredevil
and will be short-listed for the NY Festival of Advertising’s 2006 International Advertising Awards in May. This and the runner-up videos will be incorporated into Mozilla’s 2006 marketing activities.

Perspective: This is a great initiative that will continue throughout 2006. When is your marketing team going to invite media submissions from your consumers?

Southwest Airlines have launched a blog abtly named Nuts about Southwest.

From the site
“..Nuts about Southwest is all about our Employees, Customers, airplanes, and airports. We really are Nuts about Southwest and we hope that our Readers will share that passion by posting their own comments.”

They have even put together a User Guide to explain the background, goals and the “rules of engagement”. In January, Southwest also launched an Adopt-a-pilot blog in support of their four-week school program for a hundreds of classrooms across the US.

Perspective: Southwest has been successful largely due to the evangelism of many of it’s customers, evidenced by it’s 60% Net Promoters score, the highest in the US airline industry.
The Nuts about Southwest blog is a clever initiative to reach out to those advocates, and through their conversations, continue to build it’s Customer Loyalty.

Google has released a new free 3D modeling program called SketchUp.

It’s described as a tool to let “..you to create 3D models of houses, sheds, decks, home additions, woodworking projects – even space ships. You can add details, textures and glass to your models, design with dimensional accuracy, and place your finished models in Google Earth”

You can even share them with others by posting them to the 3D Warehouse where I found this image of the RoseBowl Stadium.

Download SkethcUp (free) here.

There is a pro version available for US$495.

Here’s a cool new AJAX application know as Beeplet which allows you to be reminded of things in the future and receive notifications as email, Instant Messanger (coming soon), or as an RSS feed on your site.

Most critics agree that Behavioural Targeting is more effective than Contextual Targeting, but these results from Adrants show the extent of the effectiveness.

First lets recap on the difference between Behavioural and Contextual Targeting.

Contextual Targeting relates advertising to the context of what content it is associated with. E.g. showing a car advertisement beside a story about new road improvements, or a new tennis racquet in a tennis magazine. Behavioural Targeting relates to the behaviour of the person who is consuming the content. This means that the ads are served up based on the consumer rather than the content which is being consumed.

The study by Next Century Media across 1146 respondents for Panasonic Plasma TV’s gave these results for Behavioural Targeting when compared to Contextual.
1. Behavioural Targeting Reached 50.3% more imminent buyers
2. Behavioural Targeting Cost 50% less to reach the same quantity
3. Behavioural Targeting ads showed a 67.6% higher preference for Panasonic brand
4. A 168.9% advantage in terms of increasing the likelihood of buying the Panasonic brand.
5. 63.1% increase in unaided brand awareness (3.45 x greater than contextual targeting)

Perspective: Whilst these results are impressive for those that favour Behavioural targeting, Contextual Targeting still has a place when you don’t know the behaviour of the person consuming the content. But the advantages of behavioural targeting highlight the point that whether you are recruiting candidates for marketing research, or building a loyalty database, it’s important to gather behavioural data.

This Consumer Generated Pokemon theme song video clip has surpassed 9 million views in 4 months, making it the most watched clip on the Youtube broadcast!

At just over 3 minutes long, lots of time has been consumed watching this clip. Pretty cool if you own the Pokemon brand!

GM continues to pioneer blogging for big corporations by launching a FYI blog that will encourage contribution from all GM employees.

For example this article talks about how GM is the largest corporate user of landfill gas and how it is used to power it’s plants. This certainly helps position GM in the right light in relation to the worlds energy resources.

Perspective: This is a great way to allow employees to help the PR of a business. The articles depict the passion of the GM employees and provide a forum for turning the organisation “outside in”.

As part of the “Whoa!” campaign in northeastern Oklahoma, McDonald’s is giving away free ring tones or phone wallpapers to consumers who submit a photo to the picture gallery of this microsite.

In addition to wireless Internet, cashless technology, and plasma-screen TVs, McDonalds is running a mobile scavenger hunt. Consumers register online and receive clues via text messages. There is even coupons for free fries with the purchase of a Big Mac.

Perspective: I think mobile coupons are going to become a growth area in promotional campaigns. Perhaps as an alternative to ring tones or wallpapers, some companies could consider offering content related to their brand. For example, Nike’s Runlondon site could offer a mobile version of the running routes, Health related brands could offer a personal fitness trainer. Once mapping becomes more maintstream we will start to see some interesting mashups and this will provide a great mechanic for brands to engage with their consumers.

Land Rover has launched a web tv site that will encourage participation by Land Rover owners to share their experiences, and learn from others in the community by sharing editorial content.

Perspective: It’s great to see a brand opening up it’s doors and co-ordinating a place for it’s consumers to have conversations. Other consumers are trusted sources of information and Land Rover is helping it’s advocates tell others about the fun and adventures you can have when you own one.

Here’s another great community tool, that could be classed as using the digitl world and making it analog again.

The tool is called Human Clock and like this picture shows the current time with a range of pictures which are a refreshing change from the ordinary digital numbers.

Perspective: A simple idea, that is founded on tapping social networks to deliver the clock pictures, and despite Google Ads on the site, there is an absence of advertised products in the human clock images. So come on brands, could someone create a version called Product Clock.com showing clocks made out of Mars Bars, Beer Cans, or even Boxes of flour?

via Jaffe Juice

Tags: Social Network

Adage has issued their 2006 Fact Pack which is worth a read.

Some interesting facts :-
35% of marketers will spend to develop in-house blogs
70% of media & communications companies said they were going to include blogs and social networks into their future marketing efforts
RSS is small but gathering momentum, surprisingly 78% of RSS feed users are male

But you’ll have to wait for next years report to get some formal data on Consumer Generated Media, which I predict will continue is enormous growth.

via Media 2.0

Tags: Social Network

MobileCrunch has this excellent article on the ScanR product, which allows you to take a camera phone picture and convert it into a searchable PDF file.

You need a 1 megapixel or better camera phone (or camera). ScanR will be great for heavy travellers who frequently use whiteboards and want to capture the outputs for later use. You take a picture, email it to scanr, and they email you back an enhanced pdf version.

Best of all it’s free, so check if your camera phone is supported here, and if so, try it out.

The Online Publishers Association has released a new study which reveals that Watching Videos online is becoming routine, with 25% viewing at least weekly and %46 viewing monthly. These

Here’s the headlines
•News and entertainment videos are among the most frequently watched online
•Viewers go to multiple destinations for video –and then surf for more
•Online video viewers have attractive demographics
•Online video viewers are cross-media consumers
•Viewers are receptive to video ads and driven to act
•Consumers are willing to pay for online videos to get freedom of access

Perspective: Online Video is here to stay and should become an integral part of the marketing mix. Given email is the most popular method for finding videos, viral aspects should be provided. The study suggests consumers are willing to view video ads along with their content and therefore Advertisers should be experimenting to discover the best mechanics.

Full study results here

via WOMMA