Frontiering Talk

McDonalds has begun an initiative to recruit several mum’s as correspondents as part of a quality program.

The idea is that Mum’s will be given unique insight into how McDonalds works internally, in return for the mum’s telling their social network about their (hopefully) positive experience.

No doubt McDonalds will have their listening ears on .. hoping to glean some insight into one of their key consumer demographic.

The mum’s were chosen for their online influence and degree of social network. I hope this doesn’t equate just to the number of Myspace friends? (smiles).

Perspective: I think it’s a good initiative. All brands need to open up their inner workings and indeed allow some ownership of the brand to flow to the real owners of the brand .. that is the people who consume it!

Tags: Social Network

Here’s a clever initiative from a pet-dating company to leverage the Myspace phenomenon by creating an online community for dogs called http://www.mydogspace.com

Basically it’s Myspace for dogs as the name implies. It’s a great initiative, and also slightly frustrating for me as when i worked for a Pet food manufacturer i suggested sites like this many times to fall on deaf ears.

Perspective: Watch for Mycatspace, Myfishspace and others to come soon. And where are the pet food manufacturers?/blockquote>

Robert Poe from the Dailywireless has a great story on Obopay, which has been able to setup a kind process to allow people to send money to others, as long as both are US phones.

It is kind of the way Paypal allows you to transfer money between email addresses, in that both sender and receiver of the funds has to link a credity card or bank account to their email (in Paypal’s case) or their Phone (in Obopay’s case).

Perspective: This won’t allow people to start buying groceries with their cell phones, but it’s a start and I think will take off with American teens.

Low cost flyer Jetstar has created a new campaign which encourages consumers to drop in pictures of themselves and some friends to create a “wish we were there” post card.

Perspective: It’s not a bad site, easy to use and relevant to the travel category. It’s a good chance for Jetstar to improve their database of potential customers. The post card can not really be personalised with text or your own pictures (apart from the head photos you load), and there was no option to print or save my creation. There is also no gallery of created post cards which I think would work well.

Forrester has produced a nice little report that highlights which emerging technologies Agencies believe will have the greatest impact on their design practise.

Perspective: The results are hardly surprising, but I bet most of the big agencies aren’t really prepared for many of these and will get into them by acquiring niche agencies that specialise in mobile, social etc.

The foghound blog points out this new way to segment consumers .. by visual dna.

It’s a frontiering way to organise people and I can see how this would work in organising information. I would think dating sites should add this to their profiles. Check it out at Imagini and see what you think.

Perspective: I don’t think this replaces other aspects of segmentation, but is certainly a useful addition to Age, Sex, Country.
Imagini is high on cool factor, click to start and about 10 images later you are done. As a visual person i can really relate to it, and I can see brands shuddering at trying to create different visual ads for different people .. but why shouldn’t they. We have left the one ad fits all age.

More and more campaigns are allowing consumers to interact with or co-create ads and the Mychopper - Ride a chopper with OCC is no exception.

You simply upload a face picture of yourself, select a few features and you get to co-star in the ad. The usual send to a friend, save to gallery features are there.

Here’s the video i made but you can easily make your own.

The technology platform used in this creative is called Personiva, and other examples are the Tone Skin Care campaign or this one for HP Japan.

Perspective: I think some of these campaigns will work better than others .. I don’t really watch the OCC, so didn’t really get the ad itself, but the technology is very easy to use and can see it being entertaining when used with the right creatives.