Frontiering Talk

Gossip Girl, a new tv show that premiered this week on CW, has taken brand integration to the next level by allowing people to purchase the clothes featured on each episode.

“With our audience, we know fashion is very much at the top of their minds,” says Rick Haskins, executive vice president of marketing and brand strategy for the CW.

Consumers can browse by character, brand, product or episode. Here’s a couple of items you can purchase.

Perspective: I have always been surprised that more fashion brands haven’t used the integration of TV shows or movies to market their “look” to viewers.

via NYDailyNews

Tags: Frontiering Campaigns, Frontiering Products, Frontiering Websites

How about this for the ultimate addition to your book shelf. It’s the Live Book !

The book has a simple drainage system and actually opens up into a real book !

Perspective: Products like this easily become talking points .. and create opportunities for brands to engage in the conversations

Tags: Frontiering Products

Social Network, Live Mocha launched this week.

The site describes itself as “The social way to learn a language”, and the site is built around these 3 areas.

1. Community. Livemocha is the first-of-its-kind online language-learning community.
2. Lessons. Fun and interactive lessons that move at the right pace for you.
3. Motivation. Track your progress and reach your goals with Livemocha tools.

It is very well laid out and even includes integrated chat so you can get help for the language you are learning as well as give help to those learning your native tongue.

I worked in Asia for many years and managed to learn some basic Japanese, Chinese and Thai. Almost all of this learning occured in the country where you can interact with real people, using necessity such as needing to find transport or food to inspire learning.

Learning languages should be fun, and you do need help from a community. Whilst I still think learning languages in the country where it is spoken is the best method, Live Mocha will be a great way for people to learn online. I love the concept, have signed up and are in the progress of doing my first course .. Chinese 101

Tags: Social Network, Social Networks

Blyk has just gone live in the UK and offers 217 mins free texts each month plus 43 mins of talk time. If you exceed the free amount you pay 10p/text and 15p/minute.

In return users are sent up to 6 MMS messages per day which are customised to their profile.

Blyk is invite only, either by responding to an ad, or requesting one from the website. Once in you can invite your friends.
To apply you must be between 16-24, live in Britain, have a MMS capable phone, and have an invite code.
There are plans for Blyk to rollout across Europe.

Doing a quick calculation means that in return for about 28 pounds worth of free calls and text, consumers will be sent up to 180 MMS messages. That works out at about 15p per message.

Perspective: Blyk is an interesting model and one which is sure to get lots of attention from consumers (both users and their parents) as well as marketeers who will enjoy the opportunity to target directly to a demographic that getting harder and harder to reach.

Tags: Mobile

I can’t claim to be a Baseball fan, but I love to talk about campaigns that let consumers have a real say in determining an outcome.
And that’s exactly what Marc Ecko is doing with the Barry Bond’s baseball that broke the number of home run records .. 756 to be precise.

You can even join the conversation on Youtube and Myspace

Perspective: The competition is pretty simple, but given the 10,010,552 votes so far, it’s sure to generate over 756 thousand conversations! Are your giving your consumers a reason to experience and talk about your brand?

via Jaffejuice

Tags: Frontiering Products, Frontiering Websites, Word of Mouth

IsAnyOneGoingTo.com launched in this year in the UK, and allows users to register their name, town or postcode, and then a photograph of themselves and/or their vehicles and a short description of themselves. They also pick one of three categories that suits their travel needs which are best—leisure, business or student, and then enter their travel requirements.

Other members can then search the site and communicate through Skype or e-mail to arrange travel and divide the costs before meeting. Over ten thousand members have already registered with the free site.

Founder Sonia Slater explains: “Our fundamental objectives are to realize how we all can be environmentally sound and still have fun, improve the environment by reducing the number of cars on the roads, use the Internet to introduce travelers and change the way we travel.”

Perspective: Is Anyone Going to is a good example of how social networks can overcome the normal barriers that keep people from connecting.

Tags: Frontiering Websites, News, Social Network, Word of Mouth

Bob Dylan is using a very clever facebook application to promote his latest album.

The application allows you to add 10 messages which are then displayed on the sheets of paper in the famous music video of Bob Dylan’s Subterranean Homesick Blues.

Check out my script here

Perspective: Simple, powerful and has a strong tie to the actual product .. i.e. the new album.

Tags: Social Networks

XTD3D allows you to control standard windows functions using body movements instead of using keyboard / mouse.

You can watch a presentation on XTD3D from the recent Techcrunch40 here, which shows the founder of XTD3D advancing powerpoint slides and also navigating Google earth by clicking his fingers. Here’s another demonstration of the interface.

Perspective: The application can be programmed to use custom movements, and therefore it is not hard to see Gaming manufacturers integrating the technology with their games. Perhaps there is also a market for this in the growing space of virtual worlds such as Second Life.

Tags: Frontiering Products, Gaming

Here’s a clever web initiative, called Flameonwebcam, designed to help market the Fantastic Four movie.

The site provides the ability to record a brief message using your webcam, but the recording adds a flame effect to any movement which creatively links the viral to the movie.

Here’s a samplethat I created. You can send the link to your friends, or embed the video in your own site or social network.

Perspective: The site is clean and easy to use, and the use of the flame effect is a good connection to the movie. I couldn’t see any links to the actual movie website and it would have been nice to add a feature to show showing times of the movie in my city, or perhaps options to buy the DVD.

Tags: Frontiering Products, Frontiering Websites, Social Network

Riding the social network phenomenon is this new social network, known as Babyfy in the UK which combines product reviews, hospital reviews as well as special content features to provide a platform for new and existing mothers to communicate.

The site is well presented and there is already quite a lot of content and well worth a visit if you are in this category and live in the UK.
Babyfy is asking for expressions of interest with respect to Advertising and it will be interesting to see how they combine “consumer reviews” with “product ads” if that is planned.

Perspective: The name Babyfy is quite clever, glad it wasn’t called “Mumify”. I think review sites like this offer a great service to consumers, but I can’t help wondering if the brands who are trying to target this demographic will bother listening to these conversations.

Tags: Social Network, Social Networks, Word of Mouth

Linking their products around the “House to Home” principle, Ikea is running a campaign that is asking Americans to upload photos in what Ikea refers as the worlds biggest photo collaboration.

The America at Home competition runs for only a week from Sept 17-23 and will feature 100 of Americas best photographers, as well as everyday consumers. At the end of the campaign, a selection of photos will be used to create a book that becomes a time capsule of American homes.

Perspective: The site includes the Google Maps application, so you can view the images by location, and the daily assignments are a useful tool to provide some structure to the photo topics. Whilst the site is well laid out, I couldn’t help thinking that the link to the Ikea brand is far too soft. Why didn’t Ikea get real consumers to take photos of themselves enjoying the Ikea furniture and then use these photos for their next catalogue?

Tags: Frontiering Campaigns

Heinz has just announced the winner of their Top This promotion, which invited consumers across America to create the next ad for their Ketchup product.

The Top This TV competition website describes the competition as

We said make us laugh. Make us cry. Make us say, “Wow! Why didn’t we think of that?” But make it something you’d want to see on TV.
Well, people uploaded a boatload of commercials to YouTube that they wrote, cast and shot themselves—and spent tens of thousands of hours watching them.
Four runners-up will win $5,700, and their commercial will air on The Today Show on September 17. The grand prize winner will win $57,000.
Oh, and eternal glory.
Watch the winning Top This commercial on the Primetime Emmy® Awards, Live! September 16th, 8pm/7c on FOX.

Here’s a list of the semi-finalists

As you can see, many of the ads look professionally made, and perhaps some were made by agencies. However, the big winner here is the brand. Loyal consumers have spent many hours making, submitting and then telling their friends about their ads giving huge exposure to Heinz, as well as providing the change for everyday consumers to provide their interpretation of the brand positioning.

Heinz have already announced a follow up competition to start in October.

Perspective: It’s not just big brands that can run these competitions. With the ever increasing tools now available on the internet, as long as you have some passionate consumers, you can channel their creativity into a campaign channel.

Tags: Frontiering Campaigns, Word of Mouth

In an attempt to attract young people, Leader Newspapers (owned by Newscorp) has created a local search site called Nook.

The site is intended to be a lot more than just local search, allowing users to join the conversation and write about local venues such as restaurants, review local tradesmen, as well as discuss local issues.

There are no ads on the site yet, but there’s little doubt that the site will start to run ads once the content and audience numbers grow.

Where I live is a similar site servicing Sth East Queensland.

Perspective: One of the challenges from the existing local search models such as Sensis’s Yellowpages and New’s Truelocal, is that they don’t provide facilities for consumers to review businesses. This is mainly because their listings are subscription based, and they haven’t found a way to juggle charging businesses a $1000 listing fee, while allowing consumers to publish a bad review next to their listing.
However, I think that consumer review sites have a definite place and if executed correctly, even the reviews get reviewed and rated, thereby providing a much richer source of information for readers. Amazon and Cnet are perhaps the best examples of this where professional reviews are mixed with consumer reviews to provide a rich source of product commentaries. Ning’s Restaurent Reviews with maps is another example that is purely consumer review driven. If Nook strikes a chord in Melbourne, I have no doubt that News will expand the service to other cities. I also think there is a place for professional consumer review organisations like Choice to take the lead in this space.

via Search Engine Room

Tags: Frontiering Websites, Social Networks, Word of Mouth