Frontiering Talk

Imagine you are in the delivery business, and want to show that you deliver anywhere in the world.

DHL, with the help of a swedish artist Erik Nordenankar, and a GPS device have managed to create what they describe as the biggest drawing in the world.

The website documents the creation, along with detailed instructions and delivery documents, and even contains video footage of the drawings journey.

In a world of increasing clutter, it takes something unique to stand out and get noticed, and judging by the number of blogosphere conversations, the initiative appears to be something that will help raise awareness for DHL’s global delivery service.

Most of us remember the Mission Impossible series which immortalised the saying “This message will self destruct”.

Deadline Couriers created an effective PR stunt by building a billboard message that included a 8 day countdown timer. At the end of the 8 days it literally blew up.
I just love the way the message ties to the service offered by the brand !

MSNBC have released a NewsWare site, which provides an interesting news spectrum which can also be customised into a widget to embed on your blog, social network profile, or desktop.

The news experience includes this spectrum which is very engaging.

There is also a Newsblaster tool which lets you read the news while you are playing an online game.

To promote this feature, MSNBC setup the world’s first interactive cinema crowd game.

Cinema goers became human joysticks as the collective crowd body movement controls the functions of a game controller.

NBC New’s social education iCue site is also mixing news videos with study guides and educational games in what they hope will satisfy Generation Y’s shorter attention span.

Dr Martens are running a campaign allowing consumers to create a boot design at http://dmbootdesign.com/

After selecting the boot canvas (8-hole or 14-hole), and then using the sites pen and paint tools, or using their own tools, 2 consumers will be selected to have their boot designs manufactured and sold in shops worldwide.  One will be chosen by the people, and the other by a panel of industry insiders.

This isn’t the first campaign of it’s type, but it is still a good fit for the brand.  It’s a pity that they don’t provide an option for consumers to purchase their design, even if there was a premium price point.

Personalisation is a trend we see continuing and whether your brand is a car, or a toothbrush, providing consumers some way to be involved in the creation is a clever strategy.

Absolut loves visions. They love them so much that they turn visions into realities.

In an ABSOLUT World everybody can submit their visions and explore what others have envisioned and realized.  And the website reflects this idea with an interactive navigation using 3D graphics to create an engaging experience.

Realised visions are represented in by boxes that you can drag, spin and open. Each one is different, and because they are generated by consumers, you’ll find all kinds of content inside.

There is even a blog which captures the submissions to "In an Absolut world …."

I’d like the ability to save a vision as a widget and then post the result to a social network, as this would ensure greater syndication of the content.

But the site is well designed and the visions are very powerful.

Stories are the best forms of communication, and ones that you can wear can be great forms of conversation starters.

For charities, getting potential donors to feel involved with a cause can be difficult.  Rosa Loves facilitates this by selling t-shirts which have both a graphic and a story describing the cause they are supporting. The story is placed on the inside of the t-shirt next to the wearer’s heart to invoke a personal attachment to the cause.

Causes can be as simple as a person in need, or a disadvantaged community, but each one has a specific goal and a defined funding requirement.
60% of the sales from each t-shirt goes directly to the cause.  T-shirts are hand-numbered and created in small batches until the required amount has been raised.

This is a great example of a product serving a growing need for authenticity and personalisation.

In the UK Honda has launched a mini-site in support of its new campaign dubbed "The Joy of Problems".

The site features a nice Tetris inspired layout and a jigsaw that users are called to help solving.

Perspective: I like the idea that consumers can work together to solve an online puzzle, however there is currently little incentive to invite my friends to this.  For example, will the online collaboration of solving this puzzle reveal something of importance?

His New York City apartment had to be fumigated. All of his friends have tiny studio apartments. Hotels in New York are insanely expensive. Left with few living options, Mark thought it would be fun and make an interesting video to move into an IKEA store where he’d live and sleep for a week. Never in a million years did he think IKEA would go for it, but miraculously they have a agreed.

Mark moved in early morning Monday January 7th to the IKEA in Paramus, New Jersey and will stay for the week through Saturday January 12th. Every day people can watch a video recap of his day. He will be living in IKEA 24/7 and eating all his meals in the restaurant (he may order Domino’s take out once or twice). Thankfully they have a shower for him in the back offices.

He has a website to record his week in Ikea

http://marklivesinikea.com/

Perspective: This is a great initiative by Mark, but also by Ikea who will gain lots of free publicity from Mark’s live recording of his experience.

Domino’s have created a very flash "pizza builder" which not only provides excellent visuals, but allows you to custom make and then order your creation.

Perspective:  I like this site because it is both engaging, and relevant to the product that Dominos are selling.  It should also provide an excellent source of information that Dominos can use when coming up with new pizza creations.  Perhaps they could even allow consumers to name and vote for their favourite toppings.

Don’t you hate it when you hire a DVD and it’s just not your kind of movie.

Social networks such Criticker and Filmtrust are helping and it’s no surprise that a company who’s very business is about renting movies is trying to improve the “success rate” of hire versus like ratio.

Netflix have announced a contest where the prize is $1 million, to the person or team that can create a better system for improving their movie predictions system.

I love their contest and they describe it here.

Netflix is all about connecting people to the movies they love. To help customers find those movies, we’ve developed our world-class movie recommendation system: Cinematch. Now there are a lot of interesting alternative approaches to how Cinematch works that we haven’t tried. We’re curious whether any of these can beat Cinematch by making better predictions.

So, we thought we’d make a contest out of finding the answer. It’s ‘easy’, really. We provide you with a lot of anonymous rating data, and a prediction accuracy bar that is 10% better than what Cinematch can do on the same training data set. If you develop a system that we judge most beats that bar on the qualifying test set we provide, you get serious money and the bragging rights. But (and you knew there would be a catch, right?) only if you share your method with us and describe to the world how you did it and why it works. To keep things interesting, in addition to the Grand Prize, we’re also offering a USD 50,000 Progress Prize each year the contest runs. It goes to the team whose system we judge shows the most improvement over the previous year’s best accuracy bar on the same qualifying test set. No improvement, no prize.

They even have a leader board to ensure transparency of the competition, and the 2007 winner was recently announced providing a 8.43% improvement on Cinematch.

Perspective: It’s great to see companies outsource innovation in this way, and rewarding the successful innovators. There are many ways to tap into the wisdom of consumers to help with solving challenges like this, it’s just that most brands / companies aren’t prepared to let consumers in.

Your client makes biscuits, and their slogan is “Connect with Cookies”.  You know tv is dying and want to make a name for yourself trying something new and hip.  So you come up with the idea to create a social network around the connecting theme.

This is what Pepperidge Farm’s agency has just done with the creation of the Art of the Cookie website.   Whilst the NY times seems to love the idea, I think it is very poorly executed.

For a start the site budget was $2-3 million presumably to cover building, and advertising the site.
Whilst I do like the site design, it lakes the ability to interact and connect with others, which is afterall the basic essence of the brand.  The name of site is also confusing as I was expecting a site that discusses various ways to create art using or making cookies.  Why isn’t this site called ConnectingThroughCookies.com?

So what would I advise?  

Firstly, this isn’t a destination site and nor should it be.  The brand should be enabling connections by running or giving away Connection parties, sponsoring School Reunions, and enabling their consumers to connect (as opposed to giving them a check list of how to connect).

Provide people the tools to share connection stories, discuss them, and sharing them would be great, but why host them here?   Why not integrate the brand with existing social networks like Facebook, or Shespeaks and join the conversation rather than assuming people will want to spend their precious time coming here to read up on one persons journey across the country.    If you are going to share connections, would you be better working with a site like Meetup.com which is in the business of connecting people.

Tags: cookie, Social Network

Alvin and the Chipmunks is a new movie to be released on Dec 14th.  To promote the movie, the Oddcast software has been used to create quite a unique promotional microsite. The site is called Munkyourself and allows consumers to create a mashup of a chipmunk animated character generated combined with your own voice recording which is of course modified to sound like a chipmunk.

Perspective: The technology is very clever, and the site is simple to use, and allows you to send links or embed the result in your site as I have done below. I like this offering as it has strong ties to the movie.

Tags: , Frontiering Campaigns, movies

Polls and Surveys are 2 easy ways to engage opinions, and Polldaddy has just made things simpler by providing an easy way to embed these utilities into websites / blogs etc.

I’ve put one on my blog in the right hand column and true to form it was easy to add, use and manage.

Perspective: I think Widgets like this are a growth area and Polldaddy’s Open Social commitment will only help to expand it’s 70k footprint of users.

Tags: Campaigns, Products, Websites