Frontiering Talk

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

Guiness is about to launch the most expensive ad in it’s 80 year history. Costing over $20 million the ad features a variety of domino objects which end up creating a large glass of guiness from a tower of books.

This 90 second ad reminds me a little of the Honda Cog commercial and is equally engaging.

Perspective: I think Guiness should leverage this investment to “expand the talkability” of this ad. This could be done by running a consumer generated competition which invites consumers from all over the world to “continue the domino path”, in the same way that Nike did with the soccer chain promotion.

Tags: Frontiering Campaigns

Stacy’s chips .. (part of Frito lay), couldn’t afford to provide a sample of their chips to everyone in the US .. that would be 300 million chip packets. So instead, they sent a sample pack to everyone called Stacy .. which was 133,000 people.

As well as receiving the Brand story, the Stacy recipients were invited to share their sample with their friends with the following message.

“We hope you enjoyed getting your free box of Stacy’s Pita Chips as much as we enjoyed sending them to you. If you did, why not share the joy by sending a FREE gift box to a friend? Since we’ve already sent them to every Stacy, you’re free to send them to Bill or Mary or Cheryl or John—or whoever you think would enjoy Stacy’s chips the most.”

The Stacy Consumers were impressed, and many of them not only shared the sample, but also shared their story online. Like Josh, and Ryan (husband of a Stacy), and this Stacy, and no doubt many others.

Perspective: This is a great example of a brand creating an unexpected positive experience for consumers, that not only rewards, but provides the tools to share that experience when the samples are spread. Positive experiences do make things taste better, and when something tastes better, we tend to repurchase!

Tags: Frontiering Campaigns, Frontiering Products

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

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

Following up the discussion on Video advertising, it seems Google is finally ready to puts advertising into Youtube videos.

Sample here which works if you are using IE as your browser.

The ads appear about 15 seconds after a user begins watching a clip as an overlay. Users can close the ad, but the ads will disappear themselves after about 10 seconds. Rates are suppose to be $20 for 1000 impressions.

Perspective: Google has been testing these ads for a while, and it will be interesting to see how quickly marketeers move into this medium. I expect caution at first, until confidence is established that the right ads can be run against the right content. This initiative may also encourage more content deals between Youtube and major content distributors seeking to monetise their video content.

via NYtimes

Update: looks like Ten (australia tv) may be about to sign a deal with Youtube, reports B&T.

Tags: Frontiering Campaigns, Frontiering Websites