The silly season is never ending at the Orange offices, as you can see from The Feed: a random collection of light hearted fun designed to get all buddy with customers. This week it’s a Santalookalike competition. But in the past they’ve posted ‘Secret Portraits’ (student illustrators interpreting your tweets), the Film Flipper (a very basic tool to randomly choose the movie you’ll see), and who can forget the Singing Tweetograms. People tend to hate telcos like they hate banks. Rather than serving up this sort of fluff, I wonder if it would just be better to you know…give people what they want…like skilled call centre staff and accurate billing. Am I being grumpy? Sorry.
Some campaigns based on user generated content are good. Some are not. I realise the ‘It’s no picnic’ campaign won awards but I don’t know why. How engaging is it to watch 30 seconds of someone trying to talk while stuffing their face with a Picnic bar? Personally, I much prefer the slice of life moments from Beechies’ latest campaign, inviting fans to submit stories too good not to share (just like their chewing gum). It’s fun and the story lines (if not the idea of sharing) are original.
Lavazza has created a platform whereby people living outside of Italy can ask Italians for expert advice on the big issues, like falling in love (see the video for the full rundown). It’s a nice idea that’s on brand and well designed but the stats from the dedicated website and YouTube – in terms of both views and votes after 6 weeks – make me wonder how well it’s been seeded (in-store, on travel sites and so on). Fingers crossed for more quality content along the lines of ‘Episode 1‘ that will elevate the idea from a passing ad campaign to a true reference point for people.
Another campaign from Dare, this time a fictitious Product Testing Institute created for the launch of Sony’s Xperia X10. The general thrust is that the X10 is the easiest smartphone to use, no matter whether you’re a guido, glam, toddler or model. You can tell these are paid actors from the whole faux reality kind of way it has been shot (complete with deadpan central character). I wonder if the viewing would have been more compelling had they used real dumb people. Not that you ever want to make people look stupid but sometimes they just are. The YouTube numbers ranged from 300,000 to 1.2 million views per clip so I think the campaign pretty much did it’s job in terms of eyeballs. And I doubt it woul have cost too much to produce. So pats on the back all round, I’d say.
One of the easiest ways to engage fans is to get them voting for something, ideally more than once. With this in mind, Dare has created the human avatar to promote a new PC game called All Points Bulletin. APB allows players to customise their appearance to the nth degree. So the folk at Dare thought, why not let fans transform a real person into a game character? I’m not sure how many votes this three-week campaign realised, but I see the six YouTube clips averaged approximately 33,000 views each. This is slightly better than the 378 followers on Twitter. (Maybe gamers are too busy playing to be tweeting – or just too young.)
Your fascist employer may have banned you from trademe and YouTube but have you discovered the joy of World Golf Tour? Currently in beta mode, this game is very addictive. The graphics are top notch and you can chat with players around the world – as you play them! But you’ll have to buy credits if you want fancy stuff like pro clubs or a customised avatar. These types of virtual goods have become a real cash cow for game developers in the past few years. So much so that the total US market for virtual goods is set to pass $2.1 billion in 2011,* up from $1.1 billion in 2009. All this despite a major recession!
*I read this in the Financial Times so it must be true.
You’re most probably blind if you haven’t seen any of ‘The Man Your Man Could Smell Like’ campaign by W+K, but in any case here’s the case study. Man, I wish I had worked on it.
Tweet nicely about Old Spice and it could be you receiving a personalised message viewed by millions on YouTube, just as fans including Ellen DeGeneres, Perez Hilton and Rose McGowan have already. I wonder if these celebs are actually paid ambassadors. Not a silly idea when you consider the respective popularity of all involved. In any case, I’m impressed by the way the brand is monitoring social media and acknowledging folk. It reminds me of a nice email I sent to the makers of Cyclops yoghurt last week. They didn’t even reply (!) so I wrote again, saying I lied and that their yoghurt really sucked. Yeah that’ll teach ‘em.
Most websites don’t need much to stand out. But they do need something, even if it’s only a simple click and drag to view sunnies from either side. I’m working on a marine safety site at the moment. Fairly bog standard product stuff that I want to make more memorable by introducing a ‘Tales of the Unexpected’ theme to the landing page, based on survivors’ testimonials. Wish me luck!
