Digital Hive

Knob Hill - er, sidewalk

In the interest of full disclosure, if you're the Pope or a Cardinal, etc. you might find this a tad off color, the product is in the beautifully euphemised "family planning" category. Consider yourself warned.....

So -  you say outdoor advertising is boring. Lacking the experiential aspect of interactive. Limited to push marketing barking from the billboards.

Think again, possums - and check out this recent Belgian example from Durex which I believe takes the medium to a new level. Street topography is integrated into "graffiti" to demonstrate the key product feature.

And walking across the pavement becomes a virtual demonstration of the product's key benefit. Clever - yet clinical. What will pharma think of next?

I'll never look at a cobblestone the same way again.

Thanks to Ad-Rag for this one.

Consumer-Generated Marketing

Check out this fabulous blog posting from Kevin Dugan all about consumer-generated marketing (which is a key tenet of our home-grown Active Branding philosophy). "By creating CGMkt, passionate consumers become an extension of a company."

Kevin calls Consumer-Generated Marketing (CGMkt) "the ultimate in authenticity" - because it comes from the customer, not the marketer. He also identifies the dark side of CGMkt - when the customer doesn't like what he/she finds out about a brand.

Tons of great examples (some with creative) - VW Polo, Flickr-vision, Converse, even the much-lauded the Neistat Brothers' iPod "dirty secret" movie that was designed to reveal to the world that iPod batteries aren't quite up to snuff.

Definitely a post (and blog) worth reading (and, commenting on!)

Marketing to women - the code's been cracked

Check out this provocative article on AdAge.com (registration required) about what it takes to market to women.

In it, Martha Barlatta (a specialist in marketing to women) says that "any time you place and create advertising to reach women, you are going to want to make sure you are speaking their language. Men and women operate within two distinct gender cultures. And although they are speaking the same language, they aren’t necessarily motivated by the same words, images or concepts."

She's outlined 7 key concepts that help marketers become fluent in female gender culture:

1. Better real than ideal - women connect with other real women, not airbrushed fantasy women

2. Beware of talking about women's "unique needs" -  women don't want to feel different!

New car smell like you've never smelled it before

Check out this fabulous AdLand post about a cool campaign Mitsubishi is running in Northern Sweden.

Mitsubishi and its agency, Miami of Sweden hung posters with wunderbaums (that's apparently the Swedish way of saying pine-scented car air freshener shaped like a Christmas tree) inside portapottys at a park. The posters proclaimed "free new car guarantee for three months*" as a headline, while the asterisked small print declared that this was the life-span of the wunderbaums and after that you might want to consider buying a new Mitsubishi instead.

Sure it's a category sell (all new cars have that luscious "wunderbaum" aroma) - but it's still a great idea. Why?

Where the boys are

Hats off to Brand Noise for a great post about how and where to reach young males these days.   They call attention to Business 2.0's new article which highlights marketers and chanells that are winning.

Who's doing this well? Well they aren't advertisers; think of them as wranglers who are drawing guys together in large numbers, which advertisers can then pepper with highly targeted pitches (some of which, by the way, might not be allowed on network TV). What follows is a look at four upstarts -- Action Media's custom-car show Hot Import Nights, gaming network Xfire, online video venue Heavy, and blog newsfeed advertiser Pheedo -- that are helping big-name brands develop new strategies that reach young men.

These four companies are also surprisingly smart about keeping costs low, so each stands a solid chance of making money; two, in fact, are already profitable. More important, they're all pioneering new forms of marketing that could alter mainstream media.

The :30's not dead yet, mates

OK, ok, so on the surface this just more manufactured marketing. But I also think there's an interesting lesson here.

Meet Tanqueray's new virtual spokesdude, Tony Sinclair. The site's not great. There's no interactivity. There's no viral? Hello people, it's 2005.

Also, the site isn't hackable. Not that I'm turning into an IT guru or something. But, hey, I would've loved to be able to put a picture of the dashing Tony Sinclair in this post instead of the boring old bottle o Tanqueray you see at left. Also, how fun it would've been to Dr, Angus-ify dear Tony - enabling people to impress their friends with his pithy maxims about the high life.

What's up Tanqueray?

However, the :30s on the site are a scream. And make it worth visiting. My favorite piece of copy from Tony Sinclair: "It's no coincidence that the first letter in the word martini is  mmmmmmmmmmmmm." (followed by demonic laughter, naturally).

The lesson for me is: great creative still wins, even if it's just TV spots. And, great TV spots are still better than bad interactive. The most potent combination (of course) is cross-channel great creative - which is hard to pull off.

Control and success are not necessarily the same thing

Glenn Engler has been talking to a few of us about an interesting NY times article that also got the attention of other marketing blogs.  Its all about Scion missing its mark on targeting the youth market (average age of actual purchasers is more forty-something than twenty-something).

Reading this immediately made me think of Alex Wipperfurth's thesis in his excellent book Brand Hijack.

The reason I think this is relevant here is that Scion is, arguably, a brand that set out to be ‘hijacked’ by consumers. The way it turned out, they might have gotten hijacked by a group that was a little different from who they intended. While this might mean that they failed, this is not necessarily the case. Here is what Wipperfurth has to say about consumer targeting and brand hijacks:

Consumers of hijacked brands are looking for meaningful connections to the product. This connection is established through a common value system rather than a common demographic denominator, or even a psychographic one [my italics]. Consumers establish a community around a brand because they believe the brand believes in them. Marketers therefore need to humanize their targeting exercises. After all, you can’t collaborate with a statistic. You can’t co-create your brand with a “twenty-one to thirty-five year old suburban college educated professional”, but you can collaborate with a group of people that share a set of values.

Don't play this Podcast too loudly!

In an effort to reach young listeners with risque marketing messages at the same time it avoids FCC decency rules, condom maker Durex has purchased product placement advertising in podcasts.

Podcasting is a new medium that uses the Internet to distribute radio-like audio files for downloading into iPods and other MP3 players. The digital distribution system operates outside of the Federal Communications Commission's regulatory jurisdiction.

Although it only emerged as a viable mass medium within the last six months, podcasting is already a craze among younger "digerati." The new entertainment technology has also quickly drawn mainstream advertisers like General Motors Corp. An estimated 22 million Americans have iPods or MP3 players that can play podcast audio files.

Durex last month.....

TV moving to the internet?

I had an interesting meeting with a friend recently.  I asked my friend what he watches on TV and he said "I don't watch TV, I use the internet."  Now, we have seen posts about people spending more time on the internet, but here is a guy who has totally switched from television to the internet, including watching broadcasts from places like CNN.

This experience made me wonder if the internet is to television as wireless phones are to landlines.  That is, are we watching the internet replace television, just as wireless phones are replacing landlines.  Clearly, we are in the very early stages of this happening - think wireless circa 1985.  And, there are some technological issues with this happening today.  Regardless of the hype, there are serious bandwidth issues to prevent this happening at scale today.  But there seems to be a transition afoot.

RSS: another nail in the coffin for 'interruption' advertising?

One hot topic on the web right now is how advertising might start to invade RSS feeds.  While its almost certainly happening, and will continue to happen, it should be noted that RSS is fundamentally suited to a "pull" not a "push" advertising model.

What do I mean by that?  Simply this: the old-fashioned advertising model involves interrupting what you are doing with a sales message of some sort.  In other words, you did not ask to see my ad, I just "pushed" it at you.  That message may or may not be relevant or engaging to you (it probably is'nt).  The quest to make it more relevant has typically been pursued by people in media departments, who try to ensure that they are buying media in the right places where people who would be receptive to a given message congregate.