Customer Marketer, Digital Strategist, Dedicated Father. Passionate about the current & next web. Enjoying life online as much as offline. Eager to see how they converge.
Five guidelines for adapting Big Ideas for the new media landscape:
1. It’s More Important To Have A Point Of View Than A Line.
Activities thrive better than ads in the new media landscape. So the most useful Big Idea is a point of view than can inspire activities. John Grant refers to this as a Marketing Enthusiasm: a point of view on the world that is bigger than the brand or the product. Persil's 'Dirt Is Good' is more than an eye-catching line. It is a marvelously rich point of view about how children develop through play. For example, its website currently promotes a list of 33 things to do before you're ten. Contrast this with Samsung's alleged Big Idea: 'Imagine'. There's no point of view there, nothing to engage with. So 'Imagine' ends up shoehorned in as the opening to its line of copy. Russell Davies nicely mocked what happens to meaningless Big Ideas online: "It was OK when a Big Idea had to support three TV scripts and some posters, but its flatness shows when the poor digital agency has to turn it into an immersive, online experience, not just a silly game of whack-a-mole with the brand mascot."
2. A Big Idea Cannot Depend On A Line
This seals the deal for me. The real growth media of recent years - music festivals, mobile phones and Facebook applications - don’t have room for them. The fragmentation of media and the shift to global marketing means that Translation, whether in to different channels or different languages, is the priority.
3. One Big Idea Doesn’t Mean One Big Execution.
Historically Big Ideas came in the form of big executions. I first encountered The Future’s Bright, The Future’s Orange through an epic cinema commercial. I thought it was dazzling at the time; I suspect I would find it indulgent today. The best way to manifest a Big Idea today is through a whole bunch of activity. The same positioning could inspire a series of 'marketing molecules' that make the most of the media and the audience. No one molecule is the high point of the brand; all contribute to it. Nike is the brand of Joga Bonito, 10K and Supersonic. Top Shop is the brand of personal shopping, vintage and the Kate Moss range. To steal a quote from Ben Malbon of BBH: media fragments, ideas don’t.
4. Align Your Big Idea To Your Business
Big Idea marketing is most powerful when it brings people along with the business. A truly robust Big Idea should be rooted in how the business generates value, where the business is going, or in the culture of the brand. Apple's 'Think Different' works on all these levels. It’s difficult getting an organisation to buy in to a Big Idea if the accountants and engineers suspect that it's just sugar sculpture from the marketing department. It's easier to get alignment and results out of something that is commercially true. I'll bet that Orange's new 'I Am' idea has more trouble taking root in the company than See What You Can Do had at 02.
5. Match Your Brand Behaviour With Audience Behaviour
A traditional Big Idea didn't care who you were or where you were. But today channels make such a difference to how people deal with ideas: quick, useful interpretations of the brand idea for mobile phones; rich, interactive ones for the Internet, visual spectacles in-store. Brand strategists used to understand consumers as consumers of the brand. I wasted my early days in advertising like a Victorian botanist trying to establish whether buyers of Felix cat food were a different species from people who bought Whiskas. Now brand strategists need to understand their audiences as consumers of media. The most useful channel-planning tool today is probably a Venn diagram of how the brand behaves and how the audience behaves. The overlap should always inspire something interesting.
HT @ouilouis
My presentation from last week's Social Media Forum with some hands-on advice on how to create and manage content on social media.
Pretty gutsy act indeed. See how the owner of a local Swedish home entertainment shop turned himself into a human jukebox and earned attention, worldwide.
Simply one of the coolest slidedecks I've ever seen
HT @moerman
To promote its new chocolate flavored beer, Portuguese brewery Sagres created a website entirely made out of well... chocolate. The baking of movie below shows off some serious skills and it's quite fun to explore the website as well, even though I don't understand a single word of Portuguese...
Burger King and Crispin Porter + Bogusky may well have decided to part ways, but they surely are dedicated to go out with a bang. With Wonder Lust, CP+B added another strong descendant to an already impressive lineage of Burger King campaigns. Here's the gist of it:
The campaign is exclusively aimed at DirecTV subscribers, which can tune to a dedicated channel 111. This channel aires an endless footage of a spinning Whopper. If you watch for five minutes, you get a free Whopper. Watch for 10 minutes, and you get two free Whoppers. And so on. You do have to pay attention, as notifications appear on the screen randomly asking consumers to press a button to make sure they're still watching.
So far, Americans have stared for over 300.000 minutes, which means a whopping 50.000 Whoppers have been given away this week already.
KinectShop allows shoppers to cycle through an assortment of products, in this case purses, and visualize the products as part of their outfit, thereby better informing the purchase decision. The natural interaction offered by the Kinect platform allows the shoppers to quickly develop a 1-to-1 connection with the product through the use of augmented reality. In augmented reality, shelf space is infinite, so while this concept experience is limited to purses it could host entire catalogs of products, such as clothing, hats, sunglasses, shoes, jewelry, makeup and more.
Connecting a foosball table to the web makes total sense to me. The digital scoreboard, league ranking, individual player stats and bragging rights via Twitter are all features that fully grasp the competitive quintessence of the foosball game. Nice work by German digital agency SinnerSchrader.
