Slicecast

I saw this today via Seth Godin, thanks. Blendtec is a US company I had not heard of 20 minutes ago. Now I want to buy one of their $1,250 $825 (now on sale) home blenders. Why is this? Very simple - they demonstrated that their product works, and not only does it work it kiss the a** of every blender I have ever seen before. I recently bought a high end smoothie blender, with a high torque motor and awesome ice smoothing capabilities - but does my blender turn ice into snow.. no.

After posting a collection of videos titled "Will it Blend?" to YouTube (YouTube profile here) and creating a supporting site at www.willitblend.com they have managed to convince me. The site is not pretty, the videos are dorky - but WHO CARES - the product (remember your 4 P's of marketing?) works. And works well (OK the video might be fake, but I doubt it..). Anyway - Seth says he has one and it rocks - so it's got a recommendation I can trust.

Anyway, without further ado - check out the best of the five videos - Blending Marbles (MARBLES!):

So, let's hope Blendtec sell more blenders because of this

This week I have mostly been thinking about Consumer Participation, the process in between the extremes of Consumer Generated Content and Brand Advertising. Consumer Participation might also be referred to as 'Engagement', or a measure of participation in a specific or broad brand level model. It's really come from looking at the effects of the Dove campaign I reported on last week, and some other stuff that has emerged from YouTube. Seems we can't get away from video these days..

So in the last week the blogosphere seems to have gone Dove Evolution crazy. Some immediate metrics I've been able to pull are:

Data valid to 1 November 2006 -

• 62 individual video's tagged "Dove Evolution" on YouTube
• 2,490,090 combined viewings of the Top 10 of these videos
• 3,698 ratings of the Top 10 of these videos (0.15% rating conversion)
• 1,594 blog entries tagged "Dove Evolution" via Technorati with some authority (4,146 with any authority)
  

Technorati trend for "Dove Evolution" (01-Nov-06)

The technorati trend chart shows the huge spike (yes the volumes are low.. but look at the spike) since the original YouTube video launched. Remember - all this buzz is for a TV campaign with an agency uploaded video to YouTube.

All in all this is rather impressive.

So it got me thinking, clearly Consumers Participation is happening, the numbers are not necessarily off the chart, but as with all conversion metrics we can observe a funnel - 2.5 million viewings with considerable commenting, rating and general YouTube participation. Thousands of blog entries, that tie a specific emotion to the campaign - each blog entry with a micro-sphere of influence (defined through the Small World Phenomenon - I have a network, each individual connects to another network and so on). My 10 blog readers are influenced by me who will influence others. Rather interesting WOM connotations there.

If consumers are therefore participants in advertising, directly or indirectly this will help us to clarify the confusion around definitions of "Engagement", and will help us to define metrics (more specifically consistent metrics) that relate to the influence of a campaign.

It occurs to me that Engagement is hierarchical, that the funnel applies and that different segments will engage in different ways. Like in the example above, when we connect through digital channels there are different levels of participation ranging from Consumer created (often spoof) advertising through to viewing. This isn't necessarily bad - your mother probably won't fire up iMovie and create her own TV Ad for her favourite brand, but then if she watches a genuine piece of Information not Advertising she may be influenced to research further.

This leads me to the conclusion. If we want to create a framework for measurement around the concept of engagement, or Consumer Participation, then we need to think multidimensional in order to capture the nature of the participation. From here we can then further refine to define specifics against target segments (or use it as a basis for defining segments). Here's how I visualise it:

Thus, we have a starting point for defining Engagement.

:) 

Poor AT&T in the US, it seems that they have been talking the talk but not walking the walk. And the blogging world is not impressed. Let me explain what has happened. I read on Sean Coon's blog via AdRants that SBC have recently bought AT&T (might be old news but to me its new, but I live in Asia..) and the new outdoor campaign claims that "Blogging. Delivered." - a fair thing to say, and similar to the old "Internet. Powered by Cisco" campaign.

But the blogging community have picked up that a search on the AT&T corporate site for "Blog" does not yield any results. Oh dear.

This is bad for a two reasons as I see it, let me explain:

1. Integrated Marketing failure. At the very least AT&T should have put some kind of digital content in place to tie the atl into their brandsite, for most brands this would be the minimum requirement of a big brand campaign such as this.
2. Look at your target audience and realise what you're talking about. Blogging right now is still fairly niche, it's cool, but niche. Those involved in blogging are early adopters, which means they are more likely to be online, digitally savvy and ready to voice an opinion. Lets say for example the campaign had suggested "Email. Delivered." - the same comments would have applied, but would have largely been ignored, because hey - everyone sends email right? Caveat: of course this campaign may be multi pronged, and this message might exist..

Of course it's difficult for an agency to pick up on something like this in the planning stage - most likely for the atl agency it sounded brilliant - think of the conversations: "hey, brief was to demonstrate AT&T deliver internet traffic, how can we crystalise that?" "dude, blogging is cool right now!" "yeah, blogging powered by at&t" "nah, cisco did powered, how about delivered?" "agreed". It's another example where what may seem like a small mistake in the campaign strategy could well lead into a PR disaster for AT&T - from most likely an innocent mistake in the planning..

Still - think about the fun that could come from this - vis a vis the Mastercard ad parodies:

Creating the billboard campaign - $25m

Forgetting to add website content - $0

Getting flamed by bloggers - Priceless

Feeling a bit evil today!

The Million Dollar Homepage, a project by UK student Alex Tew to sell 1,000,000 pixels of advertising space on a permanent webspace (like a digital billboard / times-square) has now sold 999,000 pixels.

The Million Dollar Homepage 

In fact the page is going to top $1m, as the final 1,000 pixels are now being auctioned on eBay (bid's currently stand at $23,200). Advertisers are an eclectic collection of casino's, individuals, small businesses (I am Ling. I sell damn cheap new UK cars. Wah!!!) and big brands (including Orange, The Times)

Classic disintermediation advertising model, and as Alex rightly says we can expect to see many copycats emerging...all I want to say is: Well Done Alex!

Pepsi have just launched what is possibly one of the biggest campaigns I've seen in a long time with the purpose of acquiring names and email addresses for their customer database. An integrated campaign based around one (exceptionally large) prize and hosted on the url www.heapsrich.com.au the site is there to provide lots of humour (linking off to two separate microsites where games are hosted).

Click to read more ...

Pink Panty Poker - a unique brand experience?

Crispin Porter & Bogusky's new Victoria's Secret campaign "Pink Panty Poker" attempts to draw users into an exciting world of strip poker and an immersive brand experience where I get to watch the young models get undressed to see them wearing the latest Victoria's Secret "Pink" lines. When I first read about this, I was under the impression that the site was intended for the girls - but I think it's more likely to gain a bigger cult audience from the guys. A quick pop quiz around the office indicated that the girls here would much rather see the underwear rather than going through the semi-sleazy approach of strip poker. Granted that the entire game took over 25 minutes to play, and you rarely get that kind of exposure through a campaign, and the execution was reasonably well put together.

But what was missing?

After playing the game I wanted to see something exciting - some kind of award for spending so much time with the brand - at the very least (as a guy) I would have like some suggestions from Victoria's Secret on which of the dainty little things I should immediately purchase on the Victoria's Secret site. But nothing. Very disappointing - all I got was a "Play Again" link and a "visit Victoria's Secret". So thankfully the site opened up in the "Pink Section" - but there seemed very little to make me think that the game and the "Pink" section were related. Of course I'm sure the girls get it, but the girls I speak to want more - and they are more than happy to buy - judging by the weekly imports of Victoria's Secret items we get delivered into the office.