Thursday, March 26, 2009

Viral Agencies Are The New Ad Agencies

Does this great ad for Samsung LED TVs from the Viral Factory herald a new dawn in agency land. Essentially what they do is broadcast communicatiuons that connect with people so much so that they pass it on. These ads are based on good solid insight, great creative ideas, they are seeded cleverly, optimised and then they measure the hell out of them. 

I was at an event afew years ago when an old ad man pointed out that digitalads were rubbish because people don't stand around the water cooler talking about them.  They are now, and the watercooler is called facebook.

Though it is not necessarily about the numbers over 4.5 Million people have seen the sheep with over 13,000 votes, averaging 5 stars.

For them viral is not a noun it is an adjective.

As I suggetsed afew years ago, ad agencies had one last opportunity to hit the ball out of the park by recognising the potential of online video. Afew have recognised this new world, most are still treating it as abit of fun on the side. 

The majority of the views of the Drumming Gorilla were online. Dove Evolution was an online ad that then went on to TV. Which one was the TV ad, which one was the viral? They are not just good ads. They are good virals.

Successes are few and far between. Viral companies seem to have a better hit rate.

Marketing 2.0 Needs Agency 2.0


Excuse the personal tag cloud at the beginning... a ppt version of the Black Swan Agency post.

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Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Digital News To Your Desktop

Here is Ogilvy's Vergecast widget, appropriately named after their worldwide Verge events and a small application that will keep you updated every day on what's going on in the digital world, in- and outside Ogilvy. 

It pulls the 200 most recent news items published on Truffles, our intranet, and conveniently allows you to scroll through them by date or by category (eg. news on advertisers going digital, facts and stats, mobile marketing, blogs and podcasts, search, digital television, etc).

Get the
Yahoo! Widget Engine which will allow you to run this (and other) widgets.

Save t
he following file to your hard-drive open the zip file and doubleclick on the widget file.

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Monday, March 23, 2009

If Free Naked Ladies Can't Sell Your Product...



...you are in trouble. In an attempt to get people to download Silverlight microsoft are offering vintage issues of Playboy, FREE. 

Unfortunately they people are relunctant and are giving Microsoft a pasting, prefering to boycott the shoddy technology and view the oodles of online free German porn instead.

Sex sells, unless you are Microsoft.

Hat tip adland

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Sunday, March 08, 2009

Mobile Marketings Biggest Problem

Is its name. At the Ogilvy Telco Conference in Barcelona last month we had a number of interesting sessions, and a number of dull ones: if I hear another "Advertising Is Dead Presentation, I think I might have to do a "Presenter Is Dead" series. 

Anyway there was a lively debate at the end of the two days about how mobile and advertising needs to work together. Surrounded by the great, good, rich and scarily intelligent, I had a couple of points:

1. know you audience - stop trying to sell mobile everything & segment what you  sell by marketing task: branding, direct, reputation, service and product. 

2. love your enemies - sir martin sorrell used the frenemy phrase when talking about google - it is the same with mobile suppliers - this industry more that any other requires multiple partnerships to succeed. 

3. stop talking about money first.



Saturday, March 07, 2009

Evolution of Twitter?

I am thinking the evolution of twitter will be segmentable tweets or a way to prioritise and rank twitters. Four thousand followers on the ogilvy account mean that it is difficult to keep up. 

For example - my tubinator "the jubilee line is down" alerts get lost amid a myriad of other tweets.

Grouping these somehow, or multiple tweet subsets seems a natural progression and a way to provide time relevant info alongside nice to know stuff. 

They could be given variable life-expectancy, too.

Thoughts?

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A Future Vision by Microsoft



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Hat tip to Blogilvy for the find.


Friday, March 06, 2009