The New Fifteen

No one cares about your stupid startup

2009-12-07T09:08:00.000-08:00

Interactive Beauty App Builds Brand Loyalty For Lancôme

2009-11-19T12:35:00.000-08:00

This is a great casestudy of mobile ans social media working hard for a large brand, specifically a line beauty products. The kicker is that the iPhone app is translated into Chinese and English.
Read the article here.

itunes player from Graffiti, NYC

2009-10-22T07:54:00.000-07:00

Daffy's site relaunch

2009-08-17T11:01:00.000-07:00

Daffy's has relaunched their site and I must say that it, in short, rocks. Whether it increases sales, awareness, consumer participation, brand awareness, etc. remains to be seen. What I like is the interface. It intuitive and easy to zip around. Even the screen loader is cool. A tracking application follows the GPS signals of the delivery trucks around and you can set up alerts so that you are the first to know when new, gotta have it, fashion comes in to your local Daffy's.

Jack Daniel's whiskey brand adds mobile to marketing mix

2009-07-30T08:02:00.000-07:00

Nice mobile campaign from Jack Daniels in Europe. A bit of a swiss army knife solution that expands consumer engagement beyond an existing experiential program. In all, the download numbers are good. Close to 200,000 downloads across all the major platforms speakes to ubiquity of the adaptation of this mobile tool. Read the article here.

Loupe for iPhone

2009-07-13T13:06:00.000-07:00

"With Loupe you can capture your color inspirations so you don't have to try and guess what that shade was when you are back at your computer." Looks cool. Gonna give it a try.

New mix for July 2009

2009-07-08T20:00:00.000-07:00

Sherwin-Williams taps mobile to reach younger demographic

2009-06-05T12:19:00.000-07:00

Nice little iPhone app. from Sherwin-Williams and partners. Clean and intuitive navigation. The color matching tool works well enough but does it adjust for light source, ie natural vs. florescent? A fun app that delivers on User engagement. Read the review here.

2 not 20

2009-06-01T09:10:00.000-07:00

Having worked on an awareness and advocacy program recently for Trojan I am well versed in engaging a younger audience with content: curated, DIY, celebrity-endorsements, etc. A recent government outreach program in England about safe sex went after the same audience via the mobile channel and the results were uh, well limp. Good intentions, right channel, interesting mobisode content play. What killed the program was the fact that each mobisode was 20+ minutes long! In doing our research for Trojan, we arrived at a medium unit of content size at 2min for a variety of reasons. Read about the whole mess here.

OMG! Teens Slash Clothing Spending

2009-04-28T07:00:00.000-07:00

Like a totally cool article about trends in teen apparel spending habits. The long and short is that while clothe spending is down, shoe spending is up. Like, duh!

While the comparable-store sales declines of leading teen retailers have been telling a mostly dismal tale for months now, Piper Jaffray's new "Taking Stock With Teens" survey pretty much confirms it: Among the 8,100 teens surveyed, with a median age of 16.7 years, spending on clothes is down 19%.

A bigger surprise, however, is that they are actually spending more on shoes -- a 9% increase, according to the 17th semiannual survey, and 8% more on accessories. In fact, shoes are hot: "Footwear posted the strongest year-over-year and sequential results at a 4% and 21% gain respectively," the Minneapolis-based brokerage firms says in its report -- "an indication that the strong footwear cycle, particularly relative to the weakness in apparel, continues for the youth demographic."

Link to the article

Smartphones driving mobile shopping: PriceGrabber

2009-04-24T07:59:00.000-07:00

Yeah, I know its not that sexy. But if you read into the article, the numbers build a solid case. The kicker is that the base numbers will just get bigger, wider, hit more demographics: teens, boomers, Moms, etc. While its important to focus on the, "right now," it also very important to focus on the, "whats next."

According to PriceGrabber.com’s Mobile Shopping Behavior Survey, 58 percent of U.S. online consumers already own a Web-enabled mobile phone. Furthermore, of those consumers that own a Web-enabled mobile phone, one in 10 has bought products or services with their device.

link to article

Toshiba tests phone-controlled billboard game

2009-04-01T08:10:00.000-07:00

To promote its laptops and showcase digital signage technology capable of utilizing real-time data over the Internet, electronics giant Toshiba tested an interactive digital billboard in Tokyo last weekend that allowed YouTube users and pedestrians with mobile phones to play video games against each other.

Really? That's all you got?

2009-03-24T11:22:00.000-07:00

Can someone wake this guy up? Search is not the end all, be all. To quote http://twitter.com/storyspring, "A search marketer trashing social media marketing is an umbrella salesman trashing sunblock..." To concure with Storyspring, it is anoying when this occurs, especially in front of the tender ears at OMMA Global Hollywood.

Facebook flashmob shuts down station

2009-02-09T13:31:00.000-08:00

As reported in CNN, the genius of a flash mob to seize control of a moment. This has nice implications for event based marketing efforts. Reminds me of that great scene in the Fisher King, where Robin Williams is in Grand Central and suddenly has the vision that everyone in the station is waltzing.

Guinness mobile campaign lets you rate your pint

2009-02-02T06:33:00.000-08:00

A nice mobile campaign from Guinness. Mobile Card Cast powered the Guinness program. The program asks participans to rate their pint and get a chance to win a trip to Dublin. Ok, its a sweeps program, or is it? This program is about brand loyalty and customer loyalty. As an extension the program asks users to rate their drinking establishment for quality of pour, etc. In what might be called a 'pub loyalty index,' the favorites were rewarded with plaques and such. Read about the program here.

Will Arnett and R/GA deliver the goods for the Superbowl

2009-02-01T12:58:00.000-08:00

trojan widget

2009-01-27T07:53:00.001-08:00

Safe Sex | STI | Contraception | STD

BMW, Gaming and Branding, Oh my

2009-01-27T06:52:00.000-08:00

This is a nice, brand passive iPhone game for BMW Mini. Jumping on the iPhone bandwagon with this free game is a clear way for Mini to increase consumer engagement with the brand. It also makes complete sense because Apple and Mini have a strong overlap of demographics. BMW Mini's financial arm has launched "Mini Liquid Assets," a mobile game available for download at no charge from the iTunes App store.

Pharma Companies and Social Media Marketing

2009-01-23T10:02:00.000-08:00

Nice article about approaching Pharma marketing from the Social Media Marketing angle.

"Over 80% of Internet consumers search online for health information, trusting peer-generated social media content more than pharma company websites and what their physicians say. It has become commonplace to use online support groups to discuss medications or treatments with other patients."

Cadillac dealership leverages mobile marketing at auto show

2009-01-23T09:47:00.000-08:00

Cadillac's CTS

San Diego-based Cadillac dealership Marvin K. Brown Auto Center used mobile to generate buzz around the new CTS car and drive people to its location.

The dealer tapped Ping Mobile to create a campaign with a call to action on the Cox Media network, asking local viewers to text CTS to 269411 to receive a free gas card. The campaign was designed around the 2009 San Diego Auto Show, where the dealer had a booth set up.

"The strategy for this client’s campaign was to engage visitors to the 2009 San Diego Auto Show and make their booth stand out as much as possible, and not just fade into the background like white noise,” said Shira Simmonds, president of Ping Mobile, Englewood Cliffs, NJ.

Martha Stewart Weddings fully mobilizes print ads in latest issue

2009-01-14T15:48:00.000-08:00

Martha is getting involved. I like the notion of twining mobile marketing with a traditional marketing channel, aka magazine special issue publishing. Will this additional engagement channel take root, catch fire, ladder-up to conversion for the advertisers? Activate the la-z-boy leg rest and watch.

The Winter 2009 issue of Martha Stewart Weddings is enabling marketers to provide interactive advertisements in the publication.

Bloomingdale’s and Macy’s are examples of some of the advertisers in the issue. The Winter 2009 issue of the wedding magazine was fully mobilized using SnapTell’s Snap.Send.Get. technology which lets readers take a picture of an ad to receive additional information.

“Virtually every ad in the issue was activated with a tip, including some of the top bridal fashion, jewelry, travel and retail brands in the country,” said Amy Wilkins, senior vice president and publisher of Martha Stewart Weddings, New York.

Continue to the article

Jameson Whiskey Texts Targets On N.Y. Streets

2008-12-11T05:00:00.000-08:00

A very innovative way to use OOH in real-time to engage the user. Other than the cost of the mobile projector and the people manning it, this is seems like a low cost solution. While the CD talks about this being the first of its kind in Advertising, it really was done much earlier and better by these people. Anyway, here is the article and visual.

Insert live text messages directed at passersby into projected outdoor billboards and you've got an innovative new campaign created by Omnicom's TBWA/Chiat/Day New York on behalf of Pernod Ricard's Jameson Irish Whiskey.

The traveling ad show was set to launch in New York City Friday night, at high foot-traffic locations in Chelsea, the Lower East Side, Brooklyn's Williamsburg--and a fourth site still undetermined as of late Friday afternoon when Marketing Daily spoke with TBWA/Chiat/Day Creative Director James Cheung.

The projected ad moves from place to place in search of Jameson's target audience, Cheung explained. For instance, if the Knicks had been playing basketball at Madison Square Garden, that neighborhood could have been a target.

Once in place, the ad is projected onto a wall and a person begins typing real-time text messages aimed at specific people passing and then responding to their reactions (such as "Yes, you, in the blue shirt"). The projections are provided by event marketing agency City Eventions with--at least for launch night--the texting handled by Cheung himself.

As he awaited his debut on the streets, Cheung called the live ads a combination of "chatroom, out-of-home and conversation piece," adding that he was unaware of "anyone else who has done this before."

The conversational wall projections will move on to Los Angeles on Dec. 19, while projected ads without the live messages also begin this month in Boston, Chicago, Denver and Minneapolis. Jameson has also launched a new radio ad in 20 markets, and a trade campaign highlighting that the brand is "Defying the Economic Downturn." Jameson cited AC Nielsen figures showing dollar sales up 33% in the six-month period ending mid-October.

Right in our(one's) backyard

2008-12-03T06:17:00.000-08:00

An Art Director in my group has just shown the big boys how its done. Sean Fournier has a new album out, called, "Oh My." Sure he has a Facebook page and, yeah, he has a mySpace page. Oh and the album is free. Sean took the distribution to the next level and pumped it out through a Peer-to-Peer network. Much like Limewire and the such, Frostwire is on the radar of many. In fact, over the weekend, Frostwire handled 25, 000 downloads of his album. Incredible and a strong use of the internets. See the pr release here.

Mr. Wolff is trippin'

2008-12-02T11:38:00.000-08:00

I am pulling this quote from CNET because it illustrates why most of media elders don't get it. I believe the term, "can't see the forest through the trees," applies here. Within 5 to 10 years these "cretins" are the audience, the user. In fact, they're here right now. We just haven't given them a proper forum. They have strong opinions and equally strong brand preferences. They may not be buying big ticket items but they are buying an ass-load of shoes. To paraphrase David Ogilvy, "The consumer isn't a moron; she's your daughter."

Michael Wolff, whose new, lascivious Rupert Murdoch bio The Man Who Owns The News has taken the New York media industry by storm, stirred up some social-networking class warfare in an interview Monday with BusinessWeek's Jon Fine.

"If you're on MySpace now, you're a (expletive) cretin. And you're not only a (expletive) cretin, but you're poor," said Wolff, whose previous book Burn Rate chronicled dot-com excess in the late '90s and who openly attests to hating the word "blog."

"Nobody who has beyond an eighth grade level of education is on MySpace. It is for backwards people," added Wolff, who is also the founder of Newser.

Jaffe Juice

2008-10-30T08:36:00.000-07:00

OK, so I am hooked. Saw him speak the other night and he made so much damn sense. Good thing he has a blog, so I can stalk him from a comfortable distance, 25' or more. If you are remotely interested in where Marketing and Communications is heading, go here. He has a new term called, "Conversational Marketing." I like it and I think it makes total sense.

Info Crack

2008-10-30T08:31:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the new information crack. SiloBreaker is an insane aggregator site. "More than a news aggregator, Silobreaker provides relevance by looking at the data it finds like a person does. It recognises people, companies, topics, places and keywords; understands how they relate to each other in the news flow, and puts them in context for the user."

Yes, I know its not a new ad channel but you are researching your next campaign or push, this is your first stop. This site will provide the context for anything.

Mobile Stars in Adidas 360° Campaign

2008-09-06T07:53:00.001-07:00

New campaign run by AdMob. To publicize the launch of its new ‘Team Signature’ line of shoes, Adidas ran an integrated campaign which featured some of the biggest NBA stars teaching young players the value of playing as a team. The campaign included TV, in-store, print, online, and mobile components. 5 million hits in the first week. Whoooo. See the rest of the article here.

Arm & Hammer's Essentials

2008-09-06T07:35:00.001-07:00

It's up and running, www.armandhammeressentials.com and its beautiful. Big thanks to Michael and team for seeing through this site supporting a new A and H product launch. Go and buy ass-loads of it in your local market! Feel good about your self and feel good about the environment.

Smaato

2008-09-06T07:18:00.000-07:00

Smaato has developed an innovative mobile advertising platform that enables dynamic response advertising for mobile phones. Call and event-driven mobile advertisements are embedded in personalized and contextually relevant content.

Pinch Media

2008-09-06T07:17:00.001-07:00

the only advertising company for the iPhone that sits down with developers and helps them determine when advertising makes sense, and when it doesn’t.

New Content from The Vans Warped Tour for Trojan

2008-08-27T11:16:00.000-07:00

New PSA my group has produced for Trojan. We have this and 16 other PSA's from loads of fun bands I have never heard of on the Vans Warped Tour. I am not an old fart at 41 but this makes me feel like one. :-) Much thanks to all the bands for pitching in for a good cause.

Musestorm

2008-07-22T11:48:00.000-07:00

MuseStorm a single platform or engine that you can use to produce, manage, analyze and deliver widgets across viral and social environments. iPhone, facebook, mySpace, you name it. A very simple interface that takes the complexity out of multi-environment social placements.

Media

2008-07-19T08:23:00.001-07:00

Grabbed from MediaPost, "In steps, mediaFORGE - which built apps for Mitt Romney and PetSmart charities - is trying to solve the problem by marrying old new media distribution with new new media formats (say that five times fast). Its rich-media ad unit displays and distributes fully functional widgets. The banner ad behaves like a widget, and the widget behaves more like an ad.

Overstock.com testing showed the new IAB-compliant ad unit ran the retailer's widget that pulled in daily special product offerings. Viewers could play with the Overstock catalog in the banner just as they would in a stand-alone widget, but those who clicked through on the richer media to the site became even richer prospects.

Mixercast widget

2008-06-17T11:02:00.001-07:00

Ringside

2008-06-11T14:07:00.001-07:00

Ringside

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© Emily Forgot 2004-2008

2008-06-05T14:37:00.001-07:00

Blogged with the Flock Browser

yellowpapermould

2008-06-05T14:33:00.001-07:00

yellowpapermould

Blogged with the Flock Browser

pat, pat, pat

2008-05-28T12:40:00.001-07:00

Well, well. A little pat on the back is needed here. An integrated, multi-channel campaign for Carnival Cruise Lines' Fun Ship Island. Using display ads, search, PR, blogging, viral tagging, outdoor billboards, print and a mobile campaign in Times Square, the campaign drove 220 million online impressions and a butt-load of traffic to www.funshipisland.com

Big thanks to my crack team at Avenue A | Razorfish for pulling it off. WººT!

Open Files: Nine Digital Trends for the Future

2008-05-22T08:30:00.001-07:00

Open Files: Nine Digital Trends for the Future

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Widgets, Kungfu Panda Widgets

2008-05-22T07:46:00.001-07:00

Nice application of widget by Interpolls and DreamWorks. Through a series of questions the widget recommends which character from the movie you should train with. Apparently, I need to train with Master Mantis. The brand interaction and engagement is smooth and clocks in at just over a minute. The social/viral aspect is pretty clean too.

Mobile Marketing Guidelines 2008

2008-05-21T10:54:00.000-07:00

Hot off the presses, bitches. Get it now and please, practice safe mobile marketing.

SnapTell

2008-05-21T10:39:00.000-07:00

A fun new mobile app. that gets around a lot of the hurdles of mobile marketing. Their motto is snap.send.get. Relying on image recognition technology, the user snaps a photo of the required image, mms's it to an address at snaptell.com and within a minute you have a reply in your inbox with messaging or an offer from the advertiser. Its in beta with Rolling Stone and Men's Health trying out programs.

MUTO is out!

2008-05-20T13:42:00.001-07:00

MUTO is out!

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Data Portability: Facebook, Google and MySpace

2008-05-20T10:25:00.001-07:00

Data Portability: Facebook, Google and MySpace

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Thank you Sprint

2008-02-17T08:20:00.000-08:00

big thanks to Sprint for supporting this 2D barcode scanner format. Not wildly supported in the states but massively supported around the world(Japan, Korea, China, Europe, etc.) this little sucker unlocks a world of possibilities for us interactive folks. Go here for the Sprint update and see below for my previous post on Smartpox.

Get your Android on

2008-02-17T08:13:00.001-08:00

Ok, this is a bit geeky but come on, its cool. Be the first on your block to contribute to Google's open source mobile platform.

Smartpox in the wild

2007-12-23T07:48:00.000-08:00

An interesting development in the use of Smartpox in mainstream media. In a recent entry, AARF's design blog had a nice pick:

CBS’s NUMB3RS Features Avenue A | Razorfish’s Smartpox 2D Barcodes?

Shiny Turds

2007-10-26T04:49:00.000-07:00

Its not always about the newest channel or vehicle of expression. Its not how shiny or clean one's layout is. And it certainly isn't about how often your shiny new expression is seen by others. If your creative doesn't say say something meaningful, stand for something meaningful and tell this as a simple story, well, then we have a huge problem. These days its easy to get caught up in execution because the tools we have at our hands are peerless and impart a psuedo-hipster halo effect around the message or product. The bottom line is not matter how shiny it is, it's still a piece of shit. It might look nice but it smells and it smells bad.

The best practitioners of this mantra are abound. Here are a few:

Ok, this one is :60

2007-10-15T07:38:00.001-07:00

Yeah, false advertising but I came across this over the weekend and its a good example of a tv spot, that tells a story, keeps it simple and has some fun. Jeff was great to work with. The Director and DP took a simple storyboard and breathed life into it. And, the crowd went nuts at Turner field when they would play it on the JumboTron.

BlueCasting

2007-09-28T06:14:00.000-07:00

I've just been on the phone with those nice folks at Filter | Worldwide in London and we were talking about how their proximity marketing system call BlueCasting could work for my client. Essentially, it is a mobile marketing solution that utilizes your smartphone's Bluetooth capabilities. BlueCasting deploys small transmitters that transmit up to a 300 meter radius and when you walk within the range the transmitter detects you and send you a short message with a Bluetooth icon. If the user opt-ins, its gotta be a sexy message, then the transmitter can deliver files such as a still image, a sound sample, a video clip, a MIDI file, a WML deck, or a vCard/vCal event.

Now if you are running this in, lets say, Times Square or Tokyo, you are in luck. The market penetration or saturation of Bluetooth devices is deep but in Kansas City, you might not have such good numbers at the end of the day. However, the good news is that this type of marketing operates on three levels: 1) audience proximity, 2) viral buzz, 3) pr buzz. Nike, Absolute, Discover, etc have jumped on this. Nike built out a massive program in Tokyo that was a city-wide interactive scavenger hunt for sneakers. Crazy, right? Very cool? Oh yes.

www.bluecasting.com

www.filterww.com

ThinkPad Reserve Edition in NYTimes

2007-09-13T07:20:00.000-07:00

A nice pick from the Times' Circuits section for the Reserve Edition. Led the team that created this fun site. The cool part is that all images of the product are modeled in Maya and woven together in Flash. We were able to create a much more fluid approach to, 'discovering' the product rather than traditional photography or video angle. The teaser launch of this product was also a great lesson in viral marketing. That is for another post.

the article is here.

the site is here.

Smart Pox

2007-09-11T10:25:00.000-07:00

This is a very fun mobile tool that no one is using quite yet. Very much like Geo Tagging was before Jeep got a hold of it. Essentially, you can create a 2d barcode, the pox, that is readable by your phone via a downloadable application that is java based. The Smartpox creates a link between the offline and online world through the decoding of the "pox."

For example: say you're band wants to gain word-of-mouth exposure about a new song you have released. Plaster the town with posters that have the Smartpox on it. Encourage users to decode the "pox" which could lead them to the url with your new song embedded in it. Have them download right to their phone/mp3 player and you're in business.

www.smartpox.com

10 is the new 15

2007-09-09T07:38:00.002-07:00

15 used to be the new 30, while 30 was, forever, the new 60. Infotainment commercials even took over for a while, 60 minutes is the new 30! With all of the new ad formats, from Out of Home to Rich Media, it hard to keep up. One prays that their compatriots in Media have their heads on straight when structuring the Media Buy.

Low and behold on a recent buy, I noticed a new format. So small as to be barely noticed! Welcome to 10 seconds as the new arbiter of marketing communications. A challenge to be sure for working in the 10 second format is no slight turn. Tell a story in 30 seconds, sure. Tell a story in 15 seconds, um o.k. Now you have five less seconds. What are you going to do? Well MacGuyver, just what are you going to do?

Questions: Are you going to sell brand benefit or product benefit? A blend of both? Do you have an intro or a setup to the story? How long do you want to hold the end title? If you hold the end title for 5 seconds this means you have 5 seconds for product or brand attributes. Or maybe you hold the end title for 3 seconds, which means you now have 7 seconds to tell your story.

Suffice to say, a unit like this is a unique challenge. Yes, it may strike fear in the hearts of Creative folks everywhere but ultimately it is a challenge. In a way, we are really catching up to the folks in Out of Home and Consumer Package Goods. A highway billboard has to deliver its message to someone driving by it at 65 mph. A read of 2-3 seconds tops. The same goes with any product stacked in a supermarket aisle. The read has to be instantaneous. A sense of recognition and brand story has to occur in the blink of an eye.

Good luck to all of us in the design of the new 10 second spot. Oh, btw, there is a new Out of Home unit in a bus stop shelter that has an animation time of 4 seconds. Wooof!

Welcome!

2007-09-09T07:38:00.001-07:00

Hello!

Welcome to my new blog. I have set up this forum to talk about all the new formats and channels for Interactive Marketing Communications. A long-winded explanation for sure but we are in an era constant change and there has to be something macro to explain all the micro.

Please join in the discussion. I prefer dialogues to monologues. :-)