AR - Skoda Fabia Rally Driving - experience !!

Here is another good example of AR being used for an extremely experiential product - a car. Skoda Fabia has used Augmented Reality on this promotion are able to diliver much more than merely awareness. Think about what you (as a consumer) are getting beyond merely visiting a website or seeing and add. 

Rather than waiting for foot falls in their showrooms, Skoda has been able to take the fun of a test drive into the houses of it's potential customers and to get them to experience the thrill of driving (almost) without ever leaving their house. 

Augmented Reality - will finally take things to the next level of connection.

Augmented Reality (AR) has always been exciting however, how finally it is being adopted by more and more brands everyday and it could be / would be is the next big (really big) to hit the marketing community. AR enables a live direct or indirect view of a physical real-world environment whose elements are “augmented” by virtual computer-generated sensory input such as sound or graphics.

AR brings the virtual & real world a lot closer and open up a host of opportunities which are being increasingly exploited by brand owners. Here is a simple example used by Burger King to highlight “Value for a 1 USD” – an interesting and effective way to get the point across and ensure the engagement is longer, personal and more sharable. 

AR brings the advantage & need of physical engagement to the virtual world. It changes the one way communication to a far more engaging conversation. Each experience is very personal and unique to the consumer - enjoyable enough for him / her to share with friends on the social networks. 

AR is integrating well with all other media devices be it mobile, newsprint, internet, last mile / retail etc. Look out for more examples in the next few posts. 

Media & the power of social networks.

The impact of the social media on traditional news media and the societies they serve is enormous. While the traditional media houses claim to be embracing the social media power by of twitter accounts of their star journalists and integrating tools of SM within their programming, they seem to be battling a new age business model in journalism, which moves away from the massive “organization” set-up to a more nibble organizations set-up which takes it’s power from crowdsourcing.

Wikileaks is a shining example of this new age of journalism. Read more about Wikileaks.

A significant number (almost 50% of broadband users world wide) confess that mobile or online is their main source for news. There is opportunities for organizations like Wikileaks to move from only addressing the “long tale content” to even main stream news content and needless to add that they cut across to reach audience across the world.

While there are those who would still think that citizen journalism would not overtake traditional journalism – I differ in my views. I would expect the emergence of a large number of “content” specific platforms – which will aggregate content, which even the traditional media would need to feed on.

Meanwhile the following stats should reinforce the view on the rise of sites like Wikileaks.

While you can read more about Wikileaks here, it is however, what is quite interesting to see how the traditional press is worried about it and how petty can an organization like CNN be – instead of focusing on the serious issue of thousands of deaths of civilians in Iraq, they decide to focus on the irrelevant issues prompting the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange walked out of an interview with CNN in London. 

Almost looks as if the CNN is running a government agenda. 

Integrating Facebook into your email marketing campaigns

Integrating Facebook into your email marketing campaigns � SimplyCast: Interactive Marketing Blog

I thought it would be good to share this as a simple yet power tactic to integrate your regular email campaigns (which tend to have a very very low response rates - sub 0.1% in cases) with the powerful ability to create shareable content.

Consumer Involvement Theory - insights for advertising communications

Consumer Involvement Theory - insights for advertising communications

Here is a good note / post on how to approach brand communication based on the level of consumer involvement in the purchase cycle. Experiential communication methods make a lot of sense in high involvement categories (both B2B & B2c as well as Emotional and Rational). Even in case of impulse purchase it is BTL communication methods which make a difference more by way of effective last mile tactics.

Google Instant..

I had written an earlier note on the impact that Google Instant would have on the brands and their strategy on SEO and SEM. Found this very relevant article on the same subject on fastcompany.com. Read the article here.

Google Instant - game changer for Brands and their agencies.

Google Instant – Google’s new, very quick, letter-by-letter search result offering, would have huge impact on brands and their online spend strategies. Almost instantly the user behavior has adopted to “acceptance of suggested search terms”, this was something which was completely missing earlier.

The results seem to be driven by user history and geo-locational logic and therefore a boon and a matter of concern for brands who are vying for attention and click thrus’.

Just typing “a” in India (ND) throws the following brands up.

The Instant would have an impact on the entire logic of SEO. Previously, search-engine optimization for brands was about making sure your web pages rose to the top of Google’s results once someone had typed in the company’s full name. Now, it appears that a brand that wants to remain top in Google Instant also needs to see a critical mass of repeat visits in relevant locations in order to shore up their results. SEO will have to become a more local, retail-oriented endeavor.

While at the onset, the differences seem trivial but they will get critical as soon as one starts to look at consumer search behavior while using a mobile phone, where in keying is is tedious and hence instant suggestions would be taken quicker.

Brands that can ensure constant presence within search results for just one- or two-letter searches can expect to substantially more hits than those that require a full word for relevant results. Add this to the location-aware mobile ads run by Google, and one can visualize the SEO relevance battle turning very geographically driven.

The Promo & Activation Shortlist from Cannes

Its taken us over 7 days (and on some days late into the evening) to get to the shortlist for the category of Promo & Activation for the Cannes Lion. The list has been churned from over 1200 entries from around the world and represents some of the best work in the category.

You can view the list here.

Over the next few weeks (and after the awards are announced tonight. There is a information embargo on at the moment!!), I look forward to reviewing from of my favorite work from this list. Look forward to discussions then.

Another superb activation by KLM

I loved this campaign by KLM. It captures attention and is difficult for anyone to ignore. I brings about a bit of smile.



Also good to see that travelers stop, engage and in a number of cases take a picture to share.

Activation + Facebook engagement.

Diesel created an interactive installation in a Diesel Store in Spain, allowing users to share the moment of buying with their Facebook friends while being in the offline store.
With this the consumers are able to make pictures and publish them directly on to their very own Facebook account.

The promotional campaign ensures that Diesel no longer engages with the single consumer, it is about engaging with the consumer’s entire social network.

Great viral, great browser.

Superb viral campaign by BBH to highlight the speed of Google Chrome. A compelling reason for downloading and trying it. If you have not see it yet it means you are not part of the 2 million who have see it in the 1st week - then see it here;

Also see the making of the viral.

Understanding the effectiveness of events.

Most brand promotion initiatives, esp. the once that are done in an “event” format, have a very vague measurement matrix and most of it is anecdotal in nature.

Here is a tool which enables real time measurement of the success of the brand initiative on preset enabled parameters – EventPulse.

Never undertake another brand initiative without building in the required measurability. Watch the screencast above or visit here or visit www.pulsesuite.com for a demo and a conversation with experts.

The next level of b2b marketing strategies.

Every now and then one gets fascinated by the success of a particular marketing technique. Today was another such day (and there have not been too many of them recently :-))

Lead generation strategies for B2B clients is something that me and my agency has been involved in for the last 16 years, and have done tens of hundreds of end to end initiatives and yet for me to get goose bumps to see yet another lead gen initiative is quite remarkable.

I just witnessed my team undertake a purely online, by invitation, highly interactive, highly technical, yet cost effective session with over 254 (earlier twitted number was wrong) delegates from over 8 countries. While my team members have been doing this for a while, I had to be in the same room to understand and appreciate the success model.

The session had over 450 registrations a day prior and the session host had indicated to me that she would expect 50% attrition.

What was wonderful to see was;

Such a large number of participants / delegates, who were in for the “love” of the subject. They were not there to “network” but to “learn”. A lot of physical seminars turn out to be peer networking events.

The program format gave the option for the delegates to simply drop-off if the session is not of interest – and yet the attendance stayed constant. In the age of “conversational marketing” this session was a great example of a two way dialogue between the panel and the attendees and it was not forced.

The participation was from managers and sr. managers of large and medium enterprises and from major cities as well as the slightly distant locations. The entire rational of bandwidth were really a non-issue. (The experience of my team members has been that India and China have not just the highest delegates, but also the maximum questions come from these locations, although local language has to be used in China, Thailand & Korea)

The session lasted for over an hour and the drop rate was less than 6% from start to finish.

The 45 minutes of tech presentation was followed by 25 minutes of Q&A – better quality questions then most physical interactions. And guess what drop rates was still 6%!

The panel of speakers was the best of breed and from locations far away – they needed to spare only about 3 hours in all to reach out to audiences across 8 countries without ever having to get on a plane.

There were enough “I need to know more” and “get a rep to meet me” notes at the end of the session for me to assume that the ROI would be high on the investments in this session.

The format, bring with it huge advantages of reach, scale & interactivity, is also non-intrusive, the content has a much longer “shelf-life”, is more measurable and track able in terms of delegate interaction (pre, during and post) and at the same time far more cost effective as against other lead generation models for B2B marketing.

I believe the way we undertook / undertake the process is a b2b marketing best practice and I will create a process note and insights over the next few weeks and put it here for all to read / follow – in the meanwhile, if you need to understand more on this do drop in a line.

Marketing is like cricket.

Business Standard's Strategist is carrying one of my articles today. I had written this note (over two months of the IPL fever) on the similarities on the evolution of the game of cricket and the evolution of the behavior of the consumer.

You can read the article here.

The note is why a smart marketer has to evolve to stay relevant to the changed consumer and that you either play by the rules of the audience or you perish.

Do let me know your views.

Little Red Riding Hood - RETOLD

What a wonderful project.

""The brief told us to do a classic ad to be printed in the magazine "Filter". The target group was swedes in ages 15–30 years. After some thinking and researching, we realized that a small ad in a small magazine wouldn´t do that much of a difference.""

Slagsmålsklubben - Sponsored by destiny from Tomas Nilsson on Vimeo.

The video takes you through the most memorable day in the life of Little Red Riding Hood and along the way, you learn all sorts of details. Like the air resistance experienced by a Volkswagen Type 2-61 Minibus at 43 MPH as measured by Volkswagen GmbH in 1955. Or the wildlife density of the Hundred Acre Wood, showing a surge in the rabbit population. Not to mention the nutrition facts of Grandma with a total caloric value of 10,000 kilocalories. :-)

Cost per contact is high. Really?

When compared to traditional advertising media, experiential is often overlooked and under-rated because of a perceived lack of reach, or high cost per contact. While there is the basic logic of "counting your reach" vs "reaching those who count" and the quality of the "engagement", even in terms of reach experiential engagement scores high.

Another bit from a research undertaken by EMF and IMI International in the US, shows that Experiential Marketing has effective reach well beyond consumers directly impacted. When considering sampling costs “per person impacted”, be sure to account for the amplification benefit.

Experiential Marketing - leads to trials.

If you are trying to get consumers to try a product / brand that they do not normally buy / use - do not rely on your ad campaign to transform behavior.

Recent results of a research undertaken by EMF and IMI International in the US, where they asked consumers what influences them to purchase brands they don’t normally purchase, and which of the tactic has the greatest impact in that switch gave the following results;

While 52% by way of Experiential Activated and hence more one on one marketing is exciting - what is even more impressive is that this has stayed consistent over the last 15 years - where-in there is so much of a change in the media consumption pattern.

Nice to note, promotion is another 20%.

Awareness driven communication, does drive sales, but only to the extent of 24%.

Twitter integration into Google search results

Integration of the real time twits into Google search results in my view does three things;

1. gives a new reason for brands to not just be on Twitter but ensure they are monitoring conversation on Twitter, not just of the brand but of the entire eco-system.

2. it brings together the twittering "elite / few" to a searching "majority" and hence cannot be ignored.

3. has an amazing effect on the search engine optimization of any brand / site. In fact majority of 1st page search results seem to be from the social media space, with Twitter leading them all. And it is a lot faster.

Also there is a wonderful way of integrating twitter results specific to your google search into your results for every possible subject. Read here about Realtime Twitter Search Results on Google

Screencast of MarketPulse

MarketPulse is a superb last mile effectiveness measurement tool. It helps a brand understand how it is performing with respect to various consumer touchpoints - when compared to it's own benchmarks, or when compared to it's competitors.

It also allows a brand to understand the performance across geos and store types.

Check out the screencast of MarketPulse;

If you have problems of screen resolution and are only seeing half a screencast above :-) - please visit this site.