Participation Marketing

A few days ago I was suddenly overwhelmed by memories of my grandfather on sight of a 99p block of Walkers’ Nonsuch Toffee in Annie’s Chocolate Emporium. The invitation to ‘whack, unwrap and enjoy’ evoked a tidal-wave of long-forgotten childhood memories of toffee hammers, cans of 3-In-One Multi-Purpose Oil and creosote-soaked sheds so powerful that Annie had to ask me if I was alright, and did I want to sit down for a minute?

The Bluebird trademark

My grandfather died in 1985 and I don’t think I have given thought to whacking toffee since - after all, even then, it was an old-fashioned thing to do. My grandfather’s favourite brand was Blue Bird. Blue Bird toffee was originally called Harvino, but proprietor Harry Vincent was so inspired by Maurice Maeterlinck’s 1908 play ‘The Blue Bird’ that he renamed it.

By a curious coincidence, racing motorist Malcolm Campbell was inspired by the same play to adopt the name for his record-breaking vehicles in the 1930’s. His son Donald Campbell and grand-daughter Gina continued the tradition and also by coincidence, I had an image of the Blue Bird speed boat (amongst other things) patterned on my wallpaper as a child.

By a further coincidence I saw current land speed record holder Wing Commander Andy Green speak at the IET Wheatstone Christmas Lecture in 2009. He spoke about Bloodhound, the 1000 mph supersonic car. He wasn’t, to my knowledge, chewing toffee at the time.

Next issue: Man subjected to £1M five-year Lynx Effect advertising campaign inspired to purchase 1 x 250ml bottle of Morrisons shower therapy for men 2-in-1 shower gel for hair and body.

References

• Annie’s Chocolate Emporium, Letchworth Garden City
• The story of Blue Bird toffee
• RIP Frank Martin, 1905-1985: Gone for a cup of tea and a slide down the banisters
• ‘The Blue Bird’ - A play by Maurice Maeterlinck
• Bloodhound SSC project

Martin Cunnington Marketing

American Apparel crowdsources model rear end

This is where crowdsourcing gets interesting. The latest competition from the US clothing brand is to find the rear of the year to appear in a series of ads. I’ll leave you to guess what for.

alastairduncan Creative, Crowdsourcing, Web 2.0 American Apparel, Crowdsourcing, participation, Social

Bloody hell, a month goes by and no posts here. So here’s one, on the day that China and Google split up. If you think about it, that particular debate centres on how national governments interfere with cyber communities for their own, possibly nefarious, ends. That isn’t new, and censorship is creeping back in many Western countries as well as being sort of expected in what we rudely describe as the ‘less democratic’ world.

One of the outputs from the Digital Britain report published in the summer is the formation of bills to go through parliament to address the issues of copyright, open access, digital inclusion, that a digitally literate economy needs to get right. In the first and possibly last effort before the election, not everyone thinks that the government has got it right.  Here’s Cory Doctorow on boingboing describing the assault on freedom that locking down your ISP account presents. And here’s Rebecca McKinnon in the Guardian touching upon the French efforts to reject the Satan of Music Downloading, in the context of Google’s legal battles with China, France, Italy, etc. Mind you, Johnny Halliday isn’t exactly going to be troubling my MP3 collection in the near future, but I’m lucky to live in a country where you can say stuff like that and you aren’t marked down by the authorities as a travel risk.

Good news today - the government is tabling a series of amendments that appear to curtail the most iniquitous clauses in the bill, including the one that gives a (currently unelected) minister the right to decide on who and how to crack down on copyright infringement without recourse to any other parliamentary process. Whether they do or not remains to be seen.

What’s this got to do with marketing? The dripping irony here is that in the world of brand communication, we’re almost desperate for consumers to download our brand content for free and share it with each other. We want our viral messages to go viral, and for our amateur enthusiasts to make their own versions of our slick commercials. We want to show that consumers care enough about the brand to bother. Which makes it surprising (to me, anyway) that there weren’t more agency people involved in evaluating whether this new law is a blocker to innovation. It’s not just about digital innovation, but innovation in all forms of communication. At CES, the big consumer electronics show in Las Vegas, most of the new technology devices being showcased have social technologies built in to them. This means that people will be able to, if they can be arsed, link to each other, recommend where they are, tell people where they are going and where they’ve been through pretty much any device. If you think of Twitter as “what are you doing?” think of the next wave of social tech as “Where are you?” Hmm.

And this brings me back to the slow post movement on participation marketing, and the kind comments I’ve received on Twitter and Facebook about the past month’s pm abstinence. The answer is I’ve been busy. We’re working on a pitch. And will be at the weekend too no doubt. Plus ca change

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More charts of the day here.

alastairduncan Technology, Uncategorized Chrome, Firefox, Google, Microsoft, Mosaic, Mozilla, Safari

the gilmour gang panel at leweb

alastairduncan International, Media, Scaremongering, Web 2.0, copyright copyright, International, Participation Marketing

Rather than meetings.

As this post on Brand Republic neatly describes.

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Intriguingly contrasted with the chart below

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New Media Age kindly describes the BIMA show. Talking of friends, BIMA took over Koko in Camden last week for its annual awards ceremony, hosted by Alternative Genius’s Alastair Duncan, one of the digital elite and also probably the closest thing Stoke Newington has to royalty. Congratulations to Tribal DDB Amsterdam, DDB London and Stink Digital for winning the Grand Prix for their Cinema 21:9 campaign - you know - the one with all the freeze frames of a bank heist - for Philips.

At the BIMA Awards

alastairduncan Agencies Bima Awards, BIMA Awards 2009, Koko

The special awards shortlist are now out - check the list on the BIMA blog. Not long till the gig - yay.

alastairduncan Uncategorized BIMA, Bima Awards, BIMA Awards 2009, Creative, Digital Britain, participation, Typography, User Experience

Recent events in the idea crowdsourcing world herald a new business model for agencies. As the person responsible for putting Peperami on the internet in the first place (peperami.com 1996 for the historians amongst you) I’m well placed to comment on the recent move to find ideas using the internet. And as Jon Winsor and other (about to be ex-Crispin Porter) colleagues have announced in the early hours of this morning, it’s time for a new model that takes crowdsourcing to the next level. And that involves asking you, the creatives out there working for other agencies, to contribute to their briefs. Transparently. And at your risk.

Are you up for it? Is it the end of the agency model as we know it? Everyone seems to agree that there is an enormous challenge in the agency group mentality of silo and sausage factory. We make our money in the wrong way, from downstream process transaction rather than from upstream advisory. We fight with each other constantly over budgets. We don’t have enough people to handle the workload when we’re busy. Or we have plenty of the wrong people who can’t handle the workload because the work has changed.

Is the problem about size? The bigger an agency gets, it moves from selling ideas to selling meetings. This seemed fine, as clients have diverse needs and there are a myriad of ways to find service levels for those needs. The creativity of agencies moved into describing cross selling. to build scale and business relationships. And the creativity that clients actually want from them, ideas for better ways to engage consumers to sell more of their products and services tended to be a delegated and downstream service. Ideas became lone wolves that had to be ‘fought for’ by the creative department, instead of exciting ‘cool’ product developments that galvanise everybody involved.

Now there’s an answer. A new model where brands owners can publicly describe their problem, and can garner public responses. There’s been a few start ups that endeavour to capture this trend - idea bounty and so on, about which the naysayers claim they can’t make money, they are estate agents for ideas, isn’t it just like freelancing and so on. Well it does reflect all those things, accusations very easily levelled at any agency by the way, but the difference is that the ability to share and re-share briefs and answers quickly though the internet brings agility where previously there was treacle.

As Stuart Elliot put in in the New York Times - agencies should stop worrying about selling the status quo and start being a force for change. A ‘catalyst of record’, not an ‘agency of record’ Love that. And believe that too. I worked on a pitch last year where the client invited five agencies to test drive their cars and pitch for their business. It was an expensive and overwrought process, on everybody’s part. As we were hanging around having coffee, I said to one or two of the opposition - you know what, this is silly. They should just hire you, me, her and him. Each from a different agency - a ‘dream team’ as they say, as between us we’d provide the best answers, the best work, and it would be a laugh. Everyone agreed that it would be, but went home to prepare for the pitch battle in their own P&Ls.

I wish Jon and crew luck with their new venture. Watch that space!

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