Word of Mouth Rules. Ok.

A really good insight into WOMM. I really believe this is the here and now of marketing. You have to be in this area or you will be lost and left behind very quickly. It’s so important for brands to be quick and adopt WOMM strategies asap. 

Trainboarding

Parklife is an annual snowboard event in downtown Oslo. The idea behind Parklife is that it is only your imagination that limits where you can board.

 3 semi pro snowboarders showed what you can do and emphasised the slogan: ‘The city is your playground’

Virtual Graffiti!

Check out the virtual graffiti from Daim. Very cool!

Best Foot Forward

Vodafone Ranga Shankara Theatre Festival is the 2007 leg of an annual theatre festival held in Bangalore. The brief was to generate awareness and create buzz about it. Much before the festival commenced, a trail of giant foot prints were planted in various places around Bangalore. An inexpensive idea that whipped up excitement, curiosity and suspence in the city. And, brought out the drama from within all Bangaloreans. Dramatix text messages and video messages about the Big Foot were uploaded on youtube.com and were forwarded as emails to fuel the drama. After the city was swept up by this bizarre occurrence, the reveal was done at the same spots with a board that read “For more drama, come to Ranga Shankara”.

Digital Progression

A nice little short about text, digital text, and the future of ideas.

via http://commercial-archive.com/

Bigger is Better!!!

A campaign that speaks for itself really. This campaign was run in Rio to promote an opticians. Two fake chauffeurs held an oversize sign as if to collect ‘Paul Byrnes’.

Very easy and very clever. This is most definitely the underlying theme for standout experiential activity.

A grand experience!

 

Get from Lisbon to Dakar. Sounds a little easy! So how about, Lisbon to Dakar on a bike with only 1000 Euro to spend! 

Jorge and Carlos set out on their adventure and you can keep up to date with them here. 

Our friends at Torke have spread their message with some clever beamvertising activity and a polaroid drop in Lisbon with details of the blog attached.

Look Your Best

A simple but clever campaign for Rogers in Toronto to promote the launch of video calling. Where else do people spend so much time looking at themselves?

Yes We Can.

Over $100 million has been spent on advertising so far in the race for the White House according to the University of Wisconsin. So it helps a lot when advertising creatives and celebrities take it upon themselves to make an ad for you. Will Obama become the first internet president?

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — Perhaps the most viewed bit of political advertising this campaign season is a four-minute-plus video for Barack Obama. “Yes We Can” — a slick, celebrity-filled spot that has garnered more than 10 million online views — was created by professionals. But none of them work for the Obama campaign.

Whether it will sway the outcome of the presidential race no one can know, but the ad certainly seems to encapsulate the fact that Mr. Obama has emerged as the darling of the advertising world’s creative set. While Hillary Clinton and other candidates pay top dollar for ads and the bulk of their consumer-generated fare leaves much to be desired, Mr. Obama has benefited from free, consumer-created marketing. Many of the consumers in Obama’s case just happen to be professional creatives.

“Yes We Can” is the most successful result so far. The star-studded music video is written and produced by Black-Eyed Peas frontman Will.i.am, Jesse Dylan (son of Bob) and Mike Jurkovac. Mr. Jurkovac, a former VP-director of integration at FCB, now heads New York-based Cyclops. “Yes We Can” is a mashup — a song inspired by Mr. Obama overlapping one of his speeches — and it’s been the No. 1 viral video on the net practically since its launch. According to Viral Video Chart, at press time it had garnered 10,540,006 views.

Music videos
But that’s not the only one. There’s also “Hope Changes Everything,” an Obama-as-rockstar video tribute created by Eric Hirshberg, president-chief creative officer of Deutsch, Los Angeles. And who could forget last summer’s Obama Girl videos, courtesy of a group that included Ben Relles, who was once a staffer at Omnicom Group’s Agency.com?

More recently, Hispanic-targeted viral efforts hawking Mr. Obama have surfaced too. Reggaeton and Mariachi-style songs (which come in ringtone and MP3 formats) were created by Miguel Orozco, the president of Nueva Vista Media, a creative digital firm based in Los Angeles and Chicago. And though Mr. Obama is putting a heavy focus on the Hispanic market in Texas, Mr. Orozco said he’s never had any official interaction with the campaign.

To be sure, the other candidates have professionals on their side. Mr. Obama’s opponent counts GSD&M Idea City’s Roy Spence and Amalgamated’s Charles Rosen among her camp. But those folks work in a more traditional role, standing by the candidate’s side. The Obama campaign’s official agencies are SS&K and GMMB. And, showing at least one aspect of the traditional campaign, neither agency would comment as the Obama camp had requested that its official shops keep silent.

But there’s still a good bit of freelancers out there toiling away for the man.

Easy to get behind
The question is: Why? The answer seems to be a mix of inspiration and an easy-to-define brand.

“His politics fall perfectly in line with what I do as an artist,” said urban artist and guerrilla marketer Shepard Fairey, an Obama fan since 2004 who offered his endorsement via a striking poster series. “In advertising and marketing, things are simplified to accentuate the positive and utilize soundbites that are really powerful; it’s about economical communications, and [Barack Obama] is really good at that,” said Mr. Fairey. “That type of approach to politics — when it seems like he really has conviction, too — is really easy to distill down to marketable images. It felt really easy for me to make a poster for him.”

After Mr. Fairey’s poster series gained attention, he was approached by the Obama camp to execute another illustration — this time based on a photo of the campaign’s choosing — for a poster that will be unveiled this week. Mr. Fairey wasn’t paid for any of this work.

“This is a guy who speaks in poetry — he’s a wide-open canvas and really right for making incredibly moving and incredibly inspiring work,” said John Dukakis, the son of former Massachusetts governor and 1998 Democratic presidential hopeful Michael Dukakis, who serves as senior VP-branded entertainment at Boston ad agency Hill Holliday. It’s no surprise that “creative folks, who are constantly looking for things to do on their own that are fun, interesting and even historic,” find themselves attracted to Mr. Obama.

‘Well-defined brand’
The fact that Mr. Obama “behaves like a well-defined brand” probably has something to do with why advertising and marketing creative types are attracted to him more so than other candidates, said Mr. Hirshberg. He said he has more viral work backing the candidate in the pipeline.

According to web-analytics firm Compete, Mr. Obama trounced the competition in January web “FaceTime” (a metric measuring total online time “with the public,” taking into consideration sites such as Facebook, YouTube, MySpace and others beyond a candidate’s traditional website). Mr. Obama grabbed 60% of his party’s FaceTime — nearly triple Ms. Clinton’s attention — and on YouTube a 36 to 1 margin over Republican candidate John McCain.

But buzzworthy doesn’t always necessarily translate into votes. In terms of online buzz, Ron Paul was a hot item this election cycle. And it was reported that Obama Girl herself (model Amber Lee Ettinger) couldn’t be bothered to drag herself out to vote for the very same candidate whose praises she seductively lip-synched.

The difference between Barack Obama and previous online candidates such as Howard Dean is that Mr. Obama is doing just as well in the non-web world. And more important, this time around the youthful side of the web crowd is actually turning up to vote.

“We’ve seen in the primaries already a large section of brand-new voters, and these are people in large part who are inspired by Obama’s message, and they’re getting it not by watching the network news, but from the internet,” Mr. Dukakis said. “They once called John Kennedy the first television president, and I think it’s fair to predict that Obama could turn out to be the first internet president.”

Of course, he’s got to make it to the White House first.

Graffiti Tales

(Marketers) Everyone is looking for innovative ways to communicate their message. There is now a very big grey area regarding the use of graffiti to communicate your message. Is it legal? I suppose that depends what you do and the types of material used. One thing is for sure it is a highly effective medium… and fun too!

Check out this ‘Graffiti Hero’ from Banksy’s site.

In 1974 a 33 year old man named George Davis was convicted of robbing the payroll of the London Electricity Board in Ilford. He was nailed on the evidence of cops who were outside the bank at the time of the robbery and was sent to prison for 20 years.

However, his friend Peter Chappell was convinced Davis was innocent and inspired by discrepancies in the police statements and the fact that none of the bloodstains at the scene matched with the defendant, started calling for Davis’ release. Chappall enrolled some friends and embarked on one of the largest sustained grafitti campaigns Britain has ever seen. Over the following months ‘G DAVIS IS INNOCENT’ appeared on walls, bridges and tunnels from one side of London to the other, some of which are still visible today.

The vandalism culminated in Chappell and four others breaking into Headingley cricket ground in August 1975 the night before a test match between England and Australia. Using plastic cutlery from a service station they dug holes in the pitch, filled them with oil and painted ‘Sorry it had to be done, but George Davis is innocent’ in large white letters on the wall as they left. The match was postponed and Chappell got 18 months for criminal damage.

The campaign brought the case to the attention of the Home Secretary who after a police inquiry released Davis two years into his sentence using the highly exceptional and controversial Royal Prerogative of Mercy.

The fight to free George Davis was one of the most spetacular campaigns ever fought against injustice, an achievement only slightly marred when a year after his release Davis was found guilty of robbing the Bank of Cyprus for which he served six years, and three years after which he was caught red-handed robbing a mail train.

George Davis is now a free man and happily married to the daughter of a North London Chief Inspector of Police.