I thought it’s be nice to compare their performance, mainly from a social media traction point of view.

Diesel one hundred lovers – In case you’ve missed this awesome piece – inspired by Goddard’s “Bande a Part” movie, the video features 100 lucky selected people re-creating the famous dance. Based on special stop-motion technique, the lovers appearing in the video rapidly change, along with their clothes, all while appearing to continue to smoothly follow the choreography of the dance. The video is fully interactive: you can pause it, rolling over individual items to get further product information, buy them online and also find information about the people featured; allowing anyone to link into their activities and interests on their social network personal pages – making it the world’s most awesomely social interactive fashion catalog.

Utweet from Uniqlo, one of the most culturally digital brand out there, known for their simple ideas and slick execution. UTweet simply puts a funky little song and dance to your recent tweets, running them through several animations and as your stream is running so do some beautiful people wearing Uniqlo t-shirts.

There is very little to compare between these two projects, however, going back to the core of their initial objective (get people to see our new and interact with our brand products) both seem to have done well but in a slightly different way.

Note: one big unknown here is any media spend.

From what I was able to gather (using different tools and public data)

Diesel a hundred lovers:

187 blog posts

11 news items

378 related tweets

Over 1 million views of the final video

uTweet

456 blog posts

15 news items

27,947 tweets (!!!)

uTweet plays – ? (this one is key – can anyone help me find this data?)

Conclusions:

1. Be awesome - both brands created slick beautiful executions that once seen is hard not to interact with.

2. Do something with people – when you approach your brief with the question “what can we do with the people we want to reach” (insted of what can we say to people) you are bound to come up with much more interesting, engaging answers that actually bring value to both people and brand.

3. Personal instant gratification is key to spreadability – ‘conversation wise’ (i’m doing my best to avoid using viral here) it looks like uTweet had much more traction on public social platforms (blogosphere and twitterverse). It have reached millions of people by letting people have some fun with their social stream. Nothing innovative but admirable simplicity, playfulness and very slick execution made people happy and they couldn’t help but shouting about it. Simple, slippy ideas win.

4. Being culturally digital pays – as I mentioned earlier there is nothing innovative about uTweet. If you want to be even more critical abuot it you could even say they are taking the piss – making you to look at their clothing through your visually pimped twitter stream. But the fact that it’s Uniqlo and the culture of anticipation they have created over the years with their beautifully crafted digital toys made it one of the most successful campaigns of the year. Very few brands could have managed to pull out something like that and take home millions of mentions/ interactions.

When John, Anjali and few others tweeted about their votes for a Pepsi Refresh project I clicked through and in 20 seconds I was in a ‘standing ovation’ mode. Such awesome, admirable, bold, new-media-twitteratis-wet-dream of a project, a project we only dared dreaming about in a ‘what if’ blog posts when talking about the future of marketing
.

And here it is – Pepsi (fuckin) did it. They did not spend money on the annual advertising frenzy that is the Super-Bowl. Instead, Pepsi would spend $20 million funding community renewal events across the U.S. through the Refresh Everything platform. Check out all the details, it is beautifully executed, with healthy looking facebook community, some smart celebrity endorsement and all that. They seem to have ticked all the right boxes on a social-media-powered-campaign list.

R E S P E C T

Unsurprisingly it got loads of attention. Big guns praising as well as some early research findings showing the campaign has already paid off in terms of increased media coverage.

But the Nielsen report looks specifically at Super Bowl related conversations or so called ‘earned media’ so what they found is actually quite obvious – make a bold, well-orchestrated new-news statement and you’ll get talked about. And since Coke didn’t have anything major to stand out with around the Super Bowl frenzy, Pepsi got most of the attention.

But then I recalled the other (social) media frenzy that was around the Coke Happiness Machine viral (1.5 million view on the official video) couple of weeks ago and it got me thinking: in terms of talkability or ‘earned attention’,Happiness or Goodness – who wins the ‘conversation’? So I quickly configured a crude monitoring dashboard…

In the RED corner a $20K or so slippy idea. In the BLUE corner over $20 million bold initiative. Let’s take a look at the numbers:

Volume of conversations since 1st of Jan 2010:

Here is what Pepsi ‘earned’ to date:

Here is what coke happiness machine earned to date:

If you are a cynical, purely ROI driven marketeer, the argument that the Coke ‘shtick’ has generated 10% of the media coverage of the Pepsi project with only 0.1% of the investment is enormously seductive. Yet it’s wrong.

This grossly inadequate comparison actually tells us a good story on the future of marketing. Both projects should be compared to all other brands who did spend millions of dollars on some pretty spectacu-lousy superbowl ads that no one will remember half an hour after the game (or generally brands that keep spending loads of money on insignificant, bland advertising).

If you want to get talked about your best hope is to try and do loads of small, cheap, surprising, awesome things like the Coke Happiness shtick AS WELL AS big, bold, game-changing initiatives. Everything else will most probably fall into the obscure world of uninterestingness (which, frankly, is where 95% of marketing communications naturally reside).

BTW soon enough, the idea of big brands spending loads of CSR money via a shouty crowd-sourcing initiatives will become old news. I bet you that the next big brand that will do something similar will get less than half the attention that Pepsi rightly enjoys with Refresh Everything (but that doesn’t mean that brands shouldn’t invest loads of money in making a change for good).

Think both small and big but most important is to think different. What say you?

I can’t believe me I haven’t heard about this one until today. This politically incorrect masterpiece is nothing short of genius!

You can watch the whole thing here

Thanks @iditf

This piece that got all marketing twitteratis drooling left me with half a smile half a ‘meh’. It’s an idea I bet has been on the minds of half the creative dudes in the world. It definitely was on mine. That’s not to say I’m hot because I don’t think this idea is hot.

It reminded me of an interesting blogversation with Andy on his old blog where he claimed that: “Very clever things on the other hand have become the new obvious”.

Recently I wrote that I fear that in 2010 we’ll see loads of obvious stuff that might work but isn’t really exciting and i think that this is the perfect example.

While I strongly believe in the idea that brands should be generous etc., when I see (or do something like that with my clients) I can’t avoid the feeling that, how shall I put it, this is the kind of stuff you do when you don’t have a better idea to earn people’s attention – you give away free stuff in a slightly cheeky way.

Now compare it to this one that also gives free stuff and as I write this post I think I understand why I liked it so much better than the Coke thing. The obviousness in the Ikea promotion comes as a surprise. It’s a sweet-bitter kind of obviousness you see in a simple original idea.

With the Coke thing there was no surprise, just obviousness.

What say you?

‘Crossing the chasm’ - a borrowed term that usually used in the context of technology adoption is being used here to describe brands that manage to take the ‘cool’ ideas that comes mostly from web culture and make use of them in a way that not only doesn’t make you want to poke someone eyes out but it actually makes a successful and effective campaign – even if we like to snub it.

Few examples:

Walkers do us a flavour (2008) – yet another crowdsourcing campaign that could have gone un-noticed (or badly wrong) as most big FMCG brands go. But Walkers were very serious about it, treated the campaign as a fully integrated activity- not just as ‘digital’, put the money where the mouth is (pun intended) and created one of the most talked about marketing campaigns of that year.

Dell - one of my favourite brands last year. I was absolutely fascinated by the way they managed to turn from one of the most hated and trashed brands to one of the most respected. Dell put ‘listening’ and real-time customer service at the heart of their business, shifting proper resources to become thought (but more importantly action)-leading, brand on the interweb. Perhaps you need to badly fall on your ass in order to transform your business the way they did.

Starbucks – I don’t ‘like’ Starbucks for the same reasons I don’t like Dell (characterless mass product, if you insist) but with Starbucks Ideas, their story is very similar to Dell. A much loved brand that was going down hill with expansion that rightly threatened both their fans and haterz. Here again is a story of a brand that understood that the web can help you to redefine the relationships between you and the people who care about you. They utilised web culture to get closer to people, to strengthen existing and build new connections with people on and offline.

Burger King - I admire BK for creating a culture of anticipation (what is the next cool shit that they will pull out?) with the drip feeding of small interactive surprises – Xbox Games, Chicken Fight, Posh Converter, Dr Angus, Whopper Sacrifice, The Wopperettes etc. They seem to have develop a desire to experiment and a culture of doing – the culture/process/strategy that more brands should adopt. However, and perhaps this is just an industry insider bias, sometimes it feels like CP+B overshadows BK, if you see what I mean.

Finally the brand that actually ignited this post, T-Mobile. Like all digeratis, when I first saw ‘Dance’ I couldn’t resist snubbing it. I still don’t like it and think it’s the least good of the three. But you can’t argue with 16 million views on youtube. When I curbed my reflex, I couldn’t avoid admiring what they did with singalong -the scale, the surprise and the way they created a story that became advertising assets across all channels. 10,000 people had fuck load of fun and that’s what matters.

And now comes Josh’s Band. Not wholly original, a bit contrived, yes, but I personally think the song is wonderfully catchy (for what it supposed to be, it’s not that i’m gonna have it on repeat on my iPod) and like the 2 prequels, overall T-mobile got truly committed to the idea that marketing should be about doing something with people not just saying something to them. Kudos where deserved etc

c’mon give me more examples…

The next phase of media, I’ve been thinking, will be after the page and after the site. Media can’t expect us to go to it all the time. Media has to come to us. Media must insinuate itself into our streams.

(Jeff Jarvis)

So I decided to try and consume my ‘media’ only from the stream. No RSS, no bookmarks, no direct access – just streams.

Unsurprisingly, it proves futile after the first day. My new mantra fits exactly to the hype around Streams: old things are not being replaced with new stuff, they add to them. Sometimes they compete and sometime co-habit and complementary and together they evolve and we evolve. So categorically predicting that streams will ‘kill’ everything that was before is plain new-media fetishism.

Yes, the wonderful evolution of streams is making it very challenging for old media folks but that’s not new. First it was iGoogle, then the RSS reader and now our social streams. More and more, people consume media in different customised, ‘pull’ and ‘social’ ways which shakes the business model of the newspapers and old portals. But very very few people will ditch the old behaviour and platforms altogether. The huge majority will adopt streams behaviour that, yes, will come at the expense of something, (most probably RSS readers, if they use them at all).

But it won’t replace everything. It will just add to the old ways and will become another option, another route, another filter for us to cope with the media firehose.

(All together now)
Old things are not being replaced with new stuff, they add to them

There is something very seductive in the evolution of streams as well as the evolution of the discourse around streams. It’s fallacy is the usual early-adopters twitter-centric outlook that tends to categorically ditch the old world and embrace the new but if you read through the hyperbole there is definitely something worth watching closer.

Of all articles I find Jeff Jarvis’s the most interesting (I forgive him for the overly simplistic outlook of Stephen Fry as the future of media)

The next phase of media, I’ve been thinking, will be after the page and after the site. Media can’t expect us to go to it all the time. Media has to come to us. Media must insinuate itself into our streams.

and…

So imagine this future without pages and sites, this future that’s all built on process over product. If you’re what used to be a content-creation – if you’re Stephen Fry, post-media – you’re all about insinuating yourself into that stream. If you’re about content curation – formerly known as editing – then you’re all about prioritizing streams for people; that’s how you add value now.

This is a fascinating evolution. But, as I said, I think that Jarvis is falling to the fallacy trap of new X is killing the old Y. He ignores the simple fact that old things are not being replaced with new stuff, they add to them. Sometimes they compete and sometime co-habit and complementary and together they evolve and we evolve.

There is no future with no pages and sites – there can’t be a future with no pages and sites. Content will never be reduced to 140 characters, it has to live somewhere. News, reviews, TED, blog posts, recipes and whatnot still have to live somewhere (and be funded somehow but that’s not the point of this post). Neil was absolutely spot on when he wrote:

Websites used to be everything. I think their role now is more akin to a kind of content hub supporting a more distributed presence. Designing for platforms and streams enables an exponentially larger reach for content than could ever be acheived through a destination model, so in this way scale comes through connection. With decent content acheiving scale is relatively easy, but scale without connection is one-dimensional. Because connection builds permission: “the understanding that the real asset most organisations can build isn’t an amorphous brand but is in fact the privilege of delivering anticipated, personal and relevant messages to people who want to get them.”

The sea-change and therefore the focus is on changing consumption behaviours. The idea that our consumption of ‘stuff’ will be channeled through The Stream increasingly resonates with my daily experience.

There are 3 general ways in which I (we) consume content and ‘stuff’ online:

1. The websites I like
This is old-school bookmarking. Whether my home page or all the other stuff organised on my browser tabs which I visit occasionally

2. The RSS feed(s)
This is all the stuff I found interesting and decided to subscribe to over the years, currently 150 feeds through Google Reader

3. My stream(s)
All the stuff that my network (read: Twitter and Facebook, Emails and IM etc) is sharing and spreading.

Recently it seems that the first two are in decline and the Streams are on the up. The reason I find streams so fascinating is that in being anti-context they somehow prove to be hyper-personal-meta-context. Unlike the relatively organised bookmarking and RSS the streams suffer from lack of context (unless you have 16 columns on your twitterdeck). If Twitter is the future, or more accurately, if Twitter represents the future of how we will consume content than as Jarvis pointed out streams are full of life!

My Twitter (and Facebook) streams are essentially a hodgepode of friends’ blurbs, news and very few artists and brands I chose to invite to my stream. All in one place. Intuitively this mishmash of context doesn’t make sense but it does when you understand the natural selection of interestingness from an individual as well as from a societal perspectives.

So to test this new-age idea that if the news is that important it will find me or that if something isn’t in my inbox it’s not viral. I decided to live the rest of the year totally reliant on my stream(s) to know my way in the world.

I won’t access actively and directly any website, webblog, web page or other destination of content – content will have to find me. No RSS, no home page, NOTHING. Just me and my stream. I will occasionally report on my experience of “living ON the stream” through twitter and write a summary post at the end of the year.

Anyone care to join me?

It’s this time of the year… New year’s trends lists are the currency of the moment, and every blogger and his sister compile a knowledgeable trends list for 2010. The world doesn’t really need another one from me.

So instead I’d like to talk about one trend which we should try to avoid in the next year.

Please can we stop killing things?

Over the last few years we’ve been all guilty of new-technologies sensationalism. Our response to the overwhelming pace of change made us believe that emerging platforms and technologies will categorically and dramatically kill everything that was before them. Search for “TV is Dead” on google and you’ll get over 2million(!) results. But is it? really? (That clever dude who wrote a book on the death of TV advertising also founded a new agency that specialises in marketing in Second Life. No, really!)

What else have we had?

Twitter is killing blogging!

Widgets will kill the homepage!

Second Life is killing Real Life!

Digital is killing advertising!

Yahoo pipes will kill the browser!

Google is killing Microsoft!

iGoogle is killing Newspapers!

Gaming is killing the cinema!

Books are a thing of the past!

Google Wave will kill Facebook!

Facebook is killing email!

Twitter is killing Facebook!

And now, the most recent hyperbole, straight from Twitter’s (AKA The Pulse) oven, I give you….

Streams are killing the web page.

Guess what. it turns out that when human evolve and construct culture(s) they have some time-attention-alchemist-like qualities whereby old things are not being replaced with new stuff, they add to them. Sometimes they compete and sometime co-habit and complementary and together they evolve and we evolve. Honestly, we’re like every good parents – when we have a new baby we don’t stop loving the older one, we find time and make room in our hearts for both…;-)

True, there are some casualties (DVD did kill the VHS) and natural selection (e.g. closure of few magazines and channels), some people make less money, some people make loads new money. Things do expand and contract, evolve and change but reality is more complex and is no where near the new-technologies massacres we read about every day.

So for 2010, let’s try to avoid the trend of killing old things in favour of new things and live happily ever after…

Peace

You are all surely familiar by now with John’s really awesome idea of Fireworks (advertising) vs. Bonfires (social marketing) – it has rightly became one of the strongest memes in the community but one which we must scrutinise to avoid the danger of new-marketing (empty) truism.

The bonfires metaphor is so enormously seductive. It resonates so well with what we’re trying to do and with the sentiment of change that is needed, but it’s stickyness, just like Gladwell’s Tipping Point is also it’s crux since as usual, reality is just way more complex and difficult than a great meme.

I already posted some comments here and there but thought it’d be good to write a proper post…

When I think of bonfires in the context of marketing four important things immediately come to mind:

1. People don’t really need brands for bonfires. Bonfires have been put together by individuals and groups of people forever now – that is one of the key challenges of everything ’social’. We are being social very well, thank you without the help of brands and let’s admit it – so far 95% of the ‘branded’ bonfires were a complete sham because they were context-less marketing bonfires. Good old Goodall already discussed this one and he rightly pointed that brands are better looking for ways to support existing communities/bonfires than building new ones.

2. Bonfire is always an activity that starts as an intimate social group initiative so you need to have the minimal social context for it to happen. There is something very problematic with mixing the commercial context with genuinely social context – people will always be cynical towards the underlying motives of brands finding ways to participate. Sponsorship for example is very lazy kind of way to participate in existing bonfires. So finding and articulating a value transaction that works for everyone would prove very tricky…

3. Real people’s social bonfires are done in people leisure time simply for the sake of having great time with their friends. Building or participating in bonfires is not free – brands approaching the idea of bonfires will have brief and legals and limited resource and targets etc, which as we know is killing most social initiatives from brands. And while having a series of bonfires would still be far less expensive than some big budget fireworks, you’d still need a decent budget to start with in order to make something interesting and prove some success and as we know already from other digital stuff, scale is an issue. In short, we are already slowly sobering up fro the idea that social media is free…

4. It reminds me of ‘basking in reflected glory’ theory applied to brands and social marketing. The point I made there is that if you are cool, sexy, sociable person/brand people would invite you to their bonfires, parties and communities (or even build one for you!) and they will come if you throw one. If you are not one of these brands, you will have to work much harder to earn your social capital – if you’re boring, lame or just not nice people will ignore you and prefer you won’t be any near them.

So now what?

While I wholeheartedly believe in the sentiment of fireworks vs. bonfire I think it’s almost too simplistic in it’s current form. Perhaps we should think about something in between – like events, online or offline that are not as small and intimate as bonfires but not as hugely expensive as big TV advertising. I feel a bit déjà vu now as it reminds me of millions of conversations we had around digital marketing. If only marketing directors where brave enough to shift 10% or their media budget for smaller, much targeted, more interesting and useful initiatives we wold have had loads of lovely bonfires all over the place…

Yes, yes, we need a big shift in thinking. We need more marketing and brand directors thinking loooooonger term, and believing that brands should give as much as they take…. there are very few of them around at the moment.

All of these Xs are usually great (but not new) ideas, sometimes they are no more than empty memes but they can’t just be EVERYTHING.

It can’t be all just about X. It can’t be that simple. Actually it’s a quite natural quest to make the unfamiliar, familiar. We human feel very uncomfortable in the face uncertainty – we are not wired to embrace uncertainty but rather to always strive to make sense of the world.

But the only truth that stands the test of reality today is that there is no one truth. It’s all just too messy, unpredictable, sophisticated and changing way too quickly for anything to become marketing dogmatism.

Case in point – the recent Guinness TV ad that immediately got the experts singing “where is the conversation”? Does everything have to be about ‘the conversation’? I’m not sure. What’s wrong with old school epic production that resonates with people on a very personal level (who doesn’t want to be God every now and then?) and that leaves effective mark on our psychic for the next time we’re in a pub? Surely reality is more complex than the conversation(?)

Only when we realise how truly fluid and dynamic and out of control reality is we will be able to come up with great strategies and creative ideas. Dogmatism and fundamentalism suck in any context, definitely in business and marketing.