Supermodels strip off for climate change

If the idea behind a viral campaign for climate change group 350.org is to make people take the threat more seriously having nine supermodels strip to their smalls is perhaps not the best way to persuade people it's a bad thing.

If a warmer planet results in scantily dressed supermodels, some might conclude climate change is a good thing. Notwithstanding that the ad trivialises a serious subject; we learn nothing about climate change and it might alienate a large part of the female audience, some of us at Rubber Towers quite like this new viral. We can't think why.

On a positive note, if the viral campaign is designed purely to generate a bit of PR and easy headlines with a bit of harmless titillation, it's bang on the money. See what you think (thanks to Rev for bringing this to our attention) ...

Bono boost for YouTube

YouTube is on a roll at the moment, which looks like being a good thing for users, advertisers and agencies alike after a period of what felt like continual negative press.

The video-sharing website has revealed it got close to 10m streams for a live broadcast of a U2's Rosebowl concert on Sunday, meaning it was the single largest event the site has streamed to date.

Given that the 20th most watched show in the US last week attracted 11.8m viewers (The Mentalist), the U2 YouTube audience gives you an idea of the site's enormous reach and the type of league it is now playing in. Admittedly, the 10m figure, which was spread over 2+ hours, doesn't drill down to how many people actually watched the broadcast.

However, after repeated questions being asked about YouTube's ability to monetise its huge popularity, it's nice to see things moving in a positive direction.

The U2 concert comes hot on the heels of the Google-owned site announcing earlier this month that it now serving up more than 1bn streams per day. And don't forget Channel 4's  recent decision to put its entire programming output on YouTube free of charge and the introduction of Google's AdSense for YouTube's search.

With sites like Hulu breathing down YouTube's neck, it's great to see YouTube fighting fit. Healthy competition between these sites - unlike the search arena where Google has a far easier ride - is proving beneficial for everyone.

Twitter is like word of mouth on crack, the Peperami Animal and other tales from Media140

The breakfast of choice for the social media crowd is a healthy, humble bowl of Shredded Wheat. This was one of the Twitter generated insights Rubber Republic picked up at Media140 today. The one-day conference in London kicked off Media140’s ‘Around the world in 140 days tour’, which is set to rock up in all sorts of far flung places including Bangalore, Italy, Sydney, Perth, Mumbai and the Middle East.

The Media140 movement is all about exploring the future of real-time web and its impact or to put it simply … Twitter. The audience was mainly comprised of agencies and brands, with a smattering of publishers. The day began with a talk from Tom Bedecarre, the San Francisco-based CEO of AKQA, who was battling the effects of flying overnight. Tom’s agency has just launched a new Volkswagen model solely through an iPhone app, which carries over to Twitter and gives users who play a virtual racing game the chance to win cars.

Tom revealed that social media is the number one requirement clients are coming to the agency’s door with. He said: “It’s taking over the conversation”, and added “everything we do whether it’s a website build or mobile has a social media element”. Although Tom admitted the biggest FMCG advertisers were only “tipping their toes” in social media, he was in doubt that this nascent market will lead to more robust business opportunities than it is at the moment. Why? Tom cited the reaction of established players, Google, and Facebook, to Twitter’s arrival. “Google and Facebook are scared shitless of Twitter,” he said. What else happened?

A panel wrestled with the question ‘Can you change a brand in 140 characters?’ But for some, there was too much intellectualising and not enough in the way of successful case studies, according to questions from the floor and tweets on the live Media140 twitter feed. However, Scott Seaborn, head of mobile at Oglivy Group UK, suggested the agency has been forced to completely rethink its creative approach.“The paradigm shift in the media landscape means that consumers have all the power,” he said. “Creative has to come from the heart – social media acknowledges consumers have the power and gives them the tools to use that power.” Seaborn’s fellow panelist, Mel Exon, managing partner at BBH Labs, agreed: “We are witnessing a huge shift from short campaigns to platforms and programmes. Fundamentally, we are having to rethink everything we do in the social media space.”

Quote of the day came from Seaborn, who contributed the following gem: “Social media is word of mouth on crack”. Given that some of the audience were getting testy at the lack of examples to back up the eulogising, it was a good thing that Unilever was up next to talk about its crowd sourcing initiative for the new global campaign for Peperami. In short, the brand has ditched the traditional creative agency approach for a wiki-style route that has generated 1,200 ideas from the creative community. The FMCG is currently in the process of whittling those ideas down to 20 as it nears one big idea for a TV and print campaign. The creative will feature the suicidal Peperami Animal character, which has been experiencing endless gory slapstick deaths since the mid-nineties. Noam Buchalter, marketing manager at Peperami, Unilever, said the main benefits were cost and “gaining an insight into customer ideas through listening”.

A panel that debated the dos and don’ts of social media debated lots of different methods but basically arrived at two conclusions: be honest and transparent and don’t lie and fake it. Or as George Nimeh, managing director at Iris Digital, said: “Be nice, don’t be an ***!” Other gems included “Be the rapper, don’t be the wrapper” (also George) and “Twitter is earnt media – it takes time to earn trust and build reputation” (Daren Forsyth, founder of 140characters).

Ciaran Norris, head of social marketing at Mindshare, offered a whistle stop tour of social media, crammed with amusing anecdotes, case studies from across the pond and those at his own agency. Norris said that one of the lessons he has picked up from working on a football campaign for a client is to engage consumers with precise questions. “You need to share the debate – frame questions rather than ask open questions,” he said. And on the note, it seems only right to ask ‘what have you learnt from social media?’ It’s over to you.

More on Media140 from BR - Gordon MacMillan on Personality and social media – do you need one?

We are all connected

 Some things are just plain clever (interesting) and beautiful.  And this is one of them.  He's a formula: clever + beautiful = I WANT TO SHARE!

 Not enough things online are beautiful . . .

£££'s of social media monitoring for FREE

Geeks (*clever people*) are always right when it comes to technology.  And increasingly I'm thinking they're also right when it comes to social media.  

For the last few weeks, we've been reviewing a whole host of different social media monitoring services in the run up to the Monitoring Social Media event (November 17th) which I'm due to speak at and give some insights into the subject at (Buy tickets here @ special early bird discount here! PLUG OVER)

I won't go into our full analysis of the highs and lows of social media monitoring services, however one of my colleagues (king of the rubber geeks) made the following comment off the back of us testing a whole bunch of social media monitoring services (who charge £££'s a month).

N.B. this is word-for-word taken from his email to me:

"Out of interest, this is what I do (written very verbosely). It took me under a minute to do this:

(e.g. to look for news about Apple the computer company)

Go to Google and make an advanced search:
http://www.google.co.uk/advanced_search

Enter :
* "apple", "macintosh" and "mac" in the section "one or more of these words"
* "fruit raincoat jacket" in the "But don't show pages that have..." section.

Copy the search that's generated at the top ("apple OR iphone OR mac -fruit -raincoat -jacket")

then go to:
http://www.google.com/alerts/

paste the search term into the "Search Terms" box, and select "feed" in the "Deliver To" section.

That generates a nice RSS feed that I can use with my RSS reader (e.g. Google Reader) that will be updated with any blogs, videos, images, websites, new articles etc posted.

(here's a feed: http://www.google.com/alerts/feeds/09809255641325574415/3486854838285467889)

And if I want to see "buzz" over time I go to Google Insights for search
http://www.google.com/insights/search

and paste the same search term in...
e.g.
http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=apple%20OR%20macintosh%20OR%20mac%20-fruit%20-raincoat%20-jacket&cmpt=q

To see all the information in one dashboard, I add the google reader gadget to iGoogle ( http://www.google.com/ig ) so I see the alerts on my homepage, and also add the google search trends chart (each chart can be added as a separate gadget).
(obviously I could have configured the chart to compare apple to microsoft, or anything else like that)"

There you go.  Give it a go.  It's the equivalent of £7000 a year's worth of social media monitoring for free . . .
(I suggest you spend your savings on the upcoming Monitoring social media event! PLUG OVER (AGAIN!))

Social awesomeness (part 1)

Awesomeness is the new innovation.  Well that's according to Umair Haque - Director of Havas Media Lab.  And I couldn't agree more.  

I was super excited when I came across Umair's piece in the Harvard Business Blog titled "the Awesomeness Manifesto" as we at Rubber towers have also been working on our own bit of awesomeness theory - but rather than vanilla awesomeness we've been developing up ideas around "social awesomeness".

In his Awesomeness Manifesto Umair charts out four basic pillars of what awesomeness is based around:
- Ethical production
- Insanely great stuff
- Love
- Thick value

Ultimately, Umair's sentiment around awesomeness could be summed up in one phrase "Do epic ***" (and love doing it!) - a phrase coined by the CEO of Zappos.com - Tony Hsieh - at this year's SXSW.

Within the context of Umair's pillars of awesomeness, our concept of "social awesomeness" could be seen as the social comms framework to communicate the inner awesomeness of a business.

I won't give away our full socially awesome manifesto yet - as we're putting the finishing touches to it - but, to add to Umair's pillars, when it comes to additional values I think you need to be looking at:
- Be nice
- Give
- Be useful
- Be fun
- Engage not interrupt
- Be open

What excites me most about the idea of awesomeness is that it makes me smile and makes me want to do stuff - awesome stuff - epic ***.  That's something that concepts like innovation could never do.

Aristotle's rhetoric - the art of persuasion

I've been reading Aristotle's "ars rhetorica" recently, and  thought I'd share some bits I've learnt from my (quasi) intellectual musings - as a book titled "the art of rhetoric" is  a subject which is (obviously) v.relevant to the advertising industry.

In "the art of rhetoric" Aristotle identified 3 key characteristics of a good persuader / or good arguer.  These were:
    * Pathos: appeal to the emotion of the audience

    * Ethos: a sense of credibility and “moral competence”

    * Logos: good logical structure

I always find it interesting to apply these three characteristics to advertising campaigns to see how they stand up.  And increasingly I'd argue that these Aristotlean characteristics are becoming ever important, as social media and the art of conversation dominate.  In particular I think it's interesting to look at how the different characteristics can be used most effectively in different social media contexts.

So there you go.  Some brief (but interesting I hope) musings from ancient philosophy.

Beyond advertising, I thought it would be fun to do a quick analysis of how our political leaders (Gordon and Dave) would fair in a public debate when it comes to election time.  Here we go:

- Gordon is strong on Ethos and Logos.  He carries Ethos due to the gravitas of his economic wisdom and greying hair.  His Logos comes from years of crafting arguments in the Commons debating Chamber.

- Dave's strong on Logos, and brings some Pathos, but is weak on Ethos.  His Pathos comes from a connection with a certain audience – i.e. the middle classes – however, this isn’t particularly strong.  And he’s certainly weak on Ethos.  His baby-face, and evident lack of experience doesn’t go down well at all with a large tranche of voters.

On the face of it, when analysing the skills of each persuader, I’d say Gordon has the upper-hand – and is likely to win a public debate.  Unless, that is, Dave greys up a little, and suddenly finds 20 years of life experience.

Finally - PLUG ALERT - if you're interested in all of the above you should check out my personal side project aMap - a series of pocket argument guides partly based around Aristotle's rhetoric (and informal logic).