Reading and YouTube

I never thought I'd hear the two words together - but the National Year of Reading has developed a series of YouTube videos to promote reading amongst young people. The videos are based around a series of dares designed to promote information retrieval in the form of reading. It's interesting to see the government using YouTube in this way.

As I said, I'd never have put "reading" and "YouTube" together - however it seems to work quite nicely. The main driver of the films seems to be charismatic presenter Garron, whose enthusiasm pushes the films through making them feel like a "Why don't you" for the naughties . . .

Drug mule dogs and speaking baggies

FRANK, the drugs information and advice service, has launched a campaign raising awareness about the risks of cocaine use with a bang.

This year a fully integrated on & offline campaign incorporates a whole host of digital content, featuring videos narrated by, amongst others, a fatally wounded drug mule dog called Pablo and a talking bag of cocaine.

Our team's been tasked with distributing this online content  to drive high-levels of awareness across the net amongst FRANK's target for this campaign of 15 to 18 year olds.

In total there are four pieces of content to seed: two specially commissioned online clips - a cryptic teaser and a viral - which complement the TV spot and another film highlighting the darker side of cocaine.

We've gone for a two stage strategy.  We kicked the campaign off earlier this week with an exclusive pre-launch preview of the teaser and viral films to a discrete audience of culturally relevant bloggers (e.g. DJ / music blogs), and then yesterday, as the full campaign officially launched, we pushed the button on a blanket seeding strategy intended to generate high-levels of awareness quickly.

So far the strategy seems to be working with some good early advocacy for the campaign amongst the blogger community, and a good early surge in views of the campaign videos.

See the viral here: Baggie


and catch all the other pieces of content here: FRANK Cocaine YouTube channel

Name a viral product?

I'm putting together a list of viral products.  By viral products I mean products that require little marketing spend because (like Eastenders) every one's talking about it.

Here's the start of my list:

- In Rainbows - (Radiohead's latest album)
- Moo cards (moo.com)
- Eglu
- The Hulger phone
- Million Dollar Homepage
- iPod
- Hotmail.com (old)
- Google.com (old)
. . .

If anyone's got any more viral products to add - then please help me and add them below.  Having established a nice long list, I'm then going to be looking at what each of the products has in common . . .

Gladwell's success by numbers

In the introduction to his talk last night, Malcolm Gladwell self-depricatingly announced that he hadn't given his talk a specific title.  Usually, he said, he'd come up with some obscure title for his talks involving Freud - for example "Freuds's geology" - or put three random words together - for example "Elephant, Ice Cream, Jesus".  The idea being that the more obscure the title, the more interesting the talk, therefore the bigger the pull.  The crowd tittered at this thought, however these introductory words for me proved the most interesting of his whole talk.

I'll admit that I've never been a massive fan of Gladwell's.  I think he's clever and I admire him for bringing the genre of popular social science to the masses, however each of his books seems to grate more and more. 

The reason for this is that Gladwell comes across to me a as a bit of a one trick formulaic social science pony, who takes a simple central concept and then surrounds it by obscure anecdotes to make the concept sound a lot more interesting and important than it is.   And the formula is roughly this:

1)  Pick an "of the moment" concept that's been bubbling away in the back of public consciousness, but hasn't yet been articulated well enough for the public to "get it".   N.B. this concept will generally be pretty obvious.  Obvious enough to result in people going "Oh, I seeeeee!" once they'd read Gladwell's book.

2)  Give the concept a catchy title / name (e.g. Tipping Point, Blink . . .)  N.B. these are often existing names of concepts.

3) Explain the concept by using a varied number obscure real life examples / anecdotes to bring the concept to life, and flesh out the book so it's over 150 pages long and therefore merits being called a book and worth over £8 (paperback) or £15 (hardback).

4) Send the book to the Daily Mail to get previewed to ensure a gushingly positive review involving the words "inspiring" "genius" and "genre defining".

So, by being partly lost for something interesting to say to introduce his talk Gladwell made a Freudian-slip and revealed his inner-self - a self that's undoubtedly clever, but also hell-bent on making sure everyone knows he's clever.  That's of course not a bad thing.  Especially when the end product is as entertaining as his books, and he (and his formula) is such a Success.

Obama and the Playboy bunnies

A lot has been written about the sheer amount of cash Barrack Obama's team has thrown at his campaign.  Having raised over $600 million, Obama has been like a real life Brewster from Brewster's Millions - trying to spend all his cash in time to win the ultimate prize.

So it's been interesting traveling around the US over the last 10 days, seeing what the impact of all this campaigning cash has been.

And the answer is big.  From local radio ads, to billboard ads to prime time TV slots, it's been difficult to escape the Obama marketing machine.  Most powerful of all, however, has been his grassroots campaigning.  With houses from Venice beach to Beverly Hills to New York's Greenwich Village being plastered with Obama's iconic Hope posters, and streets teams out in force handing out stickers and leaflets.

Perhaps the most bizarre encounter of Obama's campaign came last Sunday morning in the Playboy Hotel, Las Vegas, when we bumped in to 3 Obama foot soldiers getting ready to go about their business.  We didn't ask what they were doing there, however it showed that even in Playboy heaven there was no escaping the Obama machine.

Given its heritage of sex-fuelled hedonism, maybe Obama's team thought the Las Vegas Playboy hotel was a strong symbol of his liberal democratic values.  Or maybe he had a few last million to spend and thought splashing a grand a night on Playboy bunny suites was the quickest way of spending his way to the White House.

Whichever way, the Playboy bunny strategy seems to have paid off, as I write this Obama has sealed the Presidential deal - and even hauled in Nevada, a real coup for a Democrat candidate.

Viral products - part 1

Whenever I run through my viral marketing spiel one of the first things I explain is that there are two types of viral:

The first is where the "creative concept" acts as the viral agent - i.e. some highly creative type comes up with the idea of a gorilla playing the drums or a chicken that's subservient, and this creative concept is then passed around and brings you brand fame.

The second is where the "product" is the viral agent itself - i.e. you've created such a darn hot product that everyone's talking about it, spreading the message and wanting to buy it.

And its the second type of viral that really excites me.  "Viral products" are for me the Holy Grail of business.  If you can create a product that requires zero marketing budget because it's so darn amazing that everyone's talking about it, then you've just created a cash machine (and put marketers out of business).

So, it was based on thinking that made me think - OK, if we're so darn good at running viral campaigns for other people then why not have a craic at creating our very own cash-spewing viral product and make a mint ourselves.

So we did - or rather are doing.  We'll be launching said "Rubber viral product" at the beginning of December, ready for the x-mas shopping rush.  And over the next month or so in the lead up to our products launch I'll be writing a series of blog entries about the concept of viral products, and also revealing bit by bit what exactly our viral product idea is.

Excited?  I am!

Your mum credit crunch, your mum

Various brands / media commentators seem to be jumping on credit crunch gag bandwagon at the mo  - trying to get us to see the lighter side of the present dire economic situation.  My least favorite of these comes from the newly humorless Absolute Radio - who've been running a series of particularly unfunny credit crunch gags voice-overs for the last week or so.

Where brands and mainstream media seem to be treading on the wrong side of line on credit gags, user-gen communities (as always) have hit it bang on.

This is my fave so far - spotted by one of my Orient-loving colleagues:

http://www.redcafe.net/f8/sign-here-if-you-beating-credit-crunch-209757/

"Suck on my moobs credit crunch!" - genius!
 

Cadbury makes dreams come true

Hot on the heels of the infamous Gorilla and Trucks campaigns; Cadbury are giving you access to the Chocolate Dream Steam Machine and the opportunity to choose from a range of sweet, fruity, rich, nutty, subtle, and downright ludicrous flavours to mix into your very own personalised bar of Dairy Milk.

For most kids (and grown-ups) this is a dream come true. 

From a marketing perspective I hope Cadbury deliver on their promises on this campaign - unlike their previous campaign for the Natural Confectionery Company - which promised free sweets for signing up to their launch campaign.  2 months later - me and whole host of friends who signed up to the campaign have yet to receive our sweets . . . and nor have we bought any either.

Chris Moyles the saviour of . . .

I never thought I'd hear Chris Moyles talking about "consultation"  - but he did just that in his breakfast show yesterday morning.

As a brand of research activity consultation rates pretty low in the general public's perception - with most people associating consultation exercises with village halls, weak coffee, stale biscuits, and even staler conversation.

So it's nice to see the self-styled "Saviour of Radio" bigging up the BBC Trust's latest consultation exercise - and putting some real energy into it.  Maybe this is because this isn't a village hall-styled consultation - but instead an easy-to-use e-consultation without a stale biscuit in sight.

Perhaps as Chris Moyles has now established himself as the Saviour of Radio, he should be looking to move on to save other communication channels.  "Chris Moyles Saviour of consultation" has a nice ring to it (ish)?!

When viral food goes wrong

There was a time I loved Jamie Oliver.  Then I hated him.  Now I'm loving him again.  I'm loving him because he's invented "viral food".  This is Jamie's idea of spreading recipes around Rotherham by getting people to "passing on" recipes to friends.

In the first programme Jamie boldly laid out his plans by drawing out his his nice viral food theory in which within 10 turns of "passing on" all 200,000 people across Rotherham would have been reached.  Simple.

Or not so simple as it turned out in practice.  As a viral theory geek it was clear why his theory isn't working as well (or simply) as he first thought.  These are:

- Make it simple to engage with: Jamie's recipes are too complicated to get to grips with and pass on.  The first 2 recipes that he tried to get people to pass on were meat balls and salmon.  Meatballs may sound simple - in practice they're a pig to make and easily fall apart.  Spag Bol would have been a much simpler option.

- Make it simple to pass it on: Worse than a complex idea, is bad execution of the "viral agent" itself.  In this case the viral agent was a recipe card - or in fact a piece of paper with a badly laid out recipe on it (as one of the Rotherhamites pointed out!)  A Sainsbury recipe card kinda format would have been much better.  Nicely compact and easy to pass on . . .

- Target influencers: First off Jamie's approach to finding people to "pass it on" was to cast his net wide for anyone at all to create the viral effect - which largely consisted of socially awkward single mothers.  Rather than picking at random, a clever approach would have been to pick community influencers - e.g. pub staff, cornershop workers etc.  People who are connected and likely to more easily create his ideal food viral.

Local radio gold dust

If anyone's forgotten how amazing local radio is - check this.  Is true local radio viral gold dust . . .

 http://www.wordmagazine.co.uk/content/when-hardeep-met-les
 

I'm starting a campaign to get Les Ross on national radio.  Think he'd be a perfect replacement for Jonathan Ross (no relation) on Radio 2's Saturday morning slot . . . 

Europe's just got closer

For a long time now there's been a political debate rolling on about Europe, largely around the questions of its relevance to modern Britain and what exactly it does? (and of course why are they so bad at golf?!)

Clearly there's no easy or simple way of addressing these issues.  Europe, as a political body, is undoubtedly a complex body - yet, as complex as it is, it also has a clear role and benefit for Britain in today's global society.

One step the European Parliament has made to tackle the "what the hell do we do" question is launch a new online TV station called "EuroparlTV".  EuroparlTV provides an insight into the workings of the European Parliament by broadcasting debates, interviews with politicians and citizens views.

From a service delivery perspective, the project looks like a success - with a nicely designed site, and some interesting content - though interesting only if you have a PC - as the videos don't run on Macs!

The key to its success is the question of whether anyone will actually use the service.  However, with over 20 languages catered for, its pan-European appeal may well be the key to its success - very much like the European Union itself . . .

Wear and share

We're helping launch 4mations.tv - Channel 4's new website venture billed as "the centre of your animated universe".

As I'd mentioned previously on my blog, I had planned to run a kind of "diary of a social media campaign launch" - to let the world get a view of what it's like to launch a social media campaign.

However, rule 1 of social media campaigns - they're a lot of work and never go to plan!  This is mainly because they mix both technology and people - both of which are pretty unreliable . . .

In this case it's been technology that's been the beef.  Anyway, the good news is that our campaign is underway + we're in the midst of merrily spreading the word and hopefully getting the people of the interweb to embrace 4mations and "wear and share" its shiny new content.

One of my favorite 4mations' toys is the "Cursor Cleaner" - a pointless (but fun) widget that cleans your mouse - check it below (rollover for cleaning to kick in!) + get your own from our launch goodybag . . .

The credit crunch's latest victim - Manchester United

I've got a mini-theory about the relationship between sponsors and football teams:
poor performance in the markets = poor performance on the pitch.

  Here we go:
- Man United have one of their worst ever starts to their season.  AIG teeter on the brink of collapse (propped up the US Fed).
- West Ham lose their manager.  XL goes bust.
- Newcastle United have one of their most troubled years in their history.  Northern Rock goes *** up.

QED!

Anyone else got any more evidence to support my crack-pot theory?!

Viral books

Every once in a while we do something nice for our industry friends - we send them books.  And we don't just send them any old books - they're usually books our team are reading and being influenced by.  And we don't just "send" books to our friends - we "share" them.

This difference is an important difference for a couple of reasons:

Reason no. 1 is because sharing is at the heart of who we are as a viral agency.  Our underlying ethos is based around sharing stuff - content, ideas and even books - not broadcasting.

Reason no. 2 is because we're keen encourage other people to do the same.  Sharing as a basic tenet has benefits for both sides of the contract (or un-contract) with the sharer gaining social capital, and the sharee gaining whatever capitals being shared - in this case a book, or at it's core the currency of knowledge.

So sharing is at the heart of the Rubber Bookclub - and it seems to be working.  One of the first people to publicly espouse the joy of book-sharing is blogger Amelia Torode @ Life Moves Pretty Fast - who's asking for takers for our latest book club book "Cluetrain Manifesto" once she's finished with it

Anyone up for it???  . . . Bueller . . . anyone anyone . . .