Click n Mix n Collaboration: Woolies 2.0

Bringing back Woolies was never going to be an easy task given that the old Woolworths was such a loved institution.  So it's been nice to see the Woolies team embrace social media, and place collaboration at the core of its brand strategy.  To a point it was a no brainer - if people love the Woolies brand and (mostly) loved the Wollies product range,  then why not get those people closely involved in developing the newly revamped Woolies 2.0.

Over the last 20 weeks, since the Barclay Brothers bought the Woolworths brand, the Woolies team have been getting their loyal following involved in the relaunch process as much as possible by blogging, Facebooking and Twittering.  And with much success: the Woolworths blog has had over 500,000 visits and nearing 1000 comments;  Twitter  2380  followers; 5,865 Facebook fans.

Importantly the Woolies team seems to have been genuinely listening to the their customers - and in particular have brought back an online version of their much loved Pic n Mix - which they've dubbed Click n Mix - which I love!  

Happily the guys at Glue kindly dropped off a bag of Click n Mix to the office yesterday, which I devoured like a school-kid.

You can see my v.amateur video tour of Woolies' Click n Mix here:

BP's creative trickery revealed

The guys at Ogilvy London have just released this new making-of video, showing the behind the scenes trickery involved in their latest viral campaign for BP Ultimate.



Having worked on helping seed the campaign over the last few weeks it was a real eye-opener to get an insight in to how exactly they did manage to shoot a group of people carrying a car across a city (Cape Town to be specific).  I particularly love the interviews with the kids involved in the shoot who are not the most articulate interviewees!

If you haven't seen the viral campaign already, you can check out the film here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILPBWQzC5x0

and the teaser clip here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3xZNrIJWe0

Comet turns itself into "petrol station"

Am loving this idea from Comet . . . they're offering free charging points for electric cars at their stores.  Or at least they're planning to - starting with a pilot scheme at their Purley Way store (Croyden)

Check out the Register's coverage here: http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2009/06/11/comet_e_power/

I love the idea from a business model perspective - essentially turning Comet into a 21st Century retail-driven petrol station.  A great innovation for a chain that's having real trouble coping with the likes of Amazon.

 Though am not sure they've fully thought the concept through, as given the amount of space in the present range of electric cars, the only thing someone's going to be able take home in the back of their car is a toaster!

The year the media died

As a digital boy this made me smile - especially the line "Algorithms got me crossed eyed"!

An agency website that doesn't suck

Agency websites suck.  It's official.  And every agency would (should) agree.  I can't think of a single quality agency that has a website that truly reflects them (and their work) as an agency.  That was until I came across this piece of genius from US agency Boone Oakley - a website as a YouTube vid.  Can't think of anything more of the moment than that - other than maybe a company website made from Twitter, which wouldn't constitute social media a*sery . . .

Taking viral further

This week's viral of the week in Media Week is BP Ultimate's latest campaign "Takes you further".  Some might question why a viral video campaign for a big brand like BP is worthy of such an accolade and I'd argue it's based on the appreciation of the matching of well thought out planning with strong creative.

BP's creative team (Ogilvy) recognised that they (apologies for the pun) needed to take their viral further than most, and rather than simply produce a one off viral hit, create some kind of online narrative around the campaign over a lengthier period.

The strategy behind this was based around rolling out a range of unbranded teaser clips, to generate an initial buzz and general feeling of "what's going on" (or in YouTube land WTF!), followed by a main "reveal" viral clip - to help make sense of the campaign, and hit home the key messages of the campaign.

The campaign so far seems to be bubbling away nicely.  The initial teaser clips have had 50,000+ views, and the main viral clip is starting to pick up nicely too - with some nice comments too.  Importantly if you look at the comments and conversations they seem to be largely positive, which is largely linked (I'd argue) to the seeding strategy - as existing communities had been warmed to the campaign by the teasers, with the reveal then helping make sense of what had gone before.

Is social media too wordy???

I've been following Woolworth's re-launch over the last few months and really like how they've optimised the use of social media to maintain that loveable / close relationship Woolies always had with its customers.

Whilst readying themselves for their big launch in the coming months, Woolies have been maintaining their customer love + building new love via the usual social media  channels: blog, twitter and facebook.  They've also added a nice aural aspect to their social media by using Last.fm and Spotify by creating "Now that's what I call Woolworths".  That's a great innovation + nice and quirky + very Woolies.

However, one thing that the Woolies social media team seem to have missed is pictures!  There's a real lack of imagery on the Woolies blog - there's not even a photo of the mysterious Woolies blogger Matthew -  and given that much of a shopping brand experience is visual (think of those overladen-toy-covered shelves that used to fill Woolworths)  they seem to be missing a trick.

With the recent surge in Twitter usage, social media seems to have been over-run by words, and the humble image has been left behind.  If a picture paints a thousand words, then maybe we should all be vlogging + flickring rather than tweeting,  Or maybe that's the problem, images say a little too much - 1000 words rather than 140 characters . . .

Adam's all time top 5 wuttufs

There's an ongoing discussion around our office about the viral WTF phenomenon.   There's no way of explaining what a WFT (or wuttuf) is - they just are, and have to be seen to be understood.

So, King of the Wuttuf - Adam - has kindly put together a list  of his Top 5 wuttufs.  WTFFFFFFFFF?!?!?!

WTF 1 - Pretty Ricky - Late Night Special



WTF 2 - Techno Viking



WTF 3 - Angel of death takes life



WTF 4 - edarem - Pretty Woman



WTF 5 - Chocolate Rain

Creative copying

Ad creatives have been pilfering creative ideas for years, however in the age of the internet creative pick-pocketing is both more tempting and easier to uncover.

Last year I wrote a blog piece about Fiat stealing a corking cult internet clip and turning it into a long running TV ad.   Well, having spotted "the Palindromic sketch" on B3TA last week, I'm taking bets on when we'll be seeing a similar palindrome-based ad creative hitting our TV screens.  I'm guessing in the next 6 months - any sooner anyone????

Know your meme

This is a perfect follow up to my blog piece yesterday about Simon Cowell and his mastery of the social media meme (in the forms of Susan Boyle, Paul Potts and the like).  

A brilliantly observed piece of meme analysis from the guys at Rocketboom (one of my favorite vlogs) - who are also the brains behind blog project Knowyourmeme.com - the home of the modern internet meme.

Simon Cowell's ITV buzz machine

The other day Simon Cowell did a touching thing - he publicly announced that he'd take a pay cut from ITV.  At first I thought this was Cowell's attempt to jump on the credit crunch bandwagon to come across all in-touch-with-reality as a cunning pre-emptive PR tack.  However, watching what's happened with the Susan "the badger" Boyle phenomenon in the last week, Cowell's move now all makes a lot of sense.

Cowell needs ITV just as much (if not more) than ITV needs Cowell.  This is because Cowell's new media model is firmly reliant on ITV.  Cowell has cunningly devised a buzz-generating / fame-making model which relies on the symbiotic relationship of mainstream media (TV and press) and social media.  A relationship where his TV show feeds YouTube / social media which feeds mainstream news media which feeds YouTube / social media which feeds mainstream media etc. etc.

It's not by luck that 3 of the most highly viewed clips on YouTube are linked to him: Leona Lewis, Paul Potts and Susan Boyle, whose videos (between them) have been viewed over 200 million times.

The big question is - would Cowell be able to generate such levels of buzz if his shows weren't prime time ITV?  The answer to that is a clear no.  And Cowell knows it - hence how he's so heart-warmingly offered to take a pay cut from ITV.  The other option is of course to join Richard and Judy and their 6,000 viewers on UKTV . . .

Twitter = Delicious + Cute birdy

It’s interesting to see how people are using Twitter - and how it fits into the history of social media. It can’t be more than 3 years ago now that people (including Yahoo) were getting all hot and bothered about a new internet phenomenon called Delicious. Apparently we were all going to turn into a social search engine - where people usurped technology and instead of relying on other Google finding the good stuff, we’d rely on our friends to do it instead.

Well, fast-forward 3 years, and we seem to have a case of history repeating itself. Given that most people now use Twitter as a link sharing platform, Twitter has basically become the son-of-Delicious. The only difference is that instead of the dour geeky feel and positioning of Delicious, we have the cute birdy-based Twitter, with its clever positioning and simple user-experience.

And don’t Google know it - hence why the guys from the Googleplex have become Sylvester-like in their keeness to get their hands on the Tweety-Bird, and turn it into some kind of real-time user-recommended social searchy system . . .

London AdLand T*ssers

Errr, well this is certainly an interesting way of launching a brand into a new territory.  42Below have a pop at the UK ad industry - with some nice cameo appearances for Hyper, the Tea Building (Home to Glue et al) and uber-planner Faris Yacob.  It's cheeky - but will it work???? Well, it's got our office talking . . .



Thanks to Digital Prolixity for the heads up.

Why people share stuff and that meme thing

I'd like to highlight some useful Henry Jenkins research via whatconsumesme. Rather than tackling tedious definitions of 'viral', Henry explains the various motives behind why people spread media:

-  They are doing so because the brand expresses something about themselves or their community.

-  They are doing so because the brand message serves some valued social function.

-  They are doing so because the entertainment content gives expressive form to some deeply held perception or feeling about the world.

-  They are doing so because individual responses to such content helps them determine who does or does not belong in their community.

On this it's also worth talking about emotional currency.  We spread media in seconds via Twitter or email and we mustn't forget that we often do so for the selfish reason of how something makes us immediately feel.  Dosh Dosh wrote an interesting article back in July which in some depth discussed the emotional reasons behind spreading media, be it joy, sadness, anger, fear and disgust. The truth is the 'key' to spreadable media falls in murky depths, somewhere between combining emotional engagement, an individual's perceptual/communal reasoning for spreading media and brand messaging. The further we move away from the idea that spreadable media is "dancing kittens on boobies" the better. It's growing out of teenage bedrooms and the potential advertising has to be a positive force in the world in enabling worthwhile conversations is being realised.

Where does internet meme fall into all this? Debunking the idea that content should be memetic, Jenkins adds:

"Talking about memes and viral media places an emphasis on the replication of the original idea, which fails to consider the everyday reality of communication — that ideas get transformed, repurposed, or distorted as they pass from hand to hand, a process which has been accelerated as we move into network culture."

A very useful addition to existing remix culture discussions.

Jenkins also talks about the "human agency" in cultures, inherently describing them as something we collectively create. Letting people mess with your content builds brand culture, giving people a stake in its spread and ensures its sustainable awesomeness. Ad-vacate to advocate.
 

The Today programme viral challenge

The challenge is on!  This morning Evan Davis and the Today programme team have challenged Rubber Republic to make a viral campaign to test the concept of viral marketing.  As part of the feature on viral - inspired by Cadbury's Dancing Eyebrows - the Today programme are running an experiment to see if we can make Evan and his co-horts go viral.  The campaign's being put together over the next few weeks, and we'll see if we can turn radio star into internet star .  . .