Search results matching tag 'Coke'

First day on the blog...

661315 — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 11:00:00 GMT

As our debut post I felt we should set the tone and context for the forthcoming content of the FRUKT on music blog. My business partner and I sat in Hyde Park with a bottle of cold Rosé more than ten years ago and talked about how despite working for a globally renowned major record label, it didn't feel like embracing the future was on the agenda.

The chairman had never bothered to speak to me, despite me being the only person in the UK company with the words 'new media' in my job spec. Our belief was that consumer brands and technology companies, who were both 'involved' with music as sponsors and manufacturers of hardware, could become more central to the whole music business.

They could make the transition from sponsorship to partnership, enabling new ways to discover, share and distribute music and even in some cases, we could envisage ways that non-traditional music companies, could invest in and support the growth of talent. Fast forward ten years, and here we are. Eight years of FRUKT under our belts working locally and globally to bring brand ideas to life through music for clients like Heineken, BT, Coke, Nokia, Sony Electronics, O2, Vodafone, Orange, 3, Topman and many more.

Music is more than a channel - it's a huge and expansive cultural space. Given that there's never been a time in history when so many people have enjoyed so much music in so many ways, and that the traditional music business is struggling to define it's role, the game is open for new players to make their play and define a role in this exciting cultural space, and consequently share some of the love that fans have for music. So thankyou for inviting us into your world, and we look forward to having you on board for the ride as we explore the world of brands and music, and champion and celebrate the brands who go the extra mile.

Your mobile will do nicely

693284 — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 14:45:00 GMT

It's something of an urban legend - though I'm told it's utterly true - that, in the Far East, a mobile phone user can barely walk past a vending machine without pointing their device at it to buy something. Books, cans of Coke - all sorts are bought through phones and added to their usual monthly bill for payment. In the UK, that functionality has been on the radars of most in the industry for years. Now O2, which has just conducted a trial of such technology with 500 users, says it was a screaming success and is ready to bring it to market. So what does that mean for mobile marketers?

Well, if you follow the whole 'valuing interaction' model (see here for what that means), then mobile phones as cash utterly completes the circle between promotion and sale and should therefore open the floodgates to marketing budgets. For, once sorted, the mobile wallet means any marketing work delivered through the mobile as the media channel can be connected directly to sales in a way that even web work can't.

ISPs could have worked to use their monthly billing relationships with users to allow them to add web purchases to their connection charges, but it never happened. And, even if they had, the mobility of mobiles (!) takes us a significant step further, since it ties mobile marketing to offline sales – a link that the web has battled for some time to prove exists.

So, we dream up an ad, we send it to users’ phones, they are utterly convinced, walk to their nearest store (which we point them to using GPS and mapping functionality), wave their phones (complete with discount voucher) at the nearest payment thingy and walk away with their goods. It’s advertising utopia, and a sure way to the inside pockets of marketing directors.

In all likelihood, this kind of thing will only work for small ticket items – drinks, chocolate, crisps, tube tickets (Oystercard top-up was featured in the O2 tests) and the like. But, interestingly, these are the very types of brand that have struggled to make sense of the direct-response dominated online world because no-one buys sub-£5 items online. And, since it never proved to be much cop at brand advertising, that utterly limited the value of the web as an FMCG ad medium.

So, not only will mobile wallets make our lives as consumers much more whizzy, they could also open up some large doors to bigger digital budgets.

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BBC launches Mr Riley’s meaty & sweety pie range

322703 — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 01:25:00 GMT

Those watching Mischief on BBC last night (Britain’s Really Disgusting Foods) hopefully weren’t eating their evening meal in front of the TV. Mr Riley’s Pies may well come packaged to look tasty but when you discover what’s in them, even given the marketing spin, they are not so appetizing. The show that featured Steve Phillips (Spring Research), Brooke Dalton-Brewer (Spinnaker) and myself was actually great fun to make.

There’s nothing like a light hearted look at the darker side of marketing. Though I’m sure many packaging agencies are livid that advertising people exposing some of their devious techniques. Give it a personal identity, old fashion packaging for a traditional look, farm images for credibility and the master stroke – dolphin friendly. Northern comedian and anarchist, Alex Riley may not be to everyone’s taste (just like his dad’s pies – yes that is his dad on the packaging) but he makes it lot more interesting that those old stuffy BBC presenters who take it all too seriously.

Dressing up in a wet suit and filling it with water certainly makes the point about how much water is added to chicken! The programme format was simple - Alex goes in search of the most disgusting thing that can be legally sold as food. He discovers manufacturers have ingenious ways of transforming poor ingredients into something that looks and tastes like good food. Corn starch (wallpaper paste) is one common ingredient. He unearths hidden horrors, from substitute cheese to beef connective tissue and many other horrors. And that’s the legal stuff, imagine what’s not legal that gets sold? The programme set out to expose just how crap some food we’re sold can be.

What actually goes into those pies is disgusting though we all ate them and strangely they actually tasted ok. I had some in my office for weeks and as a sign of just how little real food was in them it took that long for them to go moldy. It was inevitable that the programme would set up big names and Brooker certainly got a pasting. Though I do think they were unfair to one of the big agencies (no names as I’m sure they’d prefer no further publicity).

Asda, by contrast, I thought came our really well. Thankfully, we were in on the humour rather than the victim and I do think that humour is a great way to make a point. However, there is a serious ethical and moral point – as an industry how do we cope with selling products we know are crap? Not so bad when everyone knows it - no one is trying to pretend KFC uses the finest quality freedom farm chickens. We buy it knowing exactly what it is so at least there’s an honesty about it.

But some of those pies and pasties sold as authentic quality foods aren’t. Sweets with chemicals in. Foods packed full of water or other substances. Kids snacks with e numbers? Apparently, Kellogg’s artificial Maple Syrup had the greatest number of e numbers in. Where do we draw the line? When is it acceptable and when isn’t it? Should we have a moral code in the ad business? Some agencies refuse to work on cigarette accounts (AMV), others on oil companies. With the great debate about marketing to kids, is there an ad agency who is prepared to say no to marketing crap snack food? When we did a research group with kids we asked them who are the bad brands - Coke, Pepsi, McDonalds, Burger King, petrol companies and a few others were mentioned.

Although it’s easy to take pot shots at these ethically demonised brands (I could write a lot about the good work that McDonalds, Coke and Pepsi are doing) there are many worse ones that look like angels, selling us hidden horrors. Why are chocolate, biscuit and crisp manufacturers not demonised? The programme, like advertising will be tomorrow’s chip paper - no one questions how crap fish and chips are do they? It’ll have its 15 minutes of fame around the water cooler and then a few hours later we’ll all be eating Cornish pasties again and diving into a kebab after the pub.

It’s ironic that with the credit crunch sales of McDonalds has gone up – so much for the health conscious consumer. But more frightening than the revelation about ingredients (or the fact there’s a glass full of fat in every kebab) is the ad they made themselves. It’s a lesson in why you should never do it yourself and should always get experts to write your ads!!

There’s another episode that features a few adland faces in too – look out for the one on data – Your Identity For Sale (BBC Three Sept 11th). Rebecca Wilcox, who’s a lot more attractive than Alex Riley, clocks up over 1500 ads she’s exposed to in one day and reveals the abuse of data and a few revealing facts about Facebook.