Air New Zealand enlist some marketing help from tweeters

What's the strapline on the new Air New Zealand campaign?

Personality allowed.

Thanks to Brand Republic. More here.

Blogging: Breakfast of champions

This was posted at Villa 81 by Emmet Ryan. A three minute snippet giving an overview of the IIA's recent Business Blogging Breakfast. It was organised as a launch for their Join the Conversation: A Guide to Blogging for Business. Like the vast majority of stuff these days, it's available for free.*

I was there on behalf of Marketing Magazine, so I was a passenger in one sense, but it's always an ambivalent feeling to be the ad guy in a roomful of clients who are more clued in than their agencies. It may be that the extent of their cluelessness is all they realise, but that is where each must start. There were probing questions, honest bemusement and a very palpable sense that something has to be done in this space.

The more of these things I attend, the more I see the move from realisation to motivation. No small thanks, on this occasion, to simple and useful observations from Aedan in Puddle Ducks, Brendan in FBD and Michelle from PaddyPowerTrader.com. Start following them on Twitter why dontcha? You don't do that? Well why dontcha?

Oh.

Right. No, no, it's just- No, I'm sure that's a perfectly good idea for not doing Twitter. Very reasonable. No, no, it makes loads of business sense to me now. Sheesh. I feel like such an idiot. I've been wasting my time. And yours too. Here, let me just-

SFX: Shuffles off. A click is heard.

BAM!


*UPDATE
The lovely Roseanne from the IIA informs me as per the comment below that their guide is free until May 6th only, at which point you'll have to be a member to avail.

Behold the next competitors, adland

Twitter is beginning to break into the traditional advertising model. Carri Bugbee used it to great effect to advertise Madmen, tweeting away as the show's Peggy Olson. She's been so successful that she wants to make the first Twitter ad agency. Click on the pic above to hear her enlightening thoughts. Then search and reapply, Tweeple! (Advance apologies for the ginormous pain-in-the-arse ad at the top of the clip. Hey, it's Advertising Age. Whaddya gonna?)


Thanks to the eagle-eyed Rob Reid and Christian Hughes.

Oh, so YOU hate the new Facebook too!

People ought to save themselves a box of oxygen (I checked, it's an official unit of O2 measurement) by just accepting that change will happen. When you hear that old chestnut about change being the only constant, they mean Get over the fact that your Facebook page is different and you didn't do it/want it/request it.

It's ALL changing, ALL the time. And Facebook are not going to sit around waiting for Twitter to figure out how to steal all their customers just because you're comfortable with your homepage. It's just business. I know this to be true cos I read it at Mashable.

Sure, you could already buy ads on Facebook to promote your Page. But now, the incentive to do so is far greater, because each Fan you gain can be marketed to for free via the Facebook homepage feed. Even if it costs $5-10 to acquire a Fan (PPC ads seem to run about 50 cents for Pages, assume 5-10 percent conversion), it seems like a small price to pay to have lifetime access to engage that user. We’re already seeing Twitter users take out ads to gain more followers – this trend is likely to accelerate on Facebook too.

Suddenly, Facebook’s homepage re-design makes a lot more sense, not just from a “copy Twitter because it’s so hot!” perspective, but from the “let’s make a ton of money” angle too.

All about the heuros, hombres y mujeres. All about the heuros. The great divide between social media and corporate media. A lot of people who will want to be saying 'I knew the internet when you could have a conversation, maan. When it wasn't all this commercial crap, maan.' Uh huh. And blogging was just like, y'know, you and me and our buddy Sean and what we got up to when Electric Picnic rolled around and what a laugh it was and here's the pix up on photobucket oh we were wild!

I'm almost crying here at how this corporate monster just bit by bit logoed up the beautiful dreamscape of Web 2.0. Except I'm not naive enough to think it's ever about anything other than money. Not ultimately. No matter how lofty the ideals of some early adopters might be. Muhhhnnneeeyyyyy.

Change. The only constant. Watch Twitter change this year. (They weren't just given $75 million for a paint job.) Watch more ad agencies go 'Oh, NOW I get Facebook pages. Jeez, let's DO some of them!' Watch the paint dry faster than ever before. But do it from the bandwagon rather than the side of the track. Just saying.

Twitter for normals

Don't sneer at green beer

Here's the thing. I have no idea who Karlson NaKryshi is. I won't know next week. I didn't know last week. That won't bother him one iota. He's just developed an annoying (to me) Green Beer application for Facebook that's just been used by 1.4 million Facebookers. He truly doesn't care who I am because wherever he is right now, he's on a green beer high. Here's what they say about his topical little application:

Celebrate St. Patrick's Day by sending your friends a Green Beer. Get the most beers, and win $50 towards the purchase of your favorite 12 pack or anything else you want! Tell your friends and have fun! Happy St. Patrick's Day!

How many of your clients would've liked to reach a million and a half fb profiles with their brand? Did you think of telling them they could? There are a ton of people RIGHT NOW, on Twitter and in Ireland, who are developing smart, meaningful apps - and stupid, fun ones like Green Beer - and who can work with you to intuitively develop brand extensions for your clients. People like Contrast, who annoyingly even look cool. They're well known because of a piece of software they developed to let you know who just stopped following you on Twitter. Yeah, I know, why would anyone want to know who hates them- sorry, did you just ask me what this Twitter thing is?

Oh dear. This is gonna be a long night.

Monday's Adlinks

Why it's smart to advertise during a recession. From Adrants. Pass it on to the c-word.

An' I'll tell ya who else is enjoyin' this recession: my friends Mr Smith and Mr Wesson.

Red Bull's Red Bulletin magazine of the paper kind (see what they did?) is being launched in April. A quiet and restful backwater no doubt, where mayfly dance and ducks paddle gentl- Speedboat! SPEEDBOAT!!!

The AdAge Digital Conference is on in NY this April. Unilever's top marketing person will be there, as will the senior representatives from Pizza Hut, Delta Airlines and Facebo- wait a minute, is that the Tim Kring, the guy who made Heroes? Ohmigod I am such a fan! I can NOT believe this it is so cool etc etc.

James Cridland reviews strategic radio ad value. UK regional, but relevant. Thanks D Mulley.

What your week's been waiting for: Vanilla Ice says sorry.

Happy Monday peeps. Do please allow Jon Stoort, in 140 characters or less, to fill your Twitter knowledge gap.

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Twitter Frenzy

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things With Demetri Martin

Political Humor
Joke of the Day

Skittles wrasslin' with Twits

Skittles webspace update here at Brand Republic. Are Skittles struggling with Twitter's open-ended personality, or milking it for all the colours of the rainbow? I dunno.

Thanks to Christian Hughes for drawing my attention to it. Via Twitter haha.

Websites: yours v Skittles

Fragmentation: it needn't affect the overall taste.
Pic thanks to Dirty Bunny.

Skittles has gone the next step. They've pretty much done away with their 'own' website and just harnessed themselves into a Facebook page.

Kind of.

If you go looking at their pics page, it's hosted on Flickr. Their videos? A link to a Skittles page on - you guessed it - Youtube. Click on the Chatter link and you're straight to their Twitter page. Even the links to product information bring you to Wikipedia.

They've put themselves in a very interesting place: totally visible at the centre of a very public web of communications.

It's awesome, it's obvious and it's a brave step for Mars nonetheless, embracing as it does the underlying ethos of 'social' in the term social media. There are almost 600, 000 fans on the Facebook page alone. Ten more people commented on the Skittles Twitter page in the time it took me to type this paragraph. Ok, I'm not the fastest typist, but you still have to be a bit impressed, right? Right?




Yes you do. Because Skittles are allowing unflattering comment too. Look at the top of the thread above. 'wtf is with the skittles???!!! i HATE skittles!!!!' Even antisocial has a social element in it, something not lost even on the once notoriously reclusive Mars family. So at the risk of repeating myself again for the 400th time this month, watch how brands are using social media to leverage consumer opinions. People said Bring Back Wispa was a once off, and maybe it was. Here's another in Skittles. Who's next? It could be you, or one of your clients' brands. Why not, exactly? Why not?

Bord Gais steps onto a two way street

A very interesting event on Tuesday evening. Before launching into the electricity provider fray, Bord Gais decided to talk to bloggers. Before even talking to the press, I'll have you know. They took a group of interested soc media types through the complete above-the-line campaign, created by DDFH&B and craftily titled The Big Switch.

It's a big step for the company. Their hands are tied by the Regulator in the gas market (no pun there) as to what they can charge, but in the electricity market, see, they're free to drop prices lower than the ESB. A guaranteed 10% lower, no matter how low ESB drops over the coming year.

Hence the Big Switch campaign with the lovely Lucy Kennedy. Radio, press, DM, 48s, TV... the whole nine yards of atl. It's obviously a very big deal. They're building a power plant in Cork, so they want to be firing on all cylinders (again, no pun etc). It's a radical departure and one they desperately want to get right.




Yeah, so what. Companies have big launches all the time. High profile mergers, buyouts, tryouts, new products blah blah. It seems like a good offer, they seem like good people and I don't wish failure on them, but I'm not here to shill for them either. I have gas enough as it is.

From my perspective the important so what is the bit about the bloggers. This is a company with the word Bord in the early part of its title. Suggestive of caution, perhaps, or a soupçon of 'Get away from that newfangled DVD player or you'll burst it' technophobia. Except, my pretties, except...

Except it's not. The BG Staying Alive strategy ( I meant that one) has firmly embraced the blogging community and even has the audacity to hope (and that one) that a Twitter presence will help them in the quest for positive dialogue with socially interactive young Ireland. And guess what: so far it's working. The website is somewhat refreshing too, featuring as it does the lovely Lucy (Is she gone... bigger, or is it just me?) Kennedy.

The marketing dept of Bord Gais, very probably against the advice of many internal voices, invited bloggers into a room and showed us theirs. They asked us not to tell anyone they'd showed us theirs until they also showed the people from the papers the following day, but is this not a small measure of increasing respect from a very big Irish player? I contend, my lords and ladies, that it is. A measure of respect that I predict will reap dividends, as bloggers react kindly to being included, not patronised.

Chief BG on the night, Marketing Manager 'Barry' Nicky Doran said that as a company they did not expect to get the social media side of things right straight away. Fair fucks to him. He expected mistakes. He wasn't entirely comfortable in the space. He was being led, to a degree, by the more tech-aware members of his department, but he was willing to follow that lead. He had his full trad media package in place, he was chuffed with that, and he was ready to depart from the trad use of PR by not having any! Oh my. Instead, the dialogue with the Twits and the Bloggers would be the brave new interaction that would help to launch the Gas Board's entry proper to the all-round energy market.

Even if they make a complete fuck-up of it later on, they have certainly started in the best possible way. Pay close attention to how they manage this one, advertisers, and be anticipating questions from your own clients on the back of this move.

The ripple effect:
You can read more about it here from the man who helped get them into the idea, Damien Mulley.
Another socmedia writer, Peter Donegan, gives his consumer/blogger take on it here.

Over at Fitzy's Cloud Richard has some pre- and post teaser pics and notes that The Big Switch are running Google Adwords too.

Will Knott wrote about it here and posts some pics from the evening itself here.

More bloggers will be writing about it in the coming days, and I hope to have a breakdown of the campaign in the weeks to come.

Update: A more consumerist take on it here from Maman Poulet.

And Brand Ireland blogs on it here.

Monday's adlinks

The truth does not lie:

• Paige Worthy is a fact checker for Good Magazine
• Patty Turner is the wife of the CEO of McDonalds, Frank Turner. But of course.
• Splatt and Weedon have researched incontinence. Seriously.
  More unlikeliness here from The Times Online.

Big Brother is watching:
Got a smartphone? Google's Latitude brings you - and an increasingly heated privacy debate - into the spotlight. Media Guardian reports (with a tutorial from Google)

Healthy breakfast? Er, I don't think so Mr Kellogg.

The R word again. It's a shit shit time, but Bloom earn big respect for not fronting about it.

Five year old Facebook a fad? Rhodri Marsden finds out.

Twitter uptake still surging, but what to do with it?

Ten smart brands using smart social media.

Started using your GMail labels yet? They're shockin' handy. But why so long in coming?

Don't dis my Patty, punk!

Announcing the Web 2.0 Roadshow for Adland.

Corporate/Social applications of Web 2.0 for clients in Irish advertising agencies.

This is the new roadshow we're putting together for Irish agencies that have limited or no involvement with internet conversations for their roster of clients. Snappy title, right? Somehow Corporate Sapps doesn't seem right either. Anyway, this is a heads up for what we'll be doing moving forward. It's also an invitation to demand a free pint from me if I EVER use the phrases heads up or moving forward in this blog again. Utter arse clutter.

So, to redress the balance of technophobia (it ain't technics, baby) and the chasm of understanding between having a Facebook profile and using similar for your clients, the Web 2.0 Roadshow for Adland is being compiled, nay, composed (for it will be a beautiful thing) and will be doing the rounds from March. It'll be swift, enlightening and a lot less painful than trepanning.

This is NOT for those who are already well familiar with the web's social apps and are exploiting them for clients. It's pretty much for those who think that the web begins and ends with rollover banner ads which look awful like the press ad they just did. It's an introductory course to the pros and cons of corporate engagement on platforms such as

• Facebook
• Bebo
• Blogs
• Twitter
• Email marketing
• Virals
• SMS
• YouTube
• Google

Readers of this blog are to varying degrees already in the 2.0 wave. Many of those in the agencies you work with aren't. Spread the word! The Web 2.0 Roadshow for Adland is a pretty informal beast, but it has great relevance for Account execs, managers, directors, planners, media and creatives. Not so much for the agency cat, but for everyone else it's essential like avoiding David McSavage's 'new' 'show' on RTE is essential. It makes housecalls too, so disruption is minimal.

More to follow.

Monday's adlinks

Tesco handles the truth in advertising. Very thank you, Monsieur l'Assistant teu le Manageur du Brande.

Onside Sponsorship's John Trainor does the hard sell in the Business Post. Naming rights for Lansdowne Road are still available. My suggestion: similar to the way the late, lamented Point completely disappeared into The O2, how about bye bye Lansdowne, hello The GAA? Just saying.

Jonathan Woss does it. Stephen Fwy does it. What's with celebs, fake celebs and Twitter?

Resmesshion: Cybercom are expanding and need a Head of Search Marketing and a Paid Search Executive (the unpaid one quit nyuk nyuk). Say what now? Oh yes, these are the kinds of job descriptions that modern ad agencies use now.

Shameless objectivisation of naked bodies works both ways for Powerade. Thank you Mother. Click yourselves silly, ladies.

Shameless objectivisation of writhing body works both ways for Agent Provocateur. Stand up and be counted, gents.

Bruddah can ya spare a dime? The Indo group needs a quick hundred mill...

WTF does 'disintermediated' mean? Clue: it's not good, it's happening to you and Martin Sorrell won't feel its pinch half as much as you will.

Ulrika-ka-ka wins, but not too many care any more, it seems. Shame when quality like this is ignored.

Advertising is good for kids! Yay! It's official, or at least it is for the UK's Advertising Association!

Happy Monday, Adbabies. No snoozie after lunch.

(If it seems as though I plundered Brand Republic's website a lot, that is an outrageous lie and how dare you? Through the non-evil and almighty power of Google Analytics I know where you are having coffee right now. Shut up.)

Top Dublin sound engineer and social media adopter needs your votes!

Anyone who has ever used Reelgood's fine facilities for TV and radio production on Baggot Street will doubtless be familiar with the talented fingers of John Williams. He duets with them Pro Tools like Sonny and Beyonce Knowles doing an almost-naked moonlit tango on Dollymount Strand's silver mists. However what you may not know about our John is that he is one of the world's earliest adopters of pretty much every social media platform yet invented. Nokia Game? He invented it. Facebook? He put the face in it.

And now he's on the cusp of becoming a Twitter legend. Twitter is in essence micro-blogging on the go. You're always on within your network of followers and you use your mobile (or computher) to 'tweet' regular updates to each other, all of 140 characters or less. 'By accepting messages from sms, web, mobile web, instant message, or from third party API projects, Twitter makes it easy for folks to stay connected,' say Twitter themselves, and they should know because the latest figures show that this type of networking has just gone Graiguenamanagh. 752% growth in 2008. One million new users in Dec alone.

And Reelgood's John Williams (or mcawilliams to his online frenz) is one of the most popular.

But he needs your vote to bring him the legitimacy of an award to say it is so, and we know all about that do we not, my Adfriends?

Even if you don't plan to Tweet, and you think Twitter is a bunch of top-drawer tomfoolery for timewasters, at least you'll understand the concept of it when next a prospective client says 'Here, can you explain what's all this Twit thing about?' And you'll be able to explain it and the prospective client will to themselves quietly go 'Fuck, s/he knows this kinda thing! S/He is good! I'm moving my DairyGlo Shampoo account over there tomorrow morning!'

Head over to the Shorty Awards and give John a vote in the Personal category. He's already a finalist, he's doing the Irish (micro)blogging community proud and he's going to that New York for the awards on Feb 11. Also too, the DairyGlo Shampoo account could well depend on it.

You can thank me later with a sweet, single-sided DairyGlo Shampoo radio ad brief. Or any other radio brief.

The importance of the logo to advertising

How many can you recognise? Extra points for knowing what the people behind the button actually do.

While facebook is a relatively new company, much earlier into its career than say, a creaky 23 year old Wayne Rooney, that didn't stop Microsoft from paying $240m for a chunk. Well, more a crumb really. 1.6%. That makes fb worth fifteen effing billion dollars. Not bad for a four year old. As a tradvertiser, if you're not asking why a social bloody network where people 'poke' each other is so bloody expensive, you should possibly stop playing Scrabulous for five minutes and find out.

And then there's YouTube. It's interesting to note that on the day your new €275,000 (excluding terrestrial media buy), 40" spot for your client's SwankyShine Shampoo breaks, two hundred THOUSAND people will upload videos of their own (many featuring themselves, with their bedroom walls in the background, mostly in the US and UK and, increasingly, here) and two fifths of them will be in the music and entertainment categories, stuff that other viewers will actively seek out. You don't have to be Spike Jonze or Michel Gondry either. Any old low res tat will do, as long as it's entertaining or informative.

Good luck with the new SwankyShine spots on terrestrial TV, btw. Thank God it's got added ProPylaxaToriAmos Ten, huh? At least YouTube can never make that sweet shit.

There are one million Irish profiles on this social bee already. About half a million of these seem to be Dublin nightclubs. It's Bebo, of course. Correctly used, this is an incisive way to reach a younger demographic. It could however also be a bit like standing in a lush, green meadow and shouting at the grass to try purple for a change. You need to be punting the right product or you're wasting your time. There is an interesting early test case involving the marketing of Granard's most famous export analysed here. Rarely has thirty grand generated such intense debate.

Here be bloggers. I know the word sounds fluffy and dismissable, but when everybody's TV analysis of the US election is certain sure to have its own blogger, then pay attention. No marketing campaign on earth is more finely tuned to the nuances of its target market, and if they say blogging is necessary, you should believe them. The W is for Wordpress, the B is for Blogger. Two of the main software providers for most bloggers. There are some differences between them (like Wordpress is a commune of freeware-loving hippie geeks and, er, Google owns Blogger), but fundamentals are the same. They give you a voice and a set of ears in a very big world. It's lunchtime as I write: already 88,570 posts have been written on Wordpress blogs alone today. The simplest way to understand the phenomenal attraction of blogging is to just start one.

This is Feedburner's logo. If you publish content on the web, in a blog or a podcast, and you'd like to advertise your stuff, Feedburner can help with that. Anyone who wants it will be given regular, automated updates of your new content by Feedburner. It can also help you analyse who visits your stuff. Owned by Google. The more you blog, the usefuller it is.

If you use StumbleUpon it means you can give the thumbs-up to web content you like. Wikipedia calls it a 'personalized recommendation engine which uses peer and social-networking principles.' StumbleUpon themselves say that it 'helps you discover great content you probably wouldn't find using a search engine.' Seven million people are out there using it, bigging up what they find cool or useful or relevant. Sounds nerdy? A waste of time? Yeah. That's probably not why eBay parted with seventy five million dollars for it in 2007.

When an engine is developed just to search blogs, it's safe to say that bloggers have arrived as a legitimate and understood voice in the social and commercial media mix. Technorati is the engine. But it's a bit more than that now too, as it also acts as go-between between the blogger and the advertiser. Oh, didn't I mention? If you're a good blogger you can get paid by advertisers who want your space.

Digg is where people share and discover web content. Users vote on popularity, and the best stuff rises to the top. This is, in theory, all done by users. I can, also in theory, give this blog post an extra boost by submitting it to the upcoming stories section on Digg and get some extra readership thataway. In theory.

Delicious (or del icio us) is a social bookmarking site. Instead of just bookmarking a site or page you like, you instead have a Delicious account where you keep all your favourites online. Everybody else can see and share and swop. This exposes you to more of what you like, so if trans-Carpathian slapstick cookery programme outtakes is your big thing, then you'll find like minded souls on Delicious. Or not.

Twitter is a relative newcomer, having started in California (you don't say) in 2006. In essence it's a way to network with your own friends by keeping them up to date with your movements in info bursts of up to 140 characters. This can be fed through to your computer on your Twitter homepage, Facebook, a variety of other apps or, more popularly, on your mobile phone.

You get a 'tweet' SMS or email telling you and your network that Sean has found his lucky sliothar and so won't need to kill you for accidentally giving it to Mrs Quin's Charity Shop. It may sound stalkerishly obsessive, but it's getting ferociously popular, adding on users every month by the million.

Linked in is yet another social networking site, this time for business purposes. It's your CV, portfolio and business card online. Your contacts/network is an extremely valuable part of the site's architecture, as they act as referees and an endorsement of what you're about. 30 million users are registered on Linked in. I'm dismayed to think that anyone would suggest I've added it in here so that I can be readily checked out. Shameless.


Some postscript observations.

I'm guessing that not one of these dorky names went through the focus group hell that a lot of big brand advertising is forced into. Just a small bunch of startup people with a working title and butterflies in their tummies. There are lots more out there: try 10,000 new downloadable applications already for the iPhone alone, and it's an infant.

The single unifying theme for all these new social tools is their interactive nature. They rely on user input, commentary, feedback. They thrive on it, including the critical stuff. Traffic is blood. And that represents the divergence between the old world and the new. Top-down communications the ad agency way is gone, at least for the foreseeable. Not listening is no longer optional. Marketing has undergone a radical shift, and the polarity between the young who have always known social network media and how to integrate them into their lives and interests, and the 30-plus demographic who have a half-hearted interest in a facebook account at best, has never been wider. The important thing from the agency's perspective is to appreciate which one of these is the growing market, and then learn - quickly - how to connect with them.