I found this image on the web and I had to save it to remind me that our powers in context planning can be used for evil. In this case somebody planned a media campaign for the insurance company Aflac and aligned this creative to appear anywhere that the language duck or ducks appear. In fact they probably use retargeting to identify people that tend to search for ducks more than others.
Sadly this advertising ended up in a very scary place for some people...
I got a chance to play with the Coca-Cola project Re:Brief that Google did, taking classic campaigns and updating them for the digital age today. The campaign created this video, a social object for me to share with my network.
The video includes these elements:
- The users name - The user location - Clear Coke branding - A video of somebody in Cape Town picking up the coke - A thank you message from that person
These elements were important for me as a user to share it with my friends.
The NBC Brotherhood of Man commercial evidently didn't actually appear in the Superbowl but it was the best ad of the day (via Ivan Askwith). Sarah Watson, Chief Strategy Officer at BBH New York and recent import from Britain brought up a good point, "when you live outside the U.S. you think Americans are crazy to put all this effort and spectacle into the Super Bowl, but when you live here it seems so right." Well this ad only enforces that concept:
It's been awhile since I have blogged. I'm going to try to do this more often here and on the BBH Labs blog. When I started at BBH I was asked to be the Marketing Director on Playground Sessions, a software that BBH was building in their brand invention unit called ZAG. I created a Comms Plan that changed a few times during the course of the year but we finally executed it in November 2011 and I wanted to share it with my readers here.
The Comms Plan (including 3 comms tasks):
Prior to Launch Comms Task: Be Social To be social we needed to have platforms where people could follow and engage with the brand. We first set up a “Coming Soon” website using Weebly and MailChimp to capture emails. Today I would use LaunchRock which makes it even easier. We then established a User Voice account to engage the fans to help determine the types of songs that we secured from the record labels. We started our social presence and grew these communities organically over the first 10 months with Facebook (3000 Likes) and Twitter (700 Followers). It was a good start with our initial Beta testers. Our Social Media team used Sysomos and Shoutlet for monitoring, engagement and tracking.
Launch Comms Task: Be Fascinating This was about putting a relevant message in front of a relevant audience using the fascination triggers of Power and Prestige. We worked with Twitter to get our account verifed. The week before launch we started advertising on Google with Ad Words and Twitter with Promoted Accounts. We grew our Twitter following to over 6000 leading up to the launch date. On November 3rd, 2011 we worked with YouTube to seed a special announcement video for David Sides fans and integrated annotations into the video. You can see that here:
Post Launch Comms Task: Be Famous On November 7th our Clear Channel national radio campaign started which we loved from a context standpoint running on many Top 40 music formats, similar to the music in the Playground Sessions library. We kicked off our Facebook video campaign with the help of Social Envy that earned us over 125,000 qualified and targeted video views. Finally our friends at Ad.ly got Playground Sessions into the hands of celebrities and here are some of those Tweets:
Today we have over 13,000 Twitter Followers, over 9,000 Facebook Followers. We have had hundreds of people install the software on their computers and are excited about the future press and partnership deals that we are working on.
This is a teaser ad from BBH for a campaign that starts January 10th. The real spot is worth the wait. You can read about the digital Comic Book component that Razorfish is doing in Adweek.