Put Your Brand Here!

Wonderful little round up of the best branded apps that have come up for the iPhone.

Our Song. Facebook App

It’s not often that we write about creative ideas in this newsletter. But here is one that needs a mention. A little app that the folks at Daddy, an agency out of Sweden created for Telia music store. The idea is simple: sharing one song from the Telia catalog with a friend of yours in Facebook, and then the app generates a slideshow of the pictures in which you and your friend are tagged. Try out the app here. Check out the entry board here.

Uk Continues To Prohibit Product Placement On Tv

Despite pressures from broadcasters who are facing a bleak future and from the Europen Union that allows for product placement on TV, the British Government continues to oppose product placement in TV shows that are produced and run in Britain. While shows imported from around the world can feature paid for products placed in them, the UK government continues to resist. “Britain is known around the world for the high quality of its broadcasting output. We need to continue to preserve editorial integrity as technology advances.” Culture Secretary Andy Burnham said. Read the story here.

Do Public Service Adverts Need To Shock?

Are charities being provocative on purpose, or are the issues they cover just too close to the bone, asks The Guardian. In the UK ads for charity are the ones that are mostly reported against by viewers and people groups. Charities like Barnardo’s, Greenpeace and PETA are always walking the thin line between what is acceptable and what is sensational. This ad from Barnardo’s where a girl is hit repeatedly in the head had over 800 complaints against it. According to a report from Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), it is perhaps the charitable one that turns most readily to the use of shock tactics in advertising”. This old Bernardo’s ad in which a cockroach comes out of a baby’s mouth was banned by ASA. “Unless you come up with something people won’t notice, there will always be those who prefer not to hear about it,” says Bernardo’s Diana Tickell. Peta’s spokeswoman, Poorva Joshipura says that the charity doesn’t have the advertising budgets of the big businesses it lobbies against. Getting noticed sometimes means walking close to the line. Read the story in Guardian.

Online Video, Understanding The Asian Way

While a lot has been written about how people in the west watch stuff online, little had been known about the habits of the Asian viewer. Research agency Tomorrow recently completed a research report for the Cable & Satellite Broadcasting Association of Asia on the current state of online video in the Asian region. The findings, specially from China, Japan and Korea are interesting and eye opening: 1 The Internet has become a primary entertainment destination. For young Asian consumers, the Internet is entertainment – particularly in China. 2 Social discovery drives the popularity of content. 3 Long form professional content is the most popular format. Although the West is just getting a taste of long form video on the web, in Asia it has been the most popular format for a while. 4. Audiences actively participate in content experiences. 5. Consumption is communal. Asian teenagers enjoy being online together. 6. User anonymity is important. One of the major differences between Western and Eastern online users is the importance of privacy and anonymity. 7. Local brands dominate the online video landscape. For both cultural and technical reasons, local video sharing sites in Asia have generally been more successful than foreign players such as YouTube. In Japan, Nico Nico Douga is very popular, in Korea the dominant site is PandoraTV while in China, the top two sites are Youku and Todou. Here is a presentation that sums up the study. And a link to a presentation that sums up the survey.

Water Boxes

Simple little idea that will help reduce PET bottle landfill is this one from the people at Boxed Water Is Better. These water in boxes, or recyclable paper cartons, make you wonder why anyone didn’t think about this before?

Custom Made Time

In the age of RSS feeds and blogs, Time Inc. is experimenting with a customized magazine that combines reader-selected sections from eight publications. Called “mine,” the five-issue, 10-week experiment also aligns readers with the branding message that its sole advertising partner, Toyota Motor Corp., has for its new Lexus 2010 RX sport utility vehicle: It’s as customizable as the magazine carrying its ads. Click here to go to the mine home page

Status Update Anxiety

A new kind of ailment is being tracked by psychologists and physicians, according to Psychologies UK Magazine. NewsFeed disorder. For those of us who are high ‘self-monitors’, with a greater level of self-consciousness and preoccupation with the social appropriateness of our actions (Take at look at the work of graphic artist Nicolas Feltron who calls himself a self annotator) , the news feeds give us an instantly gratifying way to control our image, that we can edit at will. We’re social creatures by nature, so when loneliness strikes we attempt to mitigate those feelings by seeking feedback – we telephone people “just to say hello”, but actually it’s to get them to ask us if we’re OK and to hear them say they love us. The same is true of status updates – we get instant replies and we can see how many people are on our wavelength. The complete story is here.

Marketing to the Infovore

There’s apparently a place in our brains that experiences a neurochemical reward when it acquires new information. That “information” doesn’t have to be reading War and Peace or learning the proof for a mathematical theorem – it could be as simple as seeing a new, unfamiliar picture. So, while conventional advertising wisdom suggests that repetition is an essential part of changing customer behavior, University of Southern California’s Irving Biederman shows us that the brain tends to tune out familiar images in favour of novel ones. Hence, advertisers must strike a balance between repeating their message but also providing novel information to trigger the reward circuits in the brain. According to Neuromarketing Magazine, one successful ad campaign that springs to mind as an excellent example of “infovore marketing” is Absolut’s long running print campaign of bottle-shaped images. Read more here.

Idea Of The Idea.

Wonderful post on JWT’s The Good Stuff blog (yes folks, Ty and his team are reviving Craig’s original blog) on the concept of an idea. Posted by Graham Wood Creative Director of design at JWT NY. He tries to give body to the concept of the idea. ‘The idea’ is something a bit soft, a bit more open, something inherent in actions, in passion, in sensation, in losing, in desperation, in experience, in understanding, in this now, in ‘this is this’, in succumbing, in not being sure, in the beginning and the ending, in dreams . . . in casting doubt aside. He goes on… An idea here is sort of, perhaps, almost anything-and the key here is to not pre-determine, to (almost) completely discard preference, presumption and assumption and allow the process of working to determine the outcome. “The idea” is something that is the heart of the reason that so many people do what they do, but it is something that exists just out of reach, fleeting and elusive. It is the reason we sing, write, make films, tell stories, live and breathe and find the common ground between each other; and this reason is entirely and specifically because the ‘idea’ is multi-faceted, fluid—it can be an opinion, a principle, a method, a notion, a motif, a theme, a fancy, a conception, a flowering, a surety, an energy, a fuel, a memory, a medium. Endorsed by an agency like JWT, that in many ways created many of the formats for brand building, branding ideas and creative ideas, Wood’s thinking brings in some fresh air. Agree or disagree? Hop over to The Good Stuff and leave your thoughts…