The Year Media Died

Wonderful little parody worth 5 minutes of your time.
The Year Media Died

Tastecasting

Get a group of socially connected people into a restaurant and get them to broadcast their experience across Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, blogs and other social networks. Here. Even Google has a similar service. Look at the what a search for Chinese Restaurants in Mumbai bought up. Don’t miss out the review links…

Workshops In Parks

Continuing on our favourite theme of brands, showing not telling is this initiative from Canon. Photography workshops in some of America’s most visited national parks. During the summer vacation, when you most expect people to come to these parks with their cameras intending to take pictures. The programme combines a competition with a series of free photography workshops at four national parks. Sessions are hosted outdoors twice daily by professional photographers, giving participants the opportunity to try a variety of Canon cameras and lenses. More here

Html 5. The New Language Of The Web

Not a day passes when some newspaper or blog writes about the arrival of HTML 5 as the new core language of the World Wide Web. HTML 5 is an open standard. By using the new language and the architecture it provides, designers and geeks will be able to create new levels of connections between different kinds of content that resides on the web and unlock the power of multimedia. Some people are even predicting the end of Flash and Silverlight. To experience HTML 5 users will need a new browser. If you are using the latest versions of Opera, Firefox or Safari browsers you should be fine. For the casual web user though, HTML 5 will mean little. If you have Internet Explorer 6 or older on your machine, and have the home page set to MSN, you needn’t bother.

Curated Perception

Traditional brand marketing is an effort to build perception around a desired business outcome (usually shareholder value). But the audience isn’t that interested in whether or not you make your numbers this quarter. In fact, every dollar spent on creating perception is a dollar that could have been spent improving the lives of your customers. Curated perception has long been a free-for-all land grab aimed squarely at focusing the attention of a market. Because information is now instantly and freely shared, those brands with the largest gaps between fabricated perception (traditional marketing) and the authentic character of their actions (products, services, human interactions) will be the quickest to sputter and implode. This is true no matter what new platforms are employed to manipulate awareness, or what tools we use to examine them. Brand experience is an illusion, human experience is real. The problem is not perception, but rather the consequences of human behavior. The solution is found not through trying to change perception, but through creating more constructive human interactions and positive, authentic experiences. Jason Sack writing on the Zeus Jones blog

Droga5’s Millions

Another D&AD black pencil winner. How agencies don’t have to think of advertising as the solution for all the world’s problems.

Yorkshire Tea tries augmented reality. Try it with your webcam on.

Lifetime Achievment at award 26

Johnson Banks blog writes of Mathew Dent, a baby faced graphic designer who won the competition to design a new series of coins for UKs Royal Mint. He just won a black pencil at D&AD this year. A black pencil is the equivalent of a lifetime achievement award for most people. And not too many companies have won one, according to the blog post. Mathew, hats off to you. Here.

Social Media Works For Gillette

One of the rare examples that we have covered of a mass marketing case from India. Picked up from Watblog, To Shave Or Not To Shave is the story of how P&G used social media to increase awareness, improve trials and finally enhance sales of the Gillette Mach3 Razor. According to a presentation given by Lucas Watson, global team leader for Procter & Gamble’s digital business strategy at the The CM Summit in New York, the Cincinnati-based firm used a “mix of paid media, earned media and social elements all working together” to grow sales. While there is a small story on WARC on the campaign, the campaign website itself has very little to showcase its stunning success. According to this story on CMD Global, the campaign started off a nationwide debate on the merits of shaving or not, setting all-time sales records with a dramatic sales increase of 38%.  Awareness doubled. Trials increased by 400% and Gillette’s market share increased by 35%. The campaign went on to win an award for branding bravery at the Media Awards in Valencia. See the case study here.

Learning and profiting from online relationships

What is all this friending on social networks really worth? Brands and marketers are trying to find out, according to this story from Businessweek. Finding that if our friends buy something, there’s a better-than-average chance we’ll buy it, too. It’s a simple insight but one that could lead to targeted messaging in an age of growing media clutter. Another research is focusing on how employees who forged tighter e-mail connections with their boss brought in on average $588 more in monthly revenue. Another research found that if someone clicked on an online ad, the people on his or her instant chat buddy list, when served the same ad, were three to four times more likely than average to click on it. As all of networked humanity mingles in this vast marketplace, trading information, creating alliances, doing favors, we may not think of our connections in such mercantile terms, but for business and individuals alike, the value in online friendship is poised to grow. From Businessweek.