Cool Marketing Thoughts

A few days ago, I wrote about a funny campaign from the Belgian postal services. The mini-site showed a survey which people could fill out to see if they would be a good mailman or not. Three days after the campaign went live, a lot of fuzz started to escalate as the union of Belgian postal service demanded the campaign would be pulled entirely because it would damage the image of ‘all mailman’ (and mailwomen) in this country. They stroke back at the management and said the campaign needed to be pulled ‘or else’. Unions are a funny thing. I’d love to see them take on the internet, because you see: once something is online, it’s not really easy to just remove it from the web again. So, today I found a tip in my mailbox from a reader who said the entire campaign site has been mirrored. That’s not so difficult because all that needed to be done was fetch the .swf file out of the cache and upload it again. Everybody knows that.

What’s even harder to believe is the aftermath of this campaign, which costed a few thousand euros (indirectly ‘our’ tax money, as the Postal services get a lot of money from the Belgian government). The union blames management for approving a campaign like this, management says they didn’t know anything about it and blames the marketing department. Marketing department feels the rain coming and blames LG&F, the agency, because they pitched the campaign.

The campaign is a beauty. I don’t understand why any mailman should feel insulted over a funny take on the profession. It’s not like all mailman are killers because there’s been a movie titled ‘the postman always rings twice’, so why would they become bad because of a few humorous questions? You tell me, and then the union. I say those union guys are totally exaggerating. And please explain why an agency should take the blame for coming up with a good idea. The marketing staff of the postal services have approved and gave the ok. The fact upper management says they didn’t know about this is totally ridiculous. As if marketing can spend thousands of Euros without them noticing, without marketing having to explain where the money went. Bollocks. My tax money went to this campaign and I like it. It’s a good thing someone mirrored the campaign. At least half of Belgium will still be able to see what the fuzz in the newspapers was all about.

Enjoy this, Belgium: het postbode examen is back online!

Update: In case the Mac domain gets pulled, Steven points to a file host where you can download the .zip file with an html and .swf so it can be mirrored everywhere. You got to love the internet. :)

I’ll see if I can get it online here as well.

Update 2: Campaign seems to have been pulled at the Mac domain. Here’s a new mirror :)

I’ll search for more people who’ve uploaded it and link to them.

Update 3: I pulled 9 Gig hosting the mailman exam. I’m taking it offline. The file is 896kb which after some math (9*1024=9216; 9216/0.896=10286) comes down 10.286 views… in just about 2 days. That’s not bad.

I’ll find a new way to host it. Update on October 3rd! The .zip file has been downloaded 30 times, surely it must appear somewhere soon. Stay tuned!

Update 4: I’ve found a file which is hosted on a foreign account, I summon it here (but i’m not hosting myself). This will stay online until someone tells me not to. Enjoy!

Here’s part two of three of the entire Flirt Vodka campaign. (Catch up with part 1 here). This is quite an extended campaign. Nothing too special if you compare it to the different products in the same segment with whom Flirt has to compete. It’s only natural they play the ‘huge campaign card’ in this way. I like the visuals very much. If anyone knows some Bulgarian, feel free to translate some copy because I can’t figure it out. Enjoy.

Copy: “Are you ready for tonight?”

Copy: (top line) “She said she’d need longer time to choose”
Copy: (bottom line) “FLIRT – keeps the memories”

Copy: (top line) “Listen to your angel!”
Copy: (bottom line) “Are you ready for the summer?”

Copy: “Are you ready for tonight?”

Copy: “Are you ready for tonight?

Copy: (top line) “He said he was picking hips ”
Copy: (bottom line) “FLIRT – keeps the memories”

Part three coming up tonight | thanks to VIK

Yeah, they’re quite the hype, those C.M.O.N.S. (c’mons or c-mons?). For a quite a few weeks already there’s been a lot of buzz around them. Rumors have it that they’re not a rockband like they pretend to be, that they’re a marketing stunt for some product launch. People said it was pronounced c-mons, and related it to the mobile phone brand Siemens. Others said it was for a tv show. The C.M.O.N.S. appeared on MTV, have a subdomain on the MTV site, they have MySpace profiles and a Spanish background according to those pages. During commercial breaks they appear in between commercials for a few seconds. There were stickers, wall paintings and floor graffiti all over Europe and their entire presentation is always by means of some knitted gingerbread-man figurines. Are they real or not? The fact is, I’ve been informed that those little puppets have managed to kidnap John Miles. It appears to be related to the Night of the Proms… are they coming too? On the action site it says: all we want is a gig at the Night Of The Proms. The url says ‘night of the cmons’, and in the video John Miles is ‘corrected’ by Blue (the puppet’s name) that it’s Night of the C’mons, not Night of the Proms. Is it ‘buzz’ for the Night of the Proms concerts? It appears to be so. Check out the link below and see the ‘victory’ video from the C.M.O.N.S. where they make John Miles beg for mercy. If you sign the petition on the site, maybe they’ll let him go in time to perform.

Check out the Night Of The C.M.O.N.S.

Here’s some examples of the buzz:

Fake wikipedia page:

Relevant links:
Night Of The Proms website
The cmons.com website
MTV page in Under The Radar
Who’s Who Wikipedia Clone

MySpace
White’s page
Blue’s page
Cherri’s page
Red’s page
Moo’s page

YouTube
Clip 1
Clip 2

You can easily sing along with the lyrics. The only word they sing is “c’mon” :)

Old school ads with a seventies touch for PlayStation2. At first I thought they weren’t so fun or special, because of the dull and ‘old’ look. However, that same vintage feeling triggered my curiosity so, on second glance and with a little more focus on the details, the ads revealed very funny situations. I particularly like the one with the kid ‘finishing’ through the ‘do not cross’ ribbon the police used to mark a crime scene. Second place goes to the kid in the supermarket (third ad). It’s in the details. And that’s really good. I like the totally different approach for PlayStation2. It’s a relief after all those arty designs from the past year. New yet vintage, and powerfully entertaining.

Agency unknown
via Adverbox