Cool Marketing Thoughts

To send New Year greetings for 2008, the communications team at the dinosaur museum in Brussels sent colleagues and main sponsors a highly original package. Inside was a block of plaster and a hammer & chisel with an invitation to amateur paleontologists to dig, not for the bones of a mighty T-Rex, but to find the museum’s greeting card.

Agency: McCann Erickson Belgium
Account Director: Talia Hendlisz
Creatives: Gregory Defay, Quentin Gascard
Thanks for the pointer, Tanguy

In an era where everybody has an untameable urgency to show their skills, where people are looking for new ways to communicate one to another; Check out ClipCaster, the world’s first online Videoke concept (a blend of Video and Karaoke)! It offers you the opportunity to mix top quality sound and webcam images to create your unique, personalized music video! Perfect for a silly nightly activity, solo or with your friends. And… show the world You’re On. Send your recorded music videos to friends by e-mail, or as a personal online message. You may even become the star of the day, have your music video featured on the homepage (ask your friends to vote!) and reach an audience of millions!

This online innovation comes with courtesy of Pisang Ambon, the delicious banana drink that has been popular for more than 50 years. Research shows that the Pisang Ambon main fans – aged between 18 and 25 – are online for an average of 4 hours a day. Rather than develop a traditional campaign with classic advertising (to which they would be largely indifferent), ClipCaster represents a major step forward in the constantly developing world of new media, internet, and video. Pisang Ambon and ClipCaster will be putting performers in the spotlight from November 2007. The platform will be launched in 12 European countries: the Netherlands, France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Portugal, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.

Agency: BrandBase, The Netherlands
Thanks, Etiënne

To promote their free online e-accounts, Dutch bank ING had their agency come up with a pretty funny idea: a virtual toilet. In just a few clicks you can have your virtual self release that tension and carry on surfing. What exactly the link is between going to the toilet and opening an e-account seems a bit of a far fetched link from some creatives who’ve spend a little too much time at the drawing board, I guess. But let’s stick with the idea that opening an e-account should be as easy as going to the toilet. Mind you, in real life I’d never take so much time to listen to the toilet lady and even virtually it takes too much time in my [humble] opinion before the link with the actual product is made. The mashed-up fashion brands during the pee-time spent (as a man) is pretty funny though and if you go pee as a girl, and that is truly the biggest gag in the clip, you need to invite a friend because “girls don’t go to the bathroom alone now do they”. Hah ! Brilliant !

Anyhow: Here’s a little timewaster for you: [click to play]

Campaign site
Agency: Emakina, Belgium

Thanks, Bert

Here’s a cunning little take on the famous subservient chicken from Burger King. Ford captured a random Swedish guy, locked him up in a sauna and you can, by typing the right commands, make him do funny things. The purpose is to promote the Ford Fiesta Cool series. This campaign is particularly aiming for the female cluster of buyers, which is probably why the Swedish man is vacuum cleaning and the likes. Try typing commands like ‘handstand’, ‘basic instinct’, ‘kalender’, ‘kubus’, ‘ballen’, ‘bellen’, ‘kammen’ ‘dans’ ‘gitaar’, ‘touw’, ’stofzuigen’ or ‘mop’. Fun ! So, what’s the deal? Kalle Hötson, the Swedish man, needs to sweat. The point is to score 300 points as fast as possible by typing the right commands. If you succeed, Kalle will go seek freshness in the airconditioned Ford Fiesta and you get to win lovely prizes.

Visit the site, and give it a go
Agency: Ogilvy, Brussels

A 56.6% increase of the visits, 8942 subscribers and a definite upward trend of the users (66.5%). What do you do when you get these facts if you’re a beer brand? Right. You invest a huge smack of money in a marketing campaign, create a dozen 3D webisodes of your virtual 3D brand mascotte and you launch a dedicated section for those fresh users to come and win prizes, and most of all, to bring their friends. You make it very modern and up-to-date by adding a ‘my’ before your brand name and off you go! That’s exactly the strategy behind MyCeres, the new social networking space branded Ceres beer, inspired by the more famous My Space or Windows Live Spaces. With MyCeres the users can create and customize their personal profile, invite friends to join, play and challenge the other subscribers to the “Fight Chen” duel (a face to face viral game), and add them to the friends list to exchange messages. MyCeres gives the opportunity to win a lot of gadgets, and the grand prize is 4 tickets to the paddock of Moto GP 2008 with the Team Honda Gresini. Time to brush up your Italian and explore the site.

Sounds all pretty exciting to me, but my sober remark in the side line is: would I really need yet another space to them spam all my friends with invites to it? I’m not denying that the growth of users and increase of visits is a good thing. I’m simply questioning the resultive actions. I’d love to see facts and figures of the MyCeres campaign.

Agency: Dartway Interactive, Genova