Cool Marketing Thoughts » Marketing

FIFA 3 Street: WoW

Miel Van Opstal — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 13:31:51 +0000

I came across a very cool trailer for FIFA3, which then lead me to a superb website that allows you to see and learn all the cool moves from the clip. I’m totally stunned. This really is amazing and the promo site must have cost a truckload of money because it looks very slick! Check this out:

Video: FIFA3 Street

Click the image to go to the site:

It must be the child within me that admires these supernatural skills and probably the long forgotten dream to run around with 21 other morons on a football field, chasing a round leather rabbit, but somewhere… I’ve always wanted to be a super pro footballer. Just like almost every sane man, I think. The thing is, I dug up my soccer ball again and actually started to try out the moves to make me feel better. And it helps.

Being Remarkable

Miel Van Opstal — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 19:10:35 +0000

Whenever you’re in Orlando, chances are you’ll see a car like this driving around. All I can say is, even though I’ve been in Orlando and went out for dinner quite a few times, there’s only one place I remember where you can eat ‘the best lobsters in town’… I wonder why that is.

Great stunt for the Boston Lobster Feast!

The Power Of Marketing

Miel Van Opstal — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 18:47:36 +0000

It’s a fact that if you are a marketeer, a lot depends on how well you can wrap up your message to sell your product. Presentation is everything. The way you propose your product, supported by testimonials and based on facts that have been broadcasted on international TV stations will definitely determine the success of a product. Word of mouth will also help you out a bit, because nowadays, people very often rely on the statements their peers make before they decide to purchase a product. The perfect illustration of a great marketing stunt is the (most likely photoshopped) product below. Needless to say, this is so much more than the bare product could ever be. This carries a story, and stories sell. Even when this is a fake, it points out exactly what marketing is all about. You can make people want something, and they’ll be happy to pay a little more for it, as long as you succeed in wrapping it up nicely before you deliver.

Lesson learned.

1 Unfortunate Logo

Miel Van Opstal — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 18:41:24 +0000

A few months ago I did a post about 8 unfortunate company logos. Recently I came across another logo that really could fit in well with the others. I’m not really sure it’s in Spanish, because I can’t really translate it, but the pic has been sent to me by a friend who found it on the web. Since it’s travelling around, I thought I’d post it here. Thing is, when it comes to picking the right company name, please make sure the abbreviation is not ambiguous in other languages. Chances are if a company like this depends on tourists to survive, I don’t think it will be quite as popular :)

Thanks, Kristof

Customized Energy Bars

Miel Van Opstal — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 22:04:40 +0000

A while ago I posted about those yummy customizable M&Ms you could order and surprize friends or business relations with. But in the light of ‘healthy futures’ and ‘powerful messages’, what can be more fun than creating your own energy bar and have a custom name printed on the wrapper? I mean, the message is pretty clear: chocolate is for wussies and sweethearts. Energy bars are so much more of a statement than practically anything you’ve ever been able to customize. And it really shows you either have a powerful product to promote while you wish a good physical condition to your target audience by bringing them something they can use.

There’s not much more to add. Start creating your own bars, and send out a message that makes sense!

Visit YouBars
Thanks, Dave

Video Seeding For Professionals

Miel Van Opstal — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 21:26:17 +0000

I remember that whenever I had to do some ‘casual seeding’ for a promo video for an agency, I had a document with all the usernames and passwords of the sites I would dump the file to. It would take me up to a day to drill down that list, surf to the site and log in, upload the video, wait for the encoding and then bookmark the url of the clip to track the number of views afterwards. I know seeding promotonial clips has taken a downfall a bit, since not all communities are that keen on ‘being abused’ by ‘yet another agency that wants to score’ with a clip in the hopes it goes viral. So. Here is a solution that can make some people very pissed, but at the same time would come in very handy for an agency to start the seeding and save a lot of time.
In comes Hey!Spread…

First thing to do the ‘undercover work’ is to have some sleeping accounts. Just go to the sites listed below and register for an account. You better start making those on beforehand, even when you don’t have a clip to seed. You can put some ‘general’ funny clips on the account and pretend to be a regular user. It’s good to have a history on a site. The longer the better. It’s good to have some activity on that account as well, it will add up to your credibility. Write down all the usernames and passwords and then head over to the Hey!Spread website.

With a simple login, you get access to their service, name your movie, tag it and start the uploading. Hey!Spread will upload your movie to:

All the links above go directly to the registration page of the sites, so in case you don’t have a username/password on that site yet, you don’t have to look for the signup page.

Hey!Spread also allows you to add a watermark to the video file, in case you want to brand it for an official release or something. As soon as you start uploading your file, all you have to do is sit back and relax. The only thing you have to wait for is the processing time of each individual video site. When everything is uploaded, you get the URL to the location of the uploaded clip. Just copy-paste that list, put it in an e-mail or a Word document, and go check the views if you need to harvest the results.

As a bonus, you can use the Hey!Spread API which allows you to propose Hey!Spread in white label as a innovative and addictive feature to your users or clients. Allow them to mass-distribute video content over the best video platforms at any time, but still be the solution provider that came up with this brilliant plan for your customer!

Have fun.

DIY Paleontology

Miel Van Opstal — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 18:26:46 +0000

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

Plane Crash Turns Out To Be Planned

Miel Van Opstal — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 19:17:38 +0000

The first time I saw this clip I thought it was a real video, like the one I’ve seen earlier of a holiday resort that had a beach right before the start of the runway of the airport. Then when I saw the plane turn I began to suspect something fishy, but I never really expected the clip to turn out the way it did!

Video: Have A Nice Trip

This is in fact a commercial for X-Travel, a Dutch site aimed for teens and youngster who are looking to plan a vacation. It’s a clip that promoted a campaign where teens could ’start their own airline company’ meaning that if they would check in 6 friends, they could win a free vacation for all. Tempting idea, and an appealing video for that specific target audience.

Creative With Adwords

Miel Van Opstal — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 11:28:40 +0000

One of the leading car rental companies in Europe is Sixt. In Germany or Switzerland, and more recently at Schiphol airport in The Netherlands as well, I saw their brand gain traction and become more present. They always find cool ways to do offline marketing stunts, as I have previously covered a few times [hanging car, don't forget]. But also in the online market, they have found ways to be remarkable when they experimented with a new way to make their Google Adwords ads stand out from the crowd.

Pretty clever.

Thanks for the pointer, Paul.

The Pocket Geek

Miel Van Opstal — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 10:35:56 +0000

Fuel Industries, an agency specializing in branded entertainment, was hired by QNX Software Systems to help out with the launch of a product directed to a very specific community (embedded software developers). So Fuel Industries came up with something a little different and developed a Flash game called The Pocket Geek to get the Foundry27 forum some more tracking.

Besides the fact the design looks really neat, I’m very fond of the ‘action-figure’ approach. It’s makes a geek-in-the-box look so adorable and cute, I think this could be a super cool direct marketing gadget to send out to agencies. Collect ‘em all, and rule the world!

The gameplay is nice, goes smooth but is a little more complicated than you might suspect at first glance. Keeping a geek productive, not hungry and happy at the same time requires tact. The IQ tests in between are funny :) The goal is to have your project finished by the end of the week. Challenging. Perfect for a Friday afternoon.

Extra stuff:

Thanks for the pointer, Nick Iannitti.

Nostalgic Deluxe Talkboy

Miel Van Opstal — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 22:00:03 +0000

Mmm. This one made me think about the old days. Where is the time when kids didn’t need a PS3 with 60 games to entertain theirselves? Where is the time when audio cassettes still did the trick? Observe the various implementations of this deluxe device Tiger once released, and think back to the endless days of super-spy-fun you once had. Fun for hours, unlimited rewind/rewrite functions… OMG. I feel sooooo old when I see this stuff flash by again. I think the clip is from 1995, but it seems almost like it’s from the 80s. Waaaaay back in the days.

Video: Tiger Deluxe TalkBoy

Underwater Love

Miel Van Opstal — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 21:47:00 +0000

Houtlust recently merged its content to Osocio.org, so you might want to adjust your bookmarks if you haven’t done so already. I was browsing the site and stumbled upon this pretty interesting ad. Sure, it’s not the first one to be depicted on the wall of a swimming pool under the water level, but I thought it was an interesting take on global warming. Even though I do not think things will take such a dramatic turn, there is still a need to alert people of the dangers if we keep up with our current wasteful lifestyle. This is a pretty cool way to communicate, and most of all I think it’s pretty wow. I’d take a few extra dives just to look at the ad better :-)

Caption: “Don’t let this be our future. Save our rainforest, stop global warming.”

Agency: Naga DDB, Malaysia

Free Air Guitar

Miel Van Opstal — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 12:16:52 +0000

Paul Hennell pointed me to a very interesting piece of hilarious marketing. It’s a bit like selling the holes in the cheese, but in this case it’s free. What a very cunning plan to put this up. A Scottish rock radio station based in Glasgow decided to hand out free air guitars as a promotional stunt for their launch. In front of their building an empty guitar stand invited people to pick a free instrument. As Paul hinted, this might be a super cool idea for a guitar store when you’d add: ‘more colors available inside’. This is just brilliant!

Thanks for the pointer, Paul!

Burn Baby Burn

Miel Van Opstal — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 15:59:53 +0000

A little while ago, a new club opened near my town. For their opening they asked an agency in Antwerp to come up with a nice idea. So, since the club was named ‘Burn’, what better way to be remarkable than to set the flyer-boy on fire while he was handing out the flyers? Using a ‘consumer generated’ quality of film, they taped it and sent it out on the web, where apparently some people thought it was real. Discussions in the comments of the site where the clip was leaked show however that not everybody was happy about the fact ‘their’ site was being used to drop a viral. Thing is, you’ll never be able to please everybody. I don’t see this as an abuse of a site, I see this as a nice way to promote a stunt.

Besides the discussion of the fact that virals still make a chance out there, I still think this is pretty cool. If they pull off the stunt a few times in a more crowded area, I’m sure it will lead to the needed word of mouth advertising scenarios. This is, and remains, something you do not see every day, and so it’s good enough to grab the attention of the people who see this happen. They will beyond any doubt accept the flyer and read it. They might not hold on to it, but they’ll read the message. And in a world where you have to deal with an overload of boring advertisements and commercials, standing out of the crowd is the first issue to work on. Mission accomplished, I’d say.

Agency: DuboisMeetsFugger
Made by Wendy Wauters & Karl Magnus
Filmed by Toon Mertens

Join The Conversation

Miel Van Opstal — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 01:14:52 +0000

As mentioned in the previous post, I’m about to dig myself a way through a pile of structurally ordered letters that make marketing sense when read in the right direction. I’ll be combining the joyful read of AnnaMaria Turano & John Rosen’s Stopwatch Marketing with Jospeh Jaffe’s Join The Conversation. Jospeh’s book is all about conversation, because there lies the true power of brand marketing. Other than offering a decent product in a perfect fashion, the talking about it and the reviews that satisfied customers have afterwards with their friends and relatives build up a brand image that is more stronger and powerful than any PR activity could achieve on its own. Third party recommendations are stronger and more dedicated and stand tall. Combine that with a decent strategy and well adjusted ideas from a book as Stopwatch Marketing and I’m pretty sure your brand/product/idea will be a hit with the right dose of both approaches.

Joseph’s book is a fistful of well aimed thoughts about how brands and marketing can profit from the power of conversation. If you look at the line-up of the chapters, you’ll get the drift.

Talking “at” versus talking “with”
The many-to-many model
Can marketing be a conversation?
The birth of Generation I
The rise of the prosumer
The new consumerism
The six Cs: Three phases of conversation
The consent-conversation relationship
What conversations are in your future?
Why are you so afraid of conversation?
The 10 tenets of good conversation
The 5 ways you can join the conversation
When conversation isn’t a conversation at all
Where does conversation fit in?
Conversation through community
Conversation through dialog
Conversation through partnership
Getting started: The manifesto for experimentation
Does conversation work?
Do you speak conversation? Take the test

Again, just as I wrote a few hours ago: I look forward to reading this and write down my thoughts. Check back soon for a decent review.

Stopwatch Marketing

Miel Van Opstal — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 00:08:07 +0000

January/February will be a month of reviews in between advertising rants and campaigns, because yesterday I offered to review a book from Jaffe Juice, and today I got contacted by John Rosen who was kind enough to put me on his list to review the Stopwatch Marketing book. I am delighted to have some new books to put on my bedside table or to read on the train rides back and forth from Amsterdam, and I’m looking forward to write down my findings for the readers of this blog. Stay tuned for that. Below is a short overview of Stopwatch Marketing. More information can be found on the dedicated blog.

In Stopwatch Marketing, we identify four basic shopping strategies – impatient, reluctant, painstaking, and recreational – and show how to analyze, evaluate, and exploit the time that represents every shopper’s most important resource; how to understand and measure the length of time your customer will spend searching for your product or service; and how to make absolutely certain that your product or service is close to the front of your customer’s queue.

Many of America’s best-known and most successful companies are using the principles of Stopwatch Marketing™ every day to achieve spectacular growth in both margin and market share. The book includes fresh company examples such as Tempur-pedic, Microsoft, Goodyear and MasterLock as well as completely original interpretations of popular case studies like Lexus, Charles Schwab, Apple, Commerce Bank and Whole Foods. Our book not only shares their stories, but offers step-by-step guidelines for building an entire marketing strategy around stopwatch principles. Our success in applying these principles to our clients’ businesses gives us confidence that we are on to something quite new and interesting in the marketing world: the criticality of the customer’s time demands in reaching a purchase decision.

This certainly seems to be an interesting read, and to be honest, seeing Microsoft in their list of examples made me quite curious to know which of the techniques or tactics are being applied. (I work for Microsoft, in case you missed my switch). Other than that, I really look forward to dig deeper in the strategies to get consumers to spend as much as they can in the shortest amount of time possible, without blasting them over with an overload of teasers or bombing them with spam. To be continued…

Delicious Men

Miel Van Opstal — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 16:16:53 +0000

Living up to its brand promise, Axe came out with a tasty new commercial a little while ago. Unlike the ‘we make a nerd be loved by gorgeous women’ approach, they now offer you the real deal. Using their deodorant, you will be changed into a yummy chocolate man and all women will want to have a piece of you. I think I’m going to move to the US, buy the deodorant and then sue Axe for not living up to its promises. Hah!

Video: Axe Chocolate
Thanks for the clip, Arns

Reality Stinks

Miel Van Opstal — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 21:29:22 +0000

If you thought you’ve experienced it all and advertisement could no longer shock/bother/make you think anymore (pick one), then here is quite the eye-opener for you. To protest against whale hunting, a poster of a whale has been hung against a wall, the whale is sliced open so that its guts come out (apparently a normal procedure), and below the poster on the floor are… some remains of intestins. I hope this ad ran in well-ventilated areas only, and I also hope that there was no restaurant nearby. These concerns put aside, this thing comes smashing in your face like a fly on a bicycle ride. And if you have my kinda luck and the fly happens to be right there when you’re talking and flies right in your throat, the effect would most likely be the same.

Done for IFAW, the international fund for animal welfare.

Agency: Republic of Everyone/Happy Soldiers, Sydney, Australia
Creative Director / Art Director / Copywriter: Happy Soldiers
Photographer: Adrian Lander
Retoucher: Electric Art
Released: December 2007
Via: AdsOfTheWorld

Victoria Bitter Bottle Orchestra

Miel Van Opstal — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 21:10:03 +0000

Arns just sent in a funny commercial I just had to post. Might be a bit older already, seeing that it’s from a beer brand from down under, and it sometimes takes a while for those campaigns to reach this part of the world. Nevertheless, I thought it was pretty cool to see a beer brand sponsor a philharmonic orchestra on the one hand AND supply all of their instruments on the other. Must have taken aaaaages to set this all straight to the right tones and to tune the contents of the bottles to create a synchronical melody out of it with such a group of people. Nice job!

Video:Victoria Bitter

In case you didn’t know: Australia’s favourite full strength beer, Victoria Bitter or VB as it’s fondly known, has a tradition of rewarding hard work and hard play, dating back to the 1890s. More info on their beersite.

Blow Up Your Phone

Miel Van Opstal — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 20:36:36 +0000

Would you like to earn a life long calling credit of € 150 amonth? Or maybe one year of free flying with Air Europa? Would you sacrifice your phone for that too? If the answer to all of these questions is a loud and clear ‘YES I DO’ the dig up your finest Spanish and surf your funky behind to Haz volar tu móvil?, a small microsite far a campaign by Pepephone, a Spanish mobile operator. Participants in the contest are invited to put their clips on YouTube (of all places) and if you’re the lucky bird, you might even win € 5000 for your entry. That should be enough to buy you a brand new phone. Thing is… if you don’t win… :-) Ah well. You’ll win, right?

Video: Blow Up Your Phone
Via: BuzzingBees | Bajo La Linea