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Crayon in Second Life

23 Oct 2006

About a week ago, Joseph Jaffe announced on Across the Sound that he was starting a new company – a company focusing exclusively on new marketing: new marketing for a new consumer. This Thursday (in Second Life), they will officially launch “crayon – a new marketing company.”

Crayon is the realization of almost 5 years of evangelism, passion and thought leadership designed around the central premise that the world has changed; the consumer has changed; but marketing has not. Judging by the general consensus and response to Jaffe’s book, together with countless conversations with senior marketers, not to mention the level of discourse on marketing blogs, it became readily apparent that now was the time to scale and staff up to accommodate the acute lack of clarity and mass confusion regarding what to do next…

Enter crayon…

In short, crayon is a shape-shifter; a mash-up; a company that integrates the best of the consulting, agency, advisory, thought leadership and education worlds. crayon’s goal is to help our clients:

Amplify, extend and enhance relevance, experience and value through bold, alternative and non-traditional approaches

Join the conversation

Create disproportionate positive business impact

Think of it as the marketing services embodiment of “Life after the 30-second spot” and then some.

I’ll work myself up the guest list and maybe do some live-blogging from within Second Life, if possible. By the way if you want to find me in Second Life, look for Coolz0r Courier ;-)

Check out the CrayonVille website for more info (online on the 26th of October, at the launch day) and stay tuned to see what Jaffe, Shel Holtz and Neville Hobson and CC Chapman and the others are cooking up in Second Life.

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Posted in Advertising, Marketing, Trends

The Property Panel

22 Sep 2006

Banks aren’t always purely dedicated to managing your money. More and more we see them evolve and participate in the conversation. HSBC, the world’s local bank, just upped the ante with their dedicated monthly webcast. A panel of highly qualified professionals come together to discuss and debate consumers’ burning issues surrounding property, on anything from buying your first home to remortgaging. Sure, this is just for a niche in the huge financial market, but if you elaborate on the matter you can easily extend it to a webcast for youngsters with financial advice, a webcast for stock market investment and so on. The point is: conversation breeds satisfied customers. If you give your clients the opportunity to send in questions which will then be discussed, the added value for those clients goes far beyond ‘using an account’. And that’s something to remember if you’re planning your next campaign for a bank.

Tune in for their first episode
Check out The Property Panel | Thanks, Asi

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Posted in 2.0 +, Campaigns, Marketing, Trends

I Love You

17 Sep 2006

I just read in a Flemish newspaper that in Hong Kong, the first(?) auction of personalized licence plates (vanity licence plates) has been organized on Saturday. The ‘I LOVE U’ licence plate went over the counter for a mere 180.000 dollars. Other uncommon plates such as HANDSOME, BABYFACE and MR DVD were auctioned as well. The morning session alone was good for 770.000 dollars. Local authorities want to gather money for projects that benefit the poor with actions such as these. They’re counting to draw in roughly 9 million dollars a year. Interesting. How much would you pay for a personalized plate? And what would it say?

After a bit more research I’ve found some other remarkable facts about this trend. It’s not the first time this is happening in Hong Kong. Back in 1999, Cora Tse, a secretary at a construction company sent to represent her boss, tittered nervously and made a winning bid, the equivalent of about $45,000. All for a piece of plastic labeled “HY1″ to be placed on the rear of her boss’ car. His company is called Hop Yuen. And he, of course, is No. 1.

Vanity license plates are one thing. Many countries and U.S. states allow their citizens to advertise themselves, their true loves or their fantasies on their cars, usually for a modest fee. But Hong Kong has taken the licence plate game to a new level by auctioning off requested or desirable plates to raise money for government-approved charities. In 1994, for instance, a wealthy man named Albert Yeung Sau-shing paid nearly $4 million (13 million HK dollars) for the right to a single-digit plate: “9.” That number nine sounds like “ever lasting” in Cantonese.

In February 2006, actor and Hong Kong action hero Jackie Chan paid 1.5 million dollars (192,000 US) for a lucky car license plate, marking one of the highest prices reached at auction this year. The plate digits were ‘123′. Money well spent.

A mysterious man in a mask drove off with the most expensive vehicle license plate sold in Hong Kong since 1997, shelling out HK$7.1 million (US$910,000) at a weekend auction, a Hong Kong newspaper reported on Monday. The man, who wore a surgical mask and would not identify himself, left the auction immediately after winning the bid for license plate number 12, which sounds like “certainly easy” in Cantonese, the South China Morning Post said in February 2005.

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Posted in Humor, Marketing, Trends

Waiter, There’s a Hologram in My Soup

08 Aug 2006

Looking for a pretty eye-catching way to impress your customers? Then try viZoo’s approach to experiental marketing. Introducing : ‘Free Format’ (R), the hologram-on-demand-service. I’ve been checking out the portfolio and I must say I’m stunned. This is mighty impressive. It goes back to 2003 already when viZoo could offer to show Gandalf “live” in some shop windows. Something never seen before! Passers-by just had to stop – they couldn’t believe their eyes, as they stood in front of shop windows at IC Company (fashion) in Copenhagen or 3 Mobile Video Company in Stockholm and Gothenburg. Isn’t this what all advertisers are dreaming of?

“We are an advertising film company, developing and producing new media with ‘edge’. “

an understatement

The nifty EMH, or Dr. Twain,
has nothing to do with viZoo.
It’s just my bench mark for a hologram.

Check out the viZoo profile throught the [PromoSamples] or visit [viZoo].

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Posted in Advertising, Interactive, Technology, Trends

Cross-Track Projection

29 Jun 2006

Hmm. I finally started catching up on the feed reader. I noticed I overlooked this item that appeared last week at the BBC News site:

Giant advertisement films are to be beamed on to London Underground platform walls.

Replacing posters on the walls opposite the platforms from the start of next year, the advertisements will be shot across from projectors installed above passengers’ heads.

Full colour and even high-definition, the “cross-track projection” system will be installed at an initial 24 stations in Zone One.

Fully computer-controlled, in addition to advertisements, it will also be able to beam across everything from football scores to lottery results.

The technology, part of a £25m digital investment programme that is also seeing LCD television screens installed up and down escalators, is being introduced by advertising giant Viacom Outdoor.

Awesome!

Notice how zero out of 4 people are checking out the LCD screens on the escalator. I wonder how that comes. I’m also thinking the original ’soap’ stories might come back to live with short (sponsored) 5-minute episodes that are being broadcasted during morning or evening rush hours while people are waiting for their rides. Since mobisodes (soap episodes for mobile devices) are already being made, it would be a small effort to extend the line to these media channels. We’ll see where this is going. Cool trend though.

FJaX: Flash Meets AJaX

26 Jun 2006

Very interesting article on the how and why of FJaX, which is worth reading if you’re into new developments:

Jay McDonald: The secret is that it’s using Flash (the “F” in Fjax) to act as a speedy little XML parsing engine, instead of handling all of that in JavaScript. But Fjax’s use of Flash is a pretty significant departure from how Flash has historically been used. In fact, this is a critical point — because Fjax isn’t geared specifically at Flash developers who are used to building things where the user interface is Flash. It’s really a whole new way of using Flash that will appeal to folks who are not “Flash people” and don’t want to make a “Flash site.”

The approach can be characterized like this: try to go to the Fjax site and point to the Flash. You can’t. It’s not visible anywhere. That’s completely different than how people are used to using Flash.

HansOnExperience

17 Jun 2006

Hans is a funny guy from The Netherlands with a lot of background. He’s been working for Tulip (the computer company) for over 17 years and he’s an evangelist and trendwatcher. I learned a lot of things from him, through his weblog and through the conversations I’ve had with him (although there weren’t that many). He’s one of those guys that lead a normal life with wife, kids and a job he loves and from the moment you stop to follow it from day to day, you’ll see you’ve missed something great he did. Don’t get me wrong, he’s not an automated greatness producer, but seriously… he knows what he’s doing and how to do it. If his blog is moving slow, that’s the time to watch it closely because then you know he’s cooking up something nice.

And so it happened that all of the sudden he sent me an email with some stuff he did. And all you can say is: wow!

What follows are some links, unfortunately for Dutch speaking/reading people only (unless he’s going to translate it) of nice things he’s been up to.

The new thing that I hadn’t heard of was that he made a screencast. Not just a screencast, but a special screencast intended to be used as a viral. And that was something I haven’t seen before. This is a nice way to grab the viewer’s attention. It’s sort of like the BRTV commercials I wrote about last year. Branded screencasts not only cause the consumer to change the idea he/she intentionally had, it’ll make it more natural for the consumer to accept your product as being ‘needed’. It gives you a whole window of opportunities to reach out and explain everything there is to be said. And that’s really great. A new medium, combined with an existing brand building tool. Quite innovative.

Because Hans sort of unwantedly crowned himself as the king of screencasting of The Netherlands and Belgium, Webwereld – a Dutch magazine – recently interviewed him about the possibilities of screencasting. An interesting read if you haven’t seen the possibilities yet, and certainly worth checking out as well.

Another nice thing Hans was involved in (he wrote page 7) is the online/offline news magazine: A Great Place To Live, which is a brochure about The Netherlands that talks about ‘what lives amongst the people’. Yeah. Hans has been quite busy. Just so you know.

Check out HansOnExperience

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Posted in Marketing, Social Networks, Trends

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