Hello Viking

How Much Brand Utility Is Too Much?

A recent article in Adweek prompted a question, “Would every company benefit from creating a community around its product?”

In his coverage of the 2008 Cannes Lions Awards, Adweek’s Brian Morrissey interviewed the forces behind Nike+, last year’s big winner.

The article gives a good look into Nike’s evolving brand philosophy. (And it’s important to emphasize evolution here. Brands do, and must, evolve.) Nike appears to have taken the lesson taught by this new Website/Community/Service to heart, spinning their digital presence into a new focus: The creation of services important/helpful to people in general.

Stefan Olander, Nike’s Global Director of Digital Media says, “If we can do something good for someone, no matter the product, it's going to be good for us,” sharing the stage with Bob Greenberg, CEO of Nike digital agency R/GA. “The goodwill value to us is gigantic.”

With two new services for different sports niches, Boot Camp and Ballers Network (a facebook app.), and a third one crafted around shoe customization, Nike’s going the whole nine yards, and seems pretty committed to it.

Which begs more questions: Is creating a relevant service for people the best way to connect with them online? Would people tire of the increasing amount of participation warranted by the growing number of product communities?

Applied Arts Magazine

So Canada likes Vikings it would seem. It must be the stylish hats.

One of Canada’s premiere visual communications magazines, Applied Arts, has chosen one of our projects as a winner of its 2008 Photo | Illustration Contest, specifically the illustrations by Aaron McConomy for PwC.tv. Congratulations and many thanks to Aaron for the great collaboration!

If one wanted, they might see them on the awards page here.

Or in context, right here.

Dan, the intern

Dan Spillman joined us on Monday. He's our summer intern. Dan goes to MCAD, and is tall. We're excited he's with us. Dan's going to help us with our first birthday celebrations, and various client projects. Welcome, Dan!

Housekeeping

We finally got around to cleaning the office. Perhaps in celebration of spring or something.

Our first intern, Dan, started this week. Yesterday, in fact. We'll post his image here soon. Dan's a junior at MCAD and we're thrilled he's with us. You'll see some of his work soon. We've got him concocting ideas for our first birthday surprise/event/web-enabled gizmo. Trust us, the whole 3G iPhone release will pale in comparison.

We've also been working with some awesome new people in Florida, Massachusetts and California. We continue to be amazed at how much easier it is now to collaborate with wonderful people across distance, and you honestly don't sense the distance.

Our bookkeepers started this week as well. It's amazing how we managed to get through almost an entire first year of operations without them. But they are now on task, and whipping us into shape. Thank you, bookkeepers!

And we've been steadily adding to the equipment rolls. Thank you, Apple, HP, etc. Nice to spend money with you, too.

All of which is now causing us to look into new real estate ideas.

Meanwhile, projects of all shapes and sizes are brewing. We wrapped an online ad campaign for our pals at Kruskopf Coontz and 3M. You'll soon see more work soon for PwC, as well as a UGC-oriented project for a nifty corporate collaboration. And other stuff.

Oh, and did we mention we've started an entirely new company?

Right. Well, it's called BannerPalooza. Our motto: "There are no small ads, only small people."

BannerPalooza is an online display ad production warehouse. You have the ideas, and BannerPalooza produces them. From storyboards, to all the Flash bits--simple animations, video, data integration, to QA and trafficking. We work with your media team and the distribution networks to insure your intentions get built properly, on-time and on-budget. We've got a talented rolodex of producers and Flash experts standing by.

And so it goes.

One Show Interactive 2008

We attended the awards ceremony for One Show Interactive a few weeks ago. In a word: Impressive.

This year's award winners were very global. (Click here to download the Interactive winners list (PDF) from the One Club.) We saw lots of great interactive work from Brazil, Japan, Sweden and the UK. This year's show only confirms the necessity to consider global audiences, or at least the presence of them. Whatever you build—be it a campaign site, digital content or online display ads—will be seen by an audience much wider and more diverse than what you might have targeted. And that's good. Not just for general awareness, but for the practice of thinking beyond your own marketing "walls." What might an audience in Korea think of your project once they stumble upon from a Google link?

We also got spend time with old friends (and judges for this year's show) Benjamin Palmer and Will McGinness (who also chaired the judging committee). Nice to see those guys on stage.

Anyway, Best of Show went to the Japanese retailer Uniqlo and the production company Projector for the "Uniqlock" campaign. It's incredible and totally deserved the top honor. It's content and re-distribution technology wrapped in a simple idea.



You can read a ton about Uniqlo—its corporate history, successes, failures and resurgence—and the Uniqlock campaign here at Creative Review. Here's a few highlights from their article:

"Uniqlock is a downloadable ‘blog part’ created by Projector. It’s a simple clock that anyone can place on their blog to give the time and location of the blog’s writer. Each hour, it plays a specially written chime by DJ/producer Tomoyuki Tanaka, aka Fantastic Plastic Machine. Nearly 20,000 are in use worldwide. Uniqlo recently updated the concept with the addition of video: in the new version (shown), each hour is marked by a short dance piece performed by dance group, Core of Woomin, and directed and choreographed by Yuichi Kodama and AIRMAN."

"Launched in June, the Worldclock section of the imaginatively wrought Uniqlock site will inform you that more than 19,000 Uniqlocks have been set, and the site has been viewed nearly 46 million times by visitors from 204 countries."

Again, impressive.

Paid Search 101 rap

Chuck; aka the Poetic Prophet, aka The SEO Rapper is amazing. This piece on paid search is awesome.

Cullect Call

One of the challenges of the information age we're in is too much information. We've been using all the major feed readers to aggregate and sort the useful from the less so. It's been a decent experience. Netvibes is beautiful and simple. The GoogReader is very straightforward. Very Google. And then we stumbled across Cullect. Or rather, we had lunch a couple times with Garrick van Buren, the guy who invented Cullect, "the most shareable feed reader."

We're hooked for several reasons:

1. Cullect will import/read almost anything. You're at a blog, news post, whatever--just hit the browser menu button you've added, and the content you want is in your "cullection." Unlike del.icio.us, there's no back-and-forth redirect, or a pop out like Tumblr. Yes, the page reloads, but it's a tiny distraction.

2. Cullect displays everything. If a blog post contained a video, from wherever, it's automatically embedded within your cullection. If there was a "tiny" URL, Cullect automatically extracts the original URL and displays it. If there's an Mp3 file, Cullect displays player controls. Cullect will also display all of the referring URLs for blog posts, and direct links for embedded content.

3. Cullect is easy to whip through. Granted, it's not perfect (yet). But a few simple keyboard commands let you zip past the current item (type "j"), or go back one item (type "k"), or collapse an item to just its title (type "c").

4. Oh yeah, you can share anything from Cullect. That's why it's "the most shareable." As an example, let's say you've got 20 feeds coming in. You want to sift through the latest feeds for a specific term. So you click the "Latest" tab to get the most recent feeds, then in the browser's URL you add "/[searchterm]", hit return and Cullect filters all of your latest feeds to display only the ones with that search term. But wait! Now you add ".rss" at the end of that URL and you've got an instant RSS feed to give clients, friends, etc. Meaning, they'll get a new filtered feed of your feeds. Perfect for sharing specific slices of news and information with co-workers and clients.

5. It's always improving. We asked Garrick for Search, and 2 days later, the functionCu was included.

6. It can be subscription based. Cullect does offer a basic service for free. And it rocks. But we like the idea that more service requires some kind of modest payment, i.e. $6 a month for the mid-level offering. We'll gladly pay that just for the access afforded users in point #5.

So check out our "Important Reading" from the Hello Viking Cullection over in our righthand sidebar. Another benefit of Cullect--you can create widgets for different slices of your feeds (Latest, Important, Recommended). Cullect uses an algorithm to filter "importance" based on things like number of referring posts. This approach provides us with a highly customized news feed that's particular to Hello Viking's tastes and preferences.

And you can check out--and share (without being registered!)--our cullection at http://cullect.com/166.

positioning

Fascinating post (and comments) over on Wieden + Kennedy London's blog, "Welcome to optimism" on the subject of how agencies position themselves.

Our own positioning suddenly feels in need of a tune up, if only because. Perhaps we need to coin a succinct rallying cry to ignite brand leaders to our side. Based on previous experiences inside larger agencies, we could devote years if not decades to this effort. But how about this handy poll instead?

Eddie Izzard + Darth Vader + Legos = Brilliant

Hat tip to our pal Paul Isakson for tweeting this video. Made our day.

(Note: The VO isn't "family friendly," per se.)

Free!

Chris Anderson's latest in Wired, "Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business" is definitely worth your time.

From an opening anecdote about razor magnate King Gillette, Anderson outlines the economic and technical forces that have evolved to create the business ecosystem we all work within today:

"It's now clear that practically everything Web technology touches starts down the path to gratis, at least as far as we consumers are concerned. Storage now joins bandwidth (YouTube: free) and processing power (Google: free) in the race to the bottom. Basic economics tells us that in a competitive market, price falls to the marginal cost. There's never been a more competitive market than the Internet, and every day the marginal cost of digital information comes closer to nothing."

It got us thinking.

If, as Anderson puts it, "The moment a company's primary expenses become things based in silicon (i.e. digital advertising infrastructure), free becomes not just an option but the inevitable destination," we've all got a lot of soul searching to do.

Advertising won't go away. Nor will it become entirely free to create or distribute.

The lesson here is to think differently about what advertising does, or is supposed to do. And to constantly evaluate our roles within this mutating system. Then be open to unusual thinking as it reveals itself.