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?

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.

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?

The Revolution is Here.

Here's the video from the site we just launched for our friends at Persuasion Arts & Sciences.

 

Friends are fantastic

The past few months have been insane. Good insane. We've been terribly fortunate to be working with some marvelous agencies and marketers, as well as really awesome creative, media and strategic partners. And the results have been quite lovely as well. Here's a quick recap:

Persuasion Arts & Sciences and Brunswick/MerCruiser 360° Control
We just launched this promotional site yesterday to coincide with the Miami Boat Show. HV delivered strategy, design and development. Big thanks to Dion and Mark for the opportunity and to John and Aubrey and crew for their fine collaboration. We're implementing an AdWords campaign around this effort as well.

Kruskopf Coontz and 3M
We've been working with KC to develop strategy, media and creative ideas to enhance an existing product campaign in the digital space. Now we're moving into production on that stuff. Tip 'o' the viking helmet to Robb, Mike, Ann, Audra and the team at KC for the work, as well as our pal Alan for the big ideas.

Taxi Branding
We're in the midst of an ongoing strategic, media, creative and production project with our friends Tim, Richard and Debra. Thanks to Jamie, Alan and Shannon for their insights and energy.

Spring and PwC
Much love to our pals at Spring. We're currently developing their new website. And we just collaborated on strategy, then led architecture and development to launch a video contest for business students at pwc.tv/videocontest. Know any b-schoolers? They could win $3,000.

Fallon
And a shout-out to Al Kelly and Tom Eslinger for the opportunity to knock heads on digital strategy and creative ideas for a new biz pitch a few weeks back. That was fun. Thanks as well to Marc and John for their efforts with us.

Venables Bell and Audi
Late last year we collaborated with the team at VB on strategy, architecture, content and design for a "Truth in Engineering" campaign site prototype. (See the work here.) Thanks to Colleen and Lissette for the opportunity and Jamie and Marc for their fine aesthetics and work ethic.

1nteractive and Pinnacle Airlines
Last fall we developed an online strategy, media plan, AdWords campaign, banner ads, and a landing page to improve Pinnacle's pilot recruitment efforts. Over 4,500 unique users hit the registration page in first 30 days, eliciting 400 applications, of which 56.1% were qualified. Per-pilot recruitment costs dropped to $163 per applicant from, well, let's just say a much bigger number. Oh, and our AdWords CTR was 2.99% on average. See the work.

We've got some other great work in the pipeline and we're teaming up with even more awesome people. Work is grand.

Which one is it?

As Armano tweeted, "Just watch it." (Great dissection of the issues in the current Writers strike.)

Test this.

We attended a very pleasant Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association "salon" this evening featuring Jamie Roach, founder and president of Offermatica.

Our Twitterings from the presentation are vague, but we were excited by Jamie's logic. Optimization and testing can be avenues to increased creativity, more relevant messaging and greater overall efficiency.

If you have a reasonable-sized audience (and budget), why wouldn't you engage in a variety of tests with all factors of your website?

It's as much about providing balance to a culture of guessing--which occurs inside even the brightest marketing organizations--as it is about providing mechanisms for continual learning. From a creative standpoint, this kind of testing isn't about rating the worthiness of a singular idea, it's about the democracy of concepting and the reality that any testing means more than one idea is required. In essence, a culture of testing will produce and "air" more ideas than a culture that doesn't test.

Jamie also mentioned Cliq, a new blog-promoting tool sponsored by Offermatica. We'll test it out.

And kudos to MIMA for hosting the event in the swank Minneapolis Club, with its fascinating wall of genteel past presidents.

We'll be back.

[blank] killed the campaign microsite star?

You saw this coming, didn't you? Of course you did. Interesting piece in Adweek today on the eventual, obvious, presumed "death" of the Campaign Microsite.

"Digital advocates often proclaim the imminent death of the 30-second spot, but the interactive industry might now be witnessing the demise of its own version of the commercial: the campaign microsite.

The growth of social media is causing marketers to realize they cannot expect consumers to always seek them out. Web widgets and video-sharing tools make it easy for any user to take content that formerly might have lived only on a brand site with them wherever they go. And social media sites help them share that content with friends."

Our 2¢: Nothing dies in advertising. The campaign microsite will continue to play a strong role when and where it needs to.

If your audience isn't hanging out in Facebook or MySpace, then perhaps a microsite can act in that role quite effectively. And it's quite easy to provide many if not all of the social networking tools and utility within a microsite (AddThis, anyone?).

Given today's wonderfully complex mix of online venues, the campaign site is simply another option.

Perhaps it's a clearinghouse, or a jumping off point. At the very least, the campaign site does offer the greatest degree of control and distribution.

If you follow Jaffe's three (new) roles for advertising: To Empower, To Demonstrate and To Involve -- it's clear social media/networks are quite wonderful for involving and empowering; whereas the campaign site has unique strengths in its abilities to demonstrate. But it's all part of a coherent whole -- each element crafted or adopted for a specific role in the marketing mix.

To suggest the demise of the campaign site is at hand is quite sensational, but hardly accurate.

Facebooking

Yes, we did it. We took Facebook's bait and created ourselves a Page. Come visit. Become a fan. We would really dig that.