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?

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?

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.

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.