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.

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.

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.

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.

2007 in friends and music and other favorites

Hello Viking started six months ago.

Since then, we've had the opportunity to collaborate with wonderful people at Spring, Dentsu America, Venables Bell, 1nteractive, Arnold, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Pinnacle Air and BlueCross BlueShield.

Thank you David, Shannon, Ted, Trish, Rey, Mike, David, Colleen, Lissette, Pierce and Woody.

And thanks to all the amazing people who collaborated with Hello Viking, sharing their skill, wisdom and experience. We look forward to working with you all in 2008!

Amidst all the excitement, we chalked up a few other favorites:

Cornelius' Sensuous
(Especially love "Fit Song")

Common's Finding Forever
("Drivin' Me Wild" might be our single of the year)

Fountains of Wayne's Traffic and Weather
(Okay, "New Routine," "Strapped for Cash" and "Yolanda Hayes" might also be our singles of the year; and we really dug the FoW show at First Avenue)







The Police reunion tour
Okay, so the crowd on the floor was 45+. But these guys were on fire.

The Sea & Cake at the Varsity Theater
We love seeing Archer and Sam. They were fantastic, in a fantastic venue.

moo.com
They love to print and we love the work they print. Beautiful website interface.

Michael Clayton
Might be our film of the year. Tony Gilroy's script was awesome.

Must not forget Basecamp. Or HighRise. Two brilliant web applications from 37Signals. Hello Viking probably wouldn't be as organized (and thus as successful) as it has been without these two awesome applications. And we found ourselves almost totally in agreement with Jason Fried when he spoke about 37Signal's process and products at this year's MIMA Summit.

And we got geeked about Twitter.

And Flickr.

Curse you, Guitar Hero III. You threaten to curb productivity in 2008.

This week in Inspiration

Every time we get a call to collaborate or bid on some work, we end up collecting a bunch of reference links. Looking across multiple projects, these links are totally unrelated to each other. But maybe you'll find something useful or inspiring in the list. Here's our recent grab bag-o-links:

k10k.net
Our pal Sung said, "it still holds its own even though the design is almost 8 years old. On the backend, it has lots of dynamic feeds so that's really nice." This is a great resource for design.

WebCreme
Got this from our pal Cole. A nifty resource for design ideas.

Schematic
Another great combination of intuitive architecture and great design. Love the metaphor. And the main control nav system is very smart.

CenterPlan
Awesome navigation interface. Thanks for the link, Jamie! (The site takes a bit to load, but it's worth it.)

Facebook | Volvo C30
Kristina at MIMA sent us this link. Good reference for the evolution of marketing on Facebook.

Firstborn
We dig their new site design. The info architecture is awesome. And if you don't hire us, hire them!

CSS Zen Garden
We love Flash, but we love CSS, too. This site does an excellent job of demonstrating how simple CSS can dramatically effect design. And it works great on the iPhone, too.

Web 2.0 how-to design guide
This is very well organized and thoughtfully written. Lots of useful insights and guides for strategy, architecture and design.

Panic
Really great product site design. So simple. Check out the download arrow, upper right. You just drag/drop one of their product icons to download it. (And it's not built in Flash.)

What's your inspiration? Please share a link or two with us.

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.