Today’s audiences don’t live in an on- or off-line world; they live in a “nonline” world. The even more advanced technology has become a part of peoples’ daily life, and they cannot tell exactly when they are “on” and when they are “off”. Marketers should therefore take a look at nonline success metrics. 

The Pod Hotel in New York combines high style with high tech. To compete with trendy boutique hotels, the hotel lets visitors make advanced connections with other guests via its closed social network PodCulture. Improving the real-world customer experience, guests connect online in specific forums to meet up in real life to drink, dine, shop or go out.

Visit the hotel one day you are in New York or just check out the website!

http://www.thepodhotel.com/

/Katrine Thuesen

Having my morning coffe on saturday, i stumbled upon this brilliant Gevalia ad while reading the papers. And when I say brilliant, I mean brilliant. This is the best corporate/ngo partnership I’ve seen since I dont know when. Let me tell you why:

Coffee producer Gevalia since 1987 , which is as long as I remember, been running campaign with the slogan “Hvilken kaffe byder du uventede gæster?”  (“Which coffee do you offer unexpected guests?”).

Everyone in Denmark above the age of 20 knows this slogan. And know, Gevalia and Dansk Røde Kors (Danish Red Cross) exploit this to its fullest extend:

Trying to make people sign up as Red Cross Visitors, Gevalia have begun running the ad above, the text saying “Not everyone is granted the joy of unexpected guests”. The ads are accompagnied by a shopping mall-tour in weeks 10-13, you talk to REd Cross visitors while you have a cup of Gevalia Coffe. Moreover, Gevalia donate1 dkr each time you buy one of their 500.000 red cross-marked cans of coffee.

So text 22600255 or mail besoeg@drk.dk now! One of your 168 weekly hours can make the life a lot easier for some of the people who lead a solitary life.

//Jakob

Myspace, Google, Skype, Facebook, Twitter, MSN, everyone’s expanding. “Choose us”, they scream. “we can provide you with everything you need”.

YouTube’s not an exception. “Okay, you have a company/ product brand! Give us your bag of gold an we can help you in 5 different ways”.

If you wanna know the five magic ways, consult the great minds at fallon planning.

If you wanna learn the more ordinary five point palm exploding heart technique, consult this humble martial artist instead:

Beatrix Kiddo, will you marry me?

//Jakob

Good to be back! Despite the financial crisis, 2009 is gonna be a swell year, I’m sure Right now, it’s 9:50 p.m. I just had a steaming cup of coffee. I’ve just spend 10 of my current 126 downloads at emusic.com on Bon Iver’s alt-folk record “For Emma, Forever Ago”, and right now I’m listening to my new record while checking up on my blogroll. Have I missed out on anything vital? Probably not.

Have i missed out on anything interesting? Definately. Like this three-and-a-half minute recap of the history of marketing, that I just saw at adverblog. It’s funny and right to the point (and a bit sad towards the end, too). Enjoy!

By the way, sorry for tricking you. If you’ve read my words AND watched the movie, you’ve definately spent more than 210 seconds. Shame on me.

// Jakob

The winners of Sony Ericsson’s Photo Battle contest have now been found.

Take a look! or check out the Photo Battle site

The Photo Battle was part of Sony Ericsson’s launch of their newest camera phone C905 equipped with 8,1 megapixels. Yesterday, they celebrated the launch by throwing the nicest party for 800 people at Skater Parken with Outlandish, White Pony – and Suspekt bringing the crowd to a boil! It was one of the best parties in a long time, I was there…

/iben

A new book, social media, awards and great case studies are on today’s menu. Let’s go back to the beginning.

Well, not so far back, let’s skip a couple of years:

Since 2004, Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, two analysts on social media from the international research company Forrester, have been bus. Since 2004 the’ve been posting about social media and technology from a marketing perspective on the blog Groundswell.  This year they’ve written a book, which I have just ordered on amazon today.

Charlene and Josh are also handing out seven Groundswell Awards, rewarding excellent and effective use of social technologies to advance an organizational or corporate goal. And the categories are:

” LISTENING. Find out what customers are really saying in order to understand them better.

TALKING. Spread messages about a company.

ENERGIZING. Get a company’s best customers to evangelize its products.

SUPPORTING. Help customers support each other to solve each other’s problems.

EMBRACING. Integrate customers into the way a business works, including using their help to design products and improve processes.

MANAGING. Empower employees and managers within an organization.

SOCIAL IMPACT. Improve society with non-commercial applications. “

You can have a look at the nominees and winners here, but I’d like to present to of the winning cases here, Namely the winners of the first two categories.

The LISTENING is all about consumer insight. How do we listen to them to understand them better? The winner was Mattel’s The Playground Community by Communispace.

Mattel and Communispace created a private online community of 500 moms with kids aged 3—10 in June 2007, in order to help them listen to and gain insight into the lives and needs of moms to help drive growth and innovation. On August 2, Mattel had to recall 1 million chinese-made toys painted with lead-based paint, and less than two weeks later, on August 14, Mattel recalled 18 million products that contained strong magnets that may detach and cause serious damage when ingested.

What did Mattel do? During this crisis they turned to their Playground Community, who gave them the information they needed to develop relevant and meaningful messages for the market, in some periods having daily contact with their community-moms.

Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff explain their award choise:

“Despite several worldwide product recalls in 2007, Mattel reported fourth quarter 2007 sales had increased 6% over last year. [...] Mattel’s listening strategy helped it to weather a difficult period and further solidified its relationship with moms as a brand that cares deeply about children and their families”

As marketing professionals we often try to come up with brilliant and engaging ways of spreading the message about our company and product, moving towards greater emphasis on below the line promotion.

A month ago I wrote a blog post about the challenges of promoting generic low-involvement products such as personal banking. The winner of the TALKING award is The Common Wealth Credit Union. A bank deeply rooted in Northern Alberta. Click at the picture below and take a look at this brilliant video. It’s 8 minutes long but it gives a genuine insight into the case, portraying how they suceeded in growing the number of new account openings  by 960% among 19-25 year olds compared to the same period a year prior:

This is social media marketing at its best. Really. Most importantly, it’s created extensive positive media coverage. I wonder if it would work in the banking industry in  Denmark. Could we communicate this way to 19-25 year-olds about banking?

I, for one, would like to congratulate The Common Wealth Credit Union on their alternative yet solid work. Larissa, last year’s winner,  got a nine-month contract. Now, Young & Free Alberta have just found next years spokesperson. Congratulation, Myles!

//Jakob

Street soccer. Street Basket. Rollerskater Hockey. Skating. Parkour. Roughly 50% of the worlds population is living in urban areas, and many of them are immersing themself in street sports, if any sports at all.

They are easily accessible, since you don’t need prefixed fields or courts. Often you just need a ball and a city, and when it comes to the neckbraking moves of parkour, buildings, lampposts and lots of concrete is enough. Marketing professionals have dug into street sports, trying to get the coolness of the street culture to mix with their brand,  Nike being quite eager on this field.

But are there any high brow sports not being suitable for at street version? Well golf, I’d say. Or, at leat, that’s what I thought up till today, when I spotted this viral piece on viralblog.com.

Big Danish financial institute Nykredit is sponsoring the Nykredit Masters, a female golf tournament. To raise awareness about Nykredit Masters and to increase the Nykredit brand preference, danish viral agency Club Viral launched the Nykredit Street Masters campaign. And here comes the brilliant part. Take a look at this 4½ minute video, it’s a bit long but it’ll be worth your while:

Okay. Now  you’ve seen it. And yes, I think it’s brilliant. And I’ll tell you why.

1. The Visuals.

I got a strangely mixed feeling of recognition and suprise when I saw the well-known triangle of Christianshavn Slotsplads, Højbro Plads and Storkespringvandet patched with a neat, green pitches of grass. Well done.

2. The Commentary.

Not being a golf enthusiast myself I can’t tell you if it’s a realistic depiction af a golf commentary. But it surely works for me. The commentaters mix well known sports lingo with professional golf expression.

3. The gags.

Getting a free drop because the ball is “embedded in a car window” and having to hit the ball from within a cafe are really good ideas.

4. The Actors.

The two commentators are casual as ever, and the winning golf player, Amanda Molthke Leth, doesn’t provoke the usual cringing feeling you get when top athletes are doing some acting. The winning gestures and smiles seem so real that, for a second there, I thought the video was real.

All in all a top knotch video that leaves you with a feeling of having seen a surreal street sports event, in the spirit of Ronaldhinos Touch of Gold-video. And the fact that Nykredit end up tying the Street Golf Tournament succesfully to their “Think Differently”-payoff just makes it even better.

//Jakob

This is both a laugh and a very interesting phenomenon. At the time of the launch of Apple’s Iphone in july last year, thousands of people were on the brink of Ifrenzying. This led to a lot of funny replicas.

The Original One:

The Knitted One:

The One Made Of Beads:

The Lego One:

The One Made Of Clay:

The Stitched One (with a salmon maki on the side?!?):

The Layer-Cake One (yummy!):

Apart from being funny, these are all proving hove apple and apple consumers have been succesful at co-creating a very powerful brand. You don’t see anyone knitting Nokia replicas or making a Zune MP3 player out of clay.

If your brand engages consumers to spent hours and hours of their spare time building replicas of your product, it seems to me as if you’ve hit a vital nerve. You’ve created loyal fans who see your brand as an important part of their identity. This doesn’t necessarily mean that managed to appeal to a broad target group. But what it certainly does mean is that you’ve created some very dedicated fans of your product. People who have the potential to become great ambassodors, who recommend your products to friends and families.

Don’t you think these 3 people have inspired many others to get their own Iphone?

Hmmm, the Iphone actually looks both quite cool and useful. Maybe I should get one myself. When’s Christmas?

//Jakob

Back in march, my dear colleague Iben did a blog post about Mark Penns book ‘Microtrends‘.

It’s a fascinating read, and, as a skilled statistician he’s got some very surprising points to make. Did you know that women car-buers are actually the majority of car-buyers in America today? But what about the car commercials? Mark Penns wrote about two years ago that most car ads are made for men. Let’s find out if he’s right.

Let’s have a look at new ads from womens top 3 favourite cars: Hyundai, Toyota and Volkswagen:

In this Hyundai i30 ad the woman’s the one with the key? Hmm, and no fast driving and big, moon-like landscapes? Well, what have Toyota got for us?

This time we have a young, male driver, but the three young passengers are young women, enjoying life, listening to their Ipod in the car. Come On Volkswagen, give us some misplaced testosterone! A man driving fast in a desert, maybe?

Yes, a young man driving fast in a desert in VW’s New Beetle! Marc Penn’s right, the ads ARE made for men. But hey, what’s this, lots of women driving, too? And a rainbow flag? Hrmpf, not especially oriented towards main stream men.

Okay, so none of the above focus on speed, power or naked women. Either Penn’s not right or else car ads have changed a lot in two years, which i doubt. It seems as if the ad agencies have understood, that some women have barriers when it comes to buying cars exclusively marketed for men.

Still, according to Penn, 70% of women are intimidated by automobile showrooms. Seems as if retailers still have some improvement to do.

// Jakob

Just after lunch we are back listening to Founder and Editor of the magazine Monocle, mr. Tyler Brulée. For those who might not know Monocle the magazine is kind of ‘the Economist meets WallPaper’. It is also the magazine who named Copenhagen the worlds best city for quality of life.

Observing the current state of media, Tyler Brûlée kept focus on the print media stating that there is no reinvention, little physical innovation in print and an erosion of quality of journalism. He then claimed that Monocle does keep wide frames, and as a result send a team to Alaska a year ago because someone from the Monocle-team said: ‘look, this governor might be interesting, she’s got Vice President candidate written all over her’. Without these wide frames, Monocle would not have been able to bring an exclusive with a – at that time – blonde! Sara Palin in those days when she was still below the radar.

Unfortunately Brûlée was only paying attention to the print media and mostly his own magazine. I was sort of expecting more from it and a wider perspective on media rather than this sales speech singing the praises of his own mag. An interesting point though was the creation of new revenue streams where Monocle as a high-end brand is also living through different other brands. Co-creating high quality travelling cases and aiming to create their own newsstands guaranteeing high quality in the experiences.

//iben