I just thought I’d invite you all to attend the second version of Act Out Awards, which will take place on thursday, November 28, 2007. in Hal D in Copenhagen. In short ACT OUT AWARDS is the result of the following discouse:

The Challenge: The technical schools in Denmark have a bad image within the target group (15-17yrs). It‘s an uncool place with old-fashioned courses. The schools offer much more but it is hard to get the message through to these ad-resistant youngsters. We concluded that we had to change the schools from withing. We had to works on the identity before we could get startet on the image.

The Solution: Creation of ACT OUT AWARDS – a competition that allows for technical creativeness while showcasing the schools’ offers. Using youngsters’ media: website (www.skabdig.dk), user-generated content, viral campaign, MSN Messenger TAB and PR activities.

The Results for ACT OUT AWARDS I: 52 teams competed. 100,000 website users. 600 students/ potential students attending the Awards Show ceremony. The value of additional press coverage amounted to 65% of the total campaign budget.

Here is a short clip of the Awards show from the first execution. Excellent fun.

In the course of the first round of ACT OUT campaign, we actually had someone make a tribute fan video for the compaign. This has never happened to me before, so I’ll share that with you also. If you don’t have a fan video yet…I highly recommend it. It works wonders for your ego. That really shows the power of User Generated communication.

Finally I’ll share one of the clips we made and seeded for viral distribution. Not conventional sex and violence, but all about technical creativity and how women can now pee standing up. Our final bastion has fallen…speaking as a man.

Read more about the ACT OUT campaign on www.skabdig.dk. Hope you all enjoy and hope to see you in Hal D on November 28.

/Baek 

As a twin or tag-on to the fantastic Run London (and Paris, Berlin, New York, etc.) Nike+ has created a new engaging piece of communication or activity. The event is called Nike+ Supersonic. And people competed in 100m and 1k sprints. Finalists won a set of Nike+ trainers and an iPod nano. So simple and yet so effective and cool. They molded the entire campaign around the same idea. The commercial, the myspace subsite (http://www.myspace.com/NikeSupersonic), the event, the after party. And with the products center stage.

Great job… Here is a link to Wieden + Kennedy’s experience with it.

 http://wklondon.typepad.com/welcome_to_optimism/2007/11/nike-supersonic.html#trackback

 /Baek

Here are a couple of pictures from the Finnish expedition.

Enjoy.

Morning view from the clients office – nice

Working hard on the brand idea.

/Samuelsen

We have been working with the Finnish branch of one of our international clients and have been to Helsinki a couple of times in the last month. Great city and very good people up there.

We facilitated a Connection Point Workshop between the client, the creative agency and MEC and came away with some good solid thinking and some great ideas for us to refine and build on. Once again it was a pleasure to see the result of different competencies working together to achieve greater results for the client.

For me it was (again) a strong indication about the future of marketing and communication. The time where agencies worked in isolation and build the big idea by themselves have long gone and the few agencies that try to hold on to this way of doing business will in my oppinion have an increasingly difficult time attracting and retaining clients. 

The future is collaboration and we need to start helping our clients get the most out of their communication budgets and the best way to do this is to become less afraid of working together across different agency types and models.

/Samuelsen     

The so called “real life” we live has for most people been more and more digitalized over the last couple of years…the digitalization has changed the way we communicate with each other and given us a billion different ways to connect to each other and hereby a billion different  ways to connect to our consumers.

We communicate with people we have never met on our myspace profile where we also upload all kinds of pictures, movies, music and brands we love to express to the people in the digital world who we are. We use different digital icons to express our mood in a messenger chat – and this has also been used by many brands in a commercial way as showing the connection to the brands we love is a very common way in the real world to express ourselves, so this of course also goes for the digital. 

 The digitalization has even changed the way we go for a run – just think of the brilliant cooperation that came out of Nike + iPod. A great example of how a thing from the real life like a running shoe and a thing from the digital world like the iPod has given the consumer/runner a real added value. Not to mention an idea that has given Nike and Apple a lot of attention and probably even better figures on the bottom line.  

What I am trying to say is that there must be so many other opportunities to combine the features of a physical thing with a digital attribute and create real added value to the consumers. Just have a look at this example that illustrates how the digital world can actually become psychical and give us some extra fun when chatting on messenger.    

 http://grouplab.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/phidgets/gallery/buddy-bugs.wmv

And to use it in a commercial way why couldn’t the bugs be replaced and produced with little Shreck dolls, Fiona dolls, the Donkey dolls etc. when UIP was launching the new Shreck III…just to mention one idea. And here is another video showing more opportunities to make the digital space more physical and through that creating new “products/ideas”. And if there is not a commercial possibility in developing this further I would be very surprised…… 

http://grouplab.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/phidgets/gallery/customizablephidgets.UIST2002.wmv 

 /Stine

I just saw the new website from Danish advertising agency Envision and they have really done a great job of making an interactive experience that showcases the agencies work and the skills of their employees. I hope we will see other agencies using their own communication to inspire clients and push the limits.Fantastic work guys.Take a peek at www.envision.dk

I have been looking forward to start blogging on Digital Vinyl and sharing my thoughts on the industry and the things we got going in mec communication and finally (even though it is 6.15 a.m) I am going to start contributing. I was reading some old posts on planningonsubversion the other day and there was one particular post that got me thinking about the future of our industry.

 3 rules for new planners

• Hate advertising
• Buy no media 
• Talk to customers

If you look at some of the campaigns that where successful at Cannes (Nike+, Tate Modern, Tap Project, Earth Hour and BK Games) I think that there is a tendency toward viewing effective communication as being more complex then cranking out a few ads, buying some media space, making sure you have the right reach and frequency (whatever that means), keeping your fingers crossed and hope that your new product will sell like hotcakes. When you look at some of the aforementioned campaigns the great insight, the big idea and a brilliant execution are all working together to create something meaningful, interesting and worthwhile for the customer. I believe that these campaigns show us a glimpse of the kind of communication that is going to be effective in a world where attention is the most scarce commodity.  

i think it is high time to let the world know what the hell we are doing here and maybe who we are. well behind this blog are the eloquent and always optimistic people of mec communication. based in copenhagen our vision is quite plainly to set the agenda for comms planning in the nordics. our mission is to develop brilliant and measurable strategic ideas and activations that drive clients´ business objectives and sales based on strong real insights and exploiting our cutting edge knowledge about new and old media channels. wow eh… we have core values such as “rock n’ roll”, which insidently is the passion and favorite pass time of one of the founding fathers – kristian baek (thats me) and the favorite skateboard trick of the other – lars samuelsen (although i doubt he really pulls it off as gracefully as he boasts). in fact here is what i imagine it looks like when lars gets on his board.
the comms business in the nordics need a huge shot of rock n’ roll and that’s what we intend to give it. “cohones” is another another value which lies close to our hearts. physically of course they are located further south. we are owned by a media company. and if there is one thing the media business needs it is a bit of balls. these values are paired with “structure” and “accountability”, which we see as some of the most important qualities our ideas must contain – along with stellar creativity, sexiness and differentiation. pretty cool eh… well we think so, but then again we get a bit nerdy when it comes to these things.digital vinyl is intended to be our outlet. we are alowed to swear here, without fear of getting sacked by the big owner of well everything including us mr. wpp – sir martin sorell , but as previously stated we are very optimistic and will usually refrain from foul language – fucking rooooight. in the following days, months and years you will get our views and comments on stuff we find relevant and interesting in our work and also some of the things we think suck. an example of the latter are the big “proforma” pitches that companies run more out of a sense of duty than desire. the clients never change their agency and they waste a huge amount of time and money for the participating comms companies. recent examples of his in dk is danske spil, tdc and dsb – these companies literally wasted milions of euros – not their own but ours…of course we didn’t win any of these pitches so this is probably just sour grapes. i’ll dry my eyes and stop crying now. i need a biscuit.

thats pretty much it. a finaly note – digital vinyl will be written in both english and danish so don’t get confused. we are several people writing and we all prefer writing in different languages. so there you have it. i always found that visuals are the strongest language, so i will leave you with a work of art from one of my favourite communicators – good ol’ banksy. i think the picture sums my view of the current state of affairs in advertising up perfectly…

have a great weekend and catch yall soon.

/baek