My favorite novel ever has now been made in to a movie. Watchmen, the 1987 graphic novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons is a masterpiece mixing traditional comic book elements

with supplemental fictional documents that add to the series’ backstory, like excerpts of an ex-masked vigilante’s autobiography:

The story of the watchmen take place in an alternative, conterfactual version of 1985. Here, the USA won the Vietnam War beacause of the help from the god-like Dr. Manhattan, and Nixon is still president.

So what does this mean for the different approaches to the marketing of the Watchmen movie?

well, I am happy to see that the comic’s way of using different narrators and diffenrent media (autobiography, correspondance between characters, scientifi articles and newspaper interviews) have been succesfully embraced in online marketing.

3 fictional tv clipshave been made, using the form and aestethics of a typical 1980′s MTV-ish programme or an congressional anti-vigilante propaganda video mimicing the Mccarthyism of the 1950′s.

Furthermore, director Zack Snyder launched a contest, encouraging people the make the own 80′s style tv ad for the Watchmen character Adrian Veidt’s perfume “Nostalgia”. Here are some of the winning entries

Fans making high quality 80′s style commercials for fictional products? Isn’t that the essence of active engagement? And, of course, all this is on the microsite supplemented by customizable social network site skins, widgets, fan banners and extensive background material on the alternative reality of the watchmen.

Watch it. And go read the graphic novel

// Jakob

Iran is a country with a young population. 50% are under 30 years, compared to 35 in Denmark. Of those those 35 million people under 30. According to viralblog, most of these youngsters are opposed to their government. Which doesn’t surprise in a country known for its opression of e.g. women rights, free speach and all those people who support them.

In 2005, there where over 700.000 Iranian blogs, with about 100.000 actively maintained. Here, the people can freely discuss politics, human rights and love – if just they stay anonymous.

Have a look at this short film on the subject, made by students at Vancouver Film School:

//Jakob

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

I just received a very disturbing news clip that McCain won by one vote. It can all be traced back to me forgetting to vote – see how this influences the whole world order This, of course is just another example of a fun and clever viral tool to engage voters and make them forward reminders to others. Make your friends sweat for a while by turning them into infamous news ‘stars’.
/ iben

I just returned from a trip to NYC – a city not surprisingly celebrating Obama. A friend of mine works for Obama’s campaign office and I got the chance to visit it myself. They have set up these so-called phonebanks on different venues in the city where volunteers go and call battleground states such as Ohio and Pennsylvania in order to turn more voters into Obama supporters. Other online tools enables people to do the same from home. These are just some of the examples of the new media tools which Obama so skillfully have implemented in his campaign.

It really is political innovation engaging people in a more profound way than just voting. Whereas the candidates would usually be dependant on traditional media, a huge part of Obama’s campaign has been led on digital platforms. Example of the shifts in the use of media: from old broadcast media to new social media is the use of facebook, a lot of viral clips and the average time spent on Obama’s YouTube: 13,3 minutes – yes minutes not sec’s! The fundamental shifts are also established in fund-raising: from the wealthy few to the middle class many and shifts in organizational models: from top-down to bottom-up.

Visit the official Obama website and take a look at the different engaging online tools and check out Next Agenda Project where Peter Leyden who was also keynote speaker at New Media Days 08 talk about the shift in paradigms.

// iben

I’m not gonna write a lot about the importance of the internet in this year’s election, I just wanna share this hillarious video with you, that I found at adverblog.com . Enjoy!

// Jakob Hussein Obama

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

I just saw this. I realise its not brand new but still I love it.

/Baek

This speaks for itself. Very Cool. I stole this post from D-Hanz at the www.marketear.me blog. Check it out. He’s got other stuff:-)

/Baek

YouTube enables the user and the content to reach each other in new ways and at the same time allows advertisers to reach their consumers in the most targeted way, says Benjamin Faes, Head of Youtube in the European region. More than 50% of the footage on YouTube has at least one comment, so it’s not just about watching, it’s also about participating.

It’s 13h’rs of video uploaded every minute on YouTube!
And it’s true a lot of content is usergenerated where consumers are becoming creators not only by producing the footage but also by commenting, linking etc. However a large number of companies are also tapping into this engaging behaviour and for strategically and commercial reasons they upload footage.

Professional content producers such as the BBC, CBS and Universal are partnering with YouTube to distribute and track the use of their content whilst testing new advertising formats. Right now it’s all about trying, is Faes statement. E.g. placing video formats on the homepage as if it was ordinary YouTube material so you can rate it, see how many watched it etc. Another type of adds are InVideoAds, which after 15 sec. of watching will appear as an overlay on top of the YouTube clip. If the user doesn’t click, then it will disappear again but it enables the user to interact with the commercial. YouTube stresses that they’re not mixing the real user-generated content with the commercial produced content but they foresees much more add formats in the future depending on the traditional media producers to deliver content.

I still  ♥ the usergenerated content though – think about the sneezing panda etc. – and here by the end of day 2 at New Media Days08 I’ll leave you with the skating dog.

// iben