Influential Marketing Blog

Why Google & Virgin America's Online Scavenger Hunt Campaign Rocked

Early this morning Google Apps partnered with Virgin America to launch a unique campaign where they invited people taking Virgin America flights all day, as well as those sitting on computers at home or work to participate in an online scavenger hunt for clues to answer questions they would pose at you on a website called "Day In The Clouds." The scavenger hunt offered questions requiring you to use many different Google apps and online tools to find the answers, and integrated with Virgin America both for some questions as well as by offering free WiFi to any passenger on one of their flights today.

The campaign generated lots of positive word of mouth for the brands and though it is just coming to a close a few hours from now so the numbers haven't been reported yet, it will likely boost both brands and work strategically to promote what each of them wanted to: Google Apps and the cloud architecture from Google's side, and the ready availability of WiFi on all flights for Virgin America. Going beyond, here are ten quick lessons that you can take from this engaging campaign on what they know about marketing that is fun and engaging that many brands forget.

1. Built on their core products/services. The level of integration so that users had to use many of Google's tools to find the answer to questions and learn about Virgin America's planes, technology and flight schedules as well as how to use the Internet on flights was brilliant. It was done in a way that no other competing brand could have done.
2. Designed for simplicity without compromising. The site was easy to use and great looking at the same time. For every marketing person who has sat in a meeting and listened to a designer argue that it is impossible to do both, just send them the URL for this site.
3. Forged the right partnership. The choice of these two brands together worked perfectly to add to the popularity of the scavenger hunt. Both have high goodwill among their fans and drew a tech-savvy audience to participate.
4. Integrated the brand without being overbearing. The brands were definitely integrated in the questions without making every question about something boring and branded. The light hearted approach worked in this case, because people know clearly that they are on a branded site, and we should realize value of that - but don't necessarily need to shove it into a user's face at every turn.
5. Engaged through fun and competition while educating. The engagement on this campaign was high because the content was great. The format was fun and competition as built into this in a way that made people want to engage and do even better. There were even tweets from flights encouraging plane-mates to do better to beat a competing plane.
6. Created a sense of urgency. The timer counting down to zero as well as the choice to make this only a one day long promotion all added to the sense of urgency for this campaign. It also meant that even on an LA to SF flight (like the one Virgin America took media on in the morning) the time would be enough to complete the quiz.
7. Offered a real challenge. Like most puzzle and game related marketing that Google has done (including their smart Da Vinci Code promotion), they don't tend to dumb the solutions down or make it easy. As a result, they keep people engaged and have them try harder.
8. Involved the right ambassadors. In the morning, there was a media flight that several high-influence tech bloggers including Ben Par from Mashable and Beth Blecherman from Techmamas were on where they played the game and participated in the start of the campaign. These early ambassadors posted about it and drove more interest and traffic to the site throughout the day.
9. Made it shareable. Once you complete the hunt, you get your score and you have the opportunity to share it immediately (which I did) through Twitter and Facebook. It might have been smart for them to have prefilled text that didn't share a score too (in case someone was embarrased by their score and didn't want to broadcast it), but either way this final step meant that people could share via Twitter or Facebook, and also follow the campaign's Twitter account for updates.
10. Had real and tangible prizes. The last smart move the team putting this promotion together did was going beyond recognition and bragging rights. Those are nice, but the winners with the highest scores will get tangible prizes and that is a big motivator to continue to participate even if you may be in it and not want to finish.

Disclaimer: Virgin America is a current client of Ogilvy PR (my employer) and I have consulted on social media efforts for them in the past. I personally did not work on this campaign, however, and am not being compensated or incentivized in any way to write this post. It is my personal opinion of their campaign and nothing more.

5 Marketing Secrets From Infomercials

Infomercials, those long TV ads that air late at night when most reasonable people should be sleeping, are often ridiculed by consumers and marketers alike. What kind of person would fall for those exaggerated claims and supposedly limited time offers? Surely these offers are only accepted by poor desperate insomniacs with too many credit cards, right? As it turns out, there is a surprising secret truth at the heart of these infomercials ... that they actually work and many of their customers are people just like you and me. Why do these infomercials work so well - and more importantly, what can anyone marketing a product or service learn from them?

The presentation below offers 5 lessons you can learn from infomercials, along with real life examples of each in action:

Underwear Brand Gives Thanks For Great Butts

As much of the US gears up for an abbreviated day of work leading up to the Thanksgiving Weekend, I thought I'd share a great marketing idea from our cousins across the pond that never quite made it to the US. It's for an underwear brand called Sloggi - who decided to launch a Miss Universe style pageant search around the world (in the markets they sell, primarily) for the world's greatest butts called "Show me your Sloggis." Men and women sent in their photos from around the world (in Sloggi brand underwear, of course) and the brand had a vote online in every market.

The winners in each market travelled to Paris last week to compete in the live competition, where they crowned two winners (pictured on the left): a girl from Brazil and a guy from France. It's not the Olympics, but having the best butt surely must inspire some national pride, right? More importantly, it's a great way to get people talking (and blogging) about Sloggi underwear. Here are some more photos from the event:

UPDATE: Check out Steve's post over at Adrants on this campaign for more background on a few other promotions the brand has done and more context around this one.

"Askvertising" And The Future Of Online Advertising

About a year ago when I was in the market for a new digital SLR camera, the first place I turned was a site I have often visited over the years for authoritative advice on cameras. The site, Digital Photography Review, or dpreview.com for short, features complete and exhaustive reviews of digital cameras on the Internet. It's not a magazine, but a free online labor of love from some hardcore photography enthusiasts.

The site features affiliate links that you can click on to purchase your new camera, and the commissions go back to dpreview. I ended up buying my Nikon D80 by clicking one of the site's links (and it's still the site that I visit to lust after the new D90). Unlike most online advertising, however, the links often come with the endorsement of the site, and the explicit request to click on them. In other words, the site ASKS you to click on their ads - a growing phenomena in online advertising that I call "askvertising." "Askvertising" is the situation when the content creators or owners of a website are actively requesting that users click on the ads to help support the site or to get useful information.

The question this raises is whether we are headed toward a future where sites will no longer simply sell banner ads or paste in code to display text links and hope to drive more and more traffic to push up the number of impressions that they can sell. The impression based model is a numbers and volume game that is slowly dying online. Affiliate marketing, content syndication and other endorsement based models of online advertising are taking its place as a way to make advertising more effective, by doing what seems to be unheard of in advertising ... making content creators CARE whether or not visitors to their site click on the ads. This is leading to three big things:

1. More contextual and topical ads are more relevant for users
2. Endorsed ads for products are more convincing and reduce consumer distrust of advertising.
3. Better ROI (click rates, cost per click, etc.) for advertisers.

On the other side, the argument against askvertising is the often discussed separation between advertising and editorial. How can you expect content creators to be impartial and unbiased when their livelihood depends on the ads? When a content creator approves an ad to be placed along with content (which is the case with affiliate marketing), or the ads are based on the context of the content (which is how most text advertising works), then the lines between advertising and editorial become grayer. Combine this with the necessity for many of these new sites to support themselves with pay for performance based ads, and generating clicks from the audience becomes a necessity. In this sense, askvertising is the digital equivalent of the donation box at a church or temple.

What does this mean for online advertisers? Simply that online media planning today needs to be about more than just buying impressions and placing banners. Making askvertising work for you means finding the right strategic sites to partner with, building out a robust affiliate marketing program, and stop focusing on volume of impressions and more on effectiveness of placements in driving action. It's time advertisers and sites alike start to figure out how to make the trend towards askvertising work for them.

Got Controversy? Why Your Brand Needs One Today

A recently released book that I contributed to asked the question with it's subtitle, "why don't they get it?" It's a fitting question today, as brands are often divided into those that understand the power of conversation and those that don't. Slowly, however, brands are adding their names to the ranks of those that get it. Dell and Comcast are often being praised as two shining examples due to their willingness to have a conversation with customers and actively use of social media tools.

There is one fact, however, that is often forgot. Both of those brands first entered into using social media out of necessity. More importantly, they started after major brand controversies. Dell had to reinvent their reputation after Dell Hell, and Comcast had to combat the incredibly damaging Technician Sleeping On The Couch video. Similar to the natural phenomenon of some forests needing fire so they can properly burn and new seeds can be released, evolving brand communications seems sometimes to adhere to a similar pattern.

Here are a few reasons why having a brand controversy may be your company's best hope to reinvent itself and start to embrace social media tools that initially seem new and scary:

1. Forces you to listen fast. Relying on daily or weekly media clips is no longer fast enough in a crisis. This means your team will need to start adopting social media tools to listen faster out of necessity. This skill will remain in the team, causing them to more actively monitor social media in the future.
2. Understand the real power of individual voices. Before seeing a crisis start from a single blogger or an errant tweet, it is difficult to describe the real power that a seemingly small time content creator can have. After a crisis breaks, it becomes easy to explain this point.
3. Demonstrate to managers why social media matters. This may be one of the biggest struggles marketers face, namely convincing their bosses that social media matters enough to dedicate time and budget to it. Having a crisis and using as well as showing the power of the tools offers a tangible example of why it is worth resourcing and budgeting.
4. Identify key influencers. Often in a crisis, the key influencers in a particular category that have the power to influence thousands if not hundreds of thousands will emerge. If marketers are paying attention, they can start to understand where the pockets of influence really are, and how to influence them.

As I write this post, there is another brand that is rapidly confronting its own brand crisis. Motrin released an ad that was immediately denounced by mom bloggers and social media types as offensive. The controversy really started through public reaction on social media and is now growing beyond those confines. I believe that this may well be the greatest opportunity ever to face the marketing team for Motrin. They now have the ear of everyone in their organization and the chance to do what few Over-the-Counter medications would ever have dared to do otherwise ... embrace using social media. The #motrinmoms controversy is a huge chance for the brand to reinvent its communications. The only question is whether they will take advantage of it or not.

Buy My Second Book Today (And Save The World)

Ok, before I get into too much trouble - let me explain. Today is the release of a project that I am honored to be involved in, and you could arguably call my second book, though I am sharing author credit with 236 other authors I highly respect. The book is called Age of Conversation 2, and is an exploration of social media and its impact on business. Engagingly subtitled "Why don't they get it?" the book is broken down into 8 key topics:

    * Manifestos
    * Keeping Secrets in the Age of Conversation
    * Moving from Conversation to Action?
    * The Accidental Marketer
    * A New Brand of Creative
    * My Marketing Tragedy
    * Business Model Evolution
    * Life in the Conversation Lane

I chose the "Manifestos" topic for my contribution, because it seemed like a big idea, and also because I knew it would come first in the book so my contribution would be earlier in the mix of over 200 others. That plan clearly worked, because my article titled "The Control Myth: An Inside Look At The Worst Advice In Marketing Today" is on page 5 (I can't help it, I'm a marketer even in a room full of marketers!).

Though I was not part of the first edition of Age of Conversation, that was also a great compilation, and this time around the project is twice the size and has contributions from many authors, bloggers and others that you will definitely recognize. No matter if you are a pro and already understand much of this world, or someone trying to figure it out, I guarantee you will find lots to learn from in this book. And you'll also help a worthy cause as all the proceeds from the book go to benefit Variety, the Children's Charity.

So what are you waiting for? Visit http://stores.lulu.com/ageofconversation and get your copy of Age of Conversation 2 in digital or print format. And flip to page 5 to see my counterintuitive contribution about control and branding. I'll give you a hint ... the future is NOT about giving up control. That's the control myth and in my piece I share the perception shift required to get past it.

Full Author List For Age of Conversation 2:

Adrian Ho, Aki Spicer, Alex Henault, Amy Jussel, Andrew Odom, Andy Nulman, Andy Sernovitz, Andy Whitlock, Angela Maiers, Ann Handley, Anna Farmery, Armando Alves, Arun Rajagopal, Asi Sharabi, Becky Carroll, Becky McCray, Bernie Scheffler, Bill Gammell, Bob LeDrew, Brad Shorr, Brandon Murphy, Branislav Peric, Brent Dixon, Brett Macfarlane, Brian Reich, C.C. Chapman, Cam Beck, Casper Willer, Cathleen Rittereiser, Cathryn Hrudicka, Cedric Giorgi, Charles Sipe, Chris Kieff, Chris Cree, Chris Wilson, Christina Kerley (CK), C.B. Whittemore, Chris Brown, Connie Bensen, Connie Reece, Corentin Monot, Craig Wilson, Daniel Honigman, Dan Schawbel, Dan Sitter, Daria Radota Rasmussen, Darren Herman, Dave Davison, David Armano, David Berkowitz, David Koopmans, David Meerman Scott, David Petherick, David Reich, David Weinfeld, David Zinger, Deanna Gernert, Deborah Brown, Dennis Price, Derrick Kwa, Dino Demopoulos, Doug Haslam, Doug Meacham, Doug Mitchell, Douglas Hanna, Douglas Karr, Drew McLellan, Duane Brown, Dustin Jacobsen, Dylan Viner, Ed Brenegar, Ed Cotton, Efrain Mendicuti, Ellen Weber, Eric Peterson, Eric Nehrlich, Ernie Mosteller, Faris Yakob, Fernanda Romano, Francis Anderson, Gareth Kay, Gary Cohen, Gaurav Mishra, Gavin Heaton, Geert Desager, George Jenkins, G.L. Hoffman, Gianandrea Facchini, Gordon Whitehead, Greg Verdino, Gretel Going & Kathryn Fleming, Hillel Cooperman, Hugh Weber, J. Erik Potter, James Gordon-Macintosh, Jamey Shiels, Jasmin Tragas, Jason Oke, Jay Ehret, Jeanne Dininni, Jeff De Cagna, Jeff Gwynne & Todd Cabral, Jeff Noble, Jeff Wallace, Jennifer Warwick, Jenny Meade, Jeremy Fuksa, Jeremy Heilpern, Jeroen Verkroost, Jessica Hagy, Joanna Young, Joe Pulizzi, John Herrington, John Moore, John Rosen, John Todor, Jon Burg, Jon Swanson, Jonathan Trenn, Jordan Behan, Julie Fleischer, Justin Foster, Karl Turley, Kate Trgovac, Katie Chatfield, Katie Konrath, Kenny Lauer, Keri Willenborg, Kevin Jessop, Kristin Gorski, Lewis Green, Lois Kelly, Lori Magno, Louise Manning, Luc Debaisieux, Mario Vellandi, Mark Blair, Mark Earls, Mark Goren, Mark Hancock, Mark Lewis, Mark McGuinness, Matt Dickman, Matt J. McDonald, Matt Moore, Michael Karnjanaprakorn, Michelle Lamar, Mike Arauz, Mike McAllen, Mike Sansone, Mitch Joel, Neil Perkin, Nettie Hartsock, Nick Rice, Oleksandr Skorokhod, Ozgur Alaz, Paul Chaney, Paul Hebert, Paul Isakson, Paul McEnany, Paul Tedesco, Paul Williams, Pet Campbell, Pete Deutschman, Peter Corbett, Phil Gerbyshak, Phil Lewis, Phil Soden, Piet Wulleman, Rachel Steiner, Sreeraj Menon, Reginald Adkins, Richard Huntington, Rishi Desai, Robert Hruzek, Roberta Rosenberg, Robyn McMaster, Roger von Oech, Rohit Bhargava, Ron Shevlin, Ryan Barrett, Ryan Karpeles, Ryan Rasmussen, Sam Huleatt, Sandy Renshaw, Scott Goodson, Scott Monty, Scott Townsend, Scott White, Sean Howard, Sean Scott, Seni Thomas, Seth Gaffney, Shama Hyder, Sheila Scarborough, Sheryl Steadman, Simon Payn, Sonia Simone, Spike Jones, Stanley Johnson, Stephen Collins, Stephen Landau, Stephen Smith, Steve Bannister, Steve Hardy, Steve Portigal, Steve Roesler, Steven Verbruggen, Steve Woodruff, Sue Edworthy, Susan Bird, Susan Gunelius, Susan Heywood, Tammy Lenski, Terrell Meek, Thomas Clifford, Thomas Knoll, Tim Brunelle, Tim Connor, Tim Jackson, Tim Mannveille, Tim Tyler, Timothy Johnson, Tinu Abayomi-Paul, Toby Bloomberg, Todd Andrlik, Troy Rutter, Troy Worman, Uwe Hook, Valeria Maltoni, Vandana Ahuja, Vanessa DiMauro, Veronique Rabuteau, Wayne Buckhanan, William Azaroff, Yves Van Landeghem

 

Lenovo Extends The Olympic Experience With 100 Athlete Blogs

For any die-hard Olympic enthusiasts like me, you already know that today is a special day. It's exactly one month from the beginning of the Summer Olympic Games in Beijing (on 08/08/08) and media attention is already starting to turn towards these Games in a more frenzied way. For several months now, I have been part of the team here in Ogilvy's 360 Digital Influence group working on what I believe will be one of the most unique Olympic sponsorships of the coming games. Of course, I'm biased since I work on the campaign, but yesterday we started to spread the word about a new campaign that I have mentioned already once before on this blog.

The campaign is called The Voices of the Olympic Games and over the past several months we have recruited 100 athletes from more than 25 countries and more than 30 sports to all blog about their experiences leading up to the games. Our campaign strategy, in a sentence is:

Use Lenovo products to power athletes sharing their real experiences leading up to and during the Olympic Games directly with fans around the world.

There are several reasons why I'm really excited about this campaign. The most obvious is that as part of it, I will be heading to Beijing to offer a live voice - something I can't wait to do. More than that, however, the scale of this project and bringing this many real voices together from so many different cultures and sports is a much needed view of the Games that will be unique in its lack of melodrama.  None of our blog posts will be set to sappy overture-style music, and the stories we have are all an unfiltered view directly from the athletes that are competing. 

Along with our site aggregating all these voices at http://summergames.lenovo.com, we are also going to be using a live Twitter feed (@lenovo2008), Flickr, del.ici.ous, and there is a Facebook application created in partnership with Citizen Sports that has already topped 60,000 downloads. I'll be blogging lots more about the Olympics, but for now please check out our site and let me know what you think. We've got another month to put the finishing touches on it before Opening Ceremonies!

Campaign Mentions & Buzz (leave a comment if you'd like to be added to this list):

• Kevin Dugan: http://prblog.typepad.com/strategic_public_relation/2008/07/social-media-br.html
• Adrants: http://www.adrants.com/2008/07/ogilvy-er-lenovo-blogs-and-tweets.php
• MarketingVox: http://www.marketingvox.com/39699-039699/
• Kyle Flaherty: http://www.engageinpr.com/2008/07/08/olympics-and-social-media/

Fly Derrie-Air Proves Newspaper Advertising Still Works (Sort Of)

A few weeks ago the Philadelphia Inquirer and a few other local papers in the Philly area launched a very interesting mock advertising campaign for a new airline called "Derrie-Air" which was proposing the revolutionary new business model of charging air passengers based on the combined weight of their luggage and themselves. The site describes what makes Derrie-Air unique: "the magic comes from our one of a kind "Sliding Scale" the more you weigh, the more you'll pay."

We've all been in situations where we could imagine the logic of having a policy like that, but it turns out the campaign was a joke that ordinary consumers could pass along to others, and one from which the newspaper could collect valuable metrics from. The problem with the campaign is that it takes exactly the kind of one sided view the doesn't work anymore. For example, the newspaper ad drove a group of people online from the Philly area, and those people likely emailed the site to friends or blogged about it. Other sites picked up on the campaign and decided to also feature it. I learned about from an email - and found coverage on several advertising and marketing blogs already about it.  If you are reading this now and hadn't heard of the campaign, you just learned about it from a blog.

I am sure the site got great traffic and the Philadelphia Inquirer and the other papers behind it reported these fantastic metrics to advertisers in order to get more of them to buy into the paper. I think real lesson here, however, is that no matter which channel you choose to promote in, they will all be interconnected. For this campaign, newspaper provided the initial surge in traffic, however anything after that would have to be attributed to word of mouth, either online or offline. The irony is that inadvertently, the campaign probably proved how interconnected media really is ... and how clueless some advertisers really are if they believe a pitch that tells them all the visits to this mock site can just be attributed to a few newspaper ads.

Is "PGC" The Next Big Opportunity In Online Advertising?

I have a former colleague of mine who left Ogilvy to focus on his own production company and create video projects. His group, g14 Productions, has just released a fantastic online video show worth checking out. It's called The Reservation and features weekly episodes of 3-4 minutes of a show that is a cross between 24 and Heroes. You might be tempted to called this User Generated Content (UGC) and lump it into the range of video being produced and uploaded to YouTube (some of which is highly entertaining, I'll admit). The difference, though, is that g14 is doing this for a living.

They are professionals by definition, and though they are distributing their work right now for free online, it seems that we need a different way to talk about the content they are producing. As the tools get better and better for delivering higher quality video online, I suspect you will start to see more shows like The Reservation make their way online as a distribution model. Just as I subscribe to blogs in my reader, perhaps one day I will get my episodes of the online video shows I follow in a download each morning to watch on the train or while on the treadmill. In a world where anyone can create content, UGC is going to start facing competition from PGC (Professionally Generated Content). To a degree, it already is.

Many of the most popular blogs online today are being staffed by journalists and professional writers. Some of the images on Flickr are so good you can barely distinguish them from the ones on Getty Images or another stock photo seller. Shows like The Reservation are being distributed online with a production quality far beyond your typical scratchy YouTube fodder. What is all of this pointing to? Professionally Generated Content, whether you buy into the goofy PGC acronym or not, is already becoming a force of social media. As the quality of this content produced by individual professionals continues to improve, this is going to offer big opportunities to brands for advertising and marketing against professionally produced content. As these professionals start to earn a living from the content they create, they are going to be open to support from these marketers as well. So here's the big question: are you paying enough attention to the opportunities for marketing through PGC?

Why Sprint's New Campaign Wins Only 50% Of Their Battle

As I tour around at events talking about why brands need to have a personality, a question that comes up often is about which brands don't have a personality and suffer from facelessness. One of the most obvious categories that has built a dreadful reputation for itself is the wireless phone industry in the US. On the whole, people are distrustful, disloyal, and generally suspicious of just about anything these carriers do. The reasons are fairly obvious, from their cruel pricing structure designed to charge you for every kilobyte or nanosecond of use, to their requirement that you lock yourself into long contracts before they will give you service. In my own experience, my last month's wireless bill was 18 pages long (and I don't even have a teenager at home).

There have been a few pioneers that are trying a different model, such as Virgin Mobile with their prepaid solutions ... but the world of the wireless carriers still promises much more flash than substance. For examples of this, just look at any recent advertising campaign by these carriers, from the fanfare behind launching the iPhone for AT&T or the wierd city name mashups used by T-Mobile to illustrate how their network would work in places where they vast majority of their customers will never travel. So while watching my DVR last week, when I saw a TV spot featuring the new CEO of Sprint talking in a more human voice about how they are simplifying their service, I stopped to pay attention. Here's the ad:

This is not the approach we are used to in America from our cell phone providers. He comes off as genuine and the plan they are offering is as simple as you can imagine. Taking this human approach certainly sets them apart from their competitors. The reason why this is only half of their battle is because alongside this declaration by the CEO and new direction are two other telling videos.  The first is a clearly scripted YouTube video read by an uncomfortable employee talking about what Sprint is "really" like, and the other is from an irate customer who received a bill for $14,000 from Sprint and tried unsuccessfully to get it resolved:

Now in the second case, the customer did ultimately get her problem resolved thanks to it getting reposted on the Consumerist blog, but the damage for Sprint was already done. I love the simple plan they have come up with for customers and the authentic way the CEO is trying to tell the story. The problem is that consumers are likely to see it alongside other examples of exactly the opposite. It seems to be a case study in how advertising alone cannot reshape an industry or a brand. Without combining it with a smart strategy for social media and word of mouth, the best laid brand messages will likely fall on deaf or disbelieving ears.