Monday Funday: Rock out with The Blue Van
Because we all got into marketing to have a little fun mixed in with our business (come on admit it, you did too), we will highlight marketing fun on our blog every Monday. Follow and contribute and you will become an inspired marketer plus the most interesting conversationalist at your next cocktail party, all courtesy Something Massive – #MonFun.
Today there has been a good bit of buzz over Apple’s iPad commercial during last night’s Oscars. (Naysayers note: Oscars placement means Apple is positioning this product for the mainstream and I’m not one to bet against Apple.) The ad itself looks like a redux of the product video on Apple’s website. By my estimation, that was good thinking on Apple’s part since that’s the very marketing bit that tipped the scales in the iPad’s favor for this focus group of one (yours truly).
What about this ad then qualifies it for Monday Funday status? That song! It’s called There Goes My Love and it’s by a Danish band called The Blue Van. The Blue Van is also responsible for Independence, the theme song to one of my favorite summer guilty pleasures – Royal Pains on the USA Network. Honestly, The Blue Van is ALL OVER TV and if it’s good enough for TV, then it’s good enough for me.
posted by Julia in: Monday Funday: Devo Color Study
Because we all got into marketing to have a little fun mixed in with our business (come on admit it, you did too), we will highlight marketing fun on our blog every Monday. Follow and contribute and you will become an inspired marketer plus the most popular conversationalist at your next cocktail party, all courtesy Something Massive – #MonFun.
Devo, of Whip It fame, has a new viral marketing initiative circulating the Internet. I, personally, had always thought of Devo as sort of a one-hit wonder and assumed that each of them was working some corporate job somewhere. Shows you how much I know. Check out this Wikipedia article on all the things these energy-dome-wearing nut cases have been up to for the last couple of decades. As you may have seen, Devo was selected to play a concert at the closing ceremonies of the Winter Olympics this weekend. It was their first televised concert in 20 years. Given the quirky, make-fun-of-itself humor that Canada embodies and actually flaunted in last night’s hilariously weird production (didn’t you love Bob Costa’s quote about the “always enjoyable giant inflatable beaver”), Devo was a perfect fit.
Devo is using the Olympic stage and an upcoming performance at Coachella to hype the release of their new album. In true Devo fashion, they have opted to make fun of all things corporate by launching the Devo Color Study. The experience starts like this:
Devo is inviting its fans to participate in a “market research” survey that will help determine the future of the band – the color of it’s haz-mat suits, logo, and even energy domes. The survey asks questions like these:
(I’m especially fond of the second since I’ve repeatedly told my husband that a yellow Ferrari is the ultimate jerk-mobile.) The campaign will be live at least until the new album releases, which would explain why the band looked like this last night:
(Photo: Coffrini/AFP/Getty, grabbed from the Rolling Stone site where you can read a whole lot more)
The Color Study is just the beginning of their market-research driven reinvention. Devo is calling for their fans to take part in selecting the songs for the CD release and even its choices for vocal style and instrumentation on any song. It’s a fun experience, made more fun by allowing their new single “Fresh” to play in the background. You can check it out here. Speaking of fun, the band’s David Casale told the LA Times, “It’s an art experiment. The experiment is the business of art. It’s always there but nobody ever talks about it. It’s just fun to use business as a part of the creative process, even if it’s satirical.” David, we think business should be fun too. So happy Monday Funday, Devo. Something Massive salutes you.
Book Review: FASCINATE, Your 7 Triggers to Persuasion and Captivation, by Sally Hogshead
Sally Hogshead’s book, FASCINATE, is a compelling journey into method and madness of persuasion. The concept is that whether you are pitching a new client, inviting a friend to lunch, luring a cranky toddler to sleep, or marketing a product, you are using triggers to elicit a certain response. Sally has narrowed these down to 7 (power, trust, mystique, prestige, vice, alarm and lust) and the book demonstrates and explains how dialing these triggers up and down can help you more effectively influence your relationships.
The book is divided into three parts. The first part discusses the role of fascination with references to sex, facial recognition in babies, the Salem witch trials, the Mona Lisa, and amnesiacs with a similar approach as the super-popular Freakonomics by Stephen Dubner and Stevel Levitt and Blink by Malcolm Gladwell. Fascinated yet? I was. Sally makes the point that we have moved from a goods-based economy to a service-based economy to an information economy to an experience economy. We are now in a fascination economy where companies and individuals that are fascinating or can make someone else feel fascinating as a result of their relationship with them will win.
I think this is an interesting point. Particularly in our field of digital marketing, experiences are now a dime a dozen. Gone are the days of wowing a consumer with some visually brilliant Flash zinger. Today, much of our marketing is based on social media which is predicated on the idea that people want to be the most fascinating thing out there with more followers, comments and retweets than anyone else. And if not that, they are trolling around to see what others find fascinating for entertainment. So Sally, I am in.
The second part of the book describes each of the 7 triggers in detail. This part reads like most advertising books and for the seasoned marketer, won’t be that revolutionary. That said, as any aspiring golfer (like me) will tell you, the fundamentals of the game don’t change but you don’t hit a hole in one until you find the visualization that works for you. Meaning, even if Part 2 feels a good bit like other marketing books, when considered in the context of a new concept like fascination, you are bound find some valuable nuggets that you can carry with you and influence success.
For me those nuggets were most closely related to my role in agency business development. Positioning an agency and its offering in such a way that potential clients are fascinated by it is the hole in one. The concept crystallized all kinds of ideas that had previously been just clouding up my brain like one big, amorphous lump (Sally, I’ll let you know if our new business win rate goes up as a result!)
The third part of the book is probably my favorite. My number one pet peeve about business books is that they always promise to tell you how to be more successful but they never actually give you a formula for doing it. Rather your are left with a bunch of stuff to consider and no real action plan for putting it into place. Sally’s book is the opposite. She gives her readers a clear plan for becoming more fascinating. I’ve already cracked the book open once this week when a concept we were planning to pitch to a client was falling just a little bit flat. I have a feeling I’ll be doing that again and again.
Project Zeus
John Moshay and I started a photoblog called Project Zeus. Each day we both post one photo at different times and thanks to the magic of Posterous and Wordpress (and of course our fabulous developer Caroline) the photos show up next to one another. It’s really interesting to see the pairs and how although we’re both on opposite sides of the country (I am in NYC and he’s in LA) some days the photos are really similar – like the photo from Brooklyn Ikea and the one from Vernon, CA. Other days they couldn’t be more different – such as the torrential rain in Brooklyn next to a sunny hillside in LA. The best thing about this is that we’re utilizing so may different technologies: we’re taking photos from our mobile devices and emailing them to Posterous. Posterous has a great Autopost feature which posts your content directly to a variety of blogging platforms. Caroline setup a Wordpress page that aligns the photos next to each other for a period of 24 hours and then they’re archived. Please have a look at Project Zeus and let us know what you think.
posted by jon in: Monday Funday: Live Off Groupon
Because we all got into marketing to have a little fun mixed in with our business (come on admit it, you did too), we will highlight marketing fun on our blog every Monday. Follow and contribute and you will become an inspired marketer plus the most popular conversationalist at your next cocktail party, all courtesy Something Massive – #MonFun.
Today’s Fun? Groupon’s Live Off Groupon $100,000 challenge.
For those of you who don’t know Groupon, it’s a local coupon site with a twist. Dolling out daily deals in 51 cities across America, Groupon offers substantial discounts at restaurants, spas, tourist attractions, and any number of local businesses with a healthy dose of personality. The discounts are made possible because a minimum number of people are required to activate the deal. So, if you see something you like, say $25 for $50 worth of food & drink at your favorite restaurant, you put down your credit card and reserve your Groupon. When the minimum has been met, your card is charged and “The deal is on!” Because Groupon relies on “Collective Buying Power”, social networking and sharing the deal is a huge part of what makes the site work.
Here at Something Massive, we are big fans of anything that uses the Internet’s inherent ability to collaborate for the greater good. Naturally, we have loved watching the Groupon brand take off. And now, we love it even more. Although they have never been a brand that’s afraid of having a little fun, they have definitely taken it up a notch this time.
Groupon has launched an insane promotion, inviting fans to apply to leave their jobs, homes, families, worldly possessions and bank accounts behind and live for a year off an unlimited supply of Groupons. They are encouraged to borrow, barter, and draw upon communities of friends and supporters to meet their basic necessities. They’ll hop from Groupon city to Groupon city and if the accomplish the challenge, Groupon will reward them with a $100,000 cash prize.
It’s a perfect fit for their quirky brand, for their huge dependence on social media, and for the every jobless college kid wrapping up their last semester this May. Lots of crazy folks are interested. If you don’t believe me, search #liveoffgroupon on Twitter, check their Facebook page, and take a look at the stats on their campaign homepage. Here’s one particularly imaginative submission video:
If you or someone you know is entering the Live Off Groupon challenge, let us know! We’d love to support insanity from our very own network. And Groupon, we applaud you for bringing your fun brand personality to life. Happy Monday Funday from Something Massive!
Whiteboard Wall is Back
The relationship between Nicole and whiteboard wall must have taken quite the toll on the other LA Something Massiveites, because as of today, whiteboard wall has permanently moved to Nicole’s corner of the office. And by that I mean that whiteboard wall has multiplied beyond the shared work space, with additions not only to Nicole’s corner but also to the conference room.
Today is a great day. “Sharing” may never be needed again.
posted by nicole in: Let’s Face It, Facebook’s UI Was Lacking
I suppose hindsight really is 20/20. Aside from my gripes about managing Facebook Pages and my tendency to sometimes just Google an application to find it’s Facebook page rather than navigating to it, Facebook’s previous design seemed to me to be an adequate method for harnessing all of the tiny tid-bits of information that a person’s network can produce.
Maybe it’s that we are only now beginning to develop a sophistication when it comes to social networking user experiences. We put up with the early MySpace UI for all of those months, after all, because it let us interact with our friends in a way we hadn’t been able to do before. I’ve been experimenting with Polyvore and Houzz (both social utilities with a fairly narrow focus) for my personal blog in these last few weeks. I find their UI to be atrocious, but their functionality is pretty cool and novel so I put up with it.
But on their 6th anniversary and with 400 million users putting it to the test, Facebook has unveiled a redesign that makes their previous UI seem like it was from the dark ages. Here were my first impressions when I logged on this morning:
I think some people will miss the ability to access applications, games, and pages from deeper within the site – say, from a friend’s profile page. That was the genius of the drop-up from the lower left in the previous design. It will be interesting to see how Facebook responds to that if/when it becomes a gripe. But I think this redesign accomplishes something that Facebook sorely needed – an invitation to discover, beyond what is in your friend feed at that moment.
I predict it will increase the depth with which users explore the site, increase user page views per visit, and open up opportunities for marketer interaction and serving ads. I also predict that the next innovation will be real-time refreshes of the News Feed, very similar to Twitter. Real time information is what it’s all about, after all.
Whatever and whenever the next redesign comes, I wonder if it will leave me feeling the same way I do today – impressed by how far we’ve come.
How Apple Sold Me on the iPad: Websites Still Matter
Apple’s ability to generate mega interest in new product launches and press conferences is truly brilliant. As is common with most media consumption today, I actually didn’t watch the press conference in real time – neither on TV nor streaming. Rather, I caught little bits and pieces of it from CNN headlines and iReports, Huffington Post blurbs, Tweets, Facebook posts, and maybe 2 minutes of Fox News coverage as I passed by a television on my way to get a cup of coffee. Much of what influenced me during Wednesday’s buzz frenzy was commentary on the product’s ridiculous name. Here’s my favorite rendition of that hullabaloo. Don’t click if you aren’t amused by feminine hygiene sketch comedy!
After consuming all of that buzz, I just wasn’t that impressed. My takeaway was that this was a giant iPod Touch with a terrible name. But all of that buzz did motivate me to visit apple.com and check out the product. And that’s when my opinion shifted. I was converted from mildly intrigued to full-on salivating. And I think this brings up an interesting point about distributed media. Although the consumer’s fragmented media habits make it critical to adopt a distributed approach, marketers should not neglect their own sites. When a consumer is hungry for more information, they should not be disappointed if they make the effort to type in your URL.
For me the coup de grace was Apple.com’s product video. Now let’s face it, a 7+ minute product video is not something I’m going to take the time to watch from just any old brand. But with all of this buzz behind it, I figured it was at least worth watching the first 30 seconds. Apple, by leveraging their genius ability to cast their own employees (some hipsters but mostly middle-aged, white guys wearing golf shirts) and still make the video engaging, had my attention until the bitter end. I thought one small nuance was especially smart. Rather than showing people sitting on their couch using the product, they changed the perspective so that the camera positioning seemed to put the product in my very own lap while I sat on the couch. Suddenly, it wasn’t hard for me to envision playing the Yahtzee app on iPad with my husband without craning my neck to see his roll on the iPhone. I could picture myself as the first in my book club to show up with an iPad instead of a paper back. With the ease of a car salesman inviting me to picture the car in my own garage while handing over the keys, Apple got to me.
It goes without saying that the market will soon be flooded with advertisements about iPad, consumer reviews, and even more buzz about if/how the iPad will change user experience design, browsing habits, and media consumption. All of these things will most definitely impact audiences and sales. Despite all of the mixed messages and short clips that had me skeptical, thanks to a visit to a product website, at least one consumer (that’s me) is already sold.
- Monday Funday: Rock out with The Blue Van
- Monday Funday: Devo Color Study
- Book Review: FASCINATE, Your 7 Triggers to Persuasion and Captivation, by Sally Hogshead
- Project Zeus
- Monday Funday: Live Off Groupon
- Whiteboard Wall is Back
- Book Review
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- Just Plain Interesting
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