A post several weeks ago on The Pop-Up City about a Lego ad campaign in Malaysia reminded us of The World’s Deepest Bin, part of Volkswagon’s The Fun Theory campaign, worth checking out if you missed it the first time around. Both campaigns provide double-take moments, using our expectations of the familiar to make us see (or think) something anew.
Interventions
Tip #6: Keep up with the Weather Forecast
Today is our fifth post in our series matching Lifehacker’s Top 10 Outdoor Tips for a More Pleasant Summer list with some suggestions of our own for how to increase the summer pleasure quotient of clients, customers or hard-working staff. Not all summer days are sunny and fair and we like to be prepared for all possibilities. There are loads of apps out there to help us stay on top of what’s coming weather-wise, but just in case, why not send out Fold N Go Fisher hats or hooded ponchos to keep customers and clients from getting unexpectedly drenched. And if your business or product is directly related to rain fall, you might want to consider sending out a branded rain gauge to remind customers of what you do, as they track the rain fall this summer.
Tip #7: Tasty Summer Produce
Today we offer our fourth post in our series matching Lifehacker’s Top 10 Outdoor Tips for a More Pleasant Summer list with some suggestions of our own for how to increase the summer pleasure quotient of clients, customers or hard-working staff. One of our favorite things about summer is fresh, local, and tasty fruits and vegetables.
Local Harvest is a website to help you find farmers’ markets, family farms, and other sources of sustainably grown food in your area. The site also has a shop with sources for everything from Blue Swedish Duck hatching eggs (we wish we could have a chicken coop) to golden amarath seeds, a healthy gluten-free “grain” used all over the world.
And if you are looking for something in your neighborhood, enter your zip code on the site and voila: you get the locations of the farmers’ market closest to your house and the nearest restaurant serving local and/or organic foods.
And to help your clients get all those goodies home, what about a cotton sling bag with large imprint areas on both sides, that rolls up when not in use for convenient storage.
Mariah Carey Sells Out
It’s no secret that the music industry has been struggling to boost profits amidst decreasing sales and a broader array of media for consumers to, well, consume. Island Def Jam, the music group whose artists include Mariah Carey, U2, the Killers, Kanye West and others, recently announced that will start integrating branded advertising in their artists’ CD booklets. The new model will launch with Mariah Carey’s upcoming album, Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel, due in stores at the end of the month. The album will include a 34-page mini-magazine filled with lifestyle ads sponsored and co-created by Elle Magazine along with the record label. Lyrics and other information about the album will presumably be mixed in with the ads, making for great brand visibility but not necessarily a very pleasant or easy-to-navigate user experience. If Island Def Jam is hoping this new business model will kill CD sales once and for all, they might be on to something. On the other hand, their primary interest appears to be making money, since there will also be a digital version of the booklet available when you purchase the album on iTunes and other digital sales outlets. With savvy consumers becoming increasingly aware of advertising and finding new ways to avoid it, this is just another example of companies coming up with ever more inventive means to make an impression.
The "You" in YouTube
If you’ve been on YouTube lately (and we’re sure you have, probably right before you came to the Branding Ideas blog!), you’ve undoubtedly noticed a pop-up advertisement appear on the bottom of the viral video you watched. Google, which bought YouTube in 2006 for a whopping $1.65 billion, is attempting to monetize its user-uploaded content, even offering a cut of the profits to uploaders. Yesterday, YouTube Product Manager Shenaz Zack announced on the YouTube Biz Blog that the video site is “extending the YouTube Partnership Program to include individual popular videos.” Cutting costs and boosting revenue is never easy (just ask the U.S. government), but Google is giving it the old college try and getting its users in on the action. It’s part of a gradual but imminent trend in which the You in YouTube is indeed “You,” partnering with billion-dollar corporations to boost everyone’s bottom line. Whether it’s a long-term strategy that will help YouTube become a profitable enterprise remains to be seen, but it should be fun to watch them try!
Kindle Advertising?
Imagine opening up your favorite novel and finding an advertisement splashed across the page. Well, that might be exactly what’s happening in the publishing industry. Amazon.com has sold over one million of its Kindle devices since it launched two years ago, and the company recently filed patents for applications that would allow advertising on the increasingly popular portable e-readers. Books remain one of the few forms of media that haven’t become inundated with advertising. Does that mean that access to books will become, like basic television, “free”? Not necessarily. Recent trends indicate that even if you pay for something outright–like, say, a movie–that doesn’t mean you won’t get slammed with commercials and marketing placements. How current Kindle users and prospective new customers will react to seeing ads in the middle of reading the latest J.K. Rowling tome remains to be seen, but like everything else, they’ll probably just grin and bear it.
Experience Unnecessary
Last week we mentioned how experience is everything when it comes to productivity in the workplace. Well, while riding the subway to work today, I looked up and saw an advertisement for Manhattan Mini Storage, a popular storage facility in New York City. The company is known for its clever, punchy subways ads, appealing to gays and even skewering Vice President Dick Cheney, and this one is no exception: “What’s more limited? Your close space or her experience?” it reads atop a photograph of what is clearly intended to look like Republican vice presidential candidate Governor Sarah Palin. The reason the ad caught my attention is because if Manhattan Mini Storage was a national company, it’s not likely they would have gone with this kind of partisan ad. New York is famously liberal and even the Republicans on Wall Street aren’t as socially conservative as Palin. The company knows this and isn’t afraid to step on the toes of the city’s few loyal Republicans in its quest to get the attention of its target audience: Manhattanites who scoff at the idea of Palin being a heartbeat away from the presidency and just don’t have enough space in the tiny studio apartments.
Vampirism Goes Viral
While the quality of HBO’s new vampire drama is questionable, the pay net set up Alan Ball’s True Blood with a pretty nifty marketing campaign, including viral and alternate reality game components, a MySpace page, multiple websites, a comic book, blood-splattered wanted posters and, of course, a fake product called TruBlood. A large billboard advertising the “synthetic blood nourishment beverage” with the clever tagline “Real blood is for suckers” could be seen at one of the entrances to the Lincoln Tunnel in Manhattan for weeks leading up to the premiere of True Blood before being replaced with an ad for the actual show. A website dedicated to the fake product asks visitors to input the century of their birth, after which you can browse the various flavors (types A, B, O, etc.), take a quiz and even purchase real merchandise (ladies boy briefs are currently sold out). Talk about viral!
Agri-Advertising: The Next Big Thing?
Forget music. Advertising might be the most universal language. As reported by local NBC affiliate KGW and picked up by Keith Olbermann on MSNBC, a farmer in Sherwood, Oregon created a maze in his cornfield featuring the likenesses of the two presumptive presidential candidates, senators John McCain and Barack Obama. The farmer created the design with the hope of encouraging people to get out and vote in November. A few questions remain: Who is the farmer’s target demographic? And what were those alien marketing execs trying to sell us with this cornfield billboard?
