Monthly Archives: July 2009
If you’re interested in great story telling, film-making, bikes or the Tour De France, you might want to check this out.
one - Beginnings
Recently we learned about a set of stories (HD documentaries) on the Cervélo site. The series, created by Cervélo, is called “Beyond The Peloton”. Cervélo is a Canadian company making high end road bikes (pedal bikes).
This is how the site describes the series: “In the High-Definition documentary Beyond The Peloton, film makers Joe Finkleman and Booker Sim follow the creation and first racing season of the Cervélo TestTeam. With their all-access passes, they will show you what race footage fails to capture, everything “beyond the peloton”.
The site itself is not at all compelling. But we think the videos are. They’re a great way to tell an engaging story that focuses on product development and the development of a professional team. The series takes an in-depth approach and is filmed from the point-of-view of a guy working in the Cervélo warehouse. He goes on the road with the test team. The story unfolds in a series of videos that tell back stories from several view points: the company founders, the engineers, the mechanics, the coaches, the manager and of course the riders on the team. But what makes it really compelling is how these films tell the human side of the experience. They talk about the team, their talent, and ability to overcome challenges. It’s a wonderful “back story” that really allows people to get a sense of the Cervélo personality by showing the team’s personality.
Originally published at iMedia Connection.
The doldrums of summer notwithstanding, I’ve noticed no dearth of self-reflective articles discussing the changing role of the advertising/marketing agency in a web 2.0 world.
Great minds wax poetic about the move from push to pull, from TV to web, from monologue to dialogue – and these are great discussion topics.
But you know what? Almost none of these articles talk about sales.
Are we forgetting our purpose?
Bursting A Bubble
I remember back when the internet was the shiny new object of fascination. Over time, businesses that marketed online to sell products survived (i.e. Amazon.com) and those that just focused on the fun online marketing stuff…well, didn’t (i.e. Pets.com).
Are we seeing a similar trend with social media? A lot of brands are throwing money at engagement and conversation and friending – but is this making the cash register ring?
Image Courtsey of Big Mouth Media; http://tinyurl.com/nellt9
Real Marketers Still Make – And Sell – Stuff
Phil Johnson’s Ad Age piece entitled Agencies Should Be Defined by What They Know, Not What They Make is one of the articles about the modern agency that rubbed me wrong.
As I read it, his article focuses on what we know (communication) at the expense of what we make (ads/experiences which turn into sales).
My conviction is that advertising agencies should become a community full of intellectually curious people…Clients should feel compelled to work with a given agency because they hold the keys to the mysteries of how people communicate with each other.
OK, sure, but isn’t this a tad esoteric?
Clients aren’t comforted by what you know. They’d rather see how you turn that into sales.
Agencies that use social media, then foster loyalty and trust, and then turn that into sales – those agencies will triumph. But agencies that dabble in social media without even considering ROI or sales…think Pets.com 2.0.
Marketers and advertisers who consider sales not lofty enough of a goal would do well to remember David Ogilvy’s number one obiter dictum from Confessions of an Advertising Man:
“We sell – or else.”
The term mom or mommy blogger is widely used to refer to moms who blog. However, the term does not accurately classify all mom bloggers because some of them actually write about more than their mothering experiences. The nomenclature issue is hotly debated in the mom blogosphere, but I’m not going to discuss this here.
What I do want to discuss, however, is the recent debate going on in the mom blogging world about transparency and ethics when it comes to reviewing products and services on blogs. Especially with the new proposed Federal Trade Commission (FTC) guidelines and the pointed attack on mom bloggers in a recent BusinessWeek article, have been up in arms. In contrast to what most people would think, most mom bloggers (or at least the serious ones) are actually in favor of the new FTC guidelines that are expected to be approved late this summer. These guidelines mean that bloggers would become liable for false claims or for failure to disclose conflicts of interest, in the same way that journalists are.
Even though these new guidelines are applicable to all types of bloggers, mom bloggers have been singled out because of the huge influx of consumer product companies using these bloggers to promote their products by either sponsoring posts, giving away free products, or paying for events and trips. While one blogger’s audience can be small, bloggers can still be very influential because many of their readers are bloggers themselves, who can pass on the word of a cool mom pick or great mom giveaway.
In response to the new found appeal of mom bloggers, some of them have begun to integrate reviews into their personal blogs or start separate review blogs.
So the issue becomes, can we trust the opinions of these mom bloggers? Is a review of a product that was given to them for free more questionable than one where a blogger just happens to write about a particular product? And, should bloggers be regulated as journalists are to disclose relationships with affiliates who may provide links to products on their sites or sponsor blog posts?
We recently turned to a group of moms in our ShopTalk community to get their opinions on mom bloggers and whether or not they trust the blogs that they read. Surprisingly very few of our moms trust reviews of products that are found on mom blogging personal or review sites. Most say that they use the information they find on mom blogging sites in combination with other sources in order to make their own informed decisions:
“I don’t just trust any one’s recommendations on a blog, I usually question and research everything and try to come to my own conclusion. Sponsored blogs usually will leave you skeptical because in the end they are trying to sell the company’s products so it will leave you wondering if the blogger is sharing a genuine recommendation and not one because she/he is being paid to.” (Bernie, 23)
“I read blogs more for entertainment than information. I would not change my buying habits from blog info because you don’t know if they have advertising contracts with certain brands, and if the promotion of certain products is genuine and personal or being bought.”(Nita, 25)
Anastasia’s post on June 9 (probably unwittingly) hit on a topic close to my heart. (Anastasia, the cheque’s in the mail.)
I lead a consumer research group at Critical Mass called Curious that develops cost-effective and time-effective (but still effective) methods of getting to insight to ensure we’re making relevant and meaningful decisions. One of our methods involves the use of MROCs (market research online communities), which Brad Bortner from Forrester Research has written about over the past year. As you might imagine, I’m all about the use of communities specifically for this purpose. But unlike Anastasia’s post, Curious works to bring the conversation to the brand (in a more controlled environment) rather than monitoring the other conversations that are going on.
Great things can happen when you bring people together. We look for those moments when one of our respondents raises an interesting issue in one of our topics and suddenly the community is ablaze with activity around that topic. It’s something that I personally think of as an extraordinary experience.
One of our communities, ShopTalk, is comprised of a few hundred consumers in the US that have all been screened along various criteria (demographic, attitudinal, behavioral). We have discussions with them every week on topics ranging from buying toothpaste, to how they would define a term like “craftsmanship,” to whether they think the needs of moms are addressed online.
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The buzz around augmented reality seems to be growing. This technology involves the interaction of live and computer-based data. It can be used to retrieve real time data based on what’s being captured with an input device, like a camera or a microphone, and display the information layer over the input one.
The video gaming industry seems to be definitely going towards that direction. First, Sony released the PlaystationEye, but the titles released until now didn’t seem to achieve great popularity. I believe they hope to change it with EyePet. Microsoft, in its turn, is now investing on Project Natal, which uses the same movement recognition principle. The gaming industry will probably be a huge factor for the popularization of augmented reality. You can read a bit more about the two systems here.
Outside the entertainment industry, applications based on this technology start to pop. The GR Smart Grid seems to be one of the most popular at this point. Recently, I came across the USPS shipment box simulator which “project box holograms onto the image from your [webcam]. Then, compare the size of the real stuff you want to ship to size of the virtual box on your screen,” according to the USPS Priority Mail website.
When we see the current state of the interaction between real and computer data (how things take a while to follow the path and their movements are not that natural), we realize that there’s still a lot to improve, like Total Immersion did, and we start thinking what’s the real value of augmented reality aside seeing cool 3D graphics that react to your movements on a screen. How can this technology help the developmThe buzz around augmented reality seems to be growing. This technology involves the interaction of live and computer-based data. It can be used to retrieve real time data based on what’s being captured with an input device, like a camera or a microphone, and display the information layer over the input one.
The video gaming industry seems to be definitely going towards that direction. First, Sony released the PlaystationEye, but the titles released until now didn’t seem to achieve great popularity. I believe they hope to change it with EyePet. Microsoft, in its turn, is now investing on Project Natal, which uses the same movement recognition principle. The gaming industry will probably be a huge factor for the popularization of augmented reality. You can read a bit more about the two systems here.
Outside the entertainment industry, applications based on this technology start to pop. The GR Smart Grid seems to be one of the most popular at this point. Recently, I came across the USPS shipment box simulator which “project box holograms onto the image from your [webcam]. Then, compare the size of the real stuff you want to ship to size of the virtual box on your screen,” according to the USPS Priority Mail website.
When we see the current state of the interaction between real and computer data (how things take a while to follow the path and their movements are not that natural), we realize that there’s still a lot to improve, like Total Immersion did, and we start thinking what’s the real value of augmented reality aside seeing cool 3D graphics that react to your movements on a screen. How can this technology help the development of better user experience?
So you may be able to come to a CD store, point your cell phone camera to a CD cover and check listeners’ reviews from amazon.com, or even compare prices with other stores. The same kind of thing you do while browsing the Internet today, but adapted to what you have in sight, anytime, anywhere. While grocery shopping, you may be able to check available recipes, nutritional information or even the availability of that item on your freezer. I really dream about the day when the front windshield of my car will be GPS-driven and I won’t even make a mistake on a bifurcation again, because that coloured lane will be shown no more on a GPS device screen, but over the actual road.
I’ve seen complicated devices like head-mounted displays, which involve helmets, goggles, tracking systems and mobile computer units, but I don’t believe many people without a really specific application field will want to use them. They will probably wait until Oakley engineer all that machinery to work inside a Juliet model.
The fact is the use of this technology, in the next few years, will be much more simple and easy. And that’s why we can believe it will be successful. In this context, the role of agencies will be to identify opportunities to create interesting applications and interactions and plan interfaces that will make the experience desirable. This technology is promising, but, as any other, only the development of good applications can create public interest to make this field develop.
ent of better user experience?
