For me, one of the most interesting things about the screenwriters’ dispute in the States (click here to support it!), is the use that individual Writers’ Guild members have been making of online video to contribute to the overall campaign. Here are a few of them (hat tip: James). Read the rest of this entry »
I’m really coming round to how good this new Tory viral ad format is. I mean, loads of stuff must have doubled under Labour that they could make videos about. Got me thinking…
Nice note from Asabailey, viral marketing gurus and new Tory ad agency. I like their stuff a lot (my favourite of late has to be their Cannes Web2.0 song - more than a bit NSFW btw). Anyway, they’re showing the first of their new series of Tory attack ads on YouTube:
In response to Lord Saatchi’s most recent calls for the Conservative party to stop its “nicely nicely approach to advertising and PR” and to get back to basics, Asabailey have created this online viral and TV campaign to create debate between consumers and the media in the Midlands and the North of England, all as an early general election looks ever more likely.
Using real Mobile Phone style footage, and images of “life under Labour” the campaign highlights the darker sides of life in modern New Labour Britain and places the blame firmly at the feet of the current Labour government.
Call me old fashioned, but I thought it could be construed a bit of a cheek to bang on about teenage thuggery if you used to be in your own young ruffians gang. Or maybe Dave, George and Boris are able to understand the problem much better than Labour, having been there, done it (over) and so on.
Anyways, I thought I’d share it with you. Oops, silly me, now where did I put the original file… Is it this one?
Web usability expert Jakob Nielsen seems to be on the defensive this week. It looks like someone asked him why he doesn’t have a blog just one time too many, and his latest weekly article is about how a real expert should set themselves apart from the madding crowds of the blogosphere and focus on quality content.
This is an approach that’s done him well over the years, and seen him crowned King of all things web 1.0. I’m not so convinced he’s on the money with this though, or that anyone setting out to be an ‘expert’ like him would be best served following his lead.
I stopped actually reading his Alertbox column about a year ago, when I noticed his feature articles were sometimes just repeating themselves from previous years. I just never got around to unsubscribing from it.
Nielsen believes that your expert quality comes out best in serious articles. Even the best expert writes bad blog posts from time to time, so effort put into this (and all the trackback-slapping to build buzz) is wasted and gets you lost in the morass of mediocrity out there. I think this is all very well & good if you were in from the beginning, and have a mailing list the size of Nielsen’s one, but for new would-be experts, it maps out a very slow path to recognition, if you actively choose not to use the networking capabilities of Web2.0 to engage with your peers/fans.
Another expert who I do read a lot more now is the Chad-like guru of permission marketing, Seth Godin. He takes the opposite track to Nielsen and posts whatever he’s pondered on the drive to work (in his Prius, natch) or happened to see on the back of a milk carton. The idea is that he’s still the expert, but he’s having a conversation to develop new thinking. And a conversation gets you talked about.
His scatter-gun epistles are sometimes wrong (often getting him more links than the less controversil ones), so then he posts equally speedy updates, keeping the conversation going. Overall, I disagree with him more than often with Nielsen, but I read him much more as his little insights have more variety and are fun as 30 second thought provokers.
But who’s right? Well, I convinced a former boss to part with £150 for a conference place to see Nielsen’s ‘98 tour, but have only dipped far enough into my pocket to buy one of Godin’s books (1999’s Permission Marketing) - I can’t afford his live appearances! So on the balance sheet, Nielsen is winning.
The time honoured method of a FIGHT! is inconclusive, but the lines never lie - Nielsen is slumping on the links, and Godin is growing, which I think is a good pointer. I’m aware that I’m hardly the target market (£250k consultancies), and also aware that Godin’s armies of trackbackers are also probably not going to do more than download the ebooks he’s generous enough to give away (a way of doing Nielsen’s serious articles even more seriously, but very rarely), but he does seem to be propelling himself into überexpertness faster than Nielsen did.
This week I’ve been pondering going to see “A Scanner Darkly”, as I’m all home alone - cinema isn’t something I normally get the oppo for. When I rang the missus, she asked why I wasn’t more interested in Snakes On A Plane - after all I’d been telling her about it for ages, whereas I only read a review of ‘Scanner’ this week. Strangely though, I just have no interest in the actual movie of Snakes On A Plane.
My misgivings seem born out by a post from New Marketing guru Seth Godin, who has noted that the SOAP box office is down and people don’t seem to be willing to follow the hype on this one. I think in this case though, the hype may actually have been counter-productive for them.
I don’t know if people were actually getting involved with the movie during the months of creativity and japing, more that they were getting involved with an in-joke about a preposterous movie scenario. You don’t actually need to see the movie for the joke to be funny - the joke is just that someone is actually making this film. In fact the fans may well have been far more interested in their own takes and parodies on the movie, rather than the director’s take, and be happy to leave it at that. The real movie becomes just one more meme parody in a long list, and a late one at that - bo-ring!
Contrast maybe with the Blair Witch - a movie spread through internet hype, but centrally-generated rather than user-generated hype. People didn’t feel a stake in their own version of it, and were more just passing on a straight marketing message, rather than creating their own jokes around a meme. Maybe SOAP is more like ‘All Your Base Are Belong To Us‘ - a good in-joke, but certainly not one which sent people scurrying to buy retro arcade games.
Seems like things are getting tricky for McDonalds. Still losing share after a healthy makeover, in the States they seem to be turning for parterships to the few people who’ll still have them. Yes, you guessed it, the only people dodgy enough out there must be monster car makers Hummer.
McD’s are actually handing out Hummer toys with happy meals - uniting two of the grimmest excesses of modern times. A gift to campaigners, who have a nifty new web toy, letting you monkey with the famous arches sign to have your say on the gruesome twosome.
What’s next - a free pack of Marlboro with every happy meal? The Hummer thing could be an astute move though - is it the only car out there capable of hauling your sorry expanded carcass after a lifetime of McDonalds munching?
I’ve just been in the States, which I’ve thoroughly enjoyed, but which did get me wondering about the collective self-respect of the nation. Exhibit A: Auntie Jemima’s Butter Rich Syrup, which I had on my rather large breakfast waffle. Now the label for this is quite illuminating - The “Butter rich” slogan in big letters is backed up by smaller a tagline extolling “Natural butter flavor”. Yes, you think, ‘I’d not unreasonably expect sauce rich in butter to be butter flavo(u)red, so this hardly shocks me’. However, there’s an asterisk denoting a tiny caveat directly below this, which reads “Natural flavor denotes other natural flavorings, contains no butter”. In other words, AUNTIE JEMIMA IS A GREAT BIG FIBBER!
Okay, this is only a little lie, and a bottle of non-butter syrup isn’t going to upset the international relations applecart or cause a worldwide stock market slump, but I think it’s symptomatic. Auntie’s marketing department clearly think that it’s not only just okay to mislead their public, and treat them as stupid, but that their public are so docile and contemptuous they can see the lies, but just choose to ignore them - there’s no need to be bothered to feel embarassed about it and try to cover up the deception. Look at the puppet, don’t look at the hand. A spot of culinary doublethink which might be the thin end of a wedge that leads to a Prez who is slashing welfare in order to give his megarich backers whopping tax cuts, but who gets re-elected on safeguarding ‘moral’ values.
Anyway, that’s enough wildly speculative ranting for the moment - not normally my thing, there must be something in the sauce…
All of this obviously being my own thoughts and nothing you can pin on my employers present or past, my union, my local party, my mates, or anyone else you might confuse me with - most of whom don't agree with me about very much anyway.
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