Friday, December 29, 2006

The Coke and Mentos Meme

I expect that you're familiar with the dramatic outcomes from mixing Coke and Mentos mints. Tens of millions of people have watched thousands of different videos (almost 1,400 on Google Video alone) of people dropping Mentos into Coke bottles on all the major video sharing sites.



If you take a look at the search volumes for Coke Google Trends (below, in blue) there's a noticeable impact of the phenomenon. The global volume of searches is higher for Coke than at any other point in its history. The significance of this is hard to isolate, particularly as Trends doesn't offer a scale. For example, why would anyone search on Coke if they weren't looking for something like this? Coke, too, isn't the kind of brand that needs to benefit from increased awareness. It does, however, benefit from consideration and preference. Do these videos deliver this? If you consider Coke's efforts in digital music downloads and compare the quantity and quality of interaction with the brand I suspect that this meme is an extremely useful one for them.



Google Trends for Coke



Coke, however, is just half the equation. When you overlay the volume of searches for Mentos (below in red) on the graph from above you can see a brand benefitting by a whole new order of magnitude. Mentos does not have the awareness of Coke and these videos won't change that. I wonder though, if Mentos marketers are in the habit of taking regular ACP studies - if so I bet this phenomenon would be sufficiently significant to be measured.


Google Trends for Coke and Mentos

I chatted with a guy who works on Mentos in Europe and it sounds as though they're ecstatic about the situation, having had nothing to do with creating it. The impact on sales has been significant as well.

Sunday, December 17, 2006

Scrubs is Meme-tastic

Ever worried that one of your favourite comedies has been on television a bit too long? The same characters, telling the same jokes...

The TV show Scrubs has produced a voice-over homage to the Charlie Brown's Christmas - the animated special that has been played on TV in North America every Christmas for the last four decades or so.



Mildly amusing, easy to pass on, easy to broadcast, benefiting from celebrity and existing cultural references.

This is meme-tastic

Meme-tastic Project

I've decided to start keeping a little record of online marketing or content that is meme-tastic.

A meme is, roughly, a unit of knowledge. Memetics is the study of how memes are passed between people.

People, for instance, know they should plan ahead in part because of:

  • 'a stitch in time saves nine'
  • 'an ounce of prevention saves a pound of cure'

    These are good ideas that have an elegant oral/cultural vehicle that passes them along. They're meme-tastic (I've made that up I think - out of laziness more than anything else).

    My interest in this subject is partly due to the fact that it's a point of intersection of traditional and emerging advertising. Mark Ritson has done some really interesting work about how advertising effectiveness is drawn significantly from how people interact with messaging culturally - whether they ignore it or talk about it.

    There's a belief around the office at the moment that the best medium for broadcasting advertising that makes people talk is television. While this may not be entirely true (there are an increasing number of internet-based memes that people have in common), it is still mostly true. The exception in advertising (as opposed to PR) is online viral advertising - a sub-industry that needs a lot of work.

    Memetics is roughly related to viral advertsing. There are virals that are meme-tastic and there are virals that make everybody work a bit too hard. Bad virals sacrifice brand values in order to gain a foothold with an initial user and then over-incentivise people to spam their friends. A meme-tastic viral is worth sharing for its own sake and helps build a brand, attaching positive associations with the brand.

    The aim of my 'project' is to put together a list of good and bad examples for future reference. These won't necessarily be viral campaigns. There are two kinds of 'meme-tastic' communication.

    The first is where the idea/concept is brilliant or interesting - it fits perfectly with a social situation, a brand or a zeitgeist and people just want to pass it on. Take, for example, the way that everybody knows that Dell Laptop batteries have been blowing up, or how for six weeks this fall people have been saying 'Yagshemesh.'

    The second kind of meme-tastic communication is for idea/concepts that are a little bit more banal but where the communication is facilitated by a cunning mass communicator or a piece of technology.

    If you have any good examples I'd love to hear about them.

  • Saturday, December 16, 2006

    Technorati Find

    MC Hammer has a blog . Its most notable feature is that he signs off every post with "Hammertime".

    Monday, December 11, 2006

    Pilot Podcast

    We've done a small test with video podcasting via an online publisher that went live last week on the VNU network in Germany. HP has licensed what sounds like a nice piece of kit. It's a mouse that sits and charges in the pc card slot of notebooks and is bluetooth. VNU filmed a short review of the product and has posted it to a number of their sites.

    I suspect that, in the near future, this kind of initiative will go through PR agencies rather than media agencies. I think, though, that this little mini-campaign wil be a pretty cost-effective media buy. Advertisers are, on the whole, probably paying over the odds to drive people to their websites in order to deliver content to them. Video streaming in ads has been possible for quite a while but the barriers to execution were relatively numerous. You Tube, Daily Motion & Google Video have had a big impact on the feasibility of syndicating video and it's a great opportunity for advertisers.


    Zeddigital Conference

    I spent a couple of days in Marrakech last week at a 'summit' attended by representatives of many of our offices around the world. As an advertising network we're really picking up some steam. Unfortunately, I missed most of the sessions due to a meeting on the first day of the conference - Marrakech isn't that easy to get to, even from London.

    There were a couple of highlights from my half-day of sessions though.

    One was a presentation by Joel Lunenfeld, who's a SVP at Moxie Interactive a US-based full service digital agency that was recently acquired by Publicis Groupe. They have a strong client list and are doing some great work, joining up creative, media, web development and data mining. I'm sure that there will be lots of opportunities to learn from them.

    The other highlight was having a chat with Jarek Sosinski, a digital planner in our Polish office. Poland is a really interesting market to keep an eye on. It's rapidly growing into an economic contender and the impact is definitely being felt in the online advertising business. Jarek was telling me, though, that there are very few 'global' online brands operating effectively in Poland. Audiences are large and growing and usage is high but the only non-Polish brand that has succeeded in imposing itself is Google.

    I get the impression that Poles like to do things there own way - if sites don't develop Polish versions (English still isn't common for adults there) then they're sufficiently entrepreneurial to develop their own content. They have, for instance, their own portals, their own advertising formats and their own instant messenger technology.

    The market forces in Poland are such that things are developing at different paces than in other markets. Of all our offices they are the most experienced at engaging in forums and bulletin boards (i.e. User Generated Content 0.9). They're currently planning a campaign for one of our UK clients, advertising bank accounts to Poles planning to move to London.

    Jarek and I also had a chuckle about Windows Vista - depending on the anti-piracy coding in it Poland may well adopt it faster then any other market in Europe.

    A snapshot of London Web

    I had a pretty useful day of meetings yesterday with a client who was in town for a couple of days. He has a remit to test emerging media channels for marketing.

    We spent the day with people and companies that are ahead of the curve when it comes to embracing the development of the web. There is, I think, a lot of innovation going on in the UK and much of it is proving fruitful.

    We met with Google to talk about what they're doing beyond search.

    We spent some time with Katie Lee from Shiny Media . They're a group of Blogs that have posted some impressive figures with what has got to be an attractive audience to the right advertisers. There has been a lot of talk about how the internet 'democratises' publishing. Most of this talk is bumph but I think that Shiny are a great example of when it is true. With three permanent staff and freelance writers they've tracked 2.3m visitors in November. I wonder what ITV.com gets....

    Euan Semple spent about an hour with us talking about some of his experiences with using social computing as Knowledge Management and Internal Communications solutions. He's not, as far as I can tell, a technology expert but, more importantly, has gained considerable experience at overcoming the barriers and identifying the opportunities that organisations are faced with when they seek to implement these tools.

    Our final session was at the VNU UK offices in Soho. IT sites generally are responding bullishly to the way the internet is changing and VNU is no exception. They've been investing in video, developing new features, updating CMS, podcasts, etc... They're likely benefiting substantially from a couple of solid years of ad sales and also feeling the pressure to respond to changing platforms.

    All in all, it was a good day. A nice cross-section, by no means exhaustive, of a booming industry that is adapting quickly.