HP Digital Integrated Campaign

In what we're pretty sure is a first for the category in the UK, we recently launched a multimedia campaign for hp which is supported by a mobile website. The campaign is in-market in the UK at the moment and will follow soon in the Netherlands.

HP has launched some great new products recently that have features that don't fully come to life on a static image. We briefed Blue Star Mobile to put together a mobile site that shows the products in action and gives somes specifications. You can check out the sites on your phone or in your computer browser. The tx1000 is a laptop with a screen that swivels and becomes touch screen. The iPAQ 514 is hp's first 'phone'. Among other cool features it allows you to listen to your email.

The campaign integrates analogue and digital worlds through SMS response options on the print advertising and billboards. We're also running some mobile banners on Orange World in the UK.

The number of people who see the site is not likely to be vast. The cost of producing and distributing this kind of content, however, has dropped substantially over the last couple of years and it's now a pretty attractive addition to a conventional campaign.

Facebook Application Tracking

There's a great site that I've been playing around with called Appaholic which has responded to the boom in applications related to Facebook. Using mysteriously-sourced but nevertheless anecdotally plausible data, the site charts the adoption of applications on Facebook.

Below is a chart showing the increase in the number of people who have two of the apps that I've added to my Facebook profile.

Why invent new ideas when you can buy them?

There was an interesting post the other day in a blog that I read occasionnally by a London-based company called Brand Tacticians. It was entitled 'Why buy media when you can earn it?' and argued that investment in media will be increasingly redundant because of free distribution on sites like YouTube. It's not a particularly new concept but it is pretty compelling.

Why, a marketer might ask, should I buy expensive 'old school' media when good creative will show itself to millions? In fact, very few marketers actually ask this question. Most are realist and understand that there are limitations to how compelling and user friendly they can expect their brand and sites to be. They don't really expect to be able to create the next YouTube or Facebook (MySpace is so Web 1.8) or even the next Lonely Girl 15.

Hence the title of this post. Why would you risk substantial amounts of budget on an idea that might or might not go viral? That might or might not be relevant to your brand or your business objectives? Why wouldn't you stick to an advertising approach that works consistently and that delivers against your commercial objectives?

I may be coming across as a bit of a reactionary from a digital media point of view bu that's not the case. It takes an enormous amount of luck and talent to have an idea and an execution that generates 'media' by itself. This is not the kind of talent that creative agencies can deliver 100% of the time and not the kind of luck to bet the farm on.

There is still a vast amount of quality media that can be bought. As long as this is the case it makes sense the that the majority of a marketer's efforts should be directed this way. Simultaneously, however, they need to be looking forward and experimenting with new channels and, in some cases, pushing their agencies to work harder on new approaches.

I've been involved a little bit in a project for hp that I think strikes the balance between realism and forward thinking very well. It's due to launch in a couple of weeks and I'm looking forward to sharing it.

Real World Wide Web

I was in a meeting with Tim Kindberg this week. He works for HP in research and development at the HP Labs in Bristol. One of his projects is physical hyperlinks. This is by no means a new technology - it's already been put to use by the BBC and won an award.

The idea is that physical objects could have a unique barcode printed on them that can be photographed by a mobile phone. The image leads to a unique reference point on the web which contains information. The technology was used as part of the BBC series Coast. Scenic walks were marked with posters that included these tags and linked to various pieces of information. You can learn more on the Active Print site.

There are a couple of barriers to this technology taking off. Having seen it in action, though, I'm much more convinced than I was. Properly integrated into phones it could be very easy to use and very useful. The phone tells you when you've succeeded in capturing the barcode - a major plus for usability.

There are, by the sounds of it, two major hurdles. The first is getting the appropriate software embedded into phones. The second is standardisation of codes.

This technology has all kinds of possible applications. The 'barcode' could, in theory, execute any number of activities on a phone. It could probably replace phone numbers on business cards, for instance.

It could definitely act as an easily traceable response mechanic on outdoor and ambient advertising. It could add real value to consumers and be easily trackable for media spend optimisation.

Some of the ideas that Tim covered were:

real time travel information at bus stops and on train platforms

in-store promotions

response mechanism on outdoor

incentive delivery on outdoor to increase footfall

map download from online to mobile

If you have another one, please feel free to comment...

Digital Integrated Advertising - A Case Study

When I created 'Digital Integrated Advertising' as a tag a week ago I intended to use it as a description for a trend that I see as rapidly increasing. Online and mobile advertising have, at least in the UK, remained relatively silo-ed, apart from other channels. First mover advertisers have made attempts to run campaigns that join up digital and non-digital media, with SMS response or strong websites for instance. Digital channels, though, have mostly existed in parallel to other channels - either online driving traffic to a website or building up the frequency of messaging of an offline campaign.

There are few campaigns that have succeeded in recognising that increasingly all parts of our life our digital. Last year, working with a number of agencies, we ran a successful and elegant campaign with British Airways that blurred these lines. We took excellent content that had been developed for a microsite about 'hidden gems' in London and developed it into a mobile guide to the city. This guide became part of an advertising campaign that ran in advertorials in Metro Newspapers across Europe and was also a very popular part of the microsite.

It's really hard to quantify the impact that this element of the campaign had, or qualify it for that matter. But here's why I think it was award-worthy (it won an NMA Effectiveness Award and probably should have won more).

it can only have helped BA build its reputation as a forward-thinking, premium brand. Unfortunately there wasn't a great deal of quantitative evidence for this apart from its popularity as part of the microsite.

people are still downloading the guide from the microsite

almost all marketing research points to word of mouth as a key influencer. Having portable content on a mobile phone probably contributed to hundreds or thousands of conversations about travelling to London around Europe

we gave potential customers something of value out of advertising

it was an efficient recycling of content

Media 2.0

There's a really interesting short essay from March 2006 on UX Magazine, a great little site that doesn't seem to publish often enough.

The essay is called 'This is Media 2.0' and is a good review and set of predictions about the impact of Web 2.0 on media. In Media 2.0 there are opportunities for publishers who act as platforms for user generated content.

Like most of Web 2.0 talk it sounds an awful lot like 1999 all over again. In fact, like most Web 2.0, there's a good reason for that - it's taken this long to get this far.

Troy Young, the author, makes some good points and it's worth a read. It isn't exactly cutting edge now that YouTube is ubiquitous but it was written in March 2006 and so seems relatively prescient. He makes some predictions, one of which fits well with some of the work we're doing as an advertising agency:

Media 2.0 companies will look to partner with brands, beyond selling audience, to offer value to community members. Media 2.0 will provide valuable opportunities for user research. Less reach, more partnership / affiliation.

HP Blogging right?

I just left a comment on a blog set up on HP.com by Eric Kintz , a VP of marketing strategy at HP.


It looks like a really good initiative - a good way to get HP marketers thinking about the blogosphere. Most impressively, he invited a guy from Lenovo to comment. I've yet, though, to see anyone crack the complexity of blogging.

One of the things that I find the most interesting about digital advertising is that the subtlest technological changes can have huge impacts. The difference between a blog and a website is not altogether huge but the impact is massive. Websites have changed the 'media landscape'. Blogs, though, change the communications landscape, which is a shift of a different order altogether.

Tired Metaphors I - The Purchase Funnel

I'm working on a different way of approaching the concept of the 'purchase funnel'. I don't know if I'm just bored of talking about it or whether it's actually an oversimplification people's behaviour. I'm almost certain, though, that there is a 'friendlier' way for marketers to conceptualise their customer relationships (or webmasters their site traffic for that matter).

The Passion Spectrum

Kathy Sierra who is, apparently an eminent commentator on 'Web 2.0' recently wrote a post referring to another post written by Scott Adams (the Dilbert cartoonist - evidently also a blogger).

Scott wrote that, in polling consumer opinion, the 'kiss of death' for a product or concept is indifference or mild approval. He says, relatively convincingly, that you're better off having a spectrum of passionate opinions, even if most of them are negative, as long as some of them are passionately positive.

"The opposite of love," one of my flatmates in University once told me, in reference to relationships, "isn't hate. It's indifference."

In the UK, Unilever are again making use of this spectrum of passions in an ad campaign for Marmite. They've gone as far as building a site devoted to what might be considered a 'basic' food stuff.

I'm not sure whether I should be pleased or annoyed that they've included an online drawing tool. This is an online fad, presumably born partly due to an advancement in Flash, that I've been cataloguing with some amusement.

There are, however, (literally) innumerable products for which people are mostly or entirely indifferent but buy anyway.

A broad spectrum of passions, I suppose, delivers inherent brand equity. This is a nice plus to a marketer but by no means a requirement.