DAS The Way I Like It

A few weeks ago we spoke about the ‘United Breaks Guitars’ video that turned a disgruntled consumer, Dave Carroll into a one man PR disaster for United Airlines. Since then Dave has produced a second video, complete with a cast of 100 volunteers, all of whom were happy to give their time and expertise in the name of brand bashing. It’s the stuff to give even the most battle hardened of communications officers nightmares, and this next example isn’t exactly going to send them drifting off into a official company-line based slumber either..
This time the company involved is holiday giant Thomson and the consumer is a chap named Andy Sharman.

It’s a familiar pattern; consumer feels they have received very poor service, consumer complains, company does not respond satisfactorily, consumer decides to do something about it. The difference in this story was that Andy knows his stuff digitally, and as a result his damning blog post was particularly search friendly, so much so that it starting beating Thomson on related terms. If you typed in “Thomson” and “Tunisia” into Google, instead of the well honed ad copy Thomson no doubt pay good money for, the top result was Andy’s and over 10,000 people read what he had to say.

Unsurprisingly, at this point, the customer service department that had been apparently so slow to respond previously suddenly jumped into action and settled Andy’s claim, (although if you read his subsequent posts he clearly didn’t feel overly satisfied.) but it was too little, too late, the damage had been done. Thomson have now retaken top spot in the search rankings, but below that is a plethora of coverage all relating to this story and dominating the top ten results. Given the highly competitive nature of the holiday market, the effect of this type of coverage must be particularly painful.

It would be fascinating to know the effect something of this nature has on the bottom line for the company involved. Of course, it’s impossible to know how many people decided against Thomson after reading the review, and the company would never disclose figures, but you can guarantee it’s considerably more than the amount in dispute initially. This example, along with all the others, should be drilled into any customer service team on the potential implications of not dealing with complaints properly.

The key to solving them isn’t in the reaction- Thomson did settle the complaint, and they’ve been and left comments directly on the blog itself admitting their faults, but by then the power of Google had taken hold and once that happens the momentum is virtually impossible to halt. No, the key is to do the upmost to prevent them in the first place. In a society where one man’s opinion can have so much gravitas, there must surely have never been a greater importance in investing in customer services.
So while it’s a battle fought online, it’s a very real world problem that goes to the heart of a business, and another great example of the respect digital needs in the boardroom.

August is a month in which generally very little happens in Ad land; I only have to look at my Twitter feed to see that at the moment there are a lot of people away on their holidays- and as a result, there’s not been much to talk about. But fear not, for today I read that Unilever has announced something that’s sure to get a debate going.

Peperami has been under the wing of Lowe for 15 years, during which time the character ‘Animal’ has become the focus of its brand. Voiced by Adrian Edmondson, the Animal has spent his time self harming in the name of snack food, but now he’s permanently severed a limb: as Lowe have had their contract terminated.

There’s nothing particularly shocking about that, eventually all brands, even those with long standing relationships, will require a fresh look at things. What is surprising is that in their place is a UGC campaign. Anyone can register for the competition, through ideabounty.com, and the brief will be based on (and this is the interesting part) the animal character.

UGC ads are nothing new; Doritos have been particularly active in the area in the last few years, giving some of the most prized ad space, the Super Bowl breaks, to competition winners. However these were very open briefs whereas the central and, crucially, existing theme for the Peperami competition has been set. It’s this dropping of Lowe but sticking with the identity that developed under them that has caused the most debate, particularly amongst irked creatives who say this is nothing more than an exploitative cost cutting exercise:

“This stinks of a money-saving exercise, rather than a genuine belief in crowd sourcing…” Read one comment on Brand Republic

I think opinion on this will be split, depending on where your loyalties lie:
If you’re a creative, you’re liable to see it as a poor showing from Unilever- it’s undoubtedly a controversial decision to follow this path as, if they were unhappy with the work Lowe were producing, why would they continue with the Animal theme?

However, if you’re more of a business/financial type it’s more likely that you’ll be inclined to believe that in tough economic times, any brand is within its rights to take a gamble with its output in order to make almost certain substantial savings. After all, it’s not like this is “Thanks for the strategy” after 12 months and one campaign, or even worse, an idea pitched by an unsuccessful agency.

In a personal opinion, I think this is a sad result of the climate we’re in and symptomatic of the changes the industry is going through, where for some areas at least the Big Idea agencies are really up against it, particularly as the internet provides such an accessible and cost effective vehicle for this type of idea.

But that’s as far as it goes.
At the moment, cost saving is at the top of nearly every brand owners list of priorities, and when that’s the case there’s no room for sentiment, no matter how long the relationships might be. It may well be that this is a money saving exercise by Unilever, but I’m not sure you can begrudge them that; clearly they have the IP rights for the campaign and so they’re fully within their rights to do what they please. My guess is that this will be a fairly short term plan to get one last hurrah from their current campaign before looking to appoint a new agency in a few months.

I can absolutely understand the anger of creatives about this, this is ultimately their lifeblood being challenged, but I’m sure there will still be applications in their scores for the competition, as it’s still a great opportunity for the winner, even if they might feel a little like they’ve danced with the devil.

There’s no denying that Spotify has been a bit of a revelation of late. We love it here, and so do most people we speak to. If nothing else, it allows for some classic musical battles across the office, and occasional bouts of what only can be described as ‘80s fever’ which is similar to swine flu, but a little less tasteful.

Obviously, where there’s a lot of traffic, there will be commercial enterprises that want to be able to tap into it; look at Twitter. For Spotify’s sake let’s hope this is the case, as the jury still seems to be out on how they’re really going to make their money, and you feel that the much coveted iPhone app they’ve developed and the rumoured 3 mobile deals might be fairly pivotal in their long term future. Whilst these commercial deals will undoubtedly appear, at the moment the guys www.invisiblefestival.org seem to have stolen the show, and what’s more, it’s for charity.

From what we’ve read, three guys decided it would be a cool idea to promote the world’s only “100% mud free, crowd-free, rain-free, tout-free, queue-free, free-free virtual festival.” It utilises the potential in Spotify’s playlist functionality to allow people to listen to the same music in their own garden, front room or anywhere else they have a computer and internet connection. Various artists have developed special one-off playlists of their music and their tastes for the event that will be live just for day and it’s nicely packaged in a playful identify. The whole event is aimed at encouraging people to give money to Cancer Research, although it’s not been directly organised by their marketing team; one of the guys happens to work for them in a different role.

Frankly, it’s great. What’s perhaps the most important thing to consider here is that the budget for the whole thing must have been close to nothing. The site is built on Wordpress (as this blog is) and promotion on the whole has been through WOM, although a few banners are now live on Spotify itself.
It’s a classic example of how if you understand the technology, digital can be a fantastically cost effective medium for some clients. To me, it also makes you think, what is real creativity? Is it taking a multi-million pound budget and making something that looks, well, a million dollars? Or is it being able to make the most of whatever the circumstances maybe, being the Ray Mears of the advertising world, if you will? There’s great skill in both, but as everyone is feeling the pinch in the current advertising climate, the ability to produce great, engaging work to restrictive budgets has perhaps never been so valuable.

A genuinely nice piece of work, with a nice story behind it and what’s more, a million miles better than a ‘chugger.’

In recent times, the word “Fail” has wormed its way into much more common use, thanks in no small part to our American cousins. There are numerous sites and blogs dedicated to ‘The Fail’, all of which basically take great pleasure out of seeing someone attempt something, and get it undeniably (and often painfully) wrong. For a great example in the corporate world, step forward that great bastion of American sporting excellence: Nike.

Nike have been involved with some truly inspirational digital projects in their time; in particular Nike+ (developed with RG/A) set the bar when it came to taking digital out into the real world. Which is why it’s so surprising to come across stories like this one in Brand Republic. In a nutshell, one of Nike’s biggest US basketball stars, LeBron James, was at a skills academy with a group of college players and proceeded to get ‘dunked-on.’ In English terms, I imagine it’s the equivalent to the cheeky school kid ‘megging’ John Terry before slotting it home. It appears there weren’t that many people there at the game and, other than being well appreciated by the few that were there, the moment passed fairly quickly. However, someone at Nike felt there was a chance that their prized asset could have his image tarnished and promptly got all heavy handed - demanding the footage from those journalists at the event.

Now, as we all know, there’s nothing better at stirring up the desire for something than being told you can’t have it – it’s human nature. My grandparents used to call it the ‘sh*t with egg on it’ effect (as in, “If I had some, you’d want some”) and anyone who has a partner who turns down an offer of food, only to have them sit and pick the lion’s share off your plate knows it all too well.

When you multiply this SWEOI effect by the power of a big brand and the ease with which information can now spread, it’s no surprise that Nike now has a bit of a PR disaster on its hands. Inevitably, the footage found its way onto You Tube et al and now over a million people have seen it, fuelled by the numerous mentions in the press and blogosphere. As with the United Airlines guitar breaking video, (see 2 posts ago) the little man quickly becomes the powerhouse in these situations.

What this really shows is the incredible importance of truly understanding the implications of your actions in a world which is now unbelievably connected. It’s no longer a case of just pushing your message out to the consumer; the way you conduct your business is in the public eye and rest assured if you screw up, you’ll not be able to sweep it under your lovely branded carpet.

Surely these moments are what the ‘LeBron James Skills Academies’ are actually all about? The chance to play against a legend, and perhaps get that one moment on which you can dine out for years, the one to tell the grand kids. They should be embraced and championed; after all, he’s just another bloke, albeit a 6ft 8” highly paid one. The rumour is that it may have been that James himself was behind the initial request and if that is the case he needs a reality check, and Nike and his advisors need to grow some basket balls.

By playing Big Brother, Nike has managed to spin a story of minor amusement, from footage in which it’s actually pretty hard to make out what’s going on, into a fairly major embarrassment – it even had to give the tapes back. For proof, you only search “LeBron James Dunk” in Google, above all his amazing performances; the top result is coverage on this very story.

An epic fail indeed.

www.livingsasquatch.com

We like this for 2 reasons; because it is a nice idea and because it’s for a Jerky brand, and we’re big fans of dried meat based products at DASi.

The site was created by Australian agency www.boffswana.com. Fundamentally, it’s nothing groundbreaking – It’s the same technique that’s been around for a while now with some nice touches, but as I’ve mentioned previously what is key is that rather than the technology being the star, we’re now at a point where it’s mainstream enough that the creative element once again takes the lead.

The key to this piece’s success is its use of UGC, as it gives the campaign much more life and a far greater reach than it otherwise would have. Many campaigns which aim to become ‘viral’ fall down because of a belief that if you add the ability to forward something on, people will automatically do so; it’s just not the case. If your campaign provides no genuine element of interest, whether that is humour, competition, the ability to shock or reward the receiver, it’s liable to be a waste of time and money.

Living Sasquatch works so well because it gives the user the opportunity to be creative with what is a nice core idea, the creativity of the user is much more important that the fact it’s an Augmented Reality piece and this allows a far more mainstream appeal. As an agency head we met yesterday said, “The best technology is practically invisible.” It’s also fantastic to see they haven’t overly branded the site, I’m not sure it would have had the same effect if midway through the legendary Sasquatch suddenly whips out a packet of processed beef. Top Stuff.

I don’t imagine this is the last we’ll see of concepts similar to this, particularly as more agencies have a grip of the technology, driving down the cost in the market, but the interesting part will be who comes up with the next creative level.

The cheeky looking chap in this video is Dave Carroll, who has managed to show once again the power of the consumer in today’s user generated world. Dave is musician of (by his own admission) fairly limited success but this month he’s been seen over 2.5 million times on You Tube, all because he decided to take out his frustration at what he saw as poor customer service in the form of a song.

His guitar was smashed by baggage handlers last year, by operators working for United Airlines. Dave claimed for the damage but United were less than helpful, something I imagine they now regret, as his song ‘United break guitars’ has become a worldwide sensation in a matter of days and is now firmly in the mainstream media, even making it onto that most treasured of US TV shows, Oprah. Unless United now manage to do something of EA Games/Tiger Woods type miracle response, (Click here if you’ve not seen that example) they’re going to have to sit and watch as their brand takes a trashing around the world, even if it is in a nice, jovial country style.

To me, this is another top example of the internet showing how the balance of power has shifted back towards the consumer- ‘disappointed of Tunbridge Wells’ can now take on the big boys and win. It’s also a fantastic example of how, no matter what your brand offers, the internet can seriously affect it whether you like it or not. The tools freely exist to champion and trash people, products, in fact anything- look at Susan Boyle for God’s sake, she’s even known as SuBo now, so if you’ve not at least considered how you’re going to react if you’re the centre of the next story, you’re potentially in for a steep learning curve.

Twitter screen shot showing Habitat anger.

Part of my job is to know what’s going on in the giant melting pot that is the digital market place. The beauty of the medium is that news travels fast and if you take the time to look you’ll always find things to talk about, and generally people will listen. Of course the flip side is that if you get something wrong, you’re in for a proverbial shoeing of which this is a classic case in point.

If you didn’t see it last week, Habitat have been roundly slated for spamming people on Twitter by using the fash tags (#) to gatecrash the most popular trending topics. At its very worst this meant that offers for its furniture popped up amongst the discussions around the Iranian election. Unsurprisingly, this caused quite a stir, and is the kind of brand damage that will take more than a 10% voucher to undo.

Habitat sent an official apology to one of the blogs that first picked it up, which read:

“I know people have been waiting for a response tweet from us; we are treating this very seriously and wanted to offer a longer message.

We have been reading everyone’s comments carefully and would like to make a very sincere apology to any Twitter users who were offended.

The top ten trending topics were pasted into hash tags without checking with us and apparently without verifying what all of the tags referred to. This was absolutely not authorised by Habitat. We were shocked when we discovered what happened and are very sorry for the offence that was caused. This is totally against our communications strategy. We never sought to abuse Twitter, have removed the content and will ensure this does not happen again.

It has been really valuable to hear how users would like us to use Twitter and we are determined to do better for the Twitter community.”

Clearly something went seriously wrong somewhere along the chain of command here, and some very valuable lessons have been learnt. There wasn’t anything malicious in what they did, but it was naïve in the
extreme and as a result the very community they were trying to reach has absolutely voiced their negative opinion.

No brand should ever take social media for granted or make short cuts and expect anything more than at best short shrift. Thankfully these types of horror stories are few and far between, and there is nothing to fear in using social media for your brand, providing you do so with respect for the people that use it. There are some fantastically knowledgeable people out there now who can show you the ropes, but it will take some time: just because it’s free does not mean it’s easy.

The IBM Wimbledon campaign is generally one of their flagship online projects of the year. I’ve been involved in a couple of them in a previous role and there’s always a huge amount of effort that goes into them. This year, they’ve done something different, as the video above shows. They’ve developed a nice app for the Google Android phone, which utilises its camera,  internal compass and GPS function in a way which effectively gives the impression of image recognition.  It’s a nice project, and to me it’s just another example of how much the market has shifted in the last 18 months. The 2007 Wimbledon project was a celebration of 3D and rich media; I’m not sure there was any interaction with the users at all.  This couldn’t be further from this year’s focus which is complemented by a range of social media activities.

This shift is something every client needs to be aware of when considering their agency partners, and is an area I’ve been banging on about to anyone who’ll listen (I had a letter printed in Media Week a couple of weeks back on this very subject). Many agencies had to play catch up in terms of staff and structure when the digital land grab really kicked in, and this was an expensive and time consuming process. The problem is that the market has continued to evolve at a frankly mind -blowing rate and those agencies that had invested heavily in being able to offer the high-end microsite and super rich production of 2007 are now potentially again geared incorrectly for today’s world.  The danger to the client is that agencies by their very nature will, on the whole, want to sell what is in their ‘tool kit’  and if their agency of choice is still trying to catch up, there’s no guarantee that you’ll be getting the best solution to your brief.

What this all means to the client is that knowing your potential agency partners inside out is key. It’s a market of incredible choice, so being thorough in terms of research and asking a few probing questions has never been of more importance.

My.IKEA from Robin Westergren on Vimeo.

Following on from my post last week, is this little beauty. More proof that once you understand the technology properly, then you can really be creative.

There’s a few other nice (and more importantly useful)  examples beginning to appear now for AR which is a sign that the technology has reached a point where it has established its own niche and isn’t just being used as an extension of another idea.  I had a conversation along these lines with Scott Seaborn, Ogilvy’s head of mobile technology recently.  He’s an incredibly enthusiastic chap, with a real passion for mobile; the type of champion that less established areas need. His belief is that for a completely new medium to become really established within advertising it might take as long as ten years.  During this gestation period, the new technology will evolve from just being used as another format for an existing area, to a standalone channel, one that has independent briefs and ideas.

We see smaller versions of this all the time within the digital space- new ideas and technology emerge, and for a while they’re seen as cool but very few people make them work commercially. Some never get past this stage and eventually begin to fade (you could argue Second Life is in this group) but for others there’s the penny drop moment; when the technological possibilities are matched by an understanding of them.  This time is when you get the mainstream uptake, and to me this feels like where AR is at the moment.

Clearly for clients, it’s hard to know when to invest some of that precious budget into relatively uncharted media waters - too soon and it will whizz over all but the early adopters’ heads, but too late and you’re just a ‘me too’ brand.  It’s not an easy balance, but with a good agency partner and a little luck the potential rewards are great. One thing is for sure though; the worst thing you can do is stand still…

Ford Fiesta First Date from Beto Lopez on Vimeo.

I picked up this story: http://ping.fm/WgHZV  off a tweet from the nice chaps at neoco, and it’s a decent example of how big brands are starting to really go after the social angle. 

In a nutshell, Ford in the US have given 100 people new Ford Fiestas to use in their day to day lives for the 6 months leading up to launch. Each of the ‘agents’ (as they are calling the test drivers) are documenting their adventures through a variety of social networking sites. To keep it more interesting than pictures of boots, sorry, trunks,  full of shopping they all have a range of ‘missions’ to complete - some of which were suggested by the public. The whole thing is packaged in a suitably dramatic title ‘The Fiesta Movement’. 

My personal opinion on this is a little mixed, it does feel a little too ’forced’ to me; the agents in the majority are annoyingly good looking and and it feels a little OTT so I get a slight ‘corporate attempting to be cool’ feel, but that might actually just be the American tone (have a look at the Dodge Ram challenge for another example) which to a Brummie like me is fairly alien.

It is undeniably though, a bold move at an incredibly difficult time for the automotive industry and they should be applauded as such. It wasn’t so long ago that this campaign would have been a very pretty but ultimately identikit full 3D minisite- full of flashy video and loading bars to boot.. 

As a final note, interestingly, Ford now have a ‘head of social media.’ I’d fully expect to see a few more of them in the next few months.