Everyone knows the welcoming, cocooning feeling when you enter a warm place from the cold outdoors and it smells good like coffee or delicious food. The intention of Kraft Food was to create this kind of warmth for their brand Stove Top (quick cooking instant stuffing) with their “experimental marketing promotion”. The NY Times reports today that heated air will be released from the roofs of 10 bus shelters in the windy city Chicago . The 10 heated shelters, primarily in downtown, will have posters that claim “Cold, provided by winter. Warmth, provided by Stove Top.” During the first three weeks of December, Kraft plans to give samples of Stove Top to the commuters and passers-by at half of the heated shelters.
The idea of the multisensory experience is that people will associate the product with warmth. For me, the idea is great. I doubt, however, that the heat coming from the roof is associated with the message. Perhaps they should have added a mouth-watering smell to increase the link between brand and experienced warm feeling .
You can easily build your own plane design in this fun application and take it to the sky, to see how well it flies. A great inspiration for all those who program flash. Also, what I found really well done was the level of detail as far as making even forms and buttons usable.
Also VERY surprising for this brand: MOZART. Can only be explained by the fact the Red Bull’s CEO is Austrian, and Austrians think Mozart was Austrian.
Christmas shopping season has started. No clue so far when it comes to gifts?
What about a goat? A baby balance? Or a HIV test?
In the UNICEF online shop, sponsored by United Internet, people can buy specific aid items donated as supplies for those in need.
I think it’s not only a great act by United Internet, it’s also a great idea to “visualize” help and make people aware what can be done - even with a small budget.
Google launched their SearchWiki last week, and caused quite a stir in the blogging community. It’s not really a wiki (as comments left are not editable), but it allows for unprecedented user control over search results.
Users can leave comments on websites returned as search results (and therefore on the Brands themselves) and move search results up or down in the list as they wish. As initially launched the results and functions were only available to signed-in users.
It was discontinued a few days later, but the implications are very interesting from a marketer’s perspective.
In the short time it was active, spammers added links to their websites to other, more popular addresses, the posted comments could not be edited (again, not very wiki-like) and users found that they could not opt-out of viewing the searchwiki results along with the content that they requested. (Several of these behaviors were not called out in the Google description of the function.)
The points for marketers are clear. Perhaps this experiment did not succeed, but a form of it is likely to make a return. Users will (and some say must) continue to gain control over their digital experience, and create their own experiences. Given this cultural fuel, how will marketers participate? Search engine optimization must evolve to include real reasons for users to include an organically presented result. Sponsored search links may radically decrease in terms of effectiveness. Those that do not take an active stance on managing their own reputations online will continue to be at the mercy of (possibly) vocal minorities, and their silence can equal guilt in the mind of the digital shopper/surfer. Below is an example of a possible future entry (from www.readwriteweb.com):
I don’t think this is the last we’ll hear about this kind of user empowerment. And marketers will have to stop thinking about search results as ads and start making them Acts.
The Red Cross Argentina dramatized the consequences of the global warming in a way that pedestrians who normally refuse to take pamphlets from a promoter could not ignore the melting man on the sidewalk. It is another example of “shockvertising” to get attention. Whether you like it or not, you simply cannot pass it……
This invention, questionable in its utility, nonetheless seemed interesting enough to share with you.
It stems from one of the projects of Julius von Bismarck, and it is a contraption where its user sees himself only from above. I guess it’s a new category: not augmented reality, but rather altered perspective reality which allows you to experience things in a totally different way.
This is off-topic as far as our industry, but it clearly does affect our industry.
If you ever want to know what exactly happened in the years leading up to the credit crisis, this is a must-read. Written by a former wall street guy, Michael Lewis, who got out of the game in his mid-20s back in 1988 to save his sanity, predicting the crisis, this 9 page article reads like the script for a thriller.
I’d never taken an accounting course, never run a business, never even had savings of my own to manage. I stumbled into a job at Salomon Brothers in 1985 and stumbled out much richer three years later, and even though I wrote a book about the experience, the whole thing still strikes me as preposterous—which is one of the reasons the money was so easy to walk away from. I figured the situation was unsustainable. Sooner rather than later, someone was going to identify me, along with a lot of people more or less like me, as a fraud. Sooner rather than later, there would come a Great Reckoning when Wall Street would wake up and hundreds if not thousands of young people like me, who had no business making huge bets with other people’s money, would be expelled from finance.
Read the mind-boggling rest of it here. I can’t wait for this to be made into a movie.
Found this on PaulinePauline’s flickr stream. It’s an advertisement in bath rooms for a dating site. Walking into a bathroom and seeing a full-sized perspectivally correct, naked lady should be pretty arresting. Or something like that…
I was so psyched when I saw this post on Swissmiss. Finally somebody took the time to point out the obvious obfuscation and mind-bogglingly inane product naming convention at Starbuck. I am sure people who ever ordered at Starbucks have found it to be a suboptimal transaction experience, too.
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Everyone knows the welcoming, cocooning feeling when you enter a warm place from the cold outdoors and it smells good like coffee or delicious food. The intention of Kraft Food was to create this kind of warmth for their brand Stove Top (quick cooking instant stuffing) with their “experimental marketing promotion”. The NY Times reports today that heated air will be released from the roofs of 10 bus shelters in the windy city Chicago . The 10 heated shelters, primarily in downtown, will have posters that claim “Cold, provided by winter. Warmth, provided by Stove Top.” During the first three weeks of December, Kraft plans to give samples of Stove Top to the commuters and passers-by at half of the heated shelters.
