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Content Designed for Sharing

We’ve all been watching examples of great brand efforts that resulted in a lot of sharing and discussion of brand content.  That is, content that gets shared or passed around (like the first Man Your Man Could Smell Like or the Darth Vader VW spot) or talked about a lot (like Old Spice WolfDog efforts or the recent Dove work). We all get excited about the idea of this kind of content for the right reasons:

• Friend to friend sharing is a much more efficient way for your content to get reach. You don’t have to pay for the media
• Friend to friend sharing comes with an implied endorsement, so it’s more likely to be received well
• Word of mouth drives interest in the brand
• It’s generally done digitally, so you can often see the data trail
• And, when it’s digital, it can live pretty much forever in the Google search results (for better or worse).
• Ultimately, it just makes your paid media work harder

 A lot of the examples we see seem like viral magic, an alchemic reaction cooked up by a lucky wizard. But, increasingly, we’re seeing examples that are pre-planned and pre-programmed for sharing; creative efforts that were specifically designed and built for sharing, which is different than how we typically approach it. We generally plan a great TV idea, then seek something else – “surround”, social content, magic influencer dust – that gets our stuff shared.  In the worst cases, we try to engineer the sharing of a tv spot, something that is, by almost all definitions, content for a passive audience. It’s doomed to fail. Except for some edge cases, nobody cares enough about your tv ad to share it with their friends.

 So, how do you design creative and execution specifically for sharing? No one has the secret, but the two examples below characterize the best of what I’m seeing when brands try to generate a lot of sharing (vs. simple awareness) and discussion.

 Oreo – Wonderfilled

You can almost hear the brief on this one. “the Daily Twist worked great; we’ve got 33 million fans. How do we get people – young people - talking about our product, preferably online?” Or, put more simply: Get as many people as possible creating content about our brand: sharing it, talking about, reacting to it, etc. From the very conception, this was an idea that was about social sharing and discussion as much as it was about the product and brand.

First: What is it that they created? Is it an ad? A music video? A song? A commercial? Social Object? All of the above?

 Second: the idea was open ended and designed for a consumer response – “What would happen if *you* were given an oreo?” It almost demands the consumer think about it and perhaps respond.

 Third: The execution was truly talkable. Remarkable, even.

• Owl City is either loved or loathed, depending on who you are. Hipsters in Brooklyn probably moaned, but the tweens and young adults cheered. They all did it on social media.
• The song is, depending on your perspective, either awesome or sacharine. No middle ground. Lots of debate.
• The idea of top of the pops singer writing a love song to a brand? Sellout! Savvy! Debatable.
• Even the animation was discussable

 Fourth: The rollout was designed for sharing:

• Stunt media buy: They launched it as a 90 during madmen, when all the ad nerds were watching, knowing it would generate discussion. Lots to discuss:
  • A 90! Who does those?
  • Visually, it was SO different from the show, it was noteworthy just by juxtaposition
  • They did a 90 so the ad skippers would  HAVE to see it and go back (“What was THAT?!?”)
•  They rolled it out via their FB page (33 mm fans)
• They had OwlCity tweet it to his fans (>1M) and Twitter followers (>1MM)
• They supported it with lots of PR and events (again, to get the kids talking)

 In hindsight, it’s really, really clear that their goal was to do something remarkable, in a remarkable way so that people would talk about, giving extra reach to their efforts. TV was just the stimulus to get the talking started.

 

REI- Sharing as part of a Collaborative project

 REI recently launched their 1440 project with the goal of capturing 24 hours of people doing what they loved in nature (1440 minutes). Pictures for every minute of the day. It’s one of my favorite projects I’ve seen. For REI, “sharing” was a way to generate both incremental reach (through the shared content) but also a way to create a marketing asset.  For every picture contributed, REI asked the contributor to share it to *their* networks. And, each image became part of the overall collection, available for all future visitors. Plus, this effort resulted in at least 1440 pieces of content that could get shared out to REI’s network over the course of the year, and presumably each of those 1440+ images were good enough that when published to REI’s feed, the fans/followers would then like/retweet or favorite the images out to their network.

 
But, to me, the best part of this project is that it comes right from their values – celebrate being out in nature – and their core purpose as a coop: A collective effort to help their members have their own kind of experience, to  inspire and  celebrate others who are doing the same. This whole project demonstrates their values perfectly.

 

Inside the Digitas ‘Social Bullpen’ | Digiday

Make games together with CraftStudio

CraftStudio has all the tools you need built right in, including modeling, painting and animating. No format compatibility issues, no lengthy conversion process, no synchronization issues.

via craftstud.io

Very cool!

Econ Nerd Uses Basic Excel Skills to Ruin A Respected Study

Herndon was stunned. As a graduate student, he'd just found serious problems in a famous economic study — the academic equivalent of a D-league basketball player dunking on LeBron James. "They say seeing is believing, but I almost didn’t believe my eyes," he says. "I had to ask my girlfriend — who's a Ph.D. student in sociology — to double-check it. And she said, 'I don't think you're seeing things, Thomas.'"

via nymag.com

This one is for the Ecel nerds among us. I love stories like this, but it just reinforces the paranioa i feel everytime i make some analysis based on my own excel docs: Are my formulas right? Is my math right?

The Well Deserved Fortune of Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin creator, Visionary and Genius

The more i read about it, the more fascinating the whole Bitcoin thing is becomeing. How could a whole ecosystem grow up around a fake monetary system cooked up by guy in his bedroom? 

TL;DR version: The creator, a mysterious guy named Satoshi, set it up so he got a super small amount from every bitcoin his algorythm created into the future. 

"The graphs were made by a new block chain analysis technique I tested that consist on tracking the ExtraNonce fields in the coinbase field of the coinbase transaction, which is the one that creates bitcoins. As far as I know, is hasn’t been done before. In the following graphs each dot is the creation of 50 BTC. I have only analyzed and printed graphs from block 0 upto block 36288. I wonder what will I get when I process the remaining three years.
The extraNonce fields increments every time the nonce fields (which is 32 bits) overflows, so it’s a slow realtime clock, until the application is restarted, in which case it goes back to 1. Note the X-Axis in the graphs is not time (as it’s said on the graph). It’s the block number (that’s a mistake)." 

Target’s ‘Show Don’t Sell’ Content Strategy | Digiday

“The entire brand ecosystem is moving towards building relationships with consumers through various means like content and social media,” Hausman said. “We aren’t moving away from selling, per se. ‘A Bullseye View’ is our way to build relationships that will eventually lead to sales. Consumers want to connect with brands. They want to understand who we are and what our stories are.”

via www.digiday.com

Smart. working w/16 bloggers, strong visual style. Not nearly integrated enough into their commerce work.

Sustainable Digital Ecosystems

Healthy digital environments should leave you feeling refreshed and energized or empowered in some way. But in order for them to do that, brands need to think of them as something that can exist long-term and have that sort of effect from the outset.

via www.teehanlax.com

Good article on healthy digital ecosystems. I like this one because it really pushes the concept of an ecosystem and makes it understandable for us in the digital space. You’ll find a lot of similarities with the key points we’ve been hitting for over a year: Be generous, make the world better, etc. No good visuals, but a couple terms I might use(landfill marketing and “digital landfill”).

Love: Subaru “Cut The Cord” Commercial

For several years now, Subaru has been promoting a very ethereal yet highly motivating RTB: love. They’re hardly the first car company to try this. Mercedes plowed a big ol’ pile of dough into their “The Love Never Fades” campaign in the mid-2000s, and Volvo explored the concept way back in the ’80s with their ubiquitous “I Love My Volvo” bumper stickers. Subaru, on the other hand, is trying to own love in its entirety by building its campaign around the line, “Love. It’s What Makes a Subaru a Subaru.”

“Cut the Cord” is the latest example. In it, a father anxiously and tenderly sends his young daughter off on her first day of school. He reassures her with messages of encouragement and love, but after she bravely climbs aboard the bus he gets into his Legacy and drives alongside it, stopping only when he sees that she’s laughing and obviously happy. His voiceover copy says, “I’m overly protective. That’s why I bought a Subaru.” Then another voice gives the love line and we cut to a super with the Subaru logo and the words Confidence in Motion. The accompanying music adds a relevant touch of melancholy.

via blog.caranddriver.com

Maybe its because i'm the target audience, but i think this is a great spot. It's a moment any parent knows, and it speaks to those of us who choose the vehicles we drive with our kids care in mind. Plus the casting is fantastic, the pictures are superbly shot, and the editing is really great.

The Long Idea

“In addition to the ‘big idea,’ Kandace talks about the ‘long idea,’ ” Mr. Murphy said, “one that has underneath it a constantly evolving dialogue” that reflects how “you’re always listening to and engaging with consumers.”

According to Mr. Summy, McCann Always On “adds a number of tools, a strategic and analytic component,” to the agency’s abilities, giving it an advantage “in unearthing truths about consumers and figuring out the right message to be delivered at the right time.”

“Tom and I are ready to walk into a pitch,” Mr. Summy said, “and for that pitch, Kandace has gathered data from 10 million signals in the digital domain, which we’re using for insights to create the long idea” for the potential client.

via www.nytimes.com

"The Long Idea" is a term i'm going to borrow liberally.

Cool! With 50 Million Users, Flipboard Opens Magazine Creation To The Masses To Take On Tumblr, Pinterest | Tech Forecast | Fast Company

But if the secret sauce of Flipboard has been its content curation, there's always the chance that such an open service could dilute the Flipboard brand and its high-quality content. But McCue is wary of such issues. "Anytime you do something like this, you're going to have some people who create really awesome stuff and some people who don't really create particularly awesome stuff," he says. "You'll have a mix. The same tools we use to find great content, we'll use to find great curators, and then we'll surface those to our readers." The startup is also launching a content search engine to help users sift through this onslaught of new content.

via www.fastcompany.com

It was a matter of time, but i didn't expect it this soon.

If You Love Your Brand, Set It Free | Smashing Magazine

Our postmodern society is more fluid and diverse — a world bursting with myriad electronic media and display capabilities. A contemporary brand identity must reach beyond its visual manifestation in print or TV, to encompass how the brand speaks across a multitude of technology platforms, how it interacts with its audience and how people experience it at an emotional level.

Therefore, consistency — while still desirable — should not necessarily be the main driver of a brand identity system. In fact, we ought to consider total consistency an unachievable ideal: it’s impossible, and even counterproductive, to try to predict and codify all potential instances of a brand’s current identity. The vast number of stakeholders, marketers and agencies handling brand assets for the types of projects undertaken in our dynamic business and technology environments makes it very difficult to exercise constant control over how a brand is expressed. Better to embrace executional variance in a smart way, by establishing loose parameters that nonetheless can create a familial feel for an otherwise very rich group of brand applications across media and across continents.

via www.smashingmagazine.com

Come back and read this.

Live Giant Squid Filmed In Deep Ocean: Scientific American

Widder and her colleagues therefore fitted Medusa with an electronic device that mimicked the bioluminescence that jellyfish produce when attacked to serve as a lure. It worked: Medusa first encountered a squid during its second deployment, igniting jubilation on the ship. “I just was blown away,” says Widder,” I couldn’t have been happier.”

via www.scientificamerican.com

I'm a sucker for anything related to giant squids. It's either because i watched that Disney version of 20,000 Leagues a hundred times, or i listened to that Ween album 500 times.