Copenhagen INK

It’s friday and therefore I wanted to share some photo fun with you: http://www.photofunia.com/ – nothing much to say, just go check it out!

Talking a little more serious – companies in need of graphic design can already crowdsource that work on sites including SitePoint, crowdSPRING and Inkd. Now customAdArt is bringing similar capabilities to the buying and selling of photographed images.

Typically, advertisers in need of photos must browse through reams of them on stock photography sites, which may or may not have anything close to what they were hoping to find. Now in beta, customAdArt aims to turn that model on its head by allowing advertisers to post requests for specific shots and then have member photographers shoot and submit their best efforts to satisfy them. Advertisers begin by posting a job on the site, including a description of what they’re looking for, a price (the minimum is USD 100), and a deadline; listing the job costs USD 50. For two weeks—or until a winner is selected—photographers can submit their best entries for the advertiser’s consideration. When clients find a photo they like—they can provide feedback first, if necessary—they pay the artist directly. In return, they gain full rights to the purchased image.

customAdArt has the potential to save advertisers the time and money they would have spent trying to find the perfect image; photographers, meanwhile, are spared the necessity of “blindly shooting and hoping that someone might be interested in their particular image,” as the site puts it. Go have a look at: www.customadart.com

Source: Springwise

Looking through a whitepaper on Facebook and reading an article ‘if it makes sense to purchase Friendster’ I found some interesting points that I wanted to share. I also made me thing about the future of the different social media networks and

At the end of 2004, Facebook had over 1 million users; today, the number has increased to over 250 million active users. And, while once the social network was limited to college students, today over two-thirds of Facebook users are not in college. In fact, those 35 and over are the fasting growing age group. Facebook reports that the average user has 120 friends on the site; there are over 5 billion minutes spent on Facebook each day worldwide; over 30 million users update their statuses at least once a day; and over 8 million users become fans of Pages each day.

According to Nielsen NetView, in April 2009 the total minutes spent on Facebook in the US reached almost 13.9 billion, a nearly 700% growth over April 2008, and resulted in Facebook being the number one social networking site for that month, far surpassing MySpace, which held the top spot a year ago.

Looking at Friendster (One of the world’s first social networks with strength in Southeast Asia, that at this time is actually looking for a buyer) - Matt Sutton, Managing director at Aktiv Digital commented on it’s potential:

“… Friendster’s largest penetration is in Asia, the world’s largest digital playing field. It actually has very high penetration in large markets with currently low digital spends — namely, the Philippines and Indonesia. This represents a short-term challenge and a long-term opportunity. Friendster is a big brand with huge reach and in this market advertisers tend to cling on to those offline hooks, attributing advertising with buying profile — the ‘if it’s famous I will be too’ approach. But that’s not a long-term defendable proposition, and things get a little more complicated when you look at it from a micro level. Facebook’s huge number of column inches has made it the kid on the street with the hippest trainers. It will find it easier to attract attention. All the big social network players can swallow huge budgets in one booking, so they need to be able to justify the spend they receive against each other. Friendster can co-exist here but it will need to differentiate its audience. The question is, can it do this?”

It made me think about something I heard at AD:Tech earlier this year;

Ian Stewart, Friendster’s Head of Asia said that there in the future of social networking will be a place for every network – each network for each target group. He described the role for the four biggest social networks this way:

• Friendster is the bedroom (Youth/teen)
• Facebook is the living room (Family/friends)
• Linkedin is the boardroom (Business)
• MySpace is the nightclub (Music)

This was backed up by a Forrester Research analyst that said, “If MySpace is about your entertainment life, Facebook is about your whole life.” Facebook which touts itself as helping you “connect and share with the people in your life,” appeals to broad range of consumers. MySpace on the other hand has a younger audience and tends to be more associated with entertainment and music.

So the future seems to bring segmentation and coexistence… Further down the road it will also bring integration and trends like aggregators will grow. In the end when everyone has a profile on several social media platforms there is a need for social media search engines as well as aggregators to make all of it more accessible:

• SPOKEO (Social media search engine)
• WINK (Social media search engine)
• Google Wave (Aggregator)
• Friendfeed (Aggregator recently bought by Facebook)

What do you think the future will bring?

‘s top 10 film for July 2009 – enjoy

1. MICROSOFT – OFFICE 2010: THE MOVIE

Agency: Traffik

2. OLYMPUS – THE PEN STORY

Agency: DSG

3. RWE – ENERGY GIANT

Agency: Jung von Matt

4. NIKE SB – TODAY WAS A GOOD DAY

Agency: Wieden & Kennedy

5. NOKIA – SAATCHI & SAATCHI NEW DIRECTORS’ SHOWCASE 2009

Agency: Saatchi & Saatchi

6. KIA – SOUL ROCK!

7. HEINEKEN – WALK IN FRIDGE

Following up on Bavaria’s SPOOF VERSION of Heinekens WALK-IN FRIDGE this is the winner of the viral competition.

Agency: Brandfighters

8. ADIDAS – THE SPARK

Agency: 180 Amsterdam

9. XBOX – PROJECT NATAL

Agency: World Famous

10. SAMSUNG – NOTEBOOK COMES TO LIFE

Agency: The Viral Factory

Thought I would share some of the lastest advergame I have come across:

Vimto

This “advergame” called “High dive” done for the softdrink brand Vimto gives you control of 3 suicidal fruits that smashes against the floor to finish their parachute jumps. It’s quite engaging and makes you play with that blending concept behind the “seriously mixed up fruit” motto.

Dansk Retursystem

For the third year in a row Plant CPH together with Initiative Universal Media Denmark created an advergame to educate the Danish youth about recycling of cans/bottles. The game lets 2nd – 5th graders play the game throughout which the need to answer a lot of questions about recycling in order to reach a high score. The youngsters battle as a class against other classes (on other schools) in order to win prices.

Check the game out here: http://www.daasefabrikken.dk + the banners and the two previous games here: http://www.daasenshaevn.dk and here: http://daasespillet.dk

Red Bull

This site is pretty nice and the 3D environment is very well produced. The visuals and the all atmosphere really remind you of Little Big Planet ones. You can build your own soap box, your own track, customize your avatar, and compete against others. The game is to promote the soap box races that Red Bull is running across Europe.

Rexona

In Brazil, Rexona Men makes you drive a trolley. The game is also using good 3D technology. What I found interesting is its promotion, via “racing” banners that involve blogs in a competition. And so their audience. Every time someone clicks, the count is updated automatically, and his vote give the blog a chance to win the virtual race, and then participate to the real one in the streets of Sao Paulo.

Patapon

Patapon is a PSP game in which you play God for the Patapons, little lovely tribal creatures searching for a new life and new lands at the end of the Earth. Your mission is to recruit them and make them facing some dangers and bizarre creatures.

Not a hell of a plot, but which is remarkable is the way of interacting with the game, Patapons march to the sound of some drums controlled by little key-combos that you have to type in the right time and in the right order. So when the second part was about to be released, what’s better to advertise it than giving people a little taste of what the game’s about doing a Flash mini-version?

Nothing much to say – great viral videos for MSI and Microsoft – just watch:

Thought I should share some of the lastest analytics news/tools I found…

Microsoft Excel-Google Analytics integration

Through one of my LinkedIn groups I found this new tool – it’s a free, open source, plug-in for Microsoft Excel that let’s you import, store, and manipulate data from Google Analytics.

The add-on is available for free download and use at: excellentanalytics.com – go check it out.

Tracking mobile applications

With all the mobile app stores that have sprung up in the past year, developers and brands have a wide range of new ways to reach mobile users. As is so often true, however, opportunity brings new challenges, and in this case it’s monitoring sales and performance across all those platforms.

Distimo, a Dutch startup has the solution, tracking prices and download activity on all the major app stores. It covers Apple, Android, Blackberry, Nokia and Palm app stores, among others and functions as a sort of Google Analytics for mobile applications, monitoring and reporting on the details of each application’s performance across platforms.

The free Distimo Monitor program (in beta) offers a central place to monitor one’s apps in all app stores. Updated daily, the Monitor program provides an analytics page that also includes information on the competition, such as which channels they’re doing best in and how price changes are affecting their download numbers.

In addition to a free monthly report focusing on Apple’s App Store, the company also offers custom reports for the Apple and Android markets that provide data specific to a client’s applications, including those of the competition.

As the world embraces all things mobile, there are opportunities aplenty not just for developers, but also for those who can help support them.

ROI

When you have all the measurement codes etc. in place, next step is to really have a closer look at your digital marketing investment ROI – some of the key metrics you should be looking at/discussing are:

• Total campaign cost
• Total cost per sold item
• Redemption cost
• Total revenue
• Total profit
• Prospect acquisition
• Customer acquisition
• Click rate
• Response rate
• Conversion rate
• Risk assesment
• Breakeven point
• Prospect asset value
• Life time customer value
• Customer satisfaction
• Long term programme value

Just received this week’s Springwise newsletter and thought I would share a post that I found really interesting and useful for many companies:

Convincing employees to contribute feedback and to genuinely consider other people’s ideas can be a hard-won task for employers. Attempting to turn that challenge into a manageable asset, Idea Exchange is an online tool created to help companies make the most of their employees’ collective wisdom.

It’s basically a virtual suggestion box where users can publish their own suggestions, large or small, and browse ideas submitted by their colleagues. Besides better sharing, there’s another big difference between Idea Exchange and a shoebox with a hole in the top—the software lets users support other’s ideas by purchasing shares in them. With the incentive of earning ‘money’, the idea is that employees will more carefully and thoughtfully offer their contributions. Employers can quickly identify favoured ideas by seeing which are being traded and which have the highest stock value. Besides ad hoc submissions to an ‘idea bank’, Idea Exchange also makes it easy for companies to run competitions to motivate people, and to focus their participation on specific topics or goals.

Provided as hosted software, Idea Exchange was developed by Nosco, a young Danish company. One to try out in your own company?

Source: Springwise

Facebook’s engagement ads actually makes really good sense to me and is a great way of driving cost-efficient traffic to your profile page or generate fans…

I have always had this viewpoint on social media, that people don’t go there to see/click on ads but to interact with their friends/family etc. That has also affected how I would advise my clients to use the social media platforms in their media mix – for interaction/engagement through applications. I have seen too many advertisers setting up profile pages, leaning back and thinking that now they are on the social media trend train…

Don’t get me wrong, the Facebook profile pages is great for allowing brands to interact with Facebook users, the pages offer the brands the opportunity for publishing great up-to-date content on the page’s wall and allows brands to have a two-way dialog with their fans. However most advertisers just set up a page and don’t really have a strategy for how to get the fans to interact with and the purpose of having the profile page in first place.

Here is where the engagement ads come into play. They typically appear on the right-hand side of the user’s Facebook dashboard, prompting them to take some sort of action: comment on a movie trailer, become a fan or RSVP for the season finale of a TV show etc. If a person takes action (writes a comment, RSVPs, becomes a “fan” of the sponsor), their response — and the accompanying ad message — is broadcast to everyone connected to that user. The ad model revolves around a single premise: that marketing messages are more effective when they come from friends – and that makes sense to me.

So in an ever growing social media world there is indeed a place for social media advertising for many clients – but there is also a need to have a concept and a strategy before you go there (like 1-800-flower).

So if you are a advertiser a good starting point could be to head over to InsideFacebook to get some more info on how to use Facebook in a smart way – first stop could be: 10 Powerful Ways to Target Facebook Ads Every Performance Advertiser Should Know.

One of my colleagues sent me this link today: www.joy-lggm730.com/sg – it’s the local website LG uses to promote their gm730 handset here in Singapore. The website is actually very engaging, with small advergames linking the key features of the phone with the gaming experience.

LG is driving traffic to the website mainly through MSN half banners. I think the website and campaign is a breath of fresh air looking at this category’s digital platforms and ads.

Go check it out for yourself at www.joy-lggm730.com/sg

In the last couple of weeks I have written a couple of blog posts around great use of Twitter as an advertising channel: Terminator case, Twitter cases – Part 1 & Twitter cases – Part 2. Last week I received this information from Hitwise and as I get the question “Has Twitter taken of in your market/region” I wanted to share this data from New Zealand showcasing that Twitter is indeed not only a US phenomenon:

Launched in March 2007, Twitter (micro-blogging service) has now passed being just the domain of the über-cool and early adopters and has quickly moved into the realm of the everyday user. High profile celebrities such Ashton Kutcher, Oprah Winfrey and Ellen de Generes, have joined Twitter and made news by simply sharing short sharp thoughts in 140 character messages.

The popularity and growth of Twitter has been astonishing over the past 12 months increasing its market share by over 14 times in All Categories (comparing June 2008 and June 2009). The website had a meteoric rise, jumping 556 places within 12 months to rank 39th most popular website in New Zealand across All Categories for June 2009.

Analysis of Hitwise Clickstream data highlights that the following industries received the largest volumes of traffic from Twitter:

• Computers and Internet – Social Networks and Forums

• Entertainment – Photography

• Computers and Internet – Search Engines

• Lifestyle – Blogs and Personal Websites

• Entertainment – Multimedia

• News and Media – Print

Industries that have seen the greatest growth in the share of Twitter’s downstream traffic since the beginning of the year, are (for the week ending 11 July 2009):

Twitpic (+178.5%), Facebook (+36.3%), Google NZ (+23.9%), YouTube (+87.8%) and Windows Live Mail (+220.4%).

The highest ranking News and Media website receiving downstream traffic from Twitter is The New Zealand Herald (www.nzherald.co.nz), which received 1.09% of clicks from Twitter for the week ending 11 July 2009; highlighting the commonplace sharing of news items of interest via the micro-blogging service.

Twitter continues to be a sensationalised growth story, almost as old as Facebook, launched in March 2007 versus Facebook’s public expansion in September 2007 (originally launched in February 2004), it has taken longer to gain acceptance or understanding and currently is one eighteenth of the size of Facebook.

So NZ marketers are now starting to look at how they can use the latest social media tool to connect, communicate and listen to their existing and potential customers. There are a number of key areas that marketers are using Twitter for (as I have descibed here  Twitter cases – Part 1 & Twitter cases – Part ), including customer service, crisis management/public relations, product/service promotion and advocacy.

However from my point of you use of Twitter only makes sense when you join the conversation in a positive and valuable way - looking, listening and learning about what people are saying about your brand is the first step…

First out is a nice website promoting the Polish beer Lech. The site gives you that summer feeling browsing through it (even if you don’t understand Polish )and includes some cool features as well – one of them is augmented reality. Check it out at http://lech.pl/nowakaledonia/

Also found this great use of augmented reality over at Adverblog: In the US Best Buy has just launched Best Buy in 3D, an augmented reality application that allows users to see in 3D the products advertised on the retailer weekly publication.

This brings a whole new dimension to augmented reality – e-shopping using this technology enables people to actually “feel” and “touch” the products – cool stuff!

Last but not least, a couple of really cool Flashmob’s promoting bounce.nu – enjoy:

For many years we have only had cookie-based tracking data to rely on when trying to determine a general profile of the users browsing the web. But the later years we have seen new profiling capabilities that helps marketers lift this veil of secrecy and deliver individualized messages to consumers.

According to a new article in The New York Times, companies such as Acxiom and Datran are now able to incorporate offline consumer information — including income, credit score, home ownership, and the like — into their data profiles. This higher level of consumer understanding can help marketers tailor messages more directly to consumers.

However in Denmark, Gemius have enabled agencies to target audiences this way for several years. Gemius gives us reach and affinity etc. of defined target groups on the largest Danish web sites (277 at the moment). The data collection method is a mix of online and offline interviews and targeting options include: Age, Gender Job title, No. of Children, Household income, Car ownership, Interests, online shopping frequency etc. etc.)

Of course consumer advocates are increasingly concerned that the additional access to demographic and behavioral information can be misused. Paul M. Schwartz, a law professor and privacy expert at the law school of the University of California, Berkeley, said the unwitting participation by consumers makes online marketing different from offline. “Interactive media really gets into this creepy Orwellian thing, where it’s a record of our thoughts on the way to decision-making,” he said. “We’re like the data-input clerks now for the industry.”

Source: imediaconnection.com, Gemius.com & The New York Times