Nokia Unloader

For those that haven't seen this campaign by Nokia - the unloader - it's worth a look. Nokia are looking to promote their phones - the E66 and E71 which allow the user to view, edit and print documents - and part of that promotion is to allow office workers the satisfaction of destroying boring documents. Take a look at this short Unloader video to explain more.

Whether you think of it as a brilliant piece of innovative marketing or as a rehash of a combination of the Honda Cogs ad and the the Mentos intern idea - I'll leave that up to you.

Second Life stats

I must confess that I haven't entered Second Life yet. Prevailing opinion amongst marketers seems to be that lots of people try Second Life, giving decent registration numbers, but few use it regularly. That didn't stop me from wanting to hear more from Philip Rosedale, the founder of Second Life, when I came across this presentation on Ted.com.

A few stats that came out from the Q&A session (from May 2008) at the end:

• The average age of a Second Life user is 32
• 55% of Second Life users are male, but women tend to use Second Life 30% more
• 35% of Second Life users are from the US
• 55% of Second Life users come from the Europe
• 55,000 people are making money on Second Life

Indiglo grid

Indiglo have come up with an interesting idea of using an ever-editable grid using Indiglo logos. As a user you can add new logos, delete logos, rotate logos, etc. And in doing so you can create a shape, a word, or any object.

But of course while you're adding, resizing and deleting your Indiglo logos as you want to, others are also using the grid to create whatever they want to create at the time. That means that you can attempt to collaborate with others, or deliberately stop others from creating what they are wanting to create. And of course, these people are from all over the world, creating a feeling of a being part of a big project - I found myself interacting with "Yukki" from Republic of Korea.

To use the grid users need only give their name or nickname so there's almost no barrier to getting involved, but of course that also means that it's near impossible to measure the impact of the grid as a piece of marketing in itself. Could it be that Uniglo are less interested in the impact of this one piece of marketing by itself, (safe in the knowledge that the grid is emphasising things that they would like the consumer to attribute to the brand - constantly adapting, fast-moving, innovative) and are more interested in looking at a measure like Net Promoter Score to give an overall view of how consumers view the brand?

How do you do yours?

Online shopping that is. It seems that the number of searches for online discount vouchers has gone up pretty dramatically. I would consider myself to be relatively progressive, compared to the average person in the UK, with my online shopping. I'm not hung up about giving out my personal details, although I do have a PayPal account (which means that I don't have to give out my contact details each time I shop) should I want to pay via that, and where it feels most appropriate I buy online.

But I've recently found out that I'm missing out on something that sounds so basic to experienced online shoppers. I simply look at a few competing sites, find the best product and go through to the online checkout - sounds like the only way to do it, right? Well experienced online shoppers are amazed at my naivity - once you've had a look for the product you want, you should search for an online voucher to get money off that product. Sometimes the slightly more expensive product turns out to be cheaper with the voucher. And I'm reliably informed that the majority of the time you will find a voucher.

Whether or not things will always be like this is debatable, but until online retailers start to concern themselves with giving discounts to people who would have bought anyway, then why not take advantage? Next time, before you go to online checkout, just run a little search for money off vouchers for that product or retailer - after all, you have nothing to lose.

And here's some old news....

It's always good to have more supporting evidence that online advertising performs better when supported by search. But it's hardly news is it? I've been telling clients that for several years as I'm sure anyone that works in digital media has....

India's struggle to break through

India is a country of contradictions. As this article at Spectator Business argues, it might be expecting GDP growth of 8% in 2008, but it's equally got some incredibly deep problems to resolve which have been summed up by this author after he runs through a few issues blocking sustainable Indian growth:

"And that's before we tackle India's two greatest Achilles heels: a bloated bureaucracy with an insidiously corrupt political core; and some of the worst infrastructure the modern world has ever seen."

As an Englishman who has spent more than 3 months in India and travelled through both the North and the South, transport and bureaucracy are both tricky, with even buying a train ticket becoming an activity taking over an hour, and requiring the strength to muscle your way to the front of the "queue" (which involves full body contact or otherwise it is considered that there is a gap that someone could slip into!). If you have the money, you don't even buy the ticket yourself - you pay someone else to go through the ordeal on your behalf.

But more concerning from what I experienced as a consumer, and heard about in a business context, was the corruption. A CEO that I met in India, running a company who had relocated from the UK given that India was where their core audience was, made reference to the various issues he had in getting his head office up and running. The process of ensuring electricity involved various bribes and use of middle-men to negotiate on behalf of the company, also taking a cut. Corruption on that scale makes it impossible for anyone to work out their business case, and that was only to sort out the leccy, one of hundreds of issues to resolve.

So since experiencing India in 2007 and again this year I've always wondered exactly how this country was going to become a global superpower - as I'm told it is by every article I read - until this one.

Simple Explanations at Common Craft

A quick plug for the Common Craft show which I think does a brilliant job of explaining things that go on online in a "plain English" way. This one about social bookmarking is probably my favourite, but to be honest they are all useful so the next time you're worried about asking someone what Twitter is, or don't understand podcasting, go to Common Craft to find out in just a few minutes.

Getting the most out of social media

Not for the first time, there is concern that social networks are not attracting ad revenues. This is clearly not ideal for social networks, but it does perhaps point to an opportunity for some businesses too. How?

Well let's take Facebook as an example. An independent sports shop in Brighton can target their ads at the appropriate age group, by those that like sport, and those that live in Brighton. So if our example sports shop placed an ad on Facebook, and targeted those that live in Brighton, 18 or over, and who had the words "sport", "sports", "cricket", "rugby" or "football" in their interests, how many people would the owner be targeting? 40,240. (If you're interested, there are 603,600 people from Brighton on Facebook, so less than 7% have added the sports related terms listed in their interests.)

So, in this example, the sports shop owner can place an ad that's highly targeted. Facebook suggests that she should pay $0.30 to achieve suitable views of the ad (so let's call that 20p for the sake of simple arithmetic), and let's assume that each person sees the ad once and she gets a phenomenal 5% click through and that. That means that our sports shop owner pays just a fraction over £400 for the Facebook campaign. Not expensive, but certainly not peanuts for our sports shop owner.

Now consider this - use the same criteria as above but set up an advert that says something like:

Sporty Sports Discount
20% off at Sporty Sports sports shop until Xmas, 7 High Street, Brighton. Cricket bats, rugby boots and footballs, 2 mins from Brighton station.

Yes, you have to offer a link for the user to click through to, but your ad doesn't have to use strong call to actions, even if Facebook might encourage it for obvious reasons. What sort of click through might be expected for an ad like the one above? From my experience, 0.05% CTR would be a lot - if you're actively trying to avoid click through 0.02% is possible, even to highly targeted audiences. So let's assume that our sports shop owner wants everyone over 18 in Brighton and with the sporting interests listed above to see the message 3 times - 120,720 impressions. That's 60 clicks at a 0.05% CTR. A massive £12 spent* for awareness from a potentially lucrative market.

So for someone like our sports shop owner, with very little expenditure you can increase awareness of your little known business amongst a highly targeted audience.

What should Facebook be doing about this?
They need to learn the lessons of the early 2000s when it was finally realised that click throughs are not the be all and end all, and instead focus on selling the fact that online ads increase qual metrics like brand awareness or purchase intent. And they need to find a way of working with small businesses to gain a lot of relatively small chunks of revenue (for ads that are potentially more relevant to users), rather than a smaller number of large chunks of revenue from big advertisers. Of course, both would be ideal, but target the smaller advertisers who offer more highly targeted ads first so as to build credibility with users and to use the word-of-mounth effect amongst small business owners.

What should big brands do about this?
They should consider using Facebook ads not to advertise products, but to publicise information that they want their potential buyers to know. If you're Lloyds TSB and you're looking to increase take up of personal bank accounts, you can tell people about the fact that you've been the most trusted bank in the UK for the last 8 years (according to a Readers Digest survey anyway), but not have a strong call to action. And you can target every over 18 on Facebook (13,165,240 people), or you can experiment first and target the 67,480 over 18s in the UK who say they are interested in "money". When the time is right for them, or when a friend talks about switching accounts, they may well remember the bank that didn't overtly try to interrupt their social networking but who has been the most trusted in the UK for 8 years running....

*£12 is worked out from the number of clicks multiplied by 20 pence as in the earlier example. In fact, when clicks are low Facebook doesn't show your ad as much unless you pay more, so in this example the sports shop owner might want to increase the cost per click she's willing to pay during the campaign to 40p, 60p or even 80p to ensure prominence, but the price of the campaign is still rediculously low.

The season of dodgy hairstyles!

As the winter truly sets in, employees are arriving at the office with woolly hats on or hoods over their heads. And in agencies, who tend to have younger staff than most companies, that creates a potential image problem for some!

Yesterday, my colleague sitting opposite me - TMW's esteemed Head of Innovation - had "flat hair" having worn a hood on the way to work. It was a no win situation - it could have been a new style so I was loathed to mention it....but of course someone else did. My colleague suggested that I really should have pointed it out to him as soon as he'd arrived in the office!

So be ready for us guys to have hair gel etc sitting on our desks. Finally we'll be able to compete with the girls (but still lose) who have their hair straighteners ready for use in the office at all times of year....

Game support for Survivor TV show

We've been talking about taking advantage of social currency for a while and here's another example of a simple Survivors game to take advantage of the fact that Survivors is being talked about at the moment. TV shows are fairly easy to run supporting collatoral for given that the BBC knew when the show would be on air and they could even look at the first week's viewing figures before investing in this.

But does the real opportunity lie in taking advantage of social currency when it springs up in a more unplanned way?

TMW clients head "admired UK firms" survey

It would be remiss of me not to promote the fact that TMW's clients have come in at 1 and 3 in this survey of "the most admired UK companies". The brand affinity that has been built up by Diageo (number 1) and Unilever (number 3) leaves these companies well placed for the downturn...