Influential trend site Trend Hunter has created a video detailing the hottest viral videos of 2008 so far. Amongst the inmates dancing to Thriller and Dove’s Campaign For Real Beauty you will find our shooting at a baby pram video (18 seconds in), part of our award winning Bullet Proof Baby Campaign. That is most definitely viral…
Our creative team are always looking to extend their skills, so for the Battlefield: Bad Company toolkit we have used new techniques to create some really stunning creative. Firstly, the grenade that features across all formats was designed and built in 3D Studio Max. The motion path of the rolling grenade was set using the Dynamics feature and then the very cool, impactful explosions were created using Particle Illusion. All of this was pulled together using Adobe After Effects. Sounds a bit technical? Just take a look at the toolkit containing MPU’s and communicating leaderboard and skys, and the bespoke ‘horseshoe’ format and it should all become clear. Please note, the ad units you are looking at here (and for all our other synced or communicating ads) are not served through an ad serving partner so you may need to refresh your page for it to sync up properly. In ‘real life’ this would be set up and served through the likes of Flash Talking or Eyeblaster and would sync up automatically.
I happened to catch the front page of Marketing Week this week which drew me into their article questioning whether ‘Buzz Marketing’ (hate that name) can survive this week’s introduction of the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008 legislation (the online version is here if you care to read it). I found the whole piece to be myopic and naive, completely ignoring the best practice disciplines of viral marketing, (overt) community engagement and user generated content as effective (and legal) forms of generating ‘buzz’.
Buzz Marketing (can we call it Peer to Peer marketing please… p2p, sits nicely alongside b2c and b2b n’est pas?) is about getting consumers to talk to each other about your brand (preferably saying nice warm cuddly things). If your agency’s only weapon in it’s arsenal for generating this discussion is to pose as a consumer in a forum, sack them.
More than happy to kill off the name, but the best-practice discipline is alive and kicking thank you very much.
It’s great when film companies really get it, so hats off to Fox Searchlight for their approach to the online presence for forthcoming Danny Boyle film ‘Sunshine’. They’ve had an official blog about the movie since august 2005, and every post written by the lovely blog owner Gia gets scores of comments from site visitors. When you read her blog, as well as having vast resources about and around the movie at your fingertips, you get a real sense of the community that has formed around the site since launch. The result? Search for ‘Sunshine’ on Google (bearing in mind how many sites there must be out there about ’sunshine’) and Gia’s site comes out top. Nothing to do with us (except we’re working on the film release) but great to see all the same. Check out the site at http://sunshinedna.com/ .
Very occasionally you come across a web app and think “now that’s clever”. Hey!Watch is a free online video encoding site. Put simply can take video in any format and turn it into any other format using this app. It also allows users to get YouTube videos as attachments by simply entering the URL of the video. Seen a viral video you’d like to show people on your mobile phone? Now you can.
My young nephew recently spent the whole day at a family gathering watching video clips on his mobile phone (film trailers, thankfully cleaner than the videos some of my friends have on their phones). In an age when every video on the internet is labelled ‘viral’, many marketeers seem to be overlooking the potential of getting their videos onto portable devices, with kids crowding round a mobile phone or a PSP to watch content, or sharing it with each other via Bluetooth. Recent start-up PSP Playlist has a unique proposition, allowing kids to download a mix of free and paid-for content from the web to their PSP at the click of a button. We’ll be trialing a portable viral campaign with them in the coming weeks.
That’s a lie, but they are good for spiders, as we’ve found since we launched the Arena Magazine web site as a blog. Back in July the site was languishing on page 6 of Google’s search results for the search term “Arena Magazine”, and now it’s in position 1 on the first page.
You might argue that it should be, but bear in mind there are several other Arena web sites that have been around much longer than ours.
Why do search engines love blogs? Regularly updated, text heavy, and lots of links. Perfect search spider health-food.
(photo from http://flickr.com/photos/zixi/ under creative commons license)
I posted this a couple of weeks ago about our first viral campaign for Koch Media, for the launch of their game “Crusty Demons”. A few weeks later, we’ve had over a million unique users visit the viral web site, and over 800 web sites referencing the viral and the product.
Interesting point here: there’s huge marketing value delivered to the client through people engaging with the viral, but equally, enormous PR value delivered through the discussion about the viral on other people’s websites.
Well done to the whole team who worked on this innovative campaign and to a brave client for letting us do it!
We’ve been playing with the concept of editing video online for some time now, and we’re very excited to finally launch our Movie Mixer technology, which we’ve deployed for client EA in their ‘Sims Shorts’ campaign.
Movie Mixer is essentially a web based video editing studio, designed and built entirely in Flash. It allows users to take pre-loaded video clips, crop them and ‘mash’ them together to create their own mini-movies and trailers. In addition to mixing the clips, users can add special effects, music and sound effects and then publish their finished creations online.
This is an excellent example of encouraging User Generated Content, and we give users all the tools they need to spread their content virally, including a send-to-a-friend mechanic and a clever ‘embed’ code which allows bloggers and MySpacers to show off their trailer directly on their site.
So in the spirit of things… here’s an example (won’t work if you’ve received this update by email, instead, please visit the blog to view!)
Get this video and more at simsshorts.com
I mentioned here a while back that Disney had invited us to build them a viral to promote the launch of the US hit High School Musical, and we’ve just finished and launched it. Targeting kids of all ages, and based on the popular dancing arcade game where you have to put your feet on the correct pads at the right time, this viral invites your fingers to do the dancing. The game combines video with skill, with players having to hit the correct key on their keyboard at the right time to keep the dancer on stage moving.
We recruited two professional dancers who performed a series of dancing moves against a green screen, allowing us to subsequently put them against whichever background we chose at design stage. As part of the promotional activity for the campaign, we placed the game exclusively on Neopets for a period before it was hosted on the Disney web site here
Social bookmarking is one of the many phenomena sweeping the net right now and if you don’t know about it, you should, so read on. In a nut shell, social bookmarking is about storing links to your favourite sites online rather than in your browser software offline. This has 3 main benefits:
1. You can access your bookmarks from any computer, as they are stored on a web page.
- This is a really handy feature, especially if you work from home or multiple locations. What’s more, you can share your links with your friends (a note of caution here, be careful what you store!) by providing them with a link to your online bookmarks page. And when you change computers, no more trying to work out how to transfer your pesky bookmarks, they’re all online, forever.
2. You can organise your bookmarks by ‘tagging’ them with descriptive words.
- This allows you to find your bookmarks really easily. you can either bring up all your bookmarks with a specific tag, or you can search within them using a text search box. This is the killer for me, as my browser bookmark list inevitably ends up long, disorganised and useless. So for example, if you were adding a link to Amazon to your social bookmarks, you might add the following tags: shop, dvd, amazon, books, e-commerce. If you then search your bookmarks for “book shop”, you’ll see Amazon right there in the list of results.
3. As you bookmark you create a database of quality links that other people can search
- And here’s why the search engines are taking a major interest in social bookmarking. Search engines such as Google use the number of INBOUND links into a site as a measure of that sites’ importance, figuring that the more quality links there are to a page, the more important and useful that site would be. By creating a database of web users bookmarks, you harness the power of millions of human editors, who tell you which sites are relevant for specific search terms or ‘tags’. This should mean that if you search other peoples bookmarks (essentially just links), the results should be much more relevant and accurate!
How does it work in practice I hear you all screaming at your monitors enthusiastically?
There are lots of social bookmarking sites in the market, but the main ones include del.icio.us, furl, Jots and Stumble Upon. Most allow users to add bookmarking buttons to their browser, so that when the user is on a site they want to bookmark, they can click the button, add some descriptive tags to the entry, and then return to the page they were on. Similarly, a second button allows the person to visit their bookmarks page with a single click.
Pop over to del.icio.us (my personal favourite) now or check out the list of alternatives here (see what i did there!), follow the simple instructions and start using this excellent free web service.
Been having a bit of a poke around in the wonderful world of Wikis this week. The most famous wiki in the world is wikipedia, a collaborative online encyclopedia which you can’t have missed in the past couple of years, however not so many people are aware that there are millions of other wikis on the net.
Wikis are a great way of collaboratively creating and editing information online, and most allow you to do so in a user environment very similar to Word and other text editing software, making them very easy to get to grips with. The difference being of course, that what you write is immediately published on the web for others to read, edit and change (although they can be password protected too).
People are using wikis as a simple method of publishing on the net, to form and manage clubs, for joint or individual research and much more.
Without any prior knowledge you can have a wiki up and running within minutes, and due to their ease of use, many consumers are using them as an alternative to blogs. We’re going to be using wikis internally for research purposes and highly recommend taking a look and thinking about how they might apply to your business and your customers. Pop over to Wikispaces, sign up for a free account and then have a play around with the technology.
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It struck us whilst monitoring the buzz for the theatrical release of a X Men The Last Stand that we truly live in an age where practically any form of information is viral.
From the outset, image stills from the movie released online spread like wildfire across the internet, being shared in websites, newsgroups, forums and blogs. Consumers in the US watched, digitised and uploaded to
Youtube chat show interviews with the cast of the movie, immediately making the content accessible across the globe (apart from China, me thinks, where yesterday The Da Vinci Codea was banned by the government). The release of the
official trailer spawned a host of amashed up trailers, with consumers editing the trailer and adding their own individual twist before re-publishing it online. And across the internet, consumers discussed, dissected and digested in
minute detail the plot, the director, the trailer, the artwork, the cast, the release date, the opening weekend and more. At a peak we picked up over 30,000 new articles per day mentioning the film!
Suddenly everyon is a journalist, and increasingly an unpaid publicist too, writing about your content and sharing it with others. Brands can no longer hope to control the use and spread of their information, and should EXPECT their information to be twisted, parodied and mutated. The smart companies will harness the power and energy of this viral spread, identify the groups behind it and actively encourage it.
Classic. I was talking to someone just the other night about wanting the email programme from the original Mission Impossible movie (or any programme that takes my email, folds it into an envelope shape and then visibly ’sends’ it off into the world wide interweb) and whadayaknow, WSJ has written a whole article about Hollywood’s portrayal of the internet and computers in movies. It’s a great read. Check it out.
we’ve been promoting Trailer Player for a while now with DVD and game distributors and retailers, convincing both of the importance of showing the product at point of purchase. If you’re thinking about buying a DVD or a game, chances are you’re going to want to watch a trailer before making your decision. Trailer Player shows your product trailer in the best light: streaming in flash, and at the best viewing experience for your bandwidth (full screen if you’ve got the right connection!).
So when EA asked us to use Trailer Player for the launch of their game FIFA Steet, we knew there would be a lot of interest in the clip. When we placed the trailer with retailer Game, we were astonished to see over 10,000 views of the trailer within two weeks of the trailer going live. If you want to know more about Trailer Player and how it can enhance your brand, give us a call!
The latest piece of cleverness for Universal Pictures International is this Google Earth application, a graphics based global hunt for the mysterious a_?Skull Islanda_T, rumoured to play home to the giant ape himself.
Starting at a specially designed micro site, users can download the Google Earth device if they dona_Tt already have it, before they begin their search. Users then zoom from New York to the lush undergrowth of Skull Island, which has been faithfully reproduced using detailed imagery from Peter Jacksona_Ts Weta Studios. Areas of the Island have been given a_?hot spotsa_T where users can uncover exclusive Kong content. The final a_?hot spota_T rewards DVD purchasers who are able to enter their King Kong DVD number with some truly unique exclusive content. As well as conceiving and negotiating the viral campaign, New Media Maze are seeding the Find Skull Island Internationally. We like a lot.
