This is obviously a very amazing prank. Check out Arnold Schwarzenegger’s prank that he had installed for his fans. The amazingly real wax figure turns to live. Awesome way to really meet his fans and get the movie publicity out. Nice!
The fan detector
Most often of not, it is not easy to have the immediate amount of engagement or the mechanism to trigger your consumer for an action. But, there are a lot of ways we can achieve so depending on the kind of promotion or the product that we are selling. In this case, music being an integral part of our lives is a good boost to trigger music fans for an action. Billboard Magazine wants to reward real music fans. They created a magazine dispenser machine that would instantly reward you with a free magazine. All you need to do is to prove that you are a fan of the artist on the cover of the magazine. How do you prove your devotion then? All you really need to do is to plug your phone to the machine. You don’t even need an app. The machine scans your library and almost instantly decides if you have at least 20 tracks of the artist on your phone. Then you either walk away with a free magazine or empty handed.
Hoops and Jumps
Sometimes the best ideas are the products from the manifestation of simple yet practical marketing objectives. When you think about basketball, you think about hoops and jumps. Adidas bring these to life with a very simple yet effective idea: Jump with Derrick Rose. In this video you see how the people would jump in order to reach for the shoe they desire. Enough said, this idea really speaks for itself. Great experience and engagement. Well done Adidas.
Be a part of fun
Most of you would have realize a lot of creative marketing campaigns for video games revolves around a rather passive form of communication like posters, banners and magazine articles. It used to be effective and one of the best ways to market a video game was through interesting write ups on tech magazines by “video game gurus” or launching ads with beautiful game cover designs tactically placed across the country on billboards or little posters at video game shops. These days, with the massive proliferation of rich content in the game industry, it is absolutely necessary to craft an experience rather than communicate one. Sid Lee and Ubisoft has recently came up with a project for “Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag.” The marketing campaign drives across their communications through online and offline. Fans were asked to log on to a site, where they would see an artwork created by artists from L’Ecole Nationale des Beaux Arts in Paris. You see a really detailed painting of a fighting scene somewhat in the era of the “Age of Piracy” along the timeline where the video game is set to be.
The interactive aspect of the campaign requires users to use their webcams and have their faces placed on the characters within the painting, and the most popular faces would be featured as part of the painting. To sweeten the deal, it is said to have their faces painted on as part of the actual piece of art to be displayed in Le Musee de la Marine this November. Again, we are witnessing a creative way of engaging consumers by getting them to be part of the marketing campaign. Naturally, we would expect social and other online media to be tagging along. Great work.
Socially WRONG
One of the biggest mistake a brand would ever commit is trying to ignore your customers’ feedbacks. And that is a grave one I must warn you. Recently, McDonalds Singapore has ran a campaign giving out Hello Kitty fairy tale characters. While the idea of giving away cute toys as incentives isn’t that bad a marketing initiative, the tricky part happens to be in this case, your social engagement should the plan FAILED. As stocks for the Kitties seem to have fallen short massively compared to the estimated target, many customers were not able to redeem their gift upon purchase. This caused a major resentment amongst the fans who meant to get what they came for.
The whole idea is to order the Extra Value Meal through the McDelivery service online and you get to then pay S$4.60 for the Kitty of the week. Now this could be potentially dangerous because you risk disrupting your online delivery service if orders are massive and would then jammed the service, making it difficult for people who simply just wish to order a happy meal. And it happened. Looking through McDonald Singapore’s facebook, I seen 3000 over comments on the post for the promotion and a lot of furious customer complaints about this lack of service.
Not only were there no response nor comments from McDonalds, it strikes me as a surprise that the company actually deleted some of the critical comments posted. Wow, I guess the most crucial part of social is to really engage and interact with your customers. Not shutting your door on them. I believe this is truly a lack of great management for their social channels as well as their marketing operations. Singapore is a rather small island and delivery services are one of the important source of revenues for most F&B restaurants. This catastrophic marketing promotion will definitely impact McDonalds Singapore’s delivery revenue greatly.
You got 5 secs.
Source : http://bit.ly/10y4hdy
TVCs in asia aren’t really interesting to the extend it could refrain one from touching that remote or replacing that with smartphone or tablet. Living in Singapore, I personally do not enjoy TV ads on my local station. The ads in Singapore lacks great story-lines and mostly end up in bad taste. However, I do believe many times creative agencies aren’t entirely at fault for producing crappy commercials. Clients do play apart on the overall quality of the ad. I remember Creative Director, Luke Sullivan once quoted someone saying “Clients these days deserve the ads they deserved”. Honestly, with the unnecessary restrictions, weird company policies and sometimes unclear marketing objectives from clients often leads to boring and unpolished ads. Remember, a TVC is just like telling a story. Except it is usually story in seconds. You got 5 seconds to get your audience excited because people want to relate to a story be it sad, humorous or interesting. But the initial 5 seconds in my opinion is your key for a longer consumer engagement later. So tell your story faster.
Mobile behaviour
Facebook, one of the number one most used app in Asia (where I come from) has certainly integrate itself into the lives of many asians. This article reports most people using Facebook mainly to check on their news feed. I am not too interested on what this article has to say but rather I’m fascinated by the fact that why hasn’t a lot of brands leverage on the news feed platform for raising brand awareness? A lot of palatable ideas can be use to attract people’s attention. One idea to keep consumers constantly engaged is to test their anticipation by getting them count the number of posts a day or even the time between each post and the winner gets a really sweet prize!
Zack Chia 