iSnack 2.0

When Kraft announced the name of their new vegemite recipe it was widely met with derision. At first I joined in the jeering - the lowercase apple-esque i, the buzzword 2.0 – it’s brand name smacking of bandwagon jumping, of me-too, of being down with the kids. Big mistake Kraft, big mistake.

Or was it?

The more I think about it, the more I realise we are actually looking at a very clever (if somewhat cynical) marketing ploy. Would Kraft really choose such a ridiculous name from nearly 50,000 entries? Was there really nothing better? Or did Kraft know exactly what they were doing, choosing a name they knew would polarise (much like their love it or hate it spread)?

Why wouldn’t they have a public vote in the first instance? Because to maximise response, you have to get everyone interested & invested first. And now that there is a vote, you know that in order to vote there will be a data capture element, creating an instant eCRM database for Kraft. “We have been overwhelmed by the passion for Vegemite.” said Simon Talbot Kraft’s corporate affairs head for Australia and New Zealand as explanation for the change. Do you really believe Kraft were unaware of the passion for their iconic spread? Or were they using that passion to generate interest in their new spread? Thousands of the iSnack branded jar have already been delivered to supermarkets -after the announcement that they were back-tracking on the name change & opening it to a public vote- these will quickly become collectors’ items. Would there be such public interest in ‘Cream Cheese Vegemite’?

Kraft have taken what is essentially a small recipe change and used it to generate international PR, thousands of blog posts & even several You Tube videos (remember the old adage, all publicity is good publicity). The result is they have managed to launch a whole new brand, with almost no marketing support.

iSnack 2.0? Genius.

ABC plans to reduce ad time for new season programming

Just in from Ad Age...

ABC has opted to remove the first ad break from new programs including "Flash Forward," "Modern Family," "Eastwick" and others set to debut this week as part of the new 2009-2010 TV season, as first reported by the Los Angeles Times.....ABC execs said the ad-reduction idea is part of a larger plan to get viewers hooked on new shows at a time when they have a dizzying array of entertainment choices.

So reading between the lines, ABC believe that if they remove ads, their content becomes more engaging and appealing. Uh oh. What does this mean for their underlying business model?

Viral infection

By now I’m sure you’ve all been Kanye’d (and if you haven’t then check out this out: www.draftfcb.co.nz) and it got me thinking about viral campaigns and how often we get clients asking us to plan one for them.

‘Creating’ a great viral campaign is about as easy as planning to win Lotto. In fact, planning to win Lotto might even be easier – all you have to do is get the correct numbers together on one line in the right week.

Creating a great viral campaign has many more factors that need to align in order to get the desired result.

First, you need a good idea. Actually, you need a great idea which also has enough relevance and appeal to capture someone’s imagination. But not just anyone – it needs to be someone who has the time and inclination to forward it on to their friends. And you need to hope that ‘someone’ has an extensive list of friends who also have the time and inclination to forward it on to their extensive list of friends. And so on, and so on.

And finally you need to have a client who understands that a) you only get one shot at a viral campaign; b) the internet community may take your viral campaign and turn it into something completely different and not aligned with your brand and c) whether it ‘works’ or not is in the lap of the Gods. Oh and d) no, you cannot accurately measure results.

There have been some cracking viral campaigns – like this oldy-but-a-goody from 42below http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMxzKQFl7pw which evolved from an award winning radio ad. Or the Cadbury’s Gorilla TVC which over the last 2 years has been mashed up and remade thousands of times by people from all over the world: http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=cadbury+gorilla&search_type=&aq=f.

But I’m pretty sure that for every great viral campaign out there, there are thousands that never made it beyond the email address book of the account director at the creative agency.

Are celebrities bigger than God?

As I was getting ready for work this morning, I stumbled across this news headline on stuff -

http://www.stuff.co.nz/entertainment/celebrities/2851918/Are-celebrities-bigger-than-religion

Unfortunately Firefox decided not to load the page so I didn't get to read it - which gave me a chance to ponder this on the way to work, and decided to find out how religion compared to celebrities in terms of online search volumes - the highest worldwide celebrity searches for the past 12 months were:

Britney Spears, Megan Fox (didn't she come out of nowhere!), Kim Kardashian and Angelina Jolie. So I decided to see how they all stacked up against searches for God - after all, he's kind of a celeb in his own right.

The results are obvious - God consistently maintained a high search volume throughout the past twelve months. And the country that has the highest index for searches? Eritrea, a country that is 50% Muslim and 48% Christian*.



*Sources: Google Insights for Search, Wikipedia

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Our search team are at capacity so we're looking for an enthusiastic person to help run search campaigns for some of the biggest brands in New Zealand.

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In return you'll get to work with one of the largest media agencies in New Zealand. We have a great team culture, a work hard, play hard attitute and an environment where proactive and enthusiastic team members are both appreciated & valued.

Find out more and apply online through Trade Me Jobs.

Hey IAB – forget about new recruits, look after the ones you have

The IAB ploughs on with its education programme, espousing the virtues of online to the die-hard traditionalists who haven’t still haven’t ventured onto the interweb. Whilst a noble (& one wonders how fruitful?) pursuit, it does mean that certain boring, but necessary housekeeping matters are being left to grow wild in its backyard:

1/ Standardisation. Whist we are at a point (nearly) where formats are standard across most sites, creative specs still vary wildly between publishers. Key to increasing spends is decreasing production costs. Often the media / production ratio for online is totally out of whack, too heavy on the production side as a result of having to build multiple versions of the same format to answer multiple creative specs. In some cases, specs within the sites themselves aren’t even consistent. One large portal requires both left & right expansions for a rectangle, as it may appear on both sides of the site. When multiple versions of a creative are required for a single site, let alone a whole plan, you know something is awry...

2/ File weights. I know we aren’t at the forefront of broadband speeds here, unlike Korea where you can download a movie in seconds, but is a 35kb limit on flash really necessary? Small file sizes are limiting creatively & force standard ads to be rich-media adserved to account for the weight. Sure page loading is important – so why not implement iframes, allowing the content to load, with the ad loading in last. Don’t think you would find users complaining about that!

3/ Research. Who can we rely on if not our industry body to provide us with the research to back up our planning decisions. Looking at the wealth of research on IAB UK & IAB US sites, much of it available to members only, makes one wonder why the IAB can’t perform the same service here. After client’s want case studies, planners want proof – you want Brands to spend more online? Give them relevant NZ research, showing how successful other brands have been. Without a prohibitively expensive brand study, we are at a loss to prove the positive effect online advertising has on brand measures – a generic NZ based study, across the industry would do much to help our case.

So whilst fancy breakfasts & Thurs night drinks are warm & fuzzy, we need a focus on less glamorous, but perhaps more important issues.

The industry needs more structure, not more knees up’s (as nice as they are).

Mobile Advertising - Groundhog day?

Mobile advertising is still in its infancy in terms of share of budgets relative to share of media consumption time, however there are aspects that make me feel like I'm back in the bad old days of early 2000. Remember those? Back when we didn't have third party adserving, when we had to dispatch multiple creative to multiple publishers, when there were ridiculous resource overheads from collating multiple media owner reports to present a single view to a client.


It seems that we've learnt nothing from the growing pains of the past few years and now that online is a proven media channel we're looking for another battlefield to forge.


So how can we accelerate mobile advertising growth? Looking backwards to look forwards is a good start.

We need true 3rd party adserving for mobile. Adserving, not click and impression tracking. Adserving provides targeting options and optimisation flexibility, and as any media planner knows, a centralised reporting structure with up to date data for all publishers is a mandatory for daily optimisation

What's the hold up? Obviously it's chicken and egg - without investment, publishers are loathe to incur further cost, however without technology, it's a harder sell for the media agencies.

Where to? Third party counter tags are a good start, so that we have up to and auditable data. However this doesn't allow for the smarts that we now take for granted in the online adserving space and I think the responsiblity has to be pushed back to the media owners to provide 3rd party adserving for mobile. Can I guarantee that they'll immediately see increased share of budgets? No. But it will remove one of the adoption barriers that currently exist.