OK. Making fun of Sharp’s Touch Wood phone’s naming was an amateurish cheap shot. Mea culpa. NTT’s advertising campaign for the phone is pure, beautiful, brilliance.
Advantage NTT docomo!
Tag: advertising
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will.i.am on chips talking to chips
In a post last year, I paraphrased a quote, “If you are not paying for a product, you are the product.” Will.i.am recently updated this quote with the line,
You are either the person getting pimped, or you’re the person doing the pimping.
will.i.am’s description of how the Black-Eyed Peas negotiated a new type of advertising unit for the Super Bowl and collaborated with Marc Benioff and Salesforce to promote Chatter.com through the mini-site thebabypeas.com is a glimpse at how switched on celebrities are using modern tools to manage their brand without the help (or interference or commissions) by an agency.
But the most visionary thing and something I keep coming back to is will.i.am’s vision of the next generation internet. It’s a world where brand “alliances” pool together to subsidize content producers. A world where, “chips talk to chips” without a middleman to make the free flow of content seamless and automatic. In this new world, a collection of devices will marry themselves to a library of content and work seamlessly together.
Extended further, it’s a world in which we no longer need the internet to connect us all. When you text someone next to you, why do you need to connect to a cell tower and send the message over a network only to round trip it right back again. If you extend the chips-talking-to-chips metaphor, why not just have the phone turn itself into the modern version of a walkie-talkie and beam the message right over? Bluetooth and NFC have started this vision but taken further, why can’t cellphones self-organize into mini-networks so that a group of phones together could share information without having to connect to the cloud?
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Nike Cosplay in Akihabara
When it comes to Japan, they just do things different here. The video below is actually several years old but is a brilliant piece of advertising. Produced for Nike iD to promote their custom design shoe line.
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Celebrity Sellouts in Japan
Here’s a bit of Friday fun for you.
Way back when the internet was limited to newsgroups and those with access to a university network, I put up a bunch of scans I made of celebrities shilling for Japanese products. The other day, while clearing a bunch of old files off my wife’s Macbook, I ran across all the old files and have reposted them here on everwas.com. Enjoy
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Isotoner 2.0
I remember when Isotoner gloves were the default fallback Christmas gift when you didn’t know what an older relative wanted. Right around November it seemed like every third TV program was brought to you by Isotoner reminding you that they were the perfect stocking stuffer. Who doesn’t need a new pair of gloves? What’s not to love?
So you’ll understand why I got a chuckle from these new Isotoner “smarTouch” gloves that have conductive threads woven into the thumb and forefinger (need to allow for pinching) so you can use touchscreens outside in the cold. Let’s go to the video,
UPDATE: The Japan Times blog, JapanPulse reports on a wide variety of touch-enabled gloves made in South Korea and Japan.
UPDATE2: Burton has a decidedly hip looking pair of touchscreen gloves as well.
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Longevity
I was just cleaning up some old blog posts and noticed that the link to a Honda viral video made over seven years ago is not only still live, but still generating comments. The video is hosted at albinoblacksheep.com, not affiliated with Honda in any way. Is it a wasted opportunity not to have this video archived over on honda.com?
While working at Yahoo, I recall many sites that built up huge, actively engaged communities around specific advertising campaigns only to be shut down and 404’d when the campaign is over. Sometimes they are redirected (i.e. yahoo.com/starwars redirects to starwars.com) but often times the community is forced to disband and all momentum is lost.
Which brand-supported communities do you think should have been maintained?
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Moo Vision
ReadWriteWeb posts about Ben & Jerry’s, the ice cream company, releasing an Augmented Reality feature as part of their Scoop of Happiness iPhone app to increase consumer engagement (or should we say enthrallment?). What’s unique about this particular AR implementation is that it doesn’t require custom QR codes or other customization to be printed on the packaging to unlock the animation. All you need is to run the app and point it at the lid of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream carton and the app automatically recognizes the printed logo of the flavor. Collect all four and you unlock custom wallpapers for your phone.
Will automatic logo recognition become the norm? The video below imagines a world where this is the case.
Augmented (hyper)Reality: Domestic Robocop from Keiichi Matsuda on Vimeo.
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Viral Video – Two Approaches
My aunt Karen is in the advertising industry and she forwards me snippets where our two industries cross paths. It’s always interesting to see something you know really well from another perspective. In this case, she sent over an article from Advertising Age, Why Microsoft Killed Kin After Just Six Weeks
While the article’s conclusion is probably correct, the pricing was too high for the limited features (no GPS?), I think they went too easy on the viral video marketing campaign which rang false from me right from the beginning. Granted, I am way out of the target segment but if I can see through a staged scene, I am sure the teenagers who ran across the YouTube clips did too.
the campaign followed 24-year-old Brooklynite Rosa Salazar as she used her Kin to connect with her friends via text messages, Facebook, MySpace, Windows Live and Twitter, with her friends’ updates rising to the top of her feed. The campaign used insights from more than 50,000 20-something consumers to appeal to the hipster, metropolitan crowd.
Why Microsoft Killed Kin After Just Six Weeks
Brooklyn When you view this video on YouTube, you’ll quickly find out, from the related videos column on the right of the page that Matty, the subject in this video, is actually a professional stand-up comedian. From that point on, the bubble is burst. You notice that the shaky camera is a professionally shaken camera. You realize the ambush scene where Rosa meets Matty has two cameras that had to have been set up in advance. You realize that what’s supposed to be intimate and a cool little insight shared with just me is actually a slick ad produced by Redmond. You feel dumb for even thinking this was genuine.
The alternate approach is to just get weird. This video by Nokia (where I work) is super slick and it’s hard to tell if it’s even about a phone. I am not a marketer and I have no idea how effective they were in driving sales but they sure are fun to watch!
N900 – The Journey Starts Here -
Sponsored Conversations
What do you get when you combine speech recognition, contextual advertising, text-to-speech software, and a disruptive business model? A phone that’s free as long as you are willing to listen to advertising.
Don’t laugh, the idea has been kicked around before. But why stop there? You could link the price of the monthly contract to selected offers. Some other ideas,
- Use GPS to verify check-ins at certain locations. As long as you’re at that location, long distance calls are free. Mom, I know it’s noisy at this bowling alley but as long as I’m here, this call is free.
- Use 2D barcodes to redeem mobile coupons that unlock discounts. Buy a Big Mac and get 1000 text messages free.
- Track coupon history for special offers. Feeling sick after that Big Mac? There’s a gym right down the road from you. Why not stop by for an orientation?
The mind reels.