MARS “CELEBRATE” FACEBOOK APPLICATION

Facebook users know that you can give your friends virtual gifts, but for the first time, there are gifts that can be redeemed in real life for real products.  Mars Snackfood UK is the first marketer to use this product through an application called Celebrate. When users buy each other a virtual candy bar using PayPal, the recipient also receives a a voucher ID code on their cell phone which can be scanned in stores to redeem the real thing.

“We are very excited to be involved with this new ground-breaking initiative with Facebook,” said Sara Miles of Mars Snackfood UK.  “It will drive traffic and incremental confectionery sales to our PayPoint retail partners in a way that is at the forefront of the digital revolution, whilst offering our consumers a different way of sending confectionery gifts to friends and family,” she said.

“As the boundaries between the virtual and real worlds are being increasingly blurred, our award-winning technology platform M BAR GO will allow users to buy each other sweets at the touch of a few buttons,” said Marc Lewis, founder and chairman of The Light Agency, the company who created the mobile voucher technology.  I never understood the purpose of paying a dollar to buy your friends a computer graphic of a cupcake or even to send a free icon like a “naughty list” around Christmas, but this gift makes sense."

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ADIDAS AND DIESEL COLLABORATION TO TARGET YOUTUBE AND FACEBOOK

Adidas, the #2 athletic footwear maker, is branching out into new arenas; creating films for social-networking sites as part of its annual spring marketing campaign and collaborating with hip fashion label Diesel in time for New York Fashion week.

As part of its overall “Celebrate Originality,” global brand message, beginning this week, Adidas will begin to debut four original films on popular online sites Facebook and YouTube. The first is about the company’s founder, Adi Dassler, and chronicles how his shoe evolved from a sports shoe to popular everyday footwear. Adidas will also host a community page on Facebook with a variety of information and applications.

While the marketing spending is undisclosed, it is believed to be “the biggest” campaign the company has done in its 49-year history. “There are two key pillars to the campaign,” said Hermann Deininger, chief marketing officer of the adidas sport style division. “One is retail and the second is digital.” Adidas will reformat some of its 80 worldwide stores into an “atelier” concept, allowing visitors to design their own shoes and send pictures and videos to a large wall within the store.

On another front, Adidas is pairing with Italian jeans maker Diesel to create four styles of jeans called “adidas Originals Denim by Diesel.” The line, which includes two men’s and two women’s jeans in four different washes, was shown at Fashion Week in New York on Sunday. The jeans will be available exclusively at adidas stores and retail for $160 to $210. This is Adidas’ first foray into completely non-sports product segment.

John Shanley, an analyst with Susquehanna Financial Group, said the campaign fits in with a trend of merging fashion and athletics trends. “I think it makes a lot of sense,” he said. “Casualwear is where most of the business is done (in the athletic sector). Technical or performance products are a relatively small part of the overall market.”

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MAZDA’S INNOVATIVE USE OF FACEBOOK

Mazda tried their hand at engaging with younger generations through the use of Facebook in a recent concept car design contest.  The Mazda Design Challenge asked Facebook users to help design the 2018 Mazda3, the manufacturer’s best international selling vehicle.

To wrap up the challenge, Franz von Holzhausen, director of Mazda Design and his team, along with contest winner, will create a clay concept car live at the upcoming LA Auto Show.  To enter, contestants submitted a 150-word description of their vision of the 2018 MAZDA3 and an optional sketch drawing. The Mazda Design team then judged each entry, choosing 10 semi-finalists.

Five finalists were chosen by the Facebook community, and each of the five finalists were paired with a Mazda designer to hone their concept, which was then judged and voted on in a second round by fellow Facebook members.

"The Mazda Design Challenge brought in a flood of cool, unique design ideas. The winning design concept is a fresh new way to look at the design of a vehicle," said von Holzhausen. "This competition was a tremendous success, and this entire process was really beneficial to my team and me to understand what design means to our target buyers. Now the hard part comes -- to see if we can actually build a full concept car on the show stand in 10 days and in full view of show goers."

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COCA-COLA’S DIY PORTABLE APPLICATION “COKETAGS” LETS YOU PROMOTE ANYTHING YOU WANT

Coca-Cola has launched CokeTag, a Facebook application that allows anyone to promote themselves and their interests via a convenient DIY portable application.  Coca-Cola describes CokeTag as a “personal, customizable widget for individuals, bands, bloggers, artists, and companies to share links to content they want to promote and drive traffic to anywhere on the Web.”

You can bundle links to on- and off-Facebook content in a convenient package, which is associated with and accessible from your Profile or Fan Pages and shared via Facebook private messages or Wall posts. Sharing viral or interesting links becomes easy via highly targeted personal networks for friends and fans.

You can bundle links to on- and off-Facebook content in a convenient package, which is associated with and accessible from your Profile or Fan Pages and shared via Facebook private messages or Wall posts. Sharing viral or interesting links becomes easy via highly targeted personal networks for friends and fans.

The CokeTag application features a self-service editor that allows you to control both the content and skin. Several levels of expandable menus enable easy navigation to specific content, while a built-in click tracker lets the creator know every time someone looks at their CokeTag and which links they visit.

Current Facebook distribution options includes: 1) Create and post your CokeTag on your personal profile page, 2) Create and post a CokeTag to any Facebook Fan Page you administer, 3) Grab and post any CokeTag that you discover on to your own personal profile, 4) Send a CokeTag as Facebook e-mail attachment, 5) Post a CokeTag as a Facebook Wall post.

Currently in beta form, CokeTag is the result of a partnership between The Coca-Cola Company and Linkstorm, an advertising technology company pioneering a new approach to social networking, online marketing and publishing. Initially built for Facebook, CokeTag will later be available across OpenSocial sites (MySpace, Bebo, etc.) and eventually to all Blogging platforms and everywhere on the Internet.

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THE GOODBUZZ FACEBOOK BUNDLE

Toronto-based Social media agency Goodbuzz is launching a new bundle package for its strategy and campaign services, which focuses on building a branded online presence specifically on Facebook.  

The Goodbuzz Facebook bundle includes a Facebook application, Facebook Connect integration with their client’s site, and a branded Facebook Fan Page for engagement purposes with Facebook users.

  We'll also link to Twitter, You Tube, and any number of others dependent on client objectives.  The bundled package is customized to each individual client, with provisions for design, campaign management and tracking. Other features include quality assurance testing, consulting, campaign launch support and other key analytics for measuring purposes.


What can we do for your brand? Contact Goodbuzz today.  

THE NATIONAL HOCKEY LEAGUE (NHL) GETS MOBILE

The National Hockey League (NHL) and Verizon Wireless are partnering to provide live and exclusive mobile content on the carrier's V Cast service. Live NHL games, local radio broadcasts and play information will be available on V Cast. Consumers can watch live hockey games from their mobile devices on New Year’s Day.

Ice stream
For the second year, Verizon Wireless and the NHL are bringing NBC Sports coverage of the 2010 Bridgestone NHL Winter Classic on New Year’s Day to V Cast for consumers to watch on their Verizon devices. At 1 p.m. EST on Jan. 1 the Boston Bruins will host the Philadelphia Flyers in the NHL’s annual outdoor game. This year it will be played in Boston.  The game will be streamed in its entirety on the NBC Sports channel on V Cast.

Additional NBC Sports games will be streamed live during the remainder of the season.  Also beginning on Jan. 1, the NHL and Verizon Wireless are giving hockey fans across the country the chance to listen to teams’ local radio broadcasts live on V Cast.  The audio will feature hometown announcers and analysts from every game will be available throughout the season and the playoffs.  Broadcasts from select games will also be available in French.

 “Verizon Wireless has featured a lot of NHL content, and we're planning to bring even more innovative mobile content and options to our customers,” said Debra Lewis, spokeswoman for Verizon Wireless, Basking Ridge, NJ. “The NHL is very forward-thinking about its mobile strategy, and we're excited to continue to work together.”  Ms. Lewis said the NHL provides Verizon with content including video, audio and exclusive extra content on players and teams.

The NHL’s Mr. DiLorenzo said partnering with Verizon meets several challenges for the League. The partenship lets the NHL serve fans who are not in front of a television or computer.  Working with Verizon also helps the NHL satisfy the demand from its passionate, tech-savvy audience and it lets the League be more pervasive in marketing the game.

“Going mobile lets us shorten the distance between league and fans,” Mr. Di Lorenzo said. “And we realize the marketing and business benefit of an increasingly pervasive content and commerce platform.”

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WALT DISNEY’S MULTIFACETED DIGITAL STRATEGY

Disney’s mobile initiatives include SMS alerts and campaigns, games, sweepstakes programs and a video-enabled mobile Web site, both a WAP version as well as one optimized for the iPhone’s Safari browser and touchscreen capabilities.

 “We’re focused on extending Disney.com to mobile platforms, and we work with all Disney-branded business units to mobilize their programs,” said Disney’s director of mobile strategy and marketing.  “We use the same ad filter for both platforms—our mobile site and iPhone app,” he said.

“The mobile site and the app support Disney films, television shows and video games, and are updated weekly with new videos, new sections [and] new games launching and both utilize news feeds from around the company with information and quizzes about popular movies and TV shows.”

According to Disney - Disney.com ranks as the No. 1 entertainment site on the mobile Web.   Consumers can even text the keyword MOBILE to the short code DISNEY to get information about the company.

In addition to the free Disney iPhone application, the company also has an expanding line-up of paid applications currently available in the App Store, including Toy Story Mania, Disney Fairies Fly, The Nightmare Before Christmas and Breakspin.  Disney Interactive Studios also recently launched the latest addition to its slate of applications, The Muppets Animal Drummer for the iPhone and iPod touch.

a multichannel approach

Disney takes a multichannel approach to marketing its many properties and mobile continues to increase in its importance as a marketing channel for Disney. “We use a multitude of methods to get the word out,” Mr. Rhodes said. “Our strategy in regards to communication is to educate the Disney audience—people are already consuming our content on other platforms.“We’re running TV spots on the Disney Channel, radio commercials, mobile calls-to-action in print and outdoor advertising, we’re promoting it on the online version of our site and we’re running mobile advertising and on-device search advertising, both natural organic search and paid search,” he said.

Disney has found that ads promoting a specific TV show or movie are more successful than general Disney-branded ads.  “We’ve learned to be brand-specific—a Hannah Montana ad that is targeted generally does well, while a general Disney ad is not as effective,” Mr. Rhodes said.

Disney sells its own inventory across its various platforms, including television, radio, online and mobile.  Disney offers cobranded sponsorship opportunities and banner ads sold on a CPM basis. It offers both cross-channel buys and mobile-specific. About 40 percent of the campaigns it sells focus exclusively on the mobile channel.

Currently Disney has three advertising sponsorship deals running on its mobile site, that represent the three types of mobile campaigns it typically sells.  Jonas Brothers and Xbox 360 are running a cobranded sponsorship campaign featured across the Disney mobile site.  Banner ads redirect users to a micro-site that is also cobranded by the Jonas Brothers and Xbox. The site broadcasts a call-to-action for consumers to participate in a user-generated-content program letting kids submit video clips then view, share, and rate videos submitted by others.

There is even a text-to-win sweepstakes integrated into the campaign, asking consumers to text the keyword XBOX to a short code to enter for the chance to meet the Jonas Brothers in person and win an Xbox 360 video game system.

“We’ve seen the text-message sweepstakes work very well.  A previous campaign with the Jonas Brothers and Best Western saw almost half of the sweepstakes entries come from mobile.  An SMS call-to-action is a great way to get people participating in a campaign,” he said.

Mass merchandiser Target, for example, launched a straightforward banner ad buy across Disney’s mobile Web site and various applications to drive consumers in store to boost holiday sales.  AT&T ran a Haunted Holidays campaign leveraging Disney’s online and mobile platforms featuring “The Nightmare Before Christmas,” Charles Dickens’ “A Tale of Two Cities” and “A Christmas Carol,” “Snow White and the Seven Dwarves” and other Disney properties relevant to the “spooky Christmas” theme.

Mobile gaming
Contrary to conventional wisdom, Disney reports that its core demographic on mobile skews older than its TV and radio properties.  “At the core, the demographics are very similar, although from mobile standpoint it’s slightly older, whereas on the Disney Channel or Radio Disney you get younger kids,” Mr. Rhodes said. “On mobile we get tweens or teens—we perform best in that 11-15 range. We also perform well on mobile with moms and adults—men are more familiar with navigating to content on their phone,” he said. “Parents are sharing mobile content with their kids, making games the No. 1 section of our mobile site.

Disney has a series of mobile games it calls “interactive adventures,” basically digital, mobile versions of the “Choose Your Own Adventure” series of books.  Hannah Montana and the Jonas Brothers for example both have their own mobile games. Other top Disney mobile games include Fairy Friends, Cannons of the Deep (based on the ride and film “The Pirates of the Caribbean”), trivia games based on various Disney film releases and the Princess and the Frog Swamp.  All Disney mobile games have free, WAP-based, ad-supported, and available within the iPhone application store, which also has games with more robust functionality such as the Wizards of Waverly.

Mobile connects all channels
Disney continues to place a greater and greater emphasis on the mobile channel, both as a publisher and an advertiser.  “Mobile fits in really prominently in our overall strategy, and our focus has been on aligning our mobile properties with the online version of the site—the same videos available online are also available on mobile.”

“We’re using mobile to connect and enhance larger campaigns for films and TV shows, and we have pretty extensive mobile programs connected to our upcoming releases, including Tim Burton’s ‘Alice in Wonderland,’ ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’ and ‘Toy Story 3,’” he said.   “Mobile is an important channel because we’re seeing a lot of adoption and traffic, not just our properties, but across the entire industry.”

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ALMOST 1.5 MILLION ITEMS BOUGHT ON EBAY VIA MOBILE THIS HOLIDAY

Holiday shopping went mobile this season, with a surge in buyers using the eBay iPhone application and other eBay mobile properties to find great deals while on the go.  The number of items bought via eBay mobile applications this year was triple last year’s holiday volume. In 2009, eBay buyers and sellers have generated more than half a billion dollars of transactions via mobile - with strong momentum this holiday season.

According to VP of platform business solutions and mobile at eBay, “consumers had the power to seek out the best deals regardless of time or location, to the point that you could even do comparison shopping on your mobile device while you’re in the store at the mall.  The lines between online and offline were permanently blurred in 2009.”

MOBILE COMMERCE UP
Nearly 6 million people have eBay on their iPhone and shoppers are making 750,000 unique visits a day to eBay via mobile applications.  Mobile purchases this season range from designer handbags to a $75,000 1966 Chevrolet Corvette.  According to an IDC report, mobile Internet users will double in number by 2013 to surpass one billion. Here are some mobile eBay trends:

- Nearly six million people are carrying eBay around in their pocket,
- Users from more than 165 countries visited the eBay mobile Web site and iPhone application,
- 1.5 million items were bought on eBay using mobile phones worldwide this holiday,

- In 2009, an item sold every 2 seconds via eBay mobile applications worldwide.

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Infographics from "SLIGHTWARE: THE NEXT GREAT THREAT TO BRANDS"

This book by Kenneth J. Weiss provides some excellent infographics on:

Forces in the User Experience

Campaigns and Conversations

The User Experience Funnel

The User Experience Lifecycle

Innovations and Artifacts

Above content expert’s from Chapter 1 of Kenneth J. Weiss’s book “Slightware: The Next Great Threat to Brands”

About the author

STELLA ARTOIS LAUNCHES MOBILE AUGMENTED-REALITY BAR GUIDE

The worlds top Belgian beer; Stella Artois has launched an augmented-reality bar guide application called “Le Bar Guide”.   “Le Bar Guide” is a free 3D Augmented-Reality iPhone application that lets consumers search using geo-tracking for bars nearby via ZIP, Postal code, country or user rating. The simple premise of the new application is to enable Stella Artois to promote all bars that serve Stella Artois.

Le Bar Guide fuses the real-world view of the consumer’s immediate surroundings in augmented reality, providing a guide to bar locations.  When the iPhone is held vertically, Le Bar Guide shows profiles of bars in the consumer’s immediate vicinity. The profiles are overlaid on the street view from their location.  Consumers can hold the phone with the camera pointing at the ground and the application will show arrows pointing the consumer in the direction of nearby bars.

This social application also importantly features user-generated content.  Consumers can rate bars according to the menu, atmosphere, other clients and the service.  The application also has a section for comments about locations for other Le Bar Guide users.

The application currently has more than 50,000 bars listed worldwide. Bar data comes from a Stella Artois Web service that provides geo-location information on all the bars that serve Stella in the U.S. and worldwide.

The Le Bar Guide’S handy “Le Taxi” feature even sources numbers for Taxi services from a local country directory.

Using the iPhone is also perfect for Stella’s target of affluent males between the ages of 25-35.    Adding Augmented Reality, the overlay of images on the real world via a device’s camera, adds a heighten experience and a more intuitive user interface.  Moreover, “Stella Artois chose this technology because they believe over the next three-to-four years augmented reality will be the primary delivery mechanism for location-based services. This is where the users are.”  

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