The Real Cost of Social Media
Focus.com’s short but sweet look at what constitutes the cost and returns of a social media campaign. Highlights include: marketing managers naming customer engagement as primary reason for a social media campaign (at least they got that right), and the hard numbers of how much more a Facebook “fan” spends on average than a non-fan.
I have to say: in this day and age, the one thing I dread (and yet hear) the most from clients is: Why don’t we go on Facebook? Why aren’t we on Twitter? Social media, of course, is the hottest topic in branding and marketing these days, yet seldom do clients think about what goes into a successful social media campaign. The most apt metaphor for social media I can think of is a garden: water and care for it and it will flourish. Leave it to languish however, and all you get is tumbleweed.
To answer this most irksome of client questions, I usually ask the hard, unsexy, yet realistic questions: Do you have content? Who produces it? Do you have regular material to have your own voice? Do you have the human resource to answer questions, return wall posts, and the heart to accept negative criticism? In short, are you committed to social media?
If the answer to any of this is no, I usually—and still do—advice clients not to venture there. After all, nothing is sadder than seeing a dying garden—unloved, despised, and worst of all, irrelevant.
True Life Costs
Yes, this is a sales pitch. Yes, the voiceover narration is not only unnecessary but annoying, and the sliders marked with the VW logo a bit too conspicuous, but disregarding all that, VW’s “True Life Costs” campaign is not only based on fun factoids both intriguing and surprising, but the creative execution is impeccable. In short, through stop-motion representations of life and its costs (transport, housing, clothing), VW makes the pitch that its car is great value in terms of savings spread through time.
What’s absolutely brilliant about the Sims-like environment is that when you adjust spending sliders for different categories, your changing expenditures are reflected in a very visual way: a shirt is alternately dressed up with a suit or disrobed to a dingy undershirt, for example—this is “intangible money” transformed into “tangible comprehension.”
I love the campaign for how it combines several important trends: education as entertainment. Truth as marketing weapon. The campaign manages to appeal to both logic (showing how your numbers with VW add up) and emotion (appreciating VW’s upfront clarity; the sheer joy of the interface and game). The concept of “value,” “money,” and “value for money” have always been abstract concepts at best. By finding a fun way to make these understandable to the layperson, VW has scored a home run in the message it seeks to deliver. Bravo indeed!
Death by Branding
Eminently well-written article of course, but I wanted to post this mainly because an AK-47 toting Ronald McDonald just tickles my fancy in too many ways to count.
Web 3.0 & the science of shopping
Web 3.0 is upon us, and as it turns out, the future does revolve around us after all.
What is most exciting about Srama Mitra’s interview here is that more so than just another iteration of the “personalized” experience, the next generation of the web promises the possibility of further upending the normal production cycle for…well, anything. We have already seen crowdsourced and crowdfunded initiatives spread across industries from creation (www.kickstarter.com), fashion (www.krush.com), to even music (www.sellaband.com)
I have no doubt that aggregate data from the masses at large will increasingly drive ever more accurate production and merchandising choices that are backtracked from demand. Just as Netflix’s rental model has now spread to every industry imaginable, so too will demand directly dictate what—and not only how many—is produced.
Big Bic
Emphatic, straight-to-the-point, visually minimal yet gorgeous. This is succinct and precise brand expression at its best. Score one for ya, ye humble Bic pen!
Lady Gaga Goes to Farmville
Normally I would be the last outfit to repost anything Gaga related, though this mashup collaboration between the Haus of Gaga and Zynga has yielded what is shaping up to be a nice campaign, and a deadpan funny video to boot. The topic of how the music industry can engage and monetize new media crops up often, and I have to say that Lady Gaga’s team and their resulting campaigns are the few that come to mind as better examples.
Urban Vernacular
Commercial signage combines two loves of mine: typography and the city. Set within the urban fabric, well-formed and designed signage is as much decoration on the city’s canvas as it is advertisement. While disused signs have long been much appreciated by hipsters and design aficionados (cue loft space), it’s nice to see the form officially appreciated at the Buchstabenmuseum, dedicated to restoring and exhibiting signage from Berlin and around the world.
BMW’s new EV brand
I have to admit: this one came as a bit of a shock to me. While other luxury automakers have only slowly dipped their aluminum (and platinum)-plated toes in the electric market with either hybrid revisions of current models or concept cars, BMW chose to dive in headfirst with a whole line of electrics prefaced with the i-moniker. Gutsy as a strategic move, infinitely effective as a marketing tool, and making me love Bimmers just that much more.
Green Phantom
While still a one-off used to test user response, the fact that even the fabled, gas-guzzling Rolls is even experimenting with green technology is perhaps a sign that the time has really come for green cars across the board, from Hyundai to now Rolls. In a defiant (and I think misguided) gesture against the times however, Aston Martin has been staunchly against the tide. Call my comments subjectively biased if you will, but I think releasing the squat ugly Cygnet to be the low-emission addition to the fleet does more damage to the marque than good.
Goodbye Cow, Pirate, and Cyclist
It’s rare that any brand these days can earn that hardest of emotions: true affection. While W+K’s cow, pirate, and cyclist campaign may not be familiar to Americans, across the pond it’s been nothing short of a minor advertising phenomenon (how many other milk campaigns get their own Facebook fan page?). Creative conception, humor, and nostalgic execution = the rare advertising character that doesn’t suck. Ending the trio’s four year run on tv, W+K produced this amusingly nostalgic adieu.
Banking on Design
Leave it to the French, of course, to transform that most mundane of daily chores—a trip to the bank—into a psychedelic tour-de-force of high design.
Especially in light of the financial meltdown, I have often argued that banks need to completely rethink their communications, from message (who trusts banks to be “rock solid” anymore?), process (making financial planning more transparent, understandable, and friendly) to design (death-by-fluorescent-light is not something you want to subject your customers to, regardless of economic condition).
While this is for now a mere concept by BNP Paribas, other banks—Raffeisen’s Zurich branch below, for example—are already showing how design can make a stark, visceral difference in a commoditized industry. 
This is however, but a cosmetic start—next step, for those who dare to take it, would be to address the trust issues that increasingly make banks out-of-touch with common reality and perception.
Boom Boom Boom
In a sign that the pink economy is finally getting its due share of attemtion, BOOM is a planned LGBT retirement community set in the sunny expanses of Palm Springs (really, where else?). Fittingly enough for the client base it is to serve, the development has no less than ten studios on its design team, including the likes of Diller+Scofidio and Arakawa+Gins.
While the project is only slated to launch in 2014, I can’t help but admire the daring yet extremely visionary positioning of the brand, located at the intersection of several important trends: graying demographics worldwide; coming-of-age in an America that now supports gay marriage in several states; the always-present yet only-now-appreciated consumption powers of the LGBT community; and design appreciation in general.
The project has gotten incredible attention from media and public. At last look, Boom is even expanding plans for a European site at Costa del Sol. With an untapped market of this magnitude, need, and interest, I have a feeling this project will launch, recession or not.
Threadless Hearts Thermos
I wasn’t expecting it to be that long before Threadless got tapped in tie-ups with other brands, so it was with no surprise that I saw that it has shacked up with Thermos. Not the most immediate co-branding partner to come to mind perhaps, but winner gets a gaggle of goodies including cash, Threadless certificates, iPad, and of course, more Thermos goodness. While worldwide impact for Thermos is for sure limited, this isn’t a bad way at all to inject a bit of youthful creativity, energy, and image into an image as staid as that of a..well, Thermos.
Once upon a time…
…unbeknownst to millenials, there existed things such as Walkmen, LP’s, and…*gasp!…game consoles not controlled with the mere touch of your fingers. Funny, this technology thing. No more than thirty years onwards and the majority are approached by these kids as if they’re ancient artifacts (which to them they admittedly are). From a design point of view, it’s interesting to see what archetypes have survived (video “play” sign, mouse) and what have obviously not (floppies and 3.5”). I particularly love the expression on the boy’s face near the end as he discovers scratching on a turntable—it’s comforting to know that thirty years onwards, some things that were cool well…are still cool.
If Social Media Were a High School….
A fun look at what each site’s high school alter ego would be. Adding more lifelike parallels: charting dropouts each year and seeing how reputations can rise and fall on a dime.
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