Found this hilarious video on Bittbox. An ingenious marketing campaign by Agency Fusion that shows they understand the trials of being a designer.
Some of you might remember the song of the same name. well, click below for the infommercial.
Every marketer, merchandiser, brand specialist or anyone involved in the art (or science) of convincing people to part with their money needs to read this book by Paco Underhill. Mr. Underhill’s the founder, CEO and President of Envirosell, a company that basically watches people shop and then makes recommendations on fine-tuning the retail experience around them.
Why Designers should read this book:
Even if you’re not involved in merchandising, in-store display design or retail interior design there are some principles and ideas that I found useful:
I regularly checkout the adgoodness blog for some great advertising inspiration and more often than not the more ingenius solutions are played out outdoors. I guess because there’s such an open palette of objects and contexts to play with compared to the limitations of the more traditional avenues like magazine, newspaper or TV.
Here are a few great examples of creativity coming to life in 3D we just received in our email inbox. They all display a great use of their natural surroundings:
Still trying to parse the myriad of concepts thrown out at the DJ Spooky lecture ( and inspired by the great diagrams of David Armano) I started to scribble. I was trying to tie together the thoughts Paul presented with some of the stuff I’ve been reading about the “Conversation Economy”. The following diagram is what I came up with along with the help of the rest of Paragon and our friendly neighborhood futurist Frank Spencer.
Like Susan said, we recently went to a DJ Spooky lecture. Although it’ll take more than this simple post (and this simple mind) to digest the volume of information he dropped that night, I thought he brought up a bunch of interesting and relevant thoughts about the convergence (or collision) of the individual and the corporate, art and artifact, content and context. I’ll try and condense it all as much as possible but he was deep and I might get lost somewhere in the middle here.
I saw on a recent (by recent I mean within the last month) Conan O’Brian show, he had a segment about local TV spots. Of course we’ve known for a while about the glory that exists on local TV as far as commercials are concerned, but every now and then a few gems shine brighter than others.
Here are just 2 of the ones we’ve found.
I use the term “Art” very loosely since I’m referring to sitcoms. Another gem from the mental floss blog and The Washington Post reporting that a pilot based on the GEICO Cavemen has been ordered by ABC.
I’ve been a fan of the GEICO Cavemen ever since the first spot, partly because it seems to be such a softer, more sophisticated sell than most “lowest rates guaranteed” insurance spots. I respect a company that can make fun of itself, especially a company whose industry is notoriously boring, or at the very least not inclined to humor.
This news however begs a few questions:
A while back, Alex Tew came up with a novel idea to charge a minimal fee for pixels on his homepage called The Million Dollar Homepage. If you thought this was brilliant but wanted a venue setup a little more professionally (and free), then check out this new promotion service called bla.st. Call it an online classified ads directory, call it shameless promotion 2.0, whatever you wanna call it, sign up now because it’s first come first serve (unless you pay).
Read some more about it at David Airey’s blog and Blog-Op
As I explained in my previous posting about MINI’s marketing strategy, there is an enormous amount of driver enthusiasm behind their approach. I decided to spend a bit of time with Murray, experiencing the phenomenon myself…
Once a month there is a little gathering of MINI drivers in Savannah, were folks meet up, have a cup of coffee and then hit the road to go a-motoring. They go for a spin, then park the cars in a fun location and take photos, and eventually head off to eat together at an interesting local restaurant. It may sound cheesy, but I will vouch for it being a lot of fun. I don’t know why, but there was something entertaining about the stares of strangers as� the group of MINIs zipped by.
There are people all over the U.S. who do this on a regular basis. I imagine it’s very much like a play-date for their cars. Whatever the appeal, the effect is always the same; strangers approach the group and want to talk about the cars. During the 2 trips I tagged along for, there were retirees, a bartender and a number of other interested folks who wanted to talk about the cars. There is nothing corporate or contrived about the gatherings, and other people sense this immediately and are drawn to the group.
MINI USA spends time and money staying connected to their drivers, and have been able to harness the resulting enthusiasm,� cultivating this owner-initiated evangelism. I’ve experienced it and seen it with my own eyes. It works. Whatever they’re doing….they need to keep on doing.
Here is some footage of my trip to Charleston with Murray. He is very knowledgable about MINIs and was a great resource for my research. You should definitely check out his blog murmini.com, if you’re interested in MINIs. Also visit coastalminis.com and Stephanie’s blog allthingsmini.blogspot.com for some more pictures from the trip.
On January 29th, the New York Times published an article by Barnaby Feder entitled “Billboards That Know You by Name”, that talked about MINI USA’s new advertising campaign created by ad agency BSSP. The strategy: To create personalized digital billboard messages targeted at MINI drivers.
Bear in mind that MINI’s existing customer base is only 150, 000 strong in the United States. Compare this with a company like Ford, which sold over 2.4 Million vehicles in 2006 alone. It seems counter-intuitive that MINI USA would focus its attention on such a small, target audience, particularly when this is the audience that obviously does not need convincing.
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