Posts Tagged ‘social media’

BBC news has really been cranking up the snow news today, live reports from every inch of the country, stories of road ‘misery’ and ‘a few hardy souls’ venturing out on the high street to get their shopping (while someone walks past quite normally with a hat on).

While they fluff up the snow reports here, proof that ski resorts have actually been inflating their snow levels has emerged in the US. A Dartmouth College study ‘Wintertime for Deceptive Advertising’ has found that while resorts routinely report 23% deeper snow at weekends, US government weather research show there is no such pattern.

Suspicions of opportunism grow when it’s revealed that it’s the ski resorts without money back guarantees but with local customers that are the worst offenders, rather than resorts whose customers fly in and take a punt on there being lots of the fluffy stuff about. Read the rest of this entry »

First Pepsi drop their Super Bowl TV ad slot for the first time in 23 years, preferring to create dialogue through a new website www.RefreshEverything.com, now Volvo has launched the first video of its new S60 model on its Facebook page only, ahead of it’s official debut at the Geneva Car show in March. Here it is:

Ben Southall, the Briton who won the ‘best job in the world’ competition to be Queensland Tourist Board’s PR representative this summer has confessed the six month experience has left him tired out and in need of, yes, a holiday.

During his tenure as a one man publicity machine the tourist board calculate that Southall posted sixty blogs on www.islandreefjob.com representing 75,000 words, along with 2000 photo uploads and 750 tweets.

“It was a job that needed 18 to 19 hours work every day,” he said. “Not just the interviews and the social side of it, but also sitting up late at night blogging and uploading pictures, it’s very time consuming.”

The demands on the normally indefatigable Southall’s time show through in his recent Twitter posts: “Bashing out the last of this years blogs – its Boxing Day what on earth am I doing!?!”

Leaving no social media channel unploughed,  Southall also recorded 47 video diaries, the last of which is below.

It’s not all over for Southall though, Queensland Tourism have rehired him on an 18 month six figure contract to promote Queensland around the world. Meanwhile, he’s got a few, very well deserved days off.

In the subtitled, wartime lampoon of Toyota’s agency competition to create a video for the Yaris, there’s a line saying “How f*&*%&% hard is it to do a Facebook fan page, a You Tube viral or a Twitter account?” Very, as it turns out, Toyota has been forced to withdraw the real winning entry, branded variously as sexist, inappropriate and even incestuous.

At the beginning of the noughties, an advert like this wouldn’t have caused any ripples globally at all, it might have turned up on the Clive James show as a cultural curiosity and then forgotten. Ten years on and the combination of broadband, YouTube and social media means this advert has been subject to instant international condemnation.

Yet in Australia, they’re probably wondering what the fuss is about. The female copywriter, the director and the directors mum all said they thought the script for the ad was very funny and the panel of Australian Saatchi & Saatchi and Toyota executives who chose it as the winner obviously agreed.

Looks to me like they just had the wrong panel of judges, probably very senior executives with great experience in the Australian car market but no experience of the international dimension of viral video.

Here’s the offending video

For those indie-minded old grumps hiding in the home office, like me while the X Factor saga rumbled to its depressing conclusion last night, a last minute hero has emerged.

A self-described stay-at-home mum from Essex, Tracy Morter set up a Facebook group in mid November, proposing ‘Rage against the machine for Christmas No1′

By the magic of Facebook and an alignment of media interest around X Factor, Tracy Morter’s idea may now determine the outcome of the Christmas singles chart.

There are 714K members of the Facebook group at the time of writing and between 250K and 500K purchases of “Killing in the name of” are estimated to be needed to secure the spot. The song is already number one on iTunes.

No wonder Simon Cowell is coming over as a bit cross in interviews about the campaign he describes as ’silly’. With all his TV ratings power, it looks like he’s still no match for a mum with a social media platform. Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t like to have a pop, but material is thin this morning and like when a comedian turns on a member of the audience to distract from his own failings, I’m going to have a go at Ogilvy. On the day Lord Mandleson won The Plain English Campaign’s Foot in Mouth prize for this sentence:

”Perhaps we need not more people looking round more corners but the same people looking round more corners more thoroughly to avoid the small things detracting from the big things the Prime Minister is getting right.”

Ogilvy has come up with this about their new social media product (I think).

The snappy headline:

Ogilvy’s 360 Degree Global Digital Influence Group Launches Insider Circle(TM), a New Influencer Relationship Management Social Media Product Read the rest of this entry »

Mumbrella has posted their shortlist for Australian social media campaign of the year, including this ‘Rad to the power of sick’ display of creative power from agency GPY&R who attempt to buy and sell the same BMX bike on Ebay for a profit using just their copy writing talent. They do quite well!

It’s that time of year again when hundreds of thousands of children will be tracking Santa’s progress across the world courtesy of NORAD (North American Air Defence Command), a tradition that began in 1955 when calls to a misprinted telephone number in an advertisement for a Colorado store, from children invited to call Santa’s hotline, came through to Colonel Harry Shoup, NORAD’s Director of Operations.

Realising what was afoot, Colonel Shoup had his staff check the radar to see if Santa had started his journey South from the North Pole. Santa was located and a legend born, NORAD using the heat from Rudolph’s nose to track the sleigh.

For 2009, you can track Santa on Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and Google Earth as well as visit his elf-staffed manufacturing facility at the North Pole www.noradsanta.org.

On Christmas Eve, Santa’s journey around the world will be revealed on the site. Here’s footage of the route he took last year QG55UH7B4WVA

While Belgium and Germany won the highest quantity of awards (49) at the European creative advertising awards Eurobest at the weekend (France 35, UK 32), France certainly had the quality, BETC Euro RSCG, Paris winning the TV Grand Prix with this masterful reworking of a comedy standard – “The Closet”

QG55UH7B4WVA

The Webby Awards top ten most influential internet moments of the decade, released yesterday has 2006 as the year the online video revolution started “flooding cyberspace with an array of professional and not-so-professional videos” and a quick spin around You Tube this morning confirms that there’s still either TV production quality footage or amateur goofing around, with not much in between.

At the professional end, Stella Artois has dropped back four decades, to 1963 with an eight part, faux retro online TV show to push its green credentials – Le Recyclage de Luxe Show, created by Mother and marketed through Facebook and Twitter. As we’re now watching an average of 10.8 hours of online video a month, according to Comscore and good content is now sprayed around freely on social networks, the days of a predominantly You’ve-been-framed-Tube may be drawing to an end.