IFAW Turtles

Our latest effort for IFAW (International Fund for Animal Welfare) has gone down a storm. We wanted to raise awareness about the impact of the souvenir trade on turtles and other endangered species. Hope you’ll agree this is a fanstastic campaign. The BBC picked up on the campaign. As did many other TV channels and countless blogs.

Please spread the message by posting and tweeting links to this blog post,

For further info visit the IFAW site.

Cannes Young Lions 48 Hour Ad

Couple of our creatives have entered the 48 hour ad contest for Cannes Young Lions. Take a view at their effort below, if you like it, give it a star rating – and you could help send them on their way to Cannes. The more hits the video gets the more chance they have of winning, so if you think it’s a great entry, for a great cause – twitter the youtube link, blog it, stick it on facebook, email it to your mates, tattoo it to your forehead, or graffiti a nearby billboard with the link.

It’s Peugeot

I’ve got that awful social media sinking feeling now. Peugeot are the brand behind the nude with a scarf campaign. What a dud campaign. Feel cheated. Open top car thus enjoying exposing yourself, lose your inhibitions, etc. Weak!

Nude twitter outrage in London

A mystery brand is attempting to use twitter in a tease campaign today. So far the campaign doesn’t seem to be succeeding. Is this the start of the twitter backlash? Or will the campaign take off over the next few days.

Display ads started to appear on Yahoo’s portal this morning. Driving people to the nude in a scarf website and the nude in a scarf twitter page. Lots of people were seemingly taking to the streets of London apparently naked apart from a scarf. Except they weren’t naked – they were wearing flash coloured body stockings. Boo hiss.

A countdown timer explained that all would be revealed just after 3pm today – I’ll post the reveal when it happens – but judging by the fact that the campaign only had just over 500 twitter followers by midday – the expected interest doesn’t appear to have materialised.

Idea of the year

Young & Rubicam have just announced the winner of their Idea of the Year awards.

These awards are chosen by Tony Granger – the global chief creative officer and his global creative board. The winner is chosen from across all categories of work (TV, digital, outdoor, print, etc) produced by any of the companies within the Y&R network.

This year the award went to the Orange campaign ‘When the light are off, the site is on‘ created by Shalmor Avnon Amichay/Y&R Interactive, Tel Aviv.

In promotion of Orange’s new ‘Orange Time’ online pay-per-view entertainment portal, the agency developed a light-sensitive website – designed to create a cinema-esque vibe relavent to the content available. Thanks to a nifty web cam interface which detects variations in the intensity of light, the users must first turn down the lights to access the page; clicking on film trailers then re-directs them to the full-length screening page on the Orange portal. TIP: IF YOU’RE AT WORK AND CAN’T TURN THE LIGHTS DOWN, JUST PUT YOUR FINGER OVER THE WEBCAM.

As neat as technology like this sounds, there are always inherent risks – eg, will it isolate those without web cams and cut traffic to the site? Thankfully, the numbers suggest just the opposite.
In one month, Orange became the No. 1 video-on-demand-portal in the country and during the campaign, there was a 50% increase in visits to the site. Impressive stuff!

Explaining the Persistence Paradox

Kevin Kelly recently drew attention to a paper by Fang Wu and Bernardo Huberman of HP Labs (PDF) analysing the popularity of almost 10 million YouTube videos. The paper takes the somewhat narrow view that all videos submitted to YouTube are attempts to achieve mass attention – to have the YouTube equivalent of a blockbuster. Within this framework, the researchers observed an interesting result which they termed the ‘Persistence Paradox’.

In essence, the Persistence Paradox is the apparent contradiction between two objective results obtained from their analysis:

The more frequently an individual uploads content, the less likely they are to have a ‘hit’ (where a hit sits in the top 1% of videos by viewership).

The more frequently an individual uploads content, the better they get (using video ratings to measure quality).

The only explanation offered is a kind of Diminishing Returns theory: “when a producer submits several videos over time, their novelty and hence their appeal to a wide audience tends to decrease.” One example of this might be Ray-Ban’s Never Hide Films, which has yet to achieve the same amount of attention earned by the original “Guy catches glasses with face” video. But as noted in the paper, this theory alone does not intuitively seem to adequately explain the apparent paradox.

Being fairly familiar with the YouTube ecosystem, several alternative explanations come to mind.

1) That difficult second album

Just like a musician, the first work someone produces in a particular channel is likely to have been gestating for a much longer period than those that follow. This goes hand-in-hand with the paper’s Diminishing Returns idea. An example would be the channel of Those Lil Rabbits, who despite producing many creative and moderately popular videos have yet to match the original towering success of their first David Blaine parody, shown above.

2) The harder the battle, the more glorious the victory

Someone that produces videos relatively infrequently (such as the Simon’s Cat animations) is likely to be putting in more effort and so produce better quality videos than someone that uploads more frequently. (If a smart match can be found this can be an efficient way for a brand to get involved – see the most recent Simon’s Cat video for the RSPCA). There is also a scarcity factor – something produced regularly is likely to have less apeal than something rarer.

3) Speak up if you have something to say

There are many motivations to join YouTube and submit a video, but people are more likely to take that step if they think they happen to have captured something really worth sharing with the world. It could be because they just happened to capture something particularly impressive (such as this ‘Crazy trampoline stunt‘), or they have one particular party piece they want to share (such as this dog trick). Another possibility in this vein is of course that of an expensive piece of branded video being launched on YouTube along with its own channel, such as the recent LED sheep video put together for Samsung.

With these ideas in mind, the Persistence Paradox does not seem so surprising. The next question we have to ask is: so what? What does this tell us if our intent is to produce a hit?

Apart from unpredictable, Black Swan Theory-type successes, the conclusions are pretty clear and reassuringly intuitive: work long and hard on your content, and if that doesn’t work, try doing something completely different. And don’t forget that gaining the loyalty of a smaller group through relevant and regular content can often be more useful than having a single huge one-off hit.

Snow Crisis – committed creatives

When the snow hit on monday 2nd feb, John and Rob, creative leads on Crisis didn’t hang around. Quick as a flash they banged out a creative concept, made the executions themselves, took the creative out into the streets, shot the work. And within 24 hours had a topical campaign on the web and media ready in the press.

All too often agencies get bogged down by process. In a world where the consumer can lead the conversation, it’s rapid, intelligent deployment of creative like the above that allows clients to be relevant.

This is the second time in recent months that we’ve managed to perform such fleet of foot creative. The last time was for the Baby P tragedy, where we produced a film and facebook viral campaign for NSPCC.

More pics of the Crisis campaign here:

I’d be very interested to know of other agencies/clients who are getting to grips with the quick-turnaround times demanded by the need to operate in a quick moving social media landscape. So please do comment.

How facebook is my audience?

Firstly my apologies for being crap. I’ve not updated this blog nearly enough recently. Too busy. But I promise to do better.

Here’s an neat application I discovered via my friend and ex-colleague Bryan Miller’s giving in a digital world blog.

It’s a handy tool that gives you a quick demographic snapshot of your audience’s facebook usage. Next time somebody asks could facebook work for my brand – point them in the direction of this tool.

The tool is courtesy of the unofficial facebook blog, AllFacebook.

Missing gorilla viral

I don’t often post agency work on here, but this loving homage to the Cadbury’s gorilla ad, for IFAW (International Fund for Animal Welfare) is just too good not to stick up. Congratulations to Magnus Thorne and Paul Turner who came up with the concept, persusaded a production team at 2am to film it for free and are currently seeding the thing like mad. Respect to IFAW too, for having the courage to run such a cool piece of work.

You can find out more about IFAW and the missing gorilla campaign here.

Free data and analytics tools

For data-driven businesses the web offers a rich variety of incredibly powerful data tools. Some of these tools offer richer insight than many more expensive industry platforms, and can be deployed quickly, effectively and imaginatively to create unique measurement models against which the success of communications can be judged.

I thought I’d stick up a few starters for ten. Some of these are things I use, others are suggestions from Russell Marsh. What I hope will happen is that the comments section will fill up with other tools that you find effective.

My current number favourite tool is Yahoo Pipes – a browser based platform that allows you to aggregate, mainpulate content and create detailed data mash-ups in seconds. If you’re a planner or work in data and haven’t played with Yahoo Pipes – SHAME. On a slight side note here are some other mashup editors: Popfly from Microsoft and the Google Mash-up editor.

Dipity I’ve blogged about before, but this tool can easily be deployed to measure the effectiveness of social media campaigns across a number of platforms (youtube, vimeo, digg, flickr, stumbleupon, twitter and many others) – all free, again set-up in seconds. For an idea of how rich a platform this is check out my free dipity feed.

Want to check out free public data sets? Amazon Web Services provide free online access to lots of public data, including the US Census Bureau’s databases.

More?

Blogpulse – to monitor the blogosphere and buzz metrics (from Nielsen).

Twilert – what are micro-bloggers tweeting about a brand, person, idea, etc. Think Google Alerts, but for Twitter.

Alexa – to understand web traffic stats.

This is a very brief ten minute, starter. Over the next few days I’ll attempt to build this post up into a resevoir of many more tools.

Note: you can find lots more tools on the rapp delicious page.