B1BLOG

Christine Her­ron at christine.net has a nice round up of the top 10 mobile mar­ket­ing cam­paigns as presen­ted at the recent Mobile Mar­ket­ing Forum. She also out­lines the key factors for a suc­cess­ful cam­paign. Worth a read.
Mobile mar­ket­ing is still in its rel­at­ive infancy. It’ll be inter­est­ing to see how con­sumers react over time to the dif­fer­ent options on offer. The more tra­di­tional text-to-win approaches are rel­at­ively safe, it’s the consumer’s choice after all. But when we get into areas such as blue­jack­ing and friend-call-a-friend tech­niques, accept­ance will vary wildly from coun­try to coun­try as dif­fer­ent cul­tures view pri­vacy in very dif­fer­ent ways.

The trick will be to truly engage the audi­ence and not simply apply dir­ect mar­ket­ing or broad­cast approaches to mobile. Per­son­ally, I believe mobile mar­ket­ing should be part of a big­ger integ­rated pic­ture – that’s why I like the Amer­ican Express Wimble­don Spon­sor­ship as there was a wide range of other activ­ity feed­ing in to the cam­paign. Whereas the have-your-vote approaches such as the Dove cam­paign feel a little shal­low as a vehicle (although maybe there was more to it).

It will also be inter­est­ing to see what hap­pens as we get greater band­width, the avail­ab­il­ity of ever richer media and the integ­ra­tion of tech­no­lo­gies such as GPS into devices. Inter­est­ing times.

In their strategy+business emag this time, Booz, Allen, Hamilton has a report: “Smart Spend­ers: The Global Innov­a­tion 1000.” Ostens­ibly this is a report on why some com­pan­ies (about 10% in the study) get expo­nen­tially bet­ter returns on lower levels of R&D invest­ment. Strategy+business is usu­ally a pretty good source of insight so admit­tedly my hopes were high.

There are some inter­est­ing facts in the piece. The top 1000 R&D spend­ers account for some 85% of R&D spend­ing as a whole. The authors point to the fact that there is vir­tu­ally no cor­rel­a­tion between per­form­ance and R&D budgets (the only one being gross mar­gin – yet the fin­an­cial value of this is sel­dom cap­tured). Many com­pan­ies waste too much time rein­vent­ing the wheel and see ideas get mired down in organ­isa­tional quick­sand. And many simply don’t under­stand what their cus­tom­ers want or how to com­mu­nic­ate with them.

All inter­est­ing stuff. But how about inform­a­tion that com­pan­ies can use to do some­thing about it?

The recom­mend­a­tions appear to boil down to:

• Get good at all parts of innov­a­tion ‘value chain’
• Go for flat structures
• Think about cus­tomer needs
• Be quick

Bey­ond that… well… every­one does it dif­fer­ently really.

This has the feel of a scen­ario where some very expens­ive research has been com­mis­sioned, but which hasn’t answered the key ques­tions. So you get lots of inform­a­tion but pre­cious little insight bey­ond a kind of innov­a­tion 101.

I would want to know about the cor­por­ate cul­tures that breed innov­a­tion. I’d want to know who they recruit, how they get the right mix of people and how they incentiv­ise them (out­side of offer­ing loads of cash). And I’d want to know about how these com­pan­ies move bey­ond what their cus­tom­ers say they want now to cre­at­ing break­through products they will want in future. The report doesn’t answer any of these.

Shame.

This is nice. Musi­cov­ery is a Pandora-esque music dis­cov­ery site that allows you to select playl­ists by click­ing your mood. Choose from dark to pos­it­ive and from calm to ener­getic and then watch it graph­ic­ally spin out tracks in a very pretty Visual Thesaurus stylee.

Source: NOTCOT.ORG

I pre-ordered World­chan­ging’s User’s Guide for the 21^st Cen­tury some time back and promptly for­got about it (as you do). Then, last week, the Amazon fairy came and every spare minute since has seen my nose bur­ied in it.

It’s a book that emphas­ises the dire situ­ation the world finds itself in but is then both inspir­a­tional and prac­tical in chart­ing a path for­ward. From the introduction:

If we face an unpre­ced­en­ted plan­et­ary crisis, we also find ourselves in a moment of innov­a­tion unlike any that has come before… Humanity’s fate rests on the out­come of the race between prob­lem solv­ers and the prob­lems them­selves. The world is get­ting bet­ter – we just have to make sure it gets bet­ter faster than it gets worse.

Tech­no­logy, of course, is not the only solu­tion (des­pite the head in the sand asser­tion by some that it is). But it is a part of the solu­tion as is help­ing and cajol­ing people, organ­isa­tions and gov­ern­ments to change their beha­viours. Com­mu­nic­a­tions pro­fes­sion­als have a key role to play, as I put in an earlier post, this is the kind of task we’re well equipped to take on.

The book is 600 or so pages which, as I was read­ing through, made me think: that’s a lot of dead tree. In the back, how­ever, is a break­down of how they’ve kept the dam­age to a min­imum. Here’s one of the labels:

They have also pur­chased wind power cred­its equi­val­ent to the amount of elec­tri­city used to pro­duce the book. I won­der what would hap­pen if all prin­ted mater­ial had to carry the same declaration.

As I say, it’s a great book which should be on everyone’s book­shelf. You can buy yours here.

When Chev­ro­let jumped into con­sumer gen­er­ated media with its ‘build your own Tahoe ad’ there was a col­lect­ive gasp of ‘you don’t wanna do that’ from the inter­net. And yes, pretty soon people put their satir­ical skills to work with a series of ads high­light­ing the Tahoe’s woe­ful green cre­den­tials and the gen­eral per­ceived stu­pid­ity of any­one con­sid­er­ing buy­ing one. As of right now, you can see over 70 of these on You­Tube (click here for a look). And, as is the norm, once the ini­tial furore died down, it all went quiet.

Well, Wired has fol­lowed up on the story to see how well (or not) the cam­paign actu­ally worked.

As it turns out, not badly at all.

BY ANY OBJECTIVE MEASURE, the Tahoe Appren­tice cam­paign has to be judged a suc­cess. The micros­ite attrac­ted 629,000 vis­it­ors by the time the con­test win­ner, Michael Thrams from nearby Ann Arbor, was announced at the end of April. On aver­age, those vis­it­ors spent more than nine minutes on the site, and nearly two-thirds of them went on to visit Chevy.com; for three weeks run­ning, Chevyapprentice.com funneled more people to the Chevy site than either Google or Yahoo did. Once there, many reques­ted info or left a cookie trail to deal­ers’ sites.

I guess the kind of people who are con­sid­er­ing buy­ing a Tahoe really won’t be that wor­ried about its eco-credentials. They are not mak­ing a decision between a Tahoe and a Prius after all but prob­ably between Chevy’s option and an even worse gas guzz­ler from another man­u­fac­turer. In that con­text, the dif­fer­ence between a brand that helps them cel­eb­rate their decision and oth­ers who remain detached is pretty clear. It’s just a shame that it’s work­ing to put yet more CO2 into the air.