Category: Brand

  • Inside Intel

    A video that was shared yeterday on Facebook by a friend got me to check out Intel’s latest global campaign – Sponsors of Tomorrow. I then remembered that a few days back I’d seen a half jacket (a page takeover on pages 1, 2) in TOI, which talked about the same thing though it seemed a cobranded effort with TOI called Innovators of tomorrow. [Disclosure: I work for the Times Group.]

    The campaign videos on YouTube were quite interesting. In addition to the ‘Rock star’ and ‘Oops’ TVCs, there are also videos of real employees at intel (is that the same Ajay Bhatt referred to in the Rock star video?) and an interactive ‘In the future i want..‘ which featured random people interviewed at the Times Square, and billboards which displayed these ‘ideas’. I was a bit intrigued by the campaign, and a Google search took me to the press kit and the official site.

    While the tagline is ‘Sponsors of tomorrow’, the campaign’s communication strategy seems to be two pronged – one, to expand on the line, and show what happens behind the scenes and how through innovation, they aim to be the ‘sponsors of tomorrow’, and two, to promote the people behind the technology. What got me intrigued was the execution.

    The single line take outs from the videos were – “Our big ideas aren’t like your big ideas”, “Our rock stars aren’t like your rock stars”. While the videos are indeed funny and convey the perspective clearly,  I wonder if those are the kind of statements, that will really inspire people to send in ideas. From the Innovators of Tomorrow effort and the website, there seems to be an agenda of interactivity, since it calls for ideas.

    On innovation and technology. Somewhere, hidden in the press release, I saw a sentence that amounted to “Its not technology, its what technology can do for them that’s important to people”. It’d have been great to see Intel expand on this and show consumers what Intel technology has made possible and what it is attempting to make possible. The global site wasn’t very impressive. “You on tomorrow” is the interactivity effort there and I promptly filled up “in the future I want__________” with “websites that load faster” and that wasn’t being frivolous. Maybe I’m reading too much science fiction, but even the 2128 Delhi video wasn’t very futuristic – holography and body scan after 19 years isn’t exactly the kind of advancement a bleeding edge  technology giant like Intel should limit its imagination to, IMHO.

    People behind the technology. Funny videos and self deprecating humour is great, the point is made. But if they wanted to showcase the people behind the efforts, this seems to be a better thing to have promoted – employee blogs. (the first comment is worth a read) And better ways using different platforms to get the people working on the technology to share how the technology they work on helps improve consumer experiences, lifestyles etc. That might generate a little more involvement than ads showing how Intel’s rock stars are different, and interactive games that deal with suiting up an engineer!! As a consumer this just made Intel geekier for me. What happens inside Intel is  definitely important, however, what it does to life outside could’ve been a more effective communication from an interactivity perspective. What do you think?

    until next time, I don’t think Intel will sponsor tomorrow’s posts 😉

    The views expressed here are solely mine, that really should go without saying. But we live in an evil world. 🙂

  • Zoozoology..and more

    The jury is still out (and perhaps permanently so) on who actually won the IPL – the fake IPL player or the Zoozoos. Both massively popular, they even have conspiracy theories built around them – the identity in case of  the former and the inspiration(cached) in case of the latter. There is even a minority who claim that actually the Deccan Chargers won, but that really isn’t relevant. 😉

    I thought the Zoozoos were adorable. The usage of Mallu food terminology in the International Roaming ad added to the fervour. I remember starting at least 2-3 conversation threads on Facebook and Twitter, the ‘people behind the zoozoos’ image i shared on Twitpic got more than 250 clicks, and I saw quite a number of online and mainstream articles on them. Yes, there were many real conversations as well across age bands. There is no doubt in my mind on the amount of buzz that was created.

    As per the afaqs article, the Vodafone brief seemed to be very clear – increase the awareness of VAS services among new acquisitions in a manner that would really stand out.  A small number of people I spoke to managed to remember the VAS services associated with each ad. I felt that the lateral interpretation of the services, or rather the rendition of that, made me try to connect before the ad ended, so it worked for me.  I even started seeing them in unrelated contexts. But a lot of people just remembered the zoozoos. Just like they remembered the pug. Now the association betweenthe Zoozoos and Vodafone would be established easily, I think, since the competition was Madhavan and Vidya Balan.

    But then, there are these little things that happen outside advertising and in the consumer experience space. Like the ‘Hutch’ that appears as the network on my phone screen. Last week, I got this call from a Vodafone customer care executive, who informed me that I could pay my bill by ECS, and that was more convenient than my current way of paying by cash. Nice, but the only snag was, I’d been using ECS for more than 3 years now. I now wonder how my billing happens smoothly.

    All of this made me think about two things. One, whether brands are thinking about segmenting their existing and potential user base, and then further evolving strategies and communication basis this. So, while the Zoozoos were extremely entertaining and informative, I really wondered about relevance. Did the Zoozoos change my perception of Vodafone? Would there have been a difference if Airtel or Reliance brought out the Zoozoos? Not just to me, who is often irritated by the Vodafone service (like many others in Bangalore) thanks to coverage and call drops, but other user segments as well.  Is this way of communication just a function of the media vehicles that are in use now, which allow very limited ways of segmentation? Will the internet and mobile really change this thinking?

    Two, from a slightly larger perspective, will buzz marketing become an end in itself? Somewhat like the trending topics on twitter, which earlier gave an indication of what the ‘happening’ conversations on Twitter were, but now are just self fulfilling memes. The Twitter reference indicates unhappiness but the original query is in all earnestness. Buzz marketing with no trackback to the brand strategy? Is this more tempting when we’re dealing with a real time way of connecting and communicating? How does this stack up against building brand equity over large timeframes? Does it matter anymore? Or is a positive history of buzz marketing sufficient? In the case of Vodafone, they succeeded in creating so much buzz that editorial space in mainstream dailies were devoting space to them. Online, there were FB groups and Twitter mentions and posts after posts. I could write about engagement and conversation in social media, but where does all that lead to? Where do the Zoozoos go from here? Do they continue to be brand mascots, or are they good enough only for a buzz? Good enough to increase TOM and therefore affect sales in a tactical way?  So, is frequent buzz marketing + good consumer experience = brand strategy? Meanwhile, if the buzz has been generated, can we put up a few more towers and spruce up the data centre?

    until next time, omnibuzz

  • What’s on TV? The Internet

    The confluence of web and TV has been a topic of discussion for quite sometime now. The initial version of Web TV- with a set top box and keyboard, didn’t work out well, but that hasn’t stopped the next generation from making attempts, and with all the components required for access built into the TV now, things are showing some promise.

    Yahoo’s TV widgets, with Flickr, news, finance etc integrated onscreen in Samsung TVs had created quite a stir at the CES 2009 event earlier this year. Yahoo and Intel have also co-developed a range of products that lets users access pages and tools while watching a program – around 20 widgets (scaled down versions) from the NYT to MySpace and Twitter. Yahoo will also release a toolkit for developers to make new content.Yahoo is not the only player here. Netflix has tied up with LG for a new line of broadband high-def TVs with Netflix built in to it. More on that here.  Verismo Networks has a PoD device – VuNow that can stream web content onto your TV without a PC or connections. (via Bangalore Inc) On another front, there are gaming consoles and DVD players etc with built in broadband access abilities.

    Meanwhile, the convergence is happening on the reverse direction too. With the net becoming a competition to TV channels as a source of entertainment, the reverse is also happening as a lot of television content is now finding its way into the net, legally. 🙂 Comcast, Time Warner Cable etc are now entering the fray with a two fold objective – to take more content online, and make the TV experience more web like. Closer to home, Star TV had tied up with nautanki.tv earlier this year to watch shows online. A couple of months back, the Times Audience Network added Big Adda as a video content partner. More about that here. Hmm, Bigflix + Big Adda?

    It is also interesting to see web based entities going beyond their current territories. Portals, like Sulekha creating Web TV. Internet video site Hulu getting into social networking. Will expand on that in a bit.

    Meanwhile, television content (shows) have started using social media to add a layer to their interactivity. MTV recently announced plans to launch a show that will also include real-time conversations taken from Facebook and Twitter, allowing users to interact with the show as it airs.  Users will be able to upload videos (their favourites and even self generated ones) through a RockYou application.(via TC) Mad Men’s tryst with Twitter, though fan generated is also a case study.

    An interesting concept I came across on TC – Delivery Agent, which helps TV networks make use of their content by being an online marketplace for products and merchandise that are seen on television shows. It pays the network a royalty for this. According to the TC article, they have gone step further by checking the index of products scheduled to appear on the show, before the show airs, and then approach the brands concerned to buy an ad package. It seems like a win-win-win concept. With even a partially enabled web on TV, this concept could be easily integrated and made into real time purchases. Absolutely measurable for brands. Imagine saans – bahu saris, wedding costumes and even office and casual wear that can be bought online. The Jassi look, or the more recent Ballika Vadhu look, anyone? 😉

    TVLoop, which started out as a Facebook app that allowed users to have view TV show episodes on their profile , has now gotten itself a website of its own.If you comment on an episode of the show on TVLoop.com, TVLoop users on Facebook or any other social network can reply directly from their respective site. (via Mashable) The Hulu social network I mentioned earlier encourages Hulu users to connect with one another and share their video preferences. The new features are expected to help Hulu better track viewing preferences, which helps further target ads. It also helps monitor conversations around videos and therefore provides more data on viewer behaviour. In both cases, the key take out is collective feedback – on content, ads served etc. From tweaking storylines and characters to embedding products better, having conversations around them and making purchase decisions easier, there is tremendous potential.

    Web on TV, TV on web, web TV and social networking, TV and social networking, at the end of it, the point is about content on demand- across platforms, a rapid increase in interactivity, and the potential to increase the relevance of a product/service to consumers and encourage purchase almost instantly.  In an era when vanilla product placements are becoming increasingly unpopular with viewers, this content integration across platforms could be the kind of tonic that’s needed for a system that currently thrives on sponsored (and usually non related, random) advertising and  insipid product placements. From the other side, the web’s current major advertising mechanism – contextual advertising just got more content to play with, and this could spawn an entire new way of advertising.

    As for me, I’m waiting for the time when I can watch the YouTube videos, Flickr photos and Twitter updates and the TV news on the same screen, and then real time reality TV, when I use my Twitter handle to eliminate participants and generally decide their fate 😉

    until next time, users, from publishers on the web to broadcast producers

  • What do you recommend?

    One feature that helps add weight (generally) to a LinkedIn Profile is ‘Recommendations’. I’m not getting into debates on how it’s used etc, that’s a subjective thing, but someone else acknowledging that the concerned person has certain skills does help. Facebook recommends friends, Twitter recommends users to follow. These are three layers – in LinkedIn its a human, in Facebook its an algorithm basis the user’s location, friends etc, and as for Twitter, well, Twitter just decides – no algorithms. But its ok, we recommend links to each other on Twitter. 🙂

    A few activities recently made me think of recommendations. Two from Google and one from Facebook. A TechCrunch article from a few days back states that Google Friend Connect now has a widget that can help publishers know (and display) which parts of their websites their visitors like best. So it helps both parties. I’m guessing it should also help Google figure out a little more data on who reads what where, and therefore some thing that can be used to improve Ad Sense’s effectiveness. 🙂

    One of Google’s services that uses a recommendation mechanism is Google Reader. Google has now added a feature on Reader that lets you know which of your friends are still worth following on Reader, basis your consumption of their shares. I wonder if they’ll utilise this data for new users – eg. if A and B are existing users and C joins the service, will Google use the A’s and B’s data to help C start off? I also think users should have the option of sharing their own trends data with each other, tools can be used to enhance utility – eg. if i know that 90% of my friends are following TC, then I might share less of TC items.

    Meanwhile, RWW thinks that Facebook has to be working on some recommendation technology. With those thumbs up and down signs on ads, I won’t be surprised if Facebook uses that on friends – ‘Manu liked this ad’ (so we’re serving this to you, since you’re his friend) and one more ‘rebellion’.

    Also, from RWW, a related topic, for a larger perspective – Linked Data. “Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web, gave a must-view talk at the TED Conference earlier this year, evangelizing Linked Data. He said that Linked Data was a sea change akin to the invention of the WWW itself.” We are moving towards a web that’s increasingly inter connected.

    That made me think – we’ve reached a state where you can now login to Facebook with your GMail id (not vice versa yet), thanks to its working with OpenID. There are tools on existing social networks (and new services) for location based social networking. Made me think of the potential of a larger recommendation based web experience, that can then spill over on to real life. Recommendations are already being used, even in online commerce.

    But what it actually made me think is about a larger system where say, Facebook, the ad publisher and I will all share revenue if the friend does some positive action on the ad served to him, thanks to me. And of course, Google will then use this info to serve ads to me later, or utilise this on its own Friend Connect + iGoogle+ AdSense . 😉

    Virtually connected lifestreams and real money. The friends of friends of friends connection utilised upto a huge degree (with privacy controls) – its not a real social connection, only an algorithm that would calculate relevance basis the degree of separation and the history of activities. Recommendations of ideas, links, ads, people, jobs, music, books and any kind of products, services etc.. an algorithm boost to ‘serendipity’, if you will 🙂 It even works the other way, so  if you say, log in to a site to check out products, it immediately searches to see if there’s a recommendation it can push at you. Trust automatically plays a key role, and how well past recommendations have worked for you.

    Meanwhile, let’s hope that Google doesn’t make a social algorithm to top the one they’re working on now – to identify which of its employees are likely to quit. A recommendation feature that allows one employee to suggest another would be a Google killer. 😉

    until next time, ahem, some social advertising -I’d recommend watching this space – for a virtual interview 😉

  • ‘What are you doing’ needs an @ reply ? 🙂

    And every so often, we hear about how brands screw up on Facebook and Twitter, these days we even regularly hear how Facebook screws up on itself, and finally we heard about how Twitter ‘screwed up’ on Twitter. In case you missed it, the chronology can be read here.

    And in case you were too lazy to follow the link, Twitter suddenly yanked off an @replies option — a non-default setting to monitor a conversation between someone you follow and someone you don’t, which was only used by 3% of the Twitter universe. In an initial blog post Twitter addressed it from a product design perspective and as a ‘small settings change’. The response from users was whale disproportionate to the 3%, resulting in the trending of #fixreplies . Poor Twitter was actually doing just that, because the 3% users were straining the servers, since each time someone sent an @reply, Twitter had to scan people’s settings to figure out which tweet could appear in whose timeline. The fun part is that we anyway got to hear only half the conversation.

    Let me try to explain quickly A and B follow each other, B follows C, A does not. In the earlier system (where A was one of the 3% who had changed the default option to ‘see all @ replies’) A could see B’s @replies to C. With this change that Twitter made, A stopped seeing it. The ‘fun part’ I mentioned earlier was that A anyway couldn’t see C’s updates, or specifically C’s @replies to B. Anyway, the 3% considered this option as an aid to ‘serendipitous discovery‘ of new people. But I think the trending happened simply because Twitter didn’t tell anyone before they made the change. As one of the 3% (I think, since I clearly remember finding people based on the @replies of those i follow. Shefaly, correct me if I’m wrong, but I think we started following each other thanks to our individual conversations with @dina) I think its a  mistake if the Twitter blog was updated without studying all the aspects, a bigger mistake if Twitter chose not to tell users the real reason.

    Twitter then blogged once more emphasising that the technical aspects, more than the product design flaws, were the chief reason for removing this option. And later, gave a consolation gift which now means that A could now see those updates of B, which does not begin with @C. eg.  wondering what @C is smoking. To me, that solves the problem, because its just a format change in a way. And who knows, maybe users will take more initiative in helping connect people now – a human touch to serendipity. Or more power to ‘recommended users’. Meanwhile, there are at least five of us who can have the pun fests we enjoy, because (only) we all follow a particular id we created only for this. So I’m sure users will figure their lives out without the option. 🙂

    Like Twitter, I too learned a few lessons from this entire exercise. That it is important to be transparent and communicate your complete perspectives, especially if you exist largely because of the community’s efforts. There might be disagreements, but its better to make your stand and reasons clear before the event. That it’s very easy for users to lose the perspective that Twitter is a free service that was never meant to be scaled so much, and a lot of what they’re doing now could be to ensure they can scale up. I’m quite glad that even unbridled mobs have  limits of ‘justice’ they can get. That it’s still an ecosystem about which very few (if any) people have a  clear long term objective about – on one side we complain about noise, and when Twitter removes an option that in many ways added to the noise, we complain about that too. That hashtags are increasingly becoming an end to themselves than a means. That it’s the real time issues that matter – most users wouldn’t know that its quite a difficult task (if not impossible) to get their first tweet, after they cross tweet # 3200.  Another example of how Twitter is so many different things to different people.

    until next time, “And I will cut you off from the peoples..”