Pre-2008 trend season has started.

As every year around this time, all sorts of sites start to publish trends. Along the many lists that get published (and some of which I will subsequently link to), there is one selfproclaimed „Uber“-List, an aggregation of links of the main sites with trends. These trends do not only concern marketing and advertising, but also technology and internet trends.
It does sound a little like a link bait, but that’s fine for me as long as that lists gets updated frequently.

Live online banner creation for a news portal.

This is a rather interesting online advertising approach from Norway:

One of Norways largest online news sources wanted to promote their online services. The idea: several copywriters comment live on the articles on the news portal, during the day and evening hours.

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Within around 150 hours, more than 1,000 unique ads have been created this way. Enjoyable idea, and if the live comments by the copywriters were any good, people might have actually surfed the portal for quite some time just to read the ads…

4 types of communities

At the Church of the customer Blog, there is an approach of how to categorize communities, which I found quite interesting. The build a square, one axis being size, the other being devotion. Most communities can be aligned along these axes:

  • Little Devotion, little in size: Clique, like a small world. (Anyone who can invite me?)
  • Little in size, but high in devotion: Cult, like Maker’s Mark Ambassadors. (Never heard of them!)
  • Low in devotion but large in size: Network, like LinkedIn or Xing.
  • Large in size and high in devotion: Nation, like Netroots Nation. (Never heard of them either!)

So what does that tell us? Size and devotion are the two main things affecting any community. Question is, whether it is possible to increase both at the same time, or if it is better to focus on one at a time?

Heineken Advergame: Google Maps with real life geo tracking.

Heineken in the Netherlands has launched a new advergame which looks interesting. The game asks playes to spot and track the delivery men of Heineken around the Netherlands and find out what their next stop will be. Whoever guesses correctly first, gets the chance to win a Nokia phone. So in a way, this game play is not that complicated or creative.

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What I admire, is something completely different: Apparantly, these delivery men are tracked in real time with real journey data, during the regular working hours. And this is remarkable. I have also worked for clients with a huge fleet of delivery vehicles and I do appreciate the fact that Heineken managed to include their drivers into this game. Creatives usually come up easily with lots of brilliant ideas how to connect the mobile workforce of a client with a webpage via all sorts of mobile devices like phones or GPS tracking devices. But organisational reality most of the time kills these ideas.

So this won’t have been easy to push through the internal, most likely rather political, approval and commitment chain in order to get the buy in of all the different departments (marketing, distribution, logistics, etc.). Kudos, I like that.

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