Bombay Sapphire: Spirit of Exploration FAIL

Interesting story from a disgruntled travel writer called Christine Gilbert, on Almost Fearless...

"The recent Spirit of Exploration Contest held by Bombay Sapphire (the gin in the blue bottle) asked bloggers, like me, to write a single essay about, wait for it, The Spirit of Exploration. At first I thought this was a great idea and even sent it to some of my online contacts encouraging them to submit. But it occurred to me: this was a blog with no traffic, they wanted free content from bloggers, the bloggers would hopefully send their readers to the site and if you won (by getting the most positive votes, ie. you sent the most traffic), you get a jpg icon that says “Bombay Sapphire Winner” to post on your blog. You write, send them traffic and get nothing but a jpg I could have made in Photoshop.



Disappointed, I decided to write a snarky version about the Spirit of Exploration and submitted it as my form of protest. I began,

“The “spirit of exploration” is a carefully designed play on words intended to make you purchase high end liquor.”

I then proceeded to cram the essay full of random observations about travel, listing as many countries as I could and generally being a wise ass. They posted it. Clearly they weren’t even reading these things. If you’re curious, you can read the full version here."

It's a great example of how decently brands should treat people but don't. Whoever was running the Bombay Sapphire blog really should have known better. Because this is quite embarrassing.

It also highlights the delicate way that blogger initiatives need to be executed. There's nothing worse as a blogger than to get some ill thought out, flaky approach from a brand your not really engaged with.

Co-Creation Festival From Tennents Lager

Tennents have come up with a great way of staging a festival... set up a web 2.0 website and let the fans decide how to spend the £150,000 of cash.

Here's a lift from their about page...

"Revolutionise Scotland’s live music scene – artists, locations, venues, ticket prices: you decide.

The Tennent's Mutual is transforming Scotland’s live music landscape by switching influence from the hands of the industry, into the heart of the music community.

By encouraging music lovers to invest its annual music budget, The Tennent’s Mutual is empowering Scotland’s gigging enthusiasts to own and control a new music agenda: for music fans, by music fans.

We’re putting our money where our mouth is: Tennent’s have donated a start-up fund of £150k for 2008, with a view to enabling you to devise and programme a series of live shows in Scotland in October / November this year. And the process starts right now!

All ticket income generated from The Tennent’s Mutual shows 2008 will be reinvested to increase next year’s budget for the project. This ensuing sum will be further fortified by an annual donation from Tennent’s Lager’s music budget. As for how said money is spent – that’s up to you.

The Tennent's Mutual is electrifying the live music landscape. Its scope is vast. And it's in your hands.

Use the left-hand menu bar for the lowdown on getting involved, plus lots more info on The Tennent's Mutual."

What a fresh idea for a festival.

Molson forced to pull 'Canadian Nation' Facebook campaign

Molson have been forced to pull a University targeted Facebook campaign after accusations that it was promoting irresponsible drinking. Think this is a good example of the difficulties of promoting alcohol using social media and UGC.

More here:
http://www.nickburcher.com/2007/11/molson-pulls-canadian-nation-student.html
http://www.theglobeandmail.com

'Pimms Harry' brought to life using social networks

Pimms have been doing something interesting online things around the central character from their TV advertising - Pimms Harry. There is a website at http://www.anyoneforpimms.com/ and there have been various things running on social networks.

There has been the opportunity to befriend Pimms Harry on Facebook and www.myspace.com/pimmsharry lets you join in with him on Myspace (screen grab below).

Good way to extend TV and radio campaigns and clever way of enhancing brand personality.


I expect to see more of this sort of activity as brands understand more about how social networks can be used creatively in support of advertising.

Posted by http://www.nickburcher.com/.

Co Creation is the future

From a fascinating blog called Doing Business in an Expanding Reality:

Second Life: A platform for co-creation

Among the types of studies that may be conducted in Second Life, one area that seems particularly promising to us is that of co-creation: Businesses today are aware that they cannot innovate inside laboratories behind closed doors and that innovation will be successful if it is partly conducted by calling on collective creativity (see the book “Fabriquer le Futur 2” (Creating the Future 2, co-written by Pierre Musso, Laurent Ponthou and Eric Seuillet, who is the president of Fabrique du Futur).

These approaches will develop and are precisely a part of the societal trend of the “Participation generation” described by Thierry Maillet in his latest book “la Génération Participation”. Citizen/consumers are increasingly seeking direct dialogue with the brands and expect them to take into account their proposals.

We believe that Second Life is an ideal platform for this process of co-creation, namely because it allows those who wish to do so to provide their creative input to the brands and to present their designs under the form of 3D prototypes. Prototypes that may then be evaluated by other residents…

To activate this co-creative process, the organisation of a competition is amusing, stimulating and well-adapted to Second Life.

Our first experiments in this direction have been very positive. The first competition we launched, a building competition for a Repères showroom, was initially intended to propose an event for our panellists and to test the principle of competitions. The result is exceptional and I invite you to admire the design, presented in the next two snapshots, by Joshua Culdesac and Piper Pitney on the Repères Second Life island.

You will also find more information on this design and its creators on the Repères Second Life site.

The other competitions we have organised so far, have also been conducted experimentally by our panel, and we have found it more interesting and of greater impact to conduct this work for the benefit of partners who do not necessarily have the means to benefit from our services normally.

We are therefore moving towards two types of co-creation processes in SL:
. Operations for the brands, invoiced according to our usual conditions,
. and, for the purposes of communication and events organisation, joint operations with associations whose projects we support, with a sharing of the costs.

Sauza User Generated Ad

Nice. Not created by Publicis Dialog. But quite fun!

Zooppa

Zooppa is an online community site dedicated to hosting and facilitating online user generated content.

Brands use Zooppa to host their brief and then set the creative community loose on the brief. The results are plentiful; amongst the mound of videos is some really interesting work. Rather than read this why not visit the site itself and see for yourself.

It's great to see someone fill the niche that is facilitating user generated content creatition.