Canadian Drink Driving Campaign

Canadian PSA's for Drinking and Driving. Responsible drinking messages are becoming more prevalent in Canada; especially over the holiday season.

This was from Paul in Toronto.

Trends predictions for 2007

Thanks to Russell Davies and PSFK for this:

"2007 will see the rise of brand abstinence. A mix of ethical consumerism and brand disappointment will see a growth in apathy held by some consumers when it comes to new product purchases.

For corporations, at best this will result in a shift towards products that offer these consumers a guilt free purchase, at worse, these consumers will turn to brand abstinence and recycle, re-craft, maintain and retain products they of their peers own."

To read the rest of PSFK's predictions click here.

One Green Bottle

Grolsch launches their new bottle with a commercial based on the One Red Paper Clip idea. I really enjoy when he trades two pink poodles for a guys girl friend.

2007 - The Year of the Purple Cow

“Don’t be afraid of the Purple Cow,” is marketing guru Seth Godin’s latest message in his book Purple Cow: Transform your Business by being Remarkable.

In a world full of boring, usual, same-old-same-old brown cows, the Purple Cow is remarkable. It’s a trailblazer. It stands out. Godin describes his work as:

". . . a manifesto for marketers who want to make a difference at their company by helping create products and services that are worth marketing in the first place. It is a plea for originality, for passion, guts, and daring. Not just because going through life with passion and guts beats the alternative (which it does), but also because it's the only way to be successful. Today, the one sure way to fail is to be boring. Your one chance for success is to be remarkable."

Godin hopes to change the rules of the marketing game. No longer should companies be creating safe products hoping that great marketing will do the job of selling them. They should be creating remarkable products which the right people will actively seek out. If an offering isn’t remarkable then it simply becomes invisible and fails.

In order to test his theories, Godin applied them to the marketing of his own book:

He chose to sell what people were buying by acknowledging that a group of people existed who took an interest in new marketing ideas.

He focussed his efforts on early adopters and ‘Sneezers’ – people who spread ideas. He published an article in Fast Company magazine summarising his theories and advertising 5,000 free copies of the book. Subscribers had only to cover the $5 postage and handling cost.

He made the product remarkable and attention-grabbing – the book came packaged in a milk carton.

He made the product easy to spread. Initially you could not purchase a single copy of the book; it had to be bought in packs of 12, making one copy for the buyer to keep for himself and 11 for him to dish out to his friends or colleagues.

He let the book make its own way to the mass market rather than thrust it upon them, working on the principle that designing anything for the masses is misguided given that it’s the people on the fringes who actually buy stuff.

He makes it sound so easy: small risks, focussed audiences, limited mass marketing. Maybe it is. Let’s make 2007 the year of the Purple Cow and put the daring, the gutsy, the original and the remarkable at the centre of our thinking.

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/

For some examples of companies which have succeeded in standing out from the herd, follow the link below:

http://www.fastcompany.com/online/67/purplecow.html

Heineken Greenspace

From Most Contagious 2006:

"Although it launched at the end of 2005, Heineken’s Greenspace is the event that continues to give into 2006. The launch event was the culmination of an urban regeneration project of disused warehouses undertaken by Heineken in Valencia, Spain, overseen by creativedirectors Adrian Caddy and Mike Kettles. Following the festival Greenspace was handed back to the city and the space has continued to play host to concerts and is available for locals to develop creative ideas, supporting art, design and film. Further events in the series are planned. Walter Drenth, Heineken’s Global Marketing Communications Manager, believes Greenspace has ‘delivered beyond expectations’ with their aim for a sustainable space for social interaction. Rem Koolhaas who helped launch the project sees it as ‘fresh, really representing corporate generosity’. Keep an eye on this fusion of CSR and patronage of the arts. Heineken, after all, is a brand that now eschews TV advertising altogether in the UK."

See below for an example of a youtube video of Marsha in concert on youtube. See how Heineken is in the background the whole time.



It's a good example of an alcohol brand pushing it's CSR credentials and of owning a colour - as Grolsch do with the Green Light District.

Cacique

From Most Contagious 2006:

"We’ve been extremely taken with Diageo’s latest campaign for Cacique rum, developed in conjunction with Senora Rushmore and digital agency Double You, which captured the current resurgence of animated film noir. Cacique’s South American Indian icon (‘Cacique’ meaning ‘tribal chief’ in Spanish), was reinvented as an edgy, nocturnal character leading drinkers into ‘the mystery of the night’. A website urging users to ‘escucha la llamada’ (‘listen to the call’) hosts a gorgeous animated short incorporating black and white imagery, comic book characters, mistaken identity …what more could you ask for? Ladies, put on your spiky stilettos, fellas, slip into those lean pinstripes. The mysterious Indian awaits."

Users are encouraged to give their mobile details to the Red Indian who may call you up with a free trip to Hong Kong.



Visit http://www.escuchalallamada.com/ to take a look.

Venice Project

From BoingBoing:

"What is the Venice Project? Skype co-founders Janus Friis and Niklas Zennström built it with some of that $2.6 billion from selling Skype to eBay. Friis explains on his blog:

It’s simple, really — we are trying to bring together the best of TV with the best of the Internet. We think TV is one of the most powerful, engaging mass medias of all time. People love TV, but they also hate TV. They love the (sometimes…) amazing storytelling, the richness, the quality itself. But they hate the linearness, the lack of choice, the lack of basic things like being able to search. And wholly missing is everything that we are now accustomed to from the Internet: tagging, recommendations, choice, and so on… TV is 507 channels and nothing on and we want to help change that!"

This from Engadget is also very informative:

"The system is intended for use by copyright-holding content owners who no doubt intend to advertise on this new network; their video data is encrypted so the P2P here isn't the same kind of P2P you might be thinking of. Friis apparently demonstrated full quality full motion video to the FT at a local Starbucks -- where all new internet projects shown off before launch -- but there's no way of knowing how real world use will clog the proverbial tubes; right now P2P video TV might not work the smoothest considering that no matter what upstream bandwidth will never equal the downstream bandwidth necessary to sustain millions of viewers, but that will begin to change in the coming years."

Move over youtube? Possibly. We'll look back at the end of the year and think how small, short and poor quality youtube videos are and come to expect TV quality footage on our computers with high quality content.

To become a beta tester visit the Venice Project blog here.