The 50 million Latinos in the United States have advertisers’ attention. This morning the NYT blogged about the sharp increase at this year’s upfront presentations in the number of broadcast networks and cable channels that aim their programming at Latino viewers.
There were nearly twice as many presentations by Spanish language networks as there were last year. We were there to see our client Univision present. They pulled out all the stops with great info, dancing, and even an appearance from Shakira.
Some key stats we picked up at the presentation, feel free to RT:
This week, in his WSJ column, Ralph Gardner reckons with himself about why it’s taken him so long to get on Twitter and what motivates some of his younger reporter colleagues to tweet in earnest. “I appreciate there’s an ulterior motive here, though I can’t say I fully subscribe. It’s about growing the brand.”
Gardner admits slowly and begrudgingly that Twitter is useful. No doubt, the people and organizations who are active on social media truly do add viewers, readers, followers, etc. by extending their reach on platforms like Facebook and Twitter. The point he seems to miss is that today’s media environment is a two-way street, where we’re all the source of each other’s truth. As everyone from brands and celebrities to consumers and Occupy protesters broadcast their opinions on Twitter, they are also taking in a gigantic stream of inputs from the people and groups they follow.
These new vehicles of communication and collaboration have created a host of new uses and users for brands to think about when they consider their offer and outreach. We can think of the traditional “UX” as a metaphor for brand interactions today, with “users” describing anyone who interacts with a company or personality through digital media or technology. In a journalist like Gardener’s case, you could use social media to source topics for future columns, learn about your audience’s interests, and end the week with a chat about the column you’ve produced.
In his book Users, Not Consumers: Who Really Determines The Success of Your Business, Aaron Shapiro, CEO of HUGE Inc wrote that users can sometimes be “more intimate with and influential on a company than anyone who has completed a purchase.” It takes Ralph Gardner a little longer to get to a similar conclusion, but he eventually says it: “It’s all about establishing your presence in the ether.”
Indeed, just being there (and being accessible to users of all sorts) is an important half of the battle. And that applies for both people and brands.
Last week at Wolff Olins New York we held an internal workshop to talk to our own strategists, designers and account managers about how they can develop their own personal online brands. Some were worried that they didn’t have much to say—nothing worthwhile that could be eloquently (or forcibly) expressed in 140 characters. While it’s always important to contribute smart things, develop a unique point of view, and create and curate content that communicates what you’re all about, our workshop stressed a more fundamental point: The first important move with social media is to just be there.
Being there lets you hear what people are saying. It makes you discoverable and accessible to a host of different users. And once you’re there, listening to others helps you figure out what you have to add.
Born in Brazil and now native to the digital space, Ale Lariu considers herself a “geeky jungle kid.” We see her more as a spunky guru for creatives in digital, marketing and advertising. Our friends at Fast Company would certainly agree; they chose her as #29 of the 100 most creative people in business in 2010, topping Tom Ford, Jamie Oliver and the founders of FourSquare.
Among her other impressive credentials, Lariu was once the SVP, Creative Director at McCann Erickson. While she enjoyed the thrills of agency life, she told us at a recent Share in our NY office that she had a stronger desire to live a “free range” existence. “I just thought, well, if technology and co-creation has allowed us to do all these things, why don’t we take advantage of them? Why are we still working in the same way?”
She left McCann to cofound SheSays, a now award-winning global creative network for women. Her goal is the engagement, education and advancement of all creative people in digital marketing and advertising, but her focus is on women.
The newest venture out of SheSays is Shout, a radical and innovative way for women in digital advertising to work collaboratively and be compensated for it. Think of an online community where everyone is encouraged to give creative input towards a client’s brief and then gets rewarded for their contribution, whether their direction is chosen or not.
Shout embodies all of Lariu’s ideas about cage-free working, or what Wolff Olins usually dubs being boundaryless. People work when and where they want, with whomever they choose to. The profit is shared, the culture is collaborative, the rewards are both financial and non-financial. A lot of the Shout community contributes part time or freelance, Lariu told us, as a sort of supplemental income.
“One insight I had when putting this together was that there are so many clever people out there. For instance, I bet I’d like to work with all of you guys. But when I was tied to one agency I couldn’t.” Once you’re part of the network, Shout has a LinkedIn-like algorithm that introduces you to people with complementing interests and skills, who you might want to work with.
At the same time, Lariu says clients are into it because of its social aspect. “On the public layer, people are always commenting on the work as it’s happening. It’s like real-time PR for them.”
Shout also collaborates with its sister company, SheSays, to educate its members through events, courses, career management and mentorship. To learn more, get involved, or take classes at these two ventures, visit http://weareshesays.com/ and http://www.everybodyshout.com/.
SHARE is a weekly show & tell at Wolff Olins NY. Check out previous Shares HERE.
Did a smart car company in Argentina just create the first Twitter-based commercial?
But for the ASCII, it’s a classic setup for a car commercial—a little smart car takes the scenic route from city to country and back, eventually maneuvering into a tight parking space between two large vehicles, showing off its size.
In this case though, 456 Tweets by the company Smart Argentina (@SmartArg) tell the story. Viewed as series of Tweets, the piece is a kind of low-fi parallax scroll, or a flipbook where each Tweet is a re-Tweetable “page” that “moves” the car forward.
While the handle Tweets in Spanish, the only relevant language here is visual. Clever use of the Twitter machine. Seen anything else like this? Direct us to it if you have!
You know the little kick of dopamine you get whenever your phone buzzes with a new text message? Imagine what it would be like if you were the thing buzzing. In the future, a magnetic marking on your arm, stomach, finger or fingernail might be able to alert you to a new text message, call, calendar alert or low battery warning.
According to Digital Spy, Nokia is filing a patent for a new “vibrating magnetic tattoo” that will do just that—an interesting project among a growing number of investigations into “haptic” (or touch) feedback in mobile devices.
Their patent application details stamping or spraying “ferromagnetic” material onto your skin and then linking it to your phone. Based on your phone’s commands, the material would vibrate with “one short pulse, multiple short pulses, few long pulses… strong pulses, weak pulses and so on,” according to the filing.
Cambridge-based Zoran Radivojevic and Piers Andrew are the inventors, along with Finland-based Jarkko Saunamaki and Tapani Jokinen.
There’s obvious value in creating #useful experiences that enrich customers’ lives, and being the first in your sector to do it. But is this truly useful? Similarly to the “Face Unlock” system in Google’s latest Android operating system, your magnet tattoo could be used as an identity check, like a magnetic fingerprint. In a very noisy place, where you risk not hearing your phone, this technology would certainly make you aware of it. In quiet places, it could also be less disturbing than the sound of your phone vibrating.
Of course, once you tell your friends about your new magnetic tattoo, ignoring their calls will become all the more incriminating.
What do you think? A #useful innovation or an uncomfortable intrusion?
The Washington Post recently got its hands on captured documents from Osama bin Laden’s compound that will be publicly released shortly. It reports that near the end, bin Laden was apparently obsessed with “rebranding” al-Qaeda.
Bin Laden’s biggest concern was al-Qaeda’s media image among Muslims. He worried that it was so tarnished that, in a draft letter probably intended for [Atiyah Abd al-Rahman], he argued that the organization should find a new name.
The al-Qaeda brand had become a problem, Bin Laden explained, because Obama administration officials “have largely stopped using the phrase ‘the war on terror’ in the context of not wanting to provoke Muslims,” and instead promoted a war against al-Qaeda. The organization’s full name was “Qaeda al-Jihad,” bin Laden noted, but in its shorthand version, “this name reduces the feeling of Muslims that we belong to them.” He proposed 10 alternatives “that would not easily be shortened to a word that does not represent us.” His first recommendation was “Taifat al-tawhid wal-jihad,” or Monotheism and Jihad Group.
Fascinating, but someone should have told him that brand is about what you stand for, not just your name.
Image via Al-Jazeera hat tip to Kevin Drum of Mother Jones
Once a goalpost for aspirational middle class bookcases everywhere, the Encylcopedia Britannica will soon cease to exist in print.
Being useful to customers is one of the most important requirements for any successful venture today. And while Britannica sales have slipped in the last 10 years, Wikipedia, the non-profit experiment in crowd-sourcing authority, has proved itself increasingly useful (even among academics and scholars). The shift reflects what people actually need in an increasingly collaborative world, where reality has to be continuously defined and updated from multiple points of view.
In an interview with the New York Times Media Decoder blog, Jorge Cauz, president of Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc., said “It’s a rite of passage in this new era…Some people will feel sad about it and nostalgic about it. But we have a better tool now. The Web site is continuously updated, it’s much more expansive and it has multimedia.”
About half a million households still pay a $70 annual fee for an online subscription to Britannica. 15% of the company’s revenue comes from those subscriptions and about 85% comes from selling curriculum products to schools. Selling print copies now accounts for less than 1%.
Sales of the print sets peaked in 1990, when 120,000 sets were sold in America. But by 2010, that figure had dropped to only 8,000 sets sold! It makes a lot of sense for Britannica to now shift its focus to educational curriculum for schools (to best fit their resources to the wants of the world).
While Britannica changes its course, there’s still a public affection tied to the 244 year-old brand that 11 years of Wikipedia hasn’t fully squashed. Perhaps 2012 will be another record sales year, as nostalgics jump to purchase Britannica’s last-ever print copies.
Thank you PSFK and The Daily Beast for pointing us to two new currencies we hadn’t heard of. One is called the “Nanto” and the other you might recognize from your laundry room.
No Money? Make Your Own
A French city called Nantes, population 300,000, will soon introduce its own virtual currency to complement the euro and encourage trade between its small local businesses. By next year, participating businesses will be able to pay or be paid in something called “Nanto.”
Accelerated by the financial crisis, Europe has seen a trend of small businesses looking to make more cashless exchanges. The WIR cooperative bank in Basel, Switzerland is already using a similar cashless payment system, but this is the first time a large European city is trying the experiment.
Tide laundry detergent has become the item to steal. According to reports in The Daily, NPR, and The Daily Beast, Tide’s recently become a major target for thieves from New York to Oregon, who are using it as a type of street currency because of its steadily high retail price. According to Planet Money, Tide’s street re-sale is anywhere from $5-$10 a bottle. It’s unclear if people are trading it for other goods, as well as cash.
While it’s hard to find hard data on this “trend,” there are loads of good anecdotes on the Web. For instance, one man in Minnesota stole $25,000 in Tide over 15 months before getting caught last year. It’s apparently enough of a problem that CVS is looking into special security measures to keep Tide on the shelf.
So why Tide and not Wisk or Seventh Generation? According to The Daily it’s all about brand recognition, both in the store and on the street. “Police say it’s simply because the Procter & Gamble detergent is the most popular and, with its Day-Glo orange logo, most recognizable of brands.”
It’s digital advertising’s 18th birthday and Google Creative Lab is celebrating with Project Re: Brief, an experiment Google put together to “re-imagine what advertising can be and push the boundaries of how creative ideas and our technology can work hand in hand.”
The project revisits four classic American commercials and interviews the old school creatives who made them, asking them to re-imagine their work for today’s multi-platform audiences.
In the trailer above, Amil Gargano (Volvo- “Drive it like you hate it”), Paula Green (Avis “We try harder”), Howie Cohen and Bob Pasqualina (Alka-Seltzer “I can’t believe I ate the whole thing”), and Harvey Gabor (Coca-Cola “Hilltop”) admit that the enormous technological shifts in the way people communicate today have brought them out of their comfort zones.
The result is a collection of modern day ad makeovers in which creatives get to rethink their best work and Google gets to show off its own technology. Coke’s classic “Hilltop” featuring the song “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing,” becomes a mobile display adthrough which viewers can send and receive messages in multiple languages and (literally buy and send a Coke) to people all over the world.
Volvo’s 1962 “Drive it Like You Hate It”, which offered that driving the car had therapeutic advantages “cheaper than psychiatry,” is “translated” through the story of Volvo owner Irv Gordon, a man who’s put almost 3 million miles on his 1966 Volvo P1800S. With Google+ and Google Maps, the new experience invites viewers to become a part of Irv’s travels in real-time as he counts down to the 3-million-mile mark.
Other reimagined commercials are forthcoming. The project will culminate in a documentary this spring, directed by Doug Pray, and the same team who joined him to make the Emmy-Award-winning film and PBS hit “Art & Copy.”
Knight-Mozilla OpenNews is a partnership aimed at driving open source innovation in news. When it started in the spring of 2011 it had an initial set of news partners that included the BBC, the Guardian, Zeit Online, the Boston Globe and Al Jazeera English. This morning I read that The New York Times, ProPublica, Speiegel Online, and Argentina’s La Nacion will also be joining.
It’s encouraging news for publishing, an industry this blog has repeatedly said needs its major players to embrace experimentation and co-creation if it’s going to develop new ideas for news presentation, delivery, and revenue-generation.
The formal announcement will be made at SXSW tomorrow, alongside a series of exhibits showcasing how open source projects are leading innovation in news, in areas like real-time visualizations, augmented video, data-journalism and HTML5 web tools.
One of OpenNews’s ambitions is to build bridges between journalists and hackers. It awards 8 fellowships annually and “embeds” each fellow at partner organizations, where they spend a year writing code in collaboration with reporters and newsroom developers. It’s fun, for example, to think about OpenNews fellow Cole Gillespie, a JavaScript developer born in the North Carolina Appalachians, becoming intimately familiar with the daily ebb and flow of Germany’s Zeit.
For participating newspapers, the project is an opportunity to try a different approach and expand their ecosystems (#boundaryless). For designers, developers and content creators, it’s about creating and supporting a community where the web is studied as it gets made. Since its creation, other groups like Hacks/Hackers have emerged that share a similar goal.
According to OpenNews’s site, they’ll soon be sponsoring “hackdays” where people can write code that helps to solve real-world journalistic problems. They’re also working on a site called “Source,” where free case studies, walkthroughs, tutorials, and code snippets will be available. We’ll keep an eye out for this and write about it when it exists.
Hispanic Americans are the 14th largest consumer economy in the world. 1 trillion dollars a year. #univision
1 in 3 Hispanics in America are millennials. #youthculture. #univision upfront.
Brands should be spending 10-15% of media buy on Hispanic market. #univision upfront.
