Every Christmas every media is filled with commercials and most of them are simply annoying. But there is always one commercial I never mind seeing every Christmas and it is from Coca Cola:
On behalf of Transmit, I wish all our readers a merry Christmas.
According to this article in the Guardian, PR experts question Tiger Wood’s wisdom of hiding away as sponsors ads vanish from TV screens, raising the question that perhaps it is not the smartest move to sit this one out. Tiger is (or was) a very lucrative commodity that is associated with some of the world’s biggest brands like Nike, Gillette and Gatorade. Gatorade decided to revoke their 100 million dollar contract but said it had nothing to do with his personal life. But he isn’t the first athlete to be caught cheating on his wife so he will probably be back.
But how does a celebrity regain his former status as a valuable brand, you might ask? Well I am glad you did. I have sent an idea to his people and I am waiting for a call from them as we speak. Here is my plan:
Nike, Tigers biggest sponsor, should start a contest called “Christmas with Tiger” where you can win all sorts of Nike golf products, but the grand prize would be to spend Christmas with the golf legend himself! Thousands of families will enter the competition for the once in a lifetime chance! Tiger will go along with it to keep Nike happy and besides his wife left him so he has nothing better to do. The media will tear this campaign apart and calling it a pathetic attempt to buy him some goodwill.
But wait, there is a twist! On Christmas Eve they announce the winner of the competition and guess what? It is his wife Elin that comes forward and says she entered the competition and claiming she can’t spend Christmas without him. This will be the beginning of Nikes new campaign “Nike, family first” or “Nike, bringing families closer together”. The campaign will feature families playing golf together and enjoying each other’s company.
Families will buy golf clubs in bulk to be like the happy family in the commercial. Nike will make millions and the public will forgive and forget all about Tigers’ infidelity.
On second thought, maybe he should just wait this one out.
A new Icelandic marketing book is has just been published and is called “Internet marketing” (in Icelandic: Markaðssetning á netinu). The authors are Guðmundur Arnar Guðmundsson who is the head of the Icelandair marketing team in Iceland and Kristján Már Hauksson who founded Nordic eMarketing. The Icelandic internet market is quite interesting; here are some figures that are revealed in the book:
Since Transmit has been developing software that monitors and helps its clients increase the efficiency of their online banners, the authors contacted us about our software, Smelltu (e. Click Capital), and the collaboration resulted in a section in the book on how to use Smelltu to maximize return on investment with online advertisements.
I flipped through the book and I must say it is very accessible to the reader and practical as well. It’s an essential addition to the library of marketing enthusiasts.
From a branding point of view, the book will definitely help you increase the visibility of your brand and that alone justifies the purchase. Check out the books website on www.online.is , It is in Icelandic, so I suggest you learn the language … or not.
It‘s official, the Bank formerly known as Kaupthing is reading my blog. A few months ago I wrote that Kaupthing was in need of a new brand. I also wrote about their internal branding. You might say I am obsessed with the bank but in my defence, it is the bank where I conduct all my banking. The bank took “my” advice and changed its name and is now called Arion Bank. The name is controversial; some people like it while others hate it. The new name comes from Greek mythology and it symbolizes persistency, cooperation and comeback.
Finnur Sveinbjörnsson the CEO of Arion Bank, says that it was about time to make these changes:
“New name, policy and value marks the new beginning with the bank, we are in a certain way saying goodbye to the old and are determined to face the challenges that our community is facing with force. Our goal is to create a solid and trustworthy bank that works with and for the people.”
The cost of the rebranding is said to be very little, they will even use the remainder of the old stationary and use the old debit and credit cards labeled Kaupthing.
This is a huge step towards the future of the bank. Whether you like the name or not, it isn’t connected to Iceland and its’ failed banking system. In a few years we might have a functional banking system once again!
Visa is one of the most well known credit cards in the world. I must admit that their ads always look professional and well thought out. Their newest ad is called “anthem” and it focuses on the winter Olympics in Vancouver 2010 and that more and more people are choosing Visa.
And it’s almost hypnotic when Morgan Freeman narrates;”more people go with Visa”. Yes Mr. Freeman I will get my Visa Immediately! You can check out the campaign on http://goworld.visa.com/
Haagen-Dazs has recently been running a campaign called Help the Honey Bees. This kind of marketing is often called “cause marketing” where big brands team up with charitable causes for mutual profit.
This particular campaign, created by San Francisco’s Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, is about saving honey bees (apparently, bee colonies in the US are declining rapidly).
The company’s target for the first phase of the campaign, which ran in August and September, was 1 million impressions. It generated more than 13 million impressions.
The second phase of the campaign will rely heavily on social media. Haagen-Dazs teamed up with ExperienceProject.com and used their TwitCause site to promote the campaign, offering to pay $1 per tweet generated (up to a maximum of $1000 per day).
Whether the social media phase is as successful as generating impressions as the first phase remains to be seen but if a Twitter storm gathers around the honey bee cause, which seems likely judging by the campaign’s initial success, Haagen-Dazs will have created quite a buzz for the bees – and their brand.
Iceland hit the headlines last week when it was announced that McDonald’s is leaving the country. It has been here since 1993 and the first BigMac was consumed by our former prime minister, David Oddsson. Instead of closing down the shop, they decided to open up a new burger joint called Metro. Apparently, they don’t use any imported ingredients.
The transition actually went smoothly. The week before they closed, they made the announcement that they were closing down McDonald’s and that they would instead rebrand the 3 locations under the name of Metro. A PR firm must have handled this, because it was covered by every media outlet in Iceland! So it’s fair to say that everybody knew about the new brand.
It has been open for 5 days and it looks like the rebranding was a success. I actually tried it today and me and my companions agreed that it looked, smelled and tasted just like McDonald’s! I didn’t think it was possible to take something like bacon burger at McDonald’s and imitate it almost to perfection with domestic ingredients, but obviously I was wrong.
Business Week published an in depth coverage of Interbrand’s recently published list of the most valuable 100 global brands.
Interbrand is of course a U.S. based company, but comparing the geographical distribution of the top 100 brands is interesting nonetheless. The chart below shows how many brands each country has on the top 100 list.
A few interesting points from the list:
Measuring the dollar value of a brand is difficult and some say the Interbrand top 100 list is little more than a parlour game. Whether or not this is true, we recommend checking out Business Week’s interactive table with the results. See if you can find your favourite brand.
Public relations are an art. An art I have been a fan of for a while. But good PR takes a lot of creative work and thinking outside the box. A year ago one of the most brilliant campaigns ever was launched titled “the best job in the world”. This is what the advertising agency Sapient Nitro had to say about the campaign:
“Tourism Queensland asked us to launch a new brand, the Islands of the Great Barrier Reef to Global Experience Seekers across eight key international markets. We drove people to an engaging website, initially through online recruitment listings and display ads. We gathered user-generated content and supported the interactive campaign with a presence on social networking sites.”
Let’s be honest, who wouldn’t want the best job in the world? The job description basically stated that you would be having lots of fun and doing all sorts of activity for 6 months, living in a dream house and all you had to do was clean your pool, feed fishes and have a weekly blog. Understandably this started spreading all over the social media and in the end most of the major media in almost every country in the world covered it! I even thought about applying, but I didn’t have a video camera. But I must say, I looked at few of the videos and the guy who won isn’t as charismatic I would have thought. Somebody might lose their job! check out his website here.
Now the Canary Islands are launching a campaign. Basically 100 Canarian residents between 18 and 35 were chosen to represent the islands as ambassadors. The reason I am writing about this is because these ambassadors are in Iceland at the moment and are basically going up and down our main street and handing out flyers to annoyed pedestrians, inviting them to an interview, and a party that was yesterday, that might get them a free trip to the islands. Online ads have been running for almost a week and everybody is aware of the visit. I hope these “ambassadors” will get to enjoy our country this weekend, because the last few days they haven’t been up to much. I like the gesture that they are giving away a free trip to the Canary Islands, but I think there might be a more refined way to use the ambassadors.
In their defense their target group is young people, but bear in mind that the current visitors of the Canary Islands are the older than 50 (at least in Iceland). And if they plan to change the islands in to an oasis for drunken Europeans their key demographic might evacuate the islands. But on the positive side, every media, web, television, radio etc. have covered the visit. So if the campaign fails, they can always think of the fact that at least they are raising brand awareness.
When the Mozilla foundation bought a two-page advertisement in The New York Times in 2004 for its rising star, the Firefox web browser, popularity was the message they chose to emphasize:
Find out what more than 10 million users from around the world already know: there is an alternative!
After authenticity one of the most effective messages a brand can send is popularity. When choosing between two restaurants, one empty and one crowded, all other things being equal most people choose the crowded restaurant.
One of the oldest web browsers on the market is the Opera web browser. Despite being renown for innovation, it was the first major browser to include tabbed browsing and ad-blocking, Opera has never quite caught on.
One factor which might have contributed to this fact is so-called “agent-spoofing”, when browsers such as Opera pretend to be Internet Explorer.
Opera, a browser that had been around for years prior to Firefox, stayed at around 1% while Firefox soared to more than 20% market share. One reason for this was that lots of Opera users identified themselves as Internet Explorer users. There were no statistics for the blogosphere or media to get excited about, because Opera users were below the radar. And Firefox’s popularity begat more popularity.
Recently, the agent-spoofing feature of Opera has changed and market-share statistics are more accurate. If the feature would have been disabled sooner, who knows, I might have been using Opera to write this post.
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