On the Brain Tap series this week, may I introduce you to Jonathan Salem Baskin, president of Baskin Associates Inc., a consultancy that works with clients to make branding and marketing go above the remit of words and images. Jonathan’s work involves partnering with alliance companies in North America, Europe and Asia to integrate specialty skills to his projects – business intelligence, retail research, web development, design etc. He also has a joint venture with Quiet Storm in the UK. In addition, he is the author of the just-released Branding Only Works on Cattle: The New Way to Get Known (and drive your competitors crazy).
Month: September 2008
Ruminating on Ad:tech London
At Ad:tech London last week, I attended a couple of talks that gave me a new perspective to the industry. One was the talk by the guys from Bebo, who spoke about how to successfully promote a brand on social networks. Now I’m not a user of Bebo, so I found it interesting that a social network like them has executed on advertising in a completely different way to Facebook. The main mode of advertising on Bebo is not so much in-your-face (boxed ads that say ‘buy this’, for example) as through the sponsorship of an idea that appeals to teens and young people. Bebo is the only social network that actually runs mini-reality-shows themselves. For one of these, called The Gap Year, a number of brands came in to give the opportunity to 6 young people to take six months off travelling around the world, all expenses paid. Their travails became the reality show, telecast on Bebo only. It wasn’t an amateur show either – the people who made Big Brother are the ones who helmed this. I think this is an interesting way of reaching out to their huge user base. It reminded me of Skype’s Nomad programme though – except for the fact that the Gap Year initiative was on Bebo and the Skype Nomad thing was primarily publicized through a blog. A social network has a more captive user base than a blog, so from a publicity point of view, the Bebo initiative makes more sense.
Seen around London
Two interesting pictures I clicked yesterday – one is a poster I saw in front of Cards Galore on the Strand, which is having a sale. Someone’s obviously having a laugh. If I were them, I’d place the ‘Sale’ note a little more sensibly. I don’t think they want to be known as a PERMANENT discount cards store, do they?
Harvest Twestival
So Harvest Twestival last night was super fun and very noisy. Some lucky people won things like an iPod Nano (no, not me…sigh!!!). Charlie Gower was nice enough to give me the ‘Wearing my Twitter T-shirt’ tee that he won, because it was the wrong size for him, so at least I got that – thanks Charlie! I was surprised to note that it was made by American Apparel, who apparently have an entire Twitter range over here. That’s a really impressive take-up of a social media site by a brand – and given my knowledge of the Twittersphere, I suspect that there will actually be a decent audience for it! There were tons of people at the Twestival that I follow on Twitter, so it was nice to finally put faces to names.
Will the twin metros help British Airways?
When this goes live, I’ll start exploring it to see if it’s that much different from other rank-and-recommend sites. British Airways is creating a social media network called Metrotwin, which is to act as a virtual bridge between London and New York, one of the airline’s busiest sectors. It will allow users to rate the best restaurants, bars, neighbourhoods and so on in each city, let them to recommend a ‘twin’ for places they like and will also recommend places to go to based on users’ likes and dislikes. The twinning concept for cities is well-known, but for BA to undertake something like this in the hopes of re-vamping their really negative global image, is – hopeful, perhaps. The project itself has potential though.
Purpling it up
Apparently I didn’t notice when Yahoo! went into severe make-over mode with their Purple scheme. They’re doing a bunch of things to make people notice them. I’m just not sure how much of it IS being noticed, unfortunately, though some of their initiatives do sound interesting:
Watching what you eat
I wonder what it would be like to eat in the Restaurant of the Future, knowing that all your moves are being tracked. It’s a restaurant on the campus of the University of Wageningen in the Netherlands that aims to track the eating habits of its visitors, but to a level that, at least for me, is unheard of. It will analyse your decisions of what you eat and drink, and how your behaviour changes given a certain impetus, such as the placement of fresh flowers on your table. Facial recognition systems will decipher your response to eating a particular food. The amount of time you take to select what food to eat is also analysed. The aim is to research all these issues and provide answers to the food industry.
The animated version of YouTube
Channel 4 has created a site called 4mations.tv, along the lines of YouTube, that purports to be the animator’s site of choice to upload free videos. It’s pretty basic for now, but they should be able to bolster it in the months to come. Some of their key ‘products’, so to speak, are videos based on a magazine called Hate!, which is of course an antithesis to all those celebrity magazines like OK! and Hello! and everything else with an exclamation. Funny.
Digital art
Some really cool digital images by Denis Zilber – take a look at all of them.
Exploring the world of the otaku
I found this rather intriguing article that chronicles the rise of the ‘otaku‘, or geek, in Japan. Prime Ministerial candidate Taro Aso is apparently an otaku himself, and thanks to the Western fascination for Japanese manga and other otaku-related stuff, the term is slowly changing the connotation that it has had so far in Japan – that of a group of people who are a slur on society. I’ve always been interested by the idea of tribes, and otaku are a great example of a tribe that draws from other worlds while simultaneously trying to live in the present. I wonder what it must be like to be one of them, given that they are mostly young (20-30 years old, I gathered from the article). Are they a tribe that is slowly being extinguished, or will they increase in the years to come? Unlike university students who can band together in the same geographical space to protest or support a cause, how do these people congregate? Does social networking have a role in strengthening their band, or is that too much a phenomenon of this world?