EA Trax- defining an audio personality

I never really questioned why a certain song played in a movie would seem appropriate for the tone and theme of a scene. Now I know! It is known as defining an ‘audio personality’. It requires selecting not only the correct, but the best possible match between a song and a movie scene. Did you know that this is also what happens in video games? The electronic arts business is quiet, but it is huge. I have previously touched on how big of a hit in-game advertising has become. But the world seems to offer endless opportunities. Electronic Arts (EA) Games, the world’s largest video game company, has delved into making the virtual world as comfortable for players as possible. Taking it as far as compiling research on the listenership profile and game-player profile and matching that up with a sound! How incredible! In a marketing sense, the marketer takes into account many aspects of an individual – race; age; gender; income, etc. However, couldn’t we learn a few lessons from the guys at EA, such as take more than the obvious into account?

Innovative CSR initiatives

When you talk about ‘green’ or CSR, do you mean it? Or is it part of your plan to fit in with the latest industry conversation? Perhaps I’m being unfair – some don’t believe that the whole ‘green’/sustainable ‘thing’ will even pick up. Yes, sure they say, it will be used, spoken about and then we will continue to do business the way we always have.

So I guess my question to you is as follows: firstly, are you a ‘green-washer’ or a ‘green-doer’?; have you taken real, meaningful initiatives to make a difference to the way your business activities are undertaken?; and, if yes, what’s driving you?

I looked at examples where Coke; Woolworths; Avon; Ariel and many other large organisations have really targeted a niche community to approach and uplift, something that falls right within their scope of work. It seems amazing to me, how every time I think we’ve hit the next big ‘thing’/challenge, people come up with the most phenomenal ideas.

So I’m curious: how are you going to flow with change?

Ten tips to add PR and marketing value through Facebook

BurrellesLuce.com recently published an article with tips on how PR and marketing professionals can boost their value through Facebook.

PR and marketing specialists have found many purposes for Facebook. In addition to general public relations and marketing initiatives, others include: internal communications; recruitment; coalition building; advertising; customer service; media outreach; and professional and personal networking.

BurrelesLuce.com say that by following these 10 steps, marketers and PR specialists should be well on their way to boosting their business value.

1. Define your goals for engaging clients through Facebook. Let your clients and connections know whether you’re planning to use the platform for professional, or personal reasons, or a combination. Then stick to that plan.

2. Choose your company’s representative carefully. Remember, the profile of the person who creates the page cannot be deleted without deleting the page itself. (Here, you probably won’t want your intern to create the page).

3. Protect your privacy. If you’re going to network with both professional and personal contacts, be sure to filter your lists and set privacy settings accordingly.

4. Treat your fan page or group like a mini-web page. Think of your fan page as an extension of your official website or blog. Provide links to become a Facebook fan, or join your Facebook group on your corporate site. Let your fans know of important updates, events you’ll be attending, and helpful resources via your page or group.

5. Engage your fans/group members with compelling content and discussion. It will help ensure that they return, interact, and possibly suggest your fan page or group to their connections.

6. Don’t pitch. Instead, focus your initial efforts on connecting with current clients and contacts. Then expand your relationship to others in your industry or to targeted niche markets.

7. Consider adding relevant pages to your ‘favorites’ on your fan page. This helps in networking; broadening brand exposure; and providing useful information to your fans. In addition, the companies; brands; and products you praise just might return the favour by including you as a favorite on their page.

8. Be careful of what and how often you post. Facebook has several measures in place to prevent the sending of spam. Familiarise yourself with Facebook’s write-up on warnings and its terms and conditions, so that you don’t inadvertently misuse the site and have your content removed or, worse, have your account disabled.

9. Use a current profile picture or custom images. This makes your page more personable; participants may be more likely to interact with you if they aren’t seeing a logo.

10. Advertise your enewsletter; contests; and promotions. Touting your giveaways and special events will help generate buzz and create interest in your offers.

Brand Tags: Scary concept or can’t you wait for it to come to SA?

Imagine that you willingly placed your brand on a website where people could write down the first word or phrase that popped into their mind about your brand? A bit unnerving, but perhaps helpful if you want to take initiative and turn your brand around.

This has actually been made possible by an initiative from Noah Brier, in the UK. He started out by taking a few brands and placing them on a website where people could leave the comments of their first impression. The more often a comment appeared, the larger the format it appeared in, in a tag cloud. This means for instance, that many people have thought that Wal-Mart is ‘evil’. The project has grown and is extending to Brazil and to Spanish-speaking countries.

Imagine if this initiative launched in South Africa. Would you be nervous?

Addressing the habit of habit

Google defines the word ‘habit’ as an established custom or an automatic pattern of behavior in reaction to a specific situation (inherited or acquired through frequent repetition).

The book by Neale Martin, Habit: The 95% of Behaviour Marketers Ignore, is a good point of reference for marketers who may have forgotten, but need to refresh on consumers’ attachment to established habits. The book highlights that the human mind works in both conscious and sub-conscious levels, known as the ‘executive’ and ‘habitual’ levels, respectively. The ‘habitual’ mind controls about 95% of human behaviour and this is important as habit, and not rational thought dominates buying decisions. The habitual mind learns through repetition and reward and works automatically, and marketers can create habit-forming behaviour by making a product’s design intuitive. This requires building brand awareness and building customer trust.

According to Mis-Asia, habits apply to almost anything, even to habits that related to reading emails. For instance, the Global Consumer Email Study indicates that half of the Asia Pacific respondents feel that ‘subject’ lines are the most compelling feature, more than two-thirds of North American and European respondents select the ‘from’ line.

“This implies the need for individual targeting, timely/trigger delivery and relevant content, indicated the study. Additionally, discount offers, free product offers, familiar brand names and personalisation of subject lines increase the likelihood of opening e-mails among all respondents,” says Mis-Asia.

As marketers, how aware are you of your consumers’ habits? Or has forgetting about their habits become your habit?

In-game advertising creeps up on ad sector

It’s really creeping up on the advertising world. In-game advertising has steadily risen and is bringing in millions in profits. The beauty of this offering is the array of avenues that are available.

Advertisers can place ads in the game through labeling their products; by showing ads while a game is uploading; and also through the exposure when a game is converted into a movie. Music bands; advertisers; and pretty much anything visible in a game has the potential to catch the attention of millions of active viewers. This is positive for the industry, which is seeing a decline in TV viewership, as viewers are steadily shifting to the gaming space. This is certainly an area for advertisers to seriously consider.

A glimpse at the success of South African advertising

The South African advertising industry has been in the spotlight in the past few weeks with both the Pendoring Advertising Awards and the Loeries Awards taking place. We have an extremely high standard of creative work in the country, as is evident from the winners of these awards and from the type of ads we see on our TV screens; hear on the radio; and see in print. Our creative work is also often compared to an international standard, winning international awards, and with many commentators saying that our advertising is far superior to its international counterpart.

So what are some of the reasons for this impressive creative standard? Festus Masekwameng, Chairman of the Loerie Awards, feels that there is a commitment in the industry to maintain high standards, while South African advertising awards also reward outstanding work from student level, meaning that students are encouraged to produce their best work from early in their careers, and it will only get better with the type of prizes they receive – for example, bursaries and overseas study trips handed out at thePendorings for their Student Awards.

South African creatives also understand what appeals to their audiences, and what they need to do to be successful in their campaigns. As a result, they create impressive adverts that capture the spirit of South African citizens and portray aspects of life that they can relate to and which are topical.

Mike Barnwell, Executive Creative Director of Grey South Africa, who has been chosen as a judge at several international advertising awards, feels that South African ads can stand up to any of their international counterparts, and the South African creative industry has earned its place at any international awards show.

What is your opinion of South African advertising, and how does it compare to its international counterpart? We would love to hear your comments!

Virtual space offers platform for creativity

The virtual reality space is yours to play with. Will you?

If they say that a single picture is worth a thousand words, then what is an entire video worth? I ask this with a niggling suspicion that I have. Although it hasn’t received as much hype as other areas in IT over the years, I find that increasingly, the virtual world is becoming more important, and not only that, it is being used more. What sparked my curiosity was Google’s recent announcement of its launch of data collection for Street View in South Africa. I overheard a comment about virtual tourism, which can benefit people interested in pre-viewing a holiday destination, or those who’ve always wanted to visit certain places, but for various reasons, have been unable to.

I dug up a little research on virtual tourism and saw that it evolved from virtual tours that started in a British museum in 1994. After museums and galleries started picking up on the trend, the real estate sector snapped-up videoing properties and began posting them online. Not much happened for a while after that, until the tourism sector picked up on it. Now, anyone is able to type in a search destination, ‘arrive there’, and visit almost any area that they wish to – online of course.

Some of the more technologically correct language on ‘the virutal world’  is better knonw as three-dimensional (3D) virtual tourism (3DVT).

This is street-level navigation of virtual reality environments for exploring physical places in space and time without physically traveling there. 3DVT invokes a virtual tour that uses three-dimensional models in addition to two-dimensional panoramic images; a sequence of hyperlinked still or video images, and/or image-based models of the real location and multimedia support elements such as sound effects, music, narration, and text. 3DVT does not require travel and viewing is supposed to evoke an experience of moving through the represented 3D space.

Now the point I’m trying to make is this: it appears as general consensus that we are living in a tough economic climate owing to the global financial crisis; many companies are slashing their budgets; clients are holding on to their cash; and it seems harder than ever to get the client on your side.

A marketing agency, for instance, needs to reach people. But how will they do this if the client doesn’t go to them? What about integrating this funky technique on your website? I don’t necessarily mean to say that your company will shift to offices of tourism, but integrating video aspects about your activities and your unique specialist business into a type of video presentation. It is said that people don’t read as much anymore, but they do look at pictures, photos and videos. Why not integrate this strategy? The client won’t feel bombarded and harassed by sales pitches, he or she would be viewing your strategies in a 3D format which is much more likely to catch their attention (and here you could go pretty big, thus placing your organisation at a strategic level, being firstly, innovative, and secondly, creative) than simply words on a screen. 

Just a suggestion. What do you think?

Choosing the right medium to create trust in your brand

At the Johannesburg AMASA forum at the beginning of July, Jason Stewart, MD of Have You Heard, South Africa’s first word-of-mouth marketing agency, mentioned an interesting statistic from research company, Millward Brown: one in three recommendations are acted upon.

The latest Nielsen Global Online Consumer Survey shows similar findings, according to an article on mybroadband. The survey shows that 90% of internet consumers worldwide trust recommendations from people they know and, interestingly, 70% trust consumer opinions posted online.

However, according to the survey, brand websites are also trusted by 70% of internet consumers – making this the most trusted form of advertiser-led advertising. The thought is that perhaps as consumer-generated media (blogposts, Twitter feeds, and various other social media platforms facilitating user-generated content that serves as recommendations for other users) has increased, advertisers have been forced to use a more realistic form of messaging, related to the consumers’ experiences, rather than to the advertisers’ ideals. The proof of this can be seen in the general increase in trust across all forms of advertising (except newspaper advertising, which saw a decrease), even if consumer-generated recommendations enjoy the highest degree.

This is perhaps noteworthy for advertisers who are all scrambling to use social media to boost their brands. Maybe the solution is rather to take heed of the success of consumer-generated media focusing on the shared experiences of consumers, than trying to use social media but still imposing the same strategies employed in traditional advertising and therefore alienating consumers as opposed to strengthening relationships.

The Nielsen survey provides interesting comment on a phenomenon we are all trying to get to grips with, and it seems that, although consumer opinions are highly regarded, so too are ads appearing in traditional media such as TV billboards; radio; and magazines.

At the end of the day, the desired outcome is to create positive word-of-mouth to generate recommendations that are acted upon for the benefit of your brand. It is worth considering that, while social media has its place when correctly applied, surveys such as this one show that it is not the only platform to create trust and generate positive recommendations – what is more important is the way in which you use your chosen medium to communicate with your target market, and the message you put across about your brand.

Advertising that works for me

Sarah Britten recently blogged about powerful advertising, saying she believes in its power not just to sell stuff, but: “to transcend the narrow boundaries of commercial speech, to express joyful creativity or capture a particularly telling insight — and sometimes both.”

She mentions past successes such as Vodacom’s ‘Yebo Gogo’ campaign, and numerous Nando’s funnies, such as the somewhat risqué Evita Bezuidenhout ad, which maintains ‘You can’t have an option A en C without an option B.’

The two ads that she mentions as particularly successful – especially in today’s viral environment, where anything can be searched for and shared online, are very funny. The first is the Samsung LED Extreme Shepherding video, with its fancy firework–explosion type sheep, while the second shows delightfully original entries into the New Zealand ‘smash a Cadbury Crème Egg’ competition.

Both very original – the type of ‘out of the box’ thinking we need more of.