Online Checkout in Real Life

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What Steve Taught Me About Advertising

This is my tribute to Steve Jobs and what he taught me about advertising. Steve was a visionary, a forward thinker and a great user experience and product designer.  In a very big way, Steve changed the world. He was one of the crazy ones. The way we now see, hear, touch and interact with things and technology, we all owe to him.

However, Steve also taught us what advertising and communications was truly about: Values. This was way back in 1997, during his second tenure back at Apple when they launched "Think Different"

Steve talked about how complicated and noisy the world was and how difficult it was for brands to get people to remember them. In order to do that, brands needed to be crystal clear on what they wanted consumers to remember about them.

Even great brands need constant investment and nurturing if it is going to continue it's relevance and vitality in people's lives. The way to do that is not to just talk about product features or the technology and how a brand is better than it's competitors. Steve preached  about the need for brands to talk about who they are and what they are about. Our customers want to know who we are and what we stand for; Where we fit in this world and in their lives. And to do this in a way where it resonates with consumers at a higher emotional level. To touch their souls and connect with them instantly.

A lot of things will change for a brand over time - the market, the brand's place in a market, the product, the distribution strategy
but core values should not change. It is fundamentally what the brand stands for.

Apple doesn't just build products that let people do their jobs, access music and content on the go or any of the many innovations that have changed consumer behavior. Apple believes that people with passion can change the world (in their own big and small ways ) for the better and the people who are crazy enough that think that they can change the world are the ones that actually do.

Think Different is a point of view that honors people who actually do that and as a result have changed the world and moved humanity forward.

And Apple didn't just talk the talk, it walked the walk. This same point of view set the stage for what Apple would become in the years that followed (and will follow): thinking different and implementing seemingly crazy ideas that no other company aside from Apple could have pulled off. And they succeeded, time and time again. Apple didn't follow the latest trends and fads in technology but forged its own path and became the company that everybody else wanted to be.

And Steve, you are by far the craziest one of them all. Thank u for your brilliance & foresight and for making it possible for us to do what we do daily. You will be dearly remembered

Don’t move products. Instead, enrich lives.” - Steve Jobs

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Don Draper Presents Facebook Timeline

One of my favorite scenes in Mad Men slightly adapted for the present. Context is the same but the product shifts from the Kodak Carousel to Facebook's new Timeline.

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Create a State of Chaos

This is how brands can use the digital space to create conversations about what it stands for and to articulate its point of view in a way where it will resonate with consumers.
State Farm's POV is that whatever unexpected happens to you, it has you covered.

What better way to demonstrate this than to unleash a robot of destruction to blow your home to smithereens. State Farm's "Create Chaos In Your Town" allows you to create a personalized rampage of destruction on your own home (or any other address) using imaging from Google's Street View.

Be prepared, Be very prepared. Unleash your own chaos at http://chaosinyourtown.com

See the full gallery on Posterous

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My Next Trip

This is an awesome Foursquare application using the API - Type in a city and get a 2 day itinerary based on user tips and recommendations on Foursquare.

Check it out on http://www.my-next-trip.com/

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The Art of Appropriation

Appropriation is the use of borrowed elements in the creation of a new work. It's a great technique for creating and developing new ideas and concept by taking a small part, from something created by someone else and using it for your own purposes without permission. It's a fancy word for stealing (on a small scale), but it's vital to any creative business. We "steal" and "borrow" all the time.

I love the word because as strategic/digital planners, we research, collect and curate ideas and content from multiple sources and then adapt them in relevant ways into what we do; whether in the form of consumer insights, data/analytics, creative stimulus or strategic frameworks.

Stealing other people's work lock, stock and barrel not only says that you're an asshole, but that you also lack the talent to come up with your own original ideas.

But appropriating ideas from another source is about being inspired and translating someone else's ideas and thinking to a new purpose. There's a lot of  skill and intuition involved in identifying relevant content and trends from different sources and weaving them together and recognizing that the same thinking or framework used there could also be applicable to what you need to craft.

"Good artists copy; great artists steal"

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Carlsberg stunts with bikers in cinema

Wow. This definitely calls for a beer. Never really liked Carlsberg but this is a great way to create a conversation.

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KLM Live Reply

KLM Royal Dutch Airlines have launched the "KLM Live Reply". Users who Tweet to KLM during the allotted campaign time might be lucky enough to receive a "KLM Live Reply" - Essentially, KLM will replace the normal Twitter typed responses with a living alphabet made up of 140 KLM employees. This dedicated crew responds to tweets and posts in a unique way, by running around and assembling the answer live before your very eyes, within the hour.”

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PayPal: Future of Shopping

Just a Google launches their highly anticipated Google Wallet, Paypal shows us what the future of shopping would look like

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7UP China Time Travel Commercial

Cardinal rule about creating viral videos: Humor. Understand your audience (societal issues, culture, trends, memes) well; make the commercial funny enough and people will pass it on.

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Adidas Shootter

More brands are starting to deliver engaging and immersive digital experiences using information gleaned from the consumer social graph.

This latest one by Adidas Japan comes in the form of a Japanese mini soccer game and uses Twitter integration to challenge you to score against an opposing team (i.e. Any one of your Twitter connections). The catch is that the more followers the opposing team has, the more opponents you have to shoot pass and this increases the difficulty of the game.

Check it out at http://www.shootter.jp/

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30 gifts to 30 strangers in Sydney

This is an awesome video by Lucas Jatoba. It ends with the quote: "Men's first responsibility is to be happy. The second is to make everyone else happy"

How true. Gave me goosebumps watching it.

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Jane the Concussion Slayer

I'm a huge fan of Jane McGonigal, the game designer, researcher and author from the Institute of the Future. She's been called the public face of gamification and evangelizes improving the quality of human life and social ills through game mechanics. Her TED Talk on Gaming Can Make A Better World is by far one of the best TED talks I've heard.

In 2009, she suffered a traumatic brain injury and had difficulties recovering from it. Jane decided to create a game, SuperBetter to help her recover. This has now been released as a platform SuperBetter that helps people suffering from any aliments, from obesity to a broken leg to addiction through pervasive game play.

Here's a video of her talking about Super Better:

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Volkswagen BlueMotion Roulette

How do you make a technical, abstract product benefit interesting? Fuel efficiency is not something you can get people particularly excited about to find out more.
Volkswagen did it by turning the entire experience into a roulette game; getting people to guess how far the new Volkswagen Golf BlueMotion will run on one full tank of gas. The winner gets to win a car. As each person could only make one guess, participants had to find out more about the car, technology and route in the process, making it an absolutely engaging experience.

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Driving User Engagement Through Gamification

Gamification is a buzzword you might have started hearing lately. It refers to the use of game play mechanics in non-game scenarios and applications, in particular consumer web and mobile sites as a means to encourage users to engage with the site or platform in specific desired behaviours.

Gamification or game-based marketing works well in this age of information fatigue, where users are constantly bombarded with an overload of information, product pushing and marketing messages from a variety of different media sources.

Instead of purely pushing website or mobile content and expecting users to consume, engage and act in the desired outcomes, users now become players. If they perform certain tasks, such as commenting on articles, emailing links to friends, checking in to specific locations, they win points and badges and compete with others within the same ecosystem which helps extend the longevity of the engagement by making it much more addictive.

Game-based marketing allows brands the ability to build in their marketing content into the game flow and user journey and leverage on mechanisms such as leader boards, points, badges and prizes to encourage and get users to perform specific tasks such as sharing the content with friends, providing feedback (rate, like) or submitting content that would be beneficial to the brand.

Gamification in Loyalty Programs

The business of engendering online loyalty and engagement through gaming techniques is not new – rewards programs for airlines, hotels and credit cards have been using game mechanics to drive sustained engagement and loyalty with consumers for a long time. Typically airline customers enroll in programs to accumulate frequent flyer miles according to the distance flown on that airline or its partners. These days, there are so many other ways to accumulate miles such as making transactions through co-branded credit cards. When customers hit a certain level, they are rewarded with upgrades, free air travel, airport lounge access and priority bookings. Points can even been redeemed for other goods and services.

In addition, loyalty programs like Cathay Pacific’s Marco Polo Club have multiple membership tiers. Users start with the entry-level green tier and then move up the ladder once they acquire enough travel mileage to meet the next tier’s threshold. Each tier provides additional rewards to customers but more importantly, it is a status symbol or badge for users to display proudly for having achieved an exclusive level that differentiates them from the masses.

In the 2009 film “Up in the Air”, George Clooney plays a man who relishes his perpetual travels and has a personal ambition of being the 7th person in history to collect ten million frequent flyer miles with American Airlines, for which he will receive a special gold emblazoned card with life time privileges.

Most famously, Foursquare gives you badges and rewards in the form of check-in offers plus special offers for “mayors”. Other websites such as LinkedIn (progress bar that subtly urges you to add more details to your profile), GetGlue (offering badges when you review shows) and Groupon (countdown timer for buyers to nab deals before time runs out) all employ gamification to drive user interactions. The list just goes on.

Gamification in Utility

To be effective, gamified applications have to connect something already meaningful to users or wrap themselves in a story that makes it meaningful for them.

To encourage people to get fit, Nike + is a gamified utility that makes running interesting by adding scores, challenges, trophies and competition to what would otherwise just be a self-tracking running application.

Mint.com is an online service that allows users to track and manage their personal finance. It is a gamified system where the “game” is your financial health. New players walk through their financial lives on a digital quest and receive a checkmark for each completed task with the progress tracked on their financial profile. When their profile is complete, they can unlock their player dashboard to see how they are doing and create goals such as getting out of debt, saving up for a new house or vacation.

People love eating and everybody wants to discover where they can get the best food. Enter Foodspotting, the crowdsourced application that allows you to take pictures of food, say what it is, and pin it via geo-location to the restaurant. Like Foursquare, you get points for doing all this and earn badges for tagging certain types of foods in pictures and participating in guides.

Even mundane activities such as doing chores and completing your to-do list can be gamified and made fun and entertaining with applications such as Epic Win and Chore Wars.

Gamification to Drive Campaigns

Game-based marketing can also be applied in short term campaigns to drive a desired user behaviour and engagement.

Two interesting and recent campaigns that incorporate gamification are Mini’s “Getaway Stockholm” and Jimmy Choo’s “To-Catch-a-Choo“.

The Mini

The former is a week long virtual-reality game that requires users to hunt for a virtual Mini with their phones and then play the classic hide and seek game to prevent other potential takers from swiping it. The person with the Virtual Mini at the end of the game wins an actual Mini Countryman.

The latter is a scavenger hunt around London that requires users to try to “catch” a pair of Jimmy Choo sneakers from clues based on where it had “checked in” on Foursquare.

Such social gaming has tremendous viral potential as well as being fun for participants. Both Mini and Jimmy Choo have been smart in creating a game that enables people to build new social circles, introduce the brand and product name into conversations and enhance the value in which the brand is known for within their respective target audience.

Blueprint for Gamification

So how does gamification apply to your brand? One way to look at it is how applying game-based marketing can help make interactions with your customers more engaging by driving participation.

A game by definition is a voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles. Players opt in to play the game because it has compelling and defined goals and rewards, an established game play (mechanics) and a dynamic feedback system (of points, levels, badges, achievements and leader boards).

As such, the four basic building blocks that create a game system involves developing goals for players, creating rules that limit players and force creativity and interaction, providing a dynamic feedback system for the progress of the players in the game and making the game voluntary.

Before jumping into gamification, brands should consider the following:

- What are the particular behaviours you are trying to reward? Is it for users to peruse, share and/or submit content?

- Understand your reward points system. Define the types of goals, how achievements are rewarded, different types of rewards and leader board mechanics to drive competition.

- Know what will make the game compelling. Just because it is a game does not mean it will be fun. Good game design, mechanics and a well thought out user journey and game flow are some principles that will help make the experience engaging and addictive.

There are many examples of companies currently using game thinking and mechanics to influence and drive behaviour. With more brands leveraging on gamification to engage users, it will not be surprising to see that within the next 5 to 10 years, almost every consumer interaction online and mobile will have some form of game mechanics built into it.

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You LOL you LOSE!

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The LivingSocial Taxi

Living Social has been the lesser known of the daily deals site (especially in Asia) as compared to Groupon.

The company started as a social discovery and cataloging network company that offers  daily deals based on handpicked experiences that can be shared with friends.

Their point of view is to surprise and delight consumers every single day and the company digs deep to deliver this by designing total experiences that delight consumers and bring an adventurous and loyal following to local businesses

This POV is manifested very nicely in the form of the Living Social Taxi where unsuspecting passengers who have hailed the cab have to make a choice—carry on to their original destination, or 'roll the die' and go for an exciting experience.

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New Balance Urban Dash

New Balance drives in-store visits in NYC with an AR app. Similar execution to the Mini Getaway in Stockholm done late last year.

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Introducing: Layar Vision

Layar's new real-world object recognition protocol will change the way we view and use Augmented Reality

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Speedo Pace Club

Speedo launches an online community and mobile app - i.e. The Nike + for Swimming.

The Speedo Pace Club provides training programs to help all levels of swimmers improve their fitness and stroke technique.Swimmers are able to find swimming pools, track their times, share them with friends, and receive support from a swimmer’s social network within Pace Club. Alongside training is content from the world’s top swimmers that includes tips on training, your diet and an insider’s perspective from the heat of competition.

The Speedo Pace Club has five components.  It lets users form a virtual swim team, via Facebook, helping them connect online for the support, recognition and motivation they need to achieve their swimming goals. It even allows them to give fellow team members a virtual high five, when appropriate. The club will also award virtual swim team members virtual badges and discounts on Speedo merchandise once they reach certain levels of achievement.

Great to see platform type ideas from classic brands.

Check out the site at: http://paceclub.speedousa.com

You can also download the mobile app at http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/speedo-pace-club/id448067082?mt=8

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