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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Building Social Currency: 3 Things You Need To Know

Many agency folks would be familiar with this scenario – getting client briefs with campaign objectives to create something that will go viral or generate “buzz”. Perhaps this may have risen from the success of campaigns like the Old Spice Guy that now has every marketer pandering to leverage on earned media to help amplify marketing efforts in light of reduced budgets.

Achieving buzz and getting something to go viral is an outcome of a well-developed and -executed campaign and not the objective. Creating content that ignites conversations is the objective. Content is what starts conversations and the content must have social currency in order for people to want to share it as part of their everyday social lives.

Social currency is what helps businesses create unique brand identities and provides the accessibility and permission to continually interact with consumers and customers.

Social currency involves creating a sense of community and strong affiliation between consumers and users of a brand. It usually involves getting these participants to co-create content and is communicated by the brand through pervasive storytelling that delivers a unique point of view.

Here are three key pillars for developing social currency:

1. Value

In order for brands to achieve engagement with its audience, it needs to consider the value that the content will deliver. Looking at it from the user’s perspective – what’s in it for them to participate and be engaged?

If the content has high value, then not only will the recipients be more likely to engage with it, but they will also be more likely to engage in conversations with the brand, compelling them to pass along the content to their friends because it has social currency.

Value can come in the form of entertainment, information, or utility.

Entertainment includes things that bring users pure delight and can come in the form of music, videos, humour, and games. Most Internet memes stem from frivolous content that provides humour, silly and frivolous entertainment that users can associate and appreciate. Value could also come in the form of content that employs gaming mechanics (an actual game or game-based interactions) that requires active participation and engagement, resulting in fun and competitive entertainment. An example of this is with men vs. women in the Trivial Pursuit experiment.

Information contains things that are emotionally useful to users such as knowledge, gossip, fame, or exclusivity. An example of knowledge as valuable content is information that is developed or curated and provides thought leadership. These are usually produced in various formats such as videos, slideshare presentations, and blog posts. Opportunities to gain fame or exclusivity are also extremely compelling value-drivers if you look at the popularity of reality shows around the world.

Utility covers value that is functionally useful and includes monetary rewards such as prizes, vouchers, and free trials as well as utilitarian applications that can make life easier, help users save time, or enable them to perform certain valuable tasks. Value is also provided by connecting participants as members of a shared community in mutually beneficial ways. One great example of this is Nike +.

2. Story-ability

Ever since the dawn of time, storytelling has been one of the primary ways humans have communicated. Humans crave stories and technology constantly advances the art of story telling that helps marketers connect. Value is created through ongoing narratives that educates, inspires, informs, and connects consumers, participants, and members of the brand community.

In order to tell a compelling story, brands must have and provide a unique point of view that users can draw an affiliation with. The point of view is formed from the brand’s unique purpose within the digital landscape and how that point of view comes together to provide value and association with what consumers need and crave for.

Puma created that connection with “after hours” athletes by paying homage to the champions of late night games from foosball to beer pong, night golf, and even the highest number of karaoke hits one can belt out within an hour via its branded community Puma Social. If 5 a.m. cab rides are more your style than 5 a.m. runs, then this platform for fans of old school diversions to come together and share in social exchange and friendly competition was tailor-made for you.

Sometimes, stories can be used to build digital movements where brands come together with consumers to rally behind a cause that is fuelled and amplified by the use of technology and social media. Pepsi Refresh is one such movement where a brand and its consumers band together to try to make the world a better place.

3. Co-creation

Not all content that comes from the brand needs to be created from within the organisation. Brands need to involve consumers in the act of creating content and conversations. Value is established through the collaborative efforts of participants who share, curate, and edit each other’s (and sometimes the brand’s) efforts. Good examples are Burberry’s Art of the Trench and Vitamin Water’s Flavor Creator.

The ultimate proof of social currency is when your content is remixed and or parodied as it happened with Cadbury’s Gorilla and Old Spice Guy.

Maybe the secrets to creating something that will go viral lies in Jennifer Aniston’s viral video for Smartwater that parodies a bunch of Internet memes including dancing babies, kicking a random guy in the groin, and being aptly named the “Jen Aniston sex tape”.

For marketers who need a viral cookbook, the above three key ingredients will provide a good framework to help you create more buzz than an entire swarm of bees put together for the next campaign and beyond.

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Coke & Happiness

Why Coke is such an awesome brand. One great point of view. One single message. Happiness.

The happiness that a drink of Coke provides. Happiness that is timeless; that always resonates with people. What happiness is, means, or looks like may change, but the emotion remains relevant.

In this series, Happiness is about turning the negative into positive. Great ad.

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Twitter Job Hustle

Ingenious way to get noticed and hired via Twitter.

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The Idea

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Renault: The electric life

Nice point of view from Renault on their electric cars. We've mentally tuned out the fact that most of the things we interact with and use daily are powered by electricity. So why not our cars? Instead of just telling people they should switch, they come to the conclusion themselves. That's what great storytelling does.

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Volkswagen Linkeduit

First interesting social campaign I've seen on Linkedin and a great use of the Linkedin API.

LinkedUit uses the LinkedIn API to create a Top Trumps type game where players compete against other LinkedIn contacts with LinkedIn data (such as number of connections, current position, work experience) used for scoring.

This is a great video that shows LinkedUit in action. You can visit the site here: http://www.linkeduit.nl

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Gaming can make a better world

A great TED Talk about how we can use gamification to help make the world a better place. All the key elements of building behaviors through pervasive game play and game mechanics are weaved together nicely into a story as told by Jane McGonigal from the Institute for the Future.

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Interactive Youtube Music Machine

This was submitted as part of the YouTube Cannes Young Lions 48 Hour Ad contest. Great idea and use of the number keys to skip to sections of the video and a great tie in with the campaign objective.

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