Marketing Week Live - Silenced by the late night salon augmented reality demonstration.
The Virgin Atlantic Sales and Marketing Director, Paul Dickinson was stunned into silence along with everyone else by a question asked by Ross Popejoy our Account Director here at the late night salon.
After giving a talk to Marketing Week Live about Smart Marketing in a recession. Ross asked a question about using emerging technology like augmented reality to help you stand out, there was a stunned silence from the whole room. Ross then had to give a summary of the technology and at the end of the session, several well respected brands asked to see the demo in which we use the Virgin Galactic Spaceship.
Augmented reality is relatively new in terms of using it for marketing, it has been around for a few years now but mainly being used in educational establishments. It is predicted that by the end of the year the technology will really have started to gain momentum in terms of using it to market products and brands. It offers the consumer a truly unique experience, allowing them to interact with the product or brand in a totally new way that creates a real wow effect.
If you speak to an agency who know what they are doing and have the license to use the software then the only thing that limits the quality of the experience is the creative idea behind it. With the technology moving into computer gaming at a rapid rate, expect to see some pretty amazing things from the marketing community all stimulating big PR exposure.
If you want to discuss anything about augmented reality, discuss projects or see some of our examples then get in touch.
A challenge indeed!! We have just recently finished a project where that was our key challenge. our client, who is a charity based in the UK was trying to do just that. The Charity focusses on working with family groups on very difficult subjects through a series of drama based workshops.
Once they have got through the pressure of starting a conversation around your peers, they then have a huge success in working out who needs help and who doesn't.
The key challenge for us was to be able to create a two way conversation with children online.
After seeing many other companies try and do this by getting children to register with secure passwords on their site, we took a look at the audiences behaviour pattern. It wasn't long before we identified that after leaving school for the day the children would then quite happily spend 2 hours speaking with their friends online via instant messenger.
So we decided that is exactly what we would do, so we created our own version of an instant messenger service with a live counsellor on the other end to talk through life's little and big problems. So far it has been a great success with the trial and other government bodies have expressed interest in how they can use the service.
If you have a similar problem, trying to work out how to engage with kids in the online world, then why not call on our expertise by clicking here.
Our top five things that are making Twitter so exciting and is it the future of marketing? The one thing not to do is go, I have a twitter account and I Twitter about our products or service, if you are a brand you need to get creative and give your customers more!! Below are some of our favourite uses and a couple of ideas from us of how to use Twitter more.
1. Some of the most relevant ad space you could ever want.
Gordon's sponsoring Gordon Ramsay, Robinsons sponsoring Andy Murray, or Scrabble sponsoring Stephen Fry. Behind every twitter account there is a background that is an image, that image can be anything the user wants, brands work so hard to create affiliations with celebrities but aren't following through with the new opportunities social media is offering. They don't have to be huge celebs either anyone that has a large targeted base of followers must be ripe targets for advertisers.
2. Is Sainsbury's missing a trick?
After watching a programme the other week, where Sainsbury's is looking to its store staff for ideas I came across an episode where one of the workers was trying to install a tent in every store, where customers could complain. I saw this as:
a. very expensive to roll out over the estate
b. difficult to manage feedback and when you have done something about a problem how do you let more than one customer know about it.
With Sainsbury's currently having over 4,000 tweets about its brand on twitter and being ranked in the top 100 companies to get mentioned on twitter, surely they should be using the service to somehow help tackle the problem of customers walking out of the door never to return because of a service issue, as it enables a very cost effective way to gather customer grievances and also gives the opportunity to PR all of the good things they are doing.
3. Terminator salvation - getting it right.
This is the latest in an emerging trend of "twitter games" that are becoming increasingly popular. The emphasis is 100% on entertaining the user. Premise: Get the fan-base engaged in the setting that the movie takes place in and let them feel like they are a part of the struggle. Tactics: Created a complimentary website to instruct users how the game is to be played, as well as to announce point leaders. Outcome, positive press before the movie launches and an audience that is all ready well and truly engaged with the story, so 100% of these I am sure would be bums on seats.
4. Madmen - extending the product experience.
A great use of extending the experience of a product or service. The campaign shows how twitter can be used to fill in gaps between customers intake of a brand. Here they use it to show what the characters are doing in between shows, so the character keeps on living with the audience, maybe feeding extra bits of information to those dedicated viewers/listeners and teasing them about the next episode, making sure they will be sitting down ready to listen.
5. Moonfruit. Competitions do work on Twitter.
The campaign worked in getting huge brand exposure for a company called moonfruit an online website builder. They created their own hashtag-based campaign. Moonfruit offered up free Apple products for tweeting their company name as a hashtag: #moonfruit. Specifically, they gave away 10 MacBook Pro computers in 10 days, as a celebration of the company’s 10th anniversary. Each day, a random user who includes the hashtag won.
Did it work? Achieving the top trending topic several days in a row, increasing their followers from 400 to 30,000 and doubling the number of people trialling their product would suggest so. But be warned as this could also be the start of Twitter spam which could equally turn the world against your brand.
If you want to find out more about Twitter and how best to use it then click here and get in touch.
We produced 6 websites, 6 blogs, a banner ad campaign, a flash game, a social networking strategy, packaging design, logo design, press ads and a whole lot more for under £35k.
How I hear you ask????
Well as the late night salon is a boutique design agency, we only charge what we need to, with no extra cost going to the running of a large machine. So the question you should be asking yourself is, are you paying over the odds with your current agency? Our point is that in todays current economy where frankly making the marketing budget work harder is key, some businesses need to be aware that they may be paying too much for the work they are receiving.
Now in no way do we suggest that you should let the quality of the creative slip in any way, in fact the latest trends are showing that the most creative work seems to be coming out of the smaller agencies, they also seem to have a better understanding of digital and emerging technology and how to truly run an integrated campaign.
If you would like to see how much more you could get from your marketing budget then click here and get in touch.
How do you increase your sales by 2300% by not doing a single thing?
Well this is a story about how one product did just that. This is a classic example of how not focussing on your key audience can achieve a greater return in sales. The product in question is a t-shirt called 3 wolves 1 moon. The t-shirt has been selling on Amazon for about 2 years at maybe one or two a day. But when Brian Govern a 32 year old law student posted a tongue in cheek review, it sparked a global frenzy that has seen the t-shirt become the number 1 selling piece of apparel on Amazon.
To put it into context they are now selling 100 of these t-shirts every hour and have just ordered another 400,000 prints to keep up with demand. On top of that the rise in demand has moved them to increase the price by an average of $5. It doesn't take a genius to work out that this product has now become a multi million $ revenue stream for the company, all by accident.
If you want to know how viral marketing could help not only increase your brands presence but also product sales why don't you get in touch and we can try to help you create your very own 3 wolves one moon viral campaign.
The Late Night Salon goes back to University with a filming brief from De Montfort. We were delighted when we got to hear that we were going back to University, unfortunately there was no partying this time around. Instead we would be getting to grips with what the students love about their time at De Montfort.
Keep your eyes open to see the series of short films which we will put on our site once we are finished in post production.
Some call it the new Myspace others just dont get it. Well we have become part of the community to see what the fuss is about. The design of your profile page is cleaner than Myspace with a lot less clutter, but it still gives you just as much opportunity to customise the page as Myspace. There's photo sharing, plus video-sharing, tagging, groups, comments, messaging and all the other standard features. Coming from the makers of PureVolume, there’s also a strong musical element: a download called Virbtunes works like MOG or Last.fm, tracking the music you listen to in iTunes and making recommendations. And just like on MySpace, bands also have special pages from which you can grab tracks to populate a player on your own profile.
The reach isn't as wide as Facebook or Myspace but can the superior design and functionality take over the world of online Social Networking?
If you are on Virb and looking for a new friend, why not click on our link.
Links
http://virb.com/thelatenightsalon
Yes our very own Creative Director here at the late night salon Miss Toria Jaymes has joined the ever increasing crowd who just can’t stop Twittering about themselves, with her ever increasing influence on the creative scene here in London the likes of Vice magazine are just one of her followers. If you think you can keep up with her ever changing life then follow her at
Links
http://twitter.com/toriajaymes
We have been working with our friends at Blacks for quite some time now but we are very excited about their new ranges coming out this season, which is just as well as we are going to have to write copy explaining how amazing they all are.
Links
