Social Hallucinations

TicTac Micha Rocks Again

TicTac Micha is back. He didn't stop to entertain the world after the great performance in Copenhagen. The great response from all over the world, the lots of fan emails showed that TicTac Micha is great and there is the need for more.
So he is back with the World tour. The first stop was in Malmö, Sweden where he rocked at the midsummer party!


and here is his first performance from Copenhagen - watch TicTac Micha video here.

Stay tuned for more updated from Micha's tour by visiting his website. :-)

The Marketing Capability: The Future is Digital

"In order for our brand to be relevant in the future, we gotta live digitally... with our communication and the products we sell. And the brands that figure this out are the brands that will succeed in the future."

From the past to the future Best Buy CMO Barry Judge tells the story of how Best Buy's Marketing Capability talks (and listens) to its customers.

Is Talk Cheap?

Image via Wikipedia

According to a recent research of Shyam Gopinath, Jacquelyn Thomas and Lakshman Krishnamurthi, there is a measurable connection between what is being said about a product in online posts and real-time customer behavior. Research showed that if you ask people what’s most important to them in evaluating a product, they say, ‘What other people like me say about it.’ Meaning that that a relatively small group of people in online communities can have a substantial influence on purchase decisions. What is crucial for brands is to track the conversations happening online, as understanding people's attitudes towards your products give you the chance to react accordingly and implement necessary changes. It makes online conversations to be your focus group on steroids, wisdom of the crowds delivering you valuable inisghts that can fuel your product strategies.

“An Internet-armed consumer can become your greatest asset or your worst nightmare.”

Read more here on Kellogg Insight website

Win a plane (Vind et Fly)

Norwegian launched the new campaign Win a Plane (Vind a fly) where you and your 40 friends can win the plane and travel to the self chosen destination in Europe. Sounds like fun to win your plane. After all traveling is social. The idea is to gather people together and give them the day of fun and great treatment.

You can join the competition her on Vind et Fly site.
Besides you can follow Norwegian on Twitter. As well as see updated from competition on news site .

 

What Motivates, Communicates

Image by şυωαίđίά ♥ ولعتني via Flickr

Change is hot topic.
Everyone talks about the change. We want the change, as change usually brings something new. The change is desired state of affairs and mind nowadays and in this ever-changing world, one thing remains constant – human motivations.
Humans are motivated to do things, which satisfy their emotional needs.
Motivation is the key. It sets the chain of events into the motion. Motivations are the main drivers of human behavior. There are to powers that influence our choices – how we do relate to others and to ourselves.
You can imagine yourself human behavior as a horse carriage with 4 horses: emotional needs, personality, self-image and relations with other people. Those 4 horses create the social context where we take decisions and act.
Think about yourself – advertising or media agency employee. Your behavior is driven by one the basic motivations – control. You do everything to avoid chaos that could be lethal for you. You never leave your eyes off mailbox, you check mails either on your PC or iPhone or Blackberry. You want to prove you are in charge, you are always on, you know always what’s going on. You want to prove you have control over what you do. What about the other motivation - the recognition? You want to stand out, be better and be different (thanks to Apple it is easier to fix the latter one). You want to impress your clients with your knowledge and qualifications. Think about the jargon you use to describe the simple things. Think about the titles you aim for to put on your business card and your resume. You do it because it works. It satisfies your self-image and helps you with the professional relations, as it stages the context for your interactions.

Behavior isn’t quite rational
Humans take decisions having one goal – to be rewarded. The bigger emotional reward brand can deliver, the stronger position it can build. Therefore, it is not only the product features should be at the center of communication, as marketing is about fulfilling consumers emotional needs, satisfying their motivations. Vanish – stain remover product isn’t about removing stains. Vanish is about being a good mother and take care for children to have a decent and clean clothes. 
Human behavior isn’t rational as it is driven by emotional needs and as long as you can deliver means to satisfy those, you open the chance for your brand to enter people’s life for longer than a moment of weakness while standing in the shop.

Marketing is a service
It shifts the understanding of marketing function from selling to giving people reasons to buy, to being a service. It requires deeper look into what’s behind human behavior, identification of motivations and creating tailor made products, services and solutions that satisfy those. It is important to align brand with one primary motivation, which will become the compass that will guide you through marketing and communication decisions and take you further on to creating strong brand experiences by linking you brand with secondary and/or tertiary motivations and placing it all within the relevant social context.

Life's for Sharing

Overwhelmed by pandemic of bad news from finance crisis to swine flu. Being bombarded with news that are more sensational than factual, more and more people get paralyzed by the fear of travel and contact with other people  We need a break, we need a moment to enjoy and share with others. 13,500 people spontaneously sang Hey Jude together in Trafalgar Square. Everyone involved arrived thinking they could be dancing - no-one had any idea how the event would unfold. The next part of Life is for Sharing campaign.


Via Richard

Internet is about experiences

...and banner advertising seems so primitive in the eyes of this website experience
Internet opens the door for the whole new world of the new immersive experiences and all we need is the idea and the right context to create them.

Ideas Generation / Brainstorming Sessions

This is the first guest post on my blog by great and very creative guy Michael Trenerry who have chosen Finland over Australia. You can read more about Michael and his company iKONIC here as well as follow him on Twitter and read his blog to get more of his wisdom. Enjoy!

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Over my time I have sat in many idea generation or brainstorming sessions both within media and advertising agencies, hotshops and on the client side or with the client. These sessions can be to generate ideas for an individual campaign, a long-term strategy, a product launch or they might very well be for your next new business pitch.

Amongst these sessions though, only very few have been in my opinion highly successful. The reason is quite simple. There has been a lacking brief, lack of structure, no leadership and no real collaboration.

The Brief
Mentioned in my earlier blog, the brief is vital. What exactly are we aiming to achieve from the session. What are our objectives & what do we already know. Sessions take time and that means money for you, so lets be sure that we have a good brief that outlays exactly what we intend to achieve during the session.

Structure and Process
I don’t want to take the fun out of these sessions because that is what they are all about but you do need some structure to tackle the brief. The structure does a few things. It ensures we maximise the time we spend in these sessions constructively. It ensures everybody gets to put ideas in. It ensures we cover all the points we need to and most of all it ensures that when we leave & finish the meeting, we leave with an action list of clear indicators & the key persons involved in ensuring those tasks are met.

A good session while structured doesn’t really feel structured. Like the term brainstorm, we start by dumping down lots of ideas. From these ideas we decide which are the most innovative and interesting and which best meet the objectives of the brief. When we have a few good ideas we can move forward – expand them, dig deeper, pull out insights, and create example case studies and so on until we feel we have our winning idea. The winning idea will often come in a second or third session after we have analyzed our key ideas in more detail.

Make sure in all cases before a meeting is over that everybody who has attended agrees with the idea & that everybody is cleary aware of what they are required to do to get to the next stage.

Session leader
In all cases, there should be a person in the session that is the session leader – the person who structures the workshop, understands the brief in minute detail, a person that listens to others, mediates and writes ideas down. This person should be skilled in running ideas/brainstorming sessions and a creative mind. The person should help the group move along in a clearly structured manner.

Without this person, we essentially normally end up having lots of ideas but no central focus – people walk away from the session with a smile but when they sit down, they don’t really know what next…

Collaboration
I have been involved with many new business pitches. The great ones show real collaboration, they show that the team worked brilliantly together and they all believe in the idea and their ability to deliver it. The successful sessions are fun, a birth of great ideas from everybody and in the end a united approach that shows very clear collaboration. The unsuccessful ones seem to have people working in modules – one digital guy creating digital ideas, one print person creating print ideas and one television person creating television ideas – no integration between the overall idea. The idea should show that all parties have worked together seemlessly on all aspects of the project.

I could continue to write more about good and bad sessions but to wrap it up, just remember what these sessions are for! Its business, we all have limited time and resources so plan & think strategically at all times BUT also remember to be super creative – don’t let the structure and process ruin the creativity required to build great ideas…

Computer Tan

I work myself for skin cancer campaign and I like the idea created by McCann London for Skcin. There is the huge problem, at leat in Denmark where lots of young people go to solarium and are ignorant to risk it brings. I've heard a lot of sad stories about young people whose lives are threathened. We need more campaigns that will not only create awareness but influence behavior and save lives.

Computer Tan is a fakevertising for a tan-tastic technological breakthrough, styled as informercial, you know TV shop. The site promotes the new and revolutionary way of getting tan right at your desk.
When you decide to try the product, your computer skin will be transformed into a tanning lights. After a minute in front of the full-screen tanning lights, images of blistering lesions appear and the skin cancer prevention message shines through.

I hope it will show to be effective way of making people more aware, more clever and creates a responsible "tanning behavior"

Insights Uncovered

Image by cdw9 via FlickrI had a few serious discussions through my career about insights and it is ineed incredible how little understanding is on what the real insights is. It is so often mistaken for information, for something you have extract from research. I always believed insights comes from observation of human behavior and social life of any kind. I've tried to find them in very unexpected places: on the bus, in the grocery store, playing with kids, reading books, browsing zombie film fans blogs. However I have always had hard time with explainig what insight is. Richars Huntington (Adliterate) nailed it in his latest post:

"No revelation or astonishing disclosure, no insight"

How to find those revelations?

"From real people, not respondents"

"great insights come from within"

‘Why would I want to go and conduct six one and a half hour groups with the good people of Solihull and Sidcup when I can read the work of someone that has been studying this area for 20 years and written seven books on the subject"

Read the whole post and get inspired here.

Traditional Advertising is The Art of Reduction

Image by basvasilich via Flickr
Traditional advertising is the art of reduction of people and products. It reduces the the complexity of culture and human interaction to one slogan or one word. The potential customers are being reduced to passive recipients of a message and all efforts are focused on depriving them of the desire to analyze the advertisement. The efforts are focused on reducing human beings into subjects of consumption - The more I consume the more I am - turning the product / service into chains of adjectives that don't convey anything meaningful. Products become nothing more than just objects of consumption that bring no value to its consumers life, except the glittering lure of getting happier or prettier - that just never happens, as days move and financial resources shrink, we stay as ugly and as miserable as we were before buying the "saviour" product.
Attracting attention becomes the main goal and all means are allowed to achieve it. Traditional advertising reduces the world to the "paradise of the adjectives" communicated with countable reach points. Communication becomes diminished to sending  fussy messages that are nothing more that  watered-down sentence telling us - buy this potatoes.

Are there any antidote to reduction powers of traditional advertising? Yes, thinking in verbs than adjectives, finding purpose ideas for your business - doing things that enrich people's lives and get them together. This is the story for another post.
_{You can read all about purpose ideas and doing things on Mark Earls' Blog - Herd.}

First Virgins, Now Sacrifice

The Whopper Sacrifice is the new campaign from Burger King that challenges to get rid of ten of your Facebook friends and get a free whopper.  Looks like the manifestation of defriending trend - decrease number of your so called friends and you get a meaty reward. Being dumped for burger - ouch, it must be painful. On the other side you can defriend each other and then go together to eat a whopper - online defriending, offline hanging out.

After all Virgin Sacrifice is a necessary fuel for one's own continued existence, like a vampire who needs to feast on virgin blood every once in a while in order to continue living, so Burger King needs to feast on human connections to earn some money. ;-)

via Angus

What is Viral?

"Viral is a thing that happens, not a thing that is. If people pass your communication on, it's viral. If they don't, it's not. Sometimes I get calls saying this viral isn't performing very well - what's the problem? We've seeded it to all the right places, it's on you tube and everything - where's our traffic? The problem is usually that they've made an ad that contains nothing people consider worth showing to their friends." (Faris Yakob)
We share things we like and things that tell something about us. We share to exchange information, to maintain relations, make other people laugh and to empower the community we are belong to. There are no recipe for effective viral campaign. Fortunately not. As Faris said, viral is a thing that happens and it is impossible to predict what we will love. It is about one great idea that can gather people. Like this event for Tic Tac with the talented boy who attracted a small crowd and make them to have fun on one rainy day in Copenhagen.

Is it possible not to love TicTac Micha? ;-)

Visit also Micha site to learn about his history, his intruments and play TicTac hero (guitar hero spoof)

This the result of cooperation between Buzzanova (bunch of engaged and creative guys), Vizeum (me) and the wonderful and daring client in the world Ferrero Scandinavia.

Human interactions are initialized by things

Image via WikipediaWe are no longer focusing on the socializing with others. Our human relations get objectified and objects are necessary for social interactions. They facilitate them and enhance them. People are not unique, the objects they own, are.
Increasingly, human interactions are initialized by things – they intermediate our contacts with others and definte the nature of our interactions.
Things become essential in the human connections. Nintendo Wii becomes the essential object for kids, it becomes the "be or not to be" of their social life. Should we study Nintendo Wii manual to get more profound understanding of youngers social life? It may be not so silly idea after all seeing so many extreme reactions to receiving Wii.

50 kids happy to get a Nintendo Wii for Christmas - watch more gamer videos

Hat tip to Seth Godin

This is Enough

Muji is a Japanese retail company which sells a wide variety of household and consumer goods that are charactirized by minimalism, recycling and no-brand policy.

The name Muji is derived from the first part of Mujirushi Ryōhin, translated as No Brand Quality Goods on Muji's European website.

Muji's vision is "This is enough"

 

Timeles idea focusing on sustainable design build around simplicity and purity. No flashy advertising, just Muji's message. The new way of earning money where profits doesn't seem to be the only focus. The state of humanity is included and cosidered. An effort to fight pointless consumption and turning less into more.