Today I tried to make up for some of me leaner days and stayed for the last four seminars of the day… if you weren’t there then you really didn’t miss that much.
The day started out with a presentation from B reel… and giving it a B would have been generous if we were grading seminars. The leader didn’t transition well and the group was all over the place as far as answers. The basis for the talk was what makes a great digital idea and they broke it into participocalypse, pioneering technology, hacking mentally, human centered value, and utilitainment. Yeah… so participocalypse is where you provide incentive for people to participate. Any easy was to do this is to provide a celebrity factor that they can get behind. The example for this was the Ford Fiesta project where they gave anyone with over 500 Twitter followers a Ford Fiesta for a year and the only condition was that they Tweet about it. Pioneering technology was about using technology in a new way, even if it wasn’t the latest model of technology. Here they stressed that the message has to be very clear in order to not get lost in the technology. Hacking mentally is about taking an existing platform and giving it a new spin. Whopper Sacrifice on Facebook was a great example of this. Human centered value is a change from disruptive communication to engaging communication. Value can be utility, education, storytelling, or environment. It’s hard for brands to stand out when they can be avoided through the internet so it’s very important to engage your target audience. Utilitainment emphasizes that the ultimate goal should be to provide utility and entertainment for the brand. Wii Fit is an example of utilitainment. At this point you might be asking yourself, “okay great, now how do we do that?” Nothing can be done without leadership and trust. The product has to appear wonderful… but also real. You have to create a medium where users can interact and make the project their own.
Up next was a fact filled session on Brazil…. I wish this had been my country! To condense some of it… Brazil is a very large country with an emerging middle class so therefore it is a growing market. However, to enter this market a potential brand needs to have a large difference between itself and its competitors. The Brazilian people are very brand loyal so it will take a lot for them to switch brands. The people of Brazil are also very social people so online shopping will not take off here as it does in other countries. The people love going to the store and talking to everyone along the way. In terms of advertising, clients tend to stay with their agency as long as they feel they are the most creative. However, even if a client is perfectly happy, they could be persuaded to switch if they feel another firm will take more creative risks with their products. Most agencies are based in Sao Paolo with a smattering in Rio and Brasília. Pay in these agencies is still centered around commission but is gradually moving towards fees. A major difference is that the client will not pay for a company to give them a pitch… I suppose that is incentive to make the pitch very very good! The presenters made comparisons between Brazil and other markets…. But they made sure to pick markets where Brazil would come out on top so that was very biased reporting in my opinion. I have more facts and figures in my notes but that pretty much sums it up.
Next up was a presentation from a Swedish company that emphasized useful advertising… but they couldn’t tell us exactly what that meant. It seemed like they were just emphasizing creativity that attracted a lot of buzz. They had a speaker making swallow a small speaker and then people could play music through his torso, they challenged the people of Sweden to “unbottle” themselves and do crazy challenges, and they put people on top of a mountain to pose for Christmas cards that were each unique because the people moved around. Each idea was very creative and you have to wonder how they convinced their clients that they were going to work. It was nice to see that these idea that could be considered way outside the box were rewarded with results for their clients.
Last but not least was the Monkey See seminar. These advertisers are basically testing sex on monkeys in association with a brand logo. There is a place up north where they have taught monkeys how to use money is a set up marketplace and it showed that monkeys follow the same buying patterns that humans do so they wanted to test to see if advertising also had an effect. This project is still in its infancy so they couldn’t really share any information but it will be interesting to see where the project goes in the future.
A hit and miss last day but I was glad to attend the last day of this amazing festival.
xoxo
Kitty
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